From the mid-tenth century, about 300 years after the collapse of the Gupta dynasty and the death of Harsha, North India endured a long period of disunion, conflict, and renewed invasions from central Asia. This era culminated in 1526 with the establishment of the Mughal Empire and a new flowering of unity and cultural brilliance. The medieval centuries of disorder and conquest, comparable in some ways to the situation in Europe after the decline of the western Roman Empire, were, how ever, in no way a period of universal disaster. Invasion and conquest were limited to relatively short periods of disturbance in the northern half of the subcontinent. Most people in most parts of India went on with their lives in the usual way most of the time. These centuries also saw the vigorous continuation of the Indian artistic tradition patronized by the Guptas and by Harsha, including the construction of a great many magnificent temples and their sculpture, especially in the south. Trade flourished, particularly with Southeast Asia; wealthy merchants subsidized temple complexes and the arts in the rich urban culture of medieval India, and great literature continued to be produced. The south remained largely peaceful, but in much of the north, invasion, conquest, and warfare brought periodic misery.

The new invaders from the north were part of the general expansion of Islam, and they brought with them an often harsh and intolerant version of the new religion. But they also brought Islamic and, in particular, Persian culture, including many educated Iranians, who served as scribes for the largely illiterate conquerors as well as administrators, artists, writers, and other elites. India, with its wealth, numbers, and sophistication, was an irresistible target, and both Hinduism and Buddhism were seen as pagan creeds, to be conquered by the faith of the Prophet. The invaders' early motives and ruthless behav ior were similar to those of the sixteenth-century Por tuguese and Spanish invaders of Asia and Latin America in their search for riches, such as gold and spices, and for converts to Catholic Christianity. For the Muslim in vaders of India, Hinduism, with its "idolatrous" worship of many gods, its tolerance, and its lack of precise scrip tural doctrine, was seen as an evil to be eliminated. Their attitude to the closely related faith and practice of Buddhism was much the same. Probably the chief original motive for their invasion of India was, however, simple plunder. Many of these central Asian groups contented themselves at first with pillaging India's wealth and slaughtering "infidel" victims before withdrawing across the passes with their loot.

In time, however, Muslim kingdoms with a largely Persian courtly culture were established in much of northern India, which had far more to attract and support them than their dry, barren, and mountainous homelands. In time this new infusion of alien vigor blended with older strands of the Indian fabric.

Since the time of Ashoka and the first Buddhist missions, there has been a close connection between India and Southeast Asia. We know very little about Southeast Asian systems before this time. It is possible that Indian influence there began before Ashoka, but our earliest data for Southeast Asian kingdoms come from the centuries after his reign and show a political, literate, and religious or philosophical culture already Indianized. Following the Muslim conquest of northern India, Islam was also carried to insular South east Asia by converts among Indian traders. These and other aspects of Indian civilization were, however, over laid onto a well-developed preexisting base whose character was distinctly different.

Indian and Chinese influences have continued to operate on Southeast Asia up to the present. But this immense area, which embraces the present-day nations of Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, has retained, despite regional differences, its own indigenous social and cultural forms. These evolved separately before the coming of Indian and Chinese elements. Only writing and various literary, artistic, political, and religious forms came in from India, Vietnam, and China. The social base and most other aspects of culture were less affected and indeed helped shape many aspects of the new culture. The latter part of this chapter deals with the civilization of South east Asia during the medieval period, after the fall of the Gupta Empire in India, when we can see for the first time in any detail the evolution of separate kingdoms and cultures in that region.

The Muslim Advance

India at first lay beyond the wave of Islamic conquests of the seventh century, which engulfed most of the Middle East and North Africa, but Arab traders continued to bring back samples of Indian wealth. Sind, the lower half of the Indus valley, was conquered by Arab forces in the eighth century, primarily as a rival trade base. But the major advance came nearly three centuries later, from the newly converted Turks of central Asia, who had been driven westward and into Afghanistan by earlier Chinese expansion under the Han and the T'ang dynasties.

The Turkish leader Mahmud of Ghazni (971-1030), known as the "Sword of Islam," mounted 17 plundering expeditions between 1001 and 1027 from his eastern Afghan base at Ghazni into the adjacent upper Indus and western Punjab, destroying Hindu temples, sacking rich cities, killing or forcibly converting the inhabitants, and then returning to Ghazni with jewels, gold, silver, women, elephants, and slaves. By the eleventh century his remote mountain-ringed capital became a great center of Islamic culture, thanks in part to stolen Indian riches. Pillage and slaughter in the name of God did not make a good impression for Islam among most Indians, but the austere new religion, with its promise of certainty and of equality, did appeal to some. And India attracted Mahmud's successors, as well as rival central Asian Turkish groups.

The military effectiveness of these invaders depended importantly on their mastery of cavalry tactics, true to their nomadic heritage, and their use of short, powerful compound bows of laminated wood, horn, and sinew that they could fire on horseback at a gallop. The Rajputs of Rajasthan, on the flank of the Islamic invasion route, fought relentlessly from their desert strongholds and fortified cities against these Turco-Afghan armies, which the more peaceful inhabitants of Hindustan were less able to resist. Some of the Rajputs had central Asian origins too, some centuries earlier, and hence shared an originally nomadic tradition of mounted, mobile warfare, but all Rajputs were part of a military culture of great tenacity, nurtured in the desert of Rajasthan. They were never completely overcome, but most of the rest of the north, seriously weakened by continual political division and internal conflict, was progressively conquered.

By the end of the twelfth century, Punjab and most of Hindustan (the valley of the Ganges) had been incorporated into a Turco-Afghan empire with its capital at Delhi. Delhi controlled an easy crossing place on the Jumna River where a range of hills stretched southwest and provided protection. Northward lay the barrier of the Himalayas; westward, the Thar Desert of Rajasthan. Eastward the broad Ganges valley led into the heart of Hindustan, but for access to it and for routes southward, Delhi had first to be secured; all invaders from the north west, the repeated route of entry via the Punjab, were obliged to maintain control of Delhi. Bengal was overrun in 1202, and in 1206 the Delhi sultanate was formally inaugurated. As a series of successive Islamic dynasties, it was to dominate most of North India for the next 320 years, until the rise of the Mughal Empire in 1526.

Bengal had prospered as a separate kingdom after the fall of the Gupta order. It remained the chief Indian center of Buddhism, including a great university and monastery at Nalanda, where some 10,000 monks lived and studied, and similar Hindu centers of learning and piety. Both religions and their followers were targets for the Muslim invaders. Tens of thousands of monks and other Hindus and Buddhists were slaughtered and the universities and monasteries destroyed. This catastrophe marked the effective end of Buddhism in the land of its birth. The few surviving Buddhists fled from the slaughter to Nepal and Tibet. Hindu monuments also suffered, for they violated Islamic principles forbidding the artistic representation of divine creation, including the human form.

Unfortunately for its people, northern India remained hopelessly divided among rival kingdoms, most of them small and nearly all of them in chronic conflict. In total, their armies were huge, but they seem never to have considered a united or even partially united stand against the invaders who, like Alexander before them, defeated the forces sent against them one by one. Even after Mahmud and his successors had established their rule over most of the north, little opposition was organized against them or against their repeated efforts to spread their conquests southward into central India and the Deccan.

The Delhi Sultans

Successive Turco-Afghan rulers were more accepting, if not of Hinduism, then of Hindus, who remained the vast majority of the Indian population. But Hindus were treated as decidedly second-class citizens and forced to pay a special tax as "infidels" if they refused, as most did, to convert. This was an improvement on the atrocities of the earlier raiders and followed the original Islamic practice of recognizing in other established religions a justified but inferior status.

There was no shortage of Hindu religious texts, and it was not hard in time to accept Hinduism as a sophisticated religion, not simply as "paganism." With more knowledge it was also recognized that Hinduism was basically monotheistic, like Islam, and could not be judged only on the basis of the many gods of Indian folk religion. This distinction was comparable to that between unadorned Christianity and folk practice involving many saints and local cults, as, for example, in Latin America. The head tax (jizya) paid by protected non-Muslims (dhimmis) was heavy, about 6 percent of an individual's total net worth annually, but it bought a degree of freedom to practice one's own religion. Moreover, the later Delhi sultans agreed to leave many of the original Hindu Indian local rulers and petty rajas in control of their domains. The sultanate thus slowly became more an Indian order and less an alien occupation. It came in time to depend increasingly on the support of India's indigenous people and, under the best of its rulers, to try to govern rather than merely to exploit. . . .

from Richard L. Greaves, Robert Zaller, Philip V. Cannistraro, Rhoads Murphey, Civilizations of the World (New York, 1997), 273-276