The Land That Would Not Bend

10Before History Was Written: The Indus Valley

Let me start with something that will surprise most people. While the Egyptians were still figuring out how to build pyramids, and the people of Europe were still living in scattered villages with wooden huts, there was already a massive civilisation in India with planned cities, indoor plumbing, and standardised weights and measures.

This was the Indus Valley Civilisation. It is one of the great forgotten chapters of world history, and most people, even most Indians, do not know much about it. Let me fix that.

The Discovery

In the 1920s, British and Indian archaeologists were digging in what is now Pakistan, near the Indus river. (An archaeologist is a person who digs up and studies the remains of old societies.) They were not expecting to find much. The area was just hills of brick and dust. But when they started digging into one of the hills, they discovered something incredible. Underneath was an entire ancient city. Not just one city. A whole network of them.

The two biggest cities they found were Mohenjo Daro, which means "Mound of the Dead" in Sindhi, and Harappa. Both cities had been built around 2600 BCE. That is over 4,600 years ago. For comparison, the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt was built around 2570 BCE. So these Indian cities were built at the same time as the pyramids, but they were doing something completely different. They were not building giant tombs for kings. They were building functional cities for ordinary people to live in.

The Cities That Should Not Have Existed

Here is what makes the Indus Valley cities so amazing. They were laid out in a grid pattern. Wide main streets ran north to south. Narrower streets crossed them east to west. This is the same basic city design that modern New York and Chandigarh use. But the Indus people figured it out 4,600 years ago.

Every house had a private bathroom. Yes, you read that right. Indoor bathrooms in 2600 BCE. The bathrooms had drains that connected to a citywide sewage system. The sewers were covered with brick slabs that could be lifted for cleaning. Wastewater flowed out of the city through underground channels. Many parts of Europe did not have anything like this until the 1800s CE.

Almost every house had a well for fresh water. There were public bathing pools, including a famous one called the Great Bath at Mohenjo Daro. It was 12 metres long, 7 metres wide, and 2.4 metres deep, lined with carefully cut bricks and waterproofed with a layer of tar. Historians think it was used for religious bathing, but we do not know for sure.

Trade That Stretched Across the Ancient World

The Indus people were not just sitting in their cities. They were trading. Indus seals, which are small carved stones used to mark goods, have been found in Mesopotamia, which is modern Iraq. That is over 2,000 kilometres away. We have Mesopotamian texts from around 2300 BCE that mention trade with a land called Meluhha, which scholars believe was the Indus Valley.

The Indus people traded cotton textiles, beads, copper, and probably timber. They had standardised weights, with the smallest unit being about 0.87 grams. The weights doubled in size as they went up. This shows incredible mathematical sophistication. They had a working number system thousands of years before most people in the world.

A Mystery That Still Cannot Be Solved

There is one frustrating thing about the Indus Valley civilisation. We cannot read their writing.

They had a script (a way of writing). We have found over 4,000 inscriptions on seals, pottery, and tablets. The signs are clear. There are about 400 to 600 different symbols. Some symbols repeat in patterns that suggest a real language. But despite over 100 years of trying, no one has been able to decipher it. We do not know what language the Indus people spoke. We do not know what their cities were really called. We do not know the names of their kings or gods or heroes.

This is one of the great unsolved puzzles of archaeology. Egyptian hieroglyphs were decoded by Jean Francois Champollion in 1822 because of the Rosetta Stone, which had the same text in three scripts. The Indus script has no Rosetta Stone. We just have the symbols themselves, staring back at us silently from a time we cannot reach.

What Was Their Religion?

We cannot read their writing, but we can look at what they made. And what they made tells us something important. We have found small clay figurines of women, very richly decorated, that scholars think were figures of a mother goddess. This kind of mother goddess worship is common across the ancient world. The Indus people probably saw nature as a feminine, life giving force.

We have also found a famous seal called the Pashupati seal. It shows a figure sitting in a yoga like position, with horns on his head, surrounded by animals. Some scholars believe this is an early form of the god who would later become Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and meditation. If they are right, this means some core Hindu ideas are at least 4,500 years old, much older than the Vedic religion that we will talk about in the next chapter.

Other figurines show what look like sacred trees, with people praying near them. Tree worship, just like in pagan Europe. Bull figurines suggest the bull was already a sacred animal, the way it still is in Hindu thought today (Shiva's mount Nandi is a bull). Even though we cannot read their texts, the visual culture of the Indus Valley feels connected to later Indian religion in important ways.

The Sudden Collapse

And then, sometime around 1900 BCE, the Indus Valley civilisation began to fall apart. By 1300 BCE, the great cities were abandoned. What happened? For a long time, historians thought it must have been an invasion. Some early archaeologists imagined Aryan invaders sweeping in and burning the cities. But the evidence does not support this. We do not find layers of weapons or fire damage that you would expect from a military conquest.

The current best theory is that it was climate change. Around this time, the monsoon weather patterns shifted. (The monsoon is the seasonal rain that Indian farming depends on.) One of the major rivers the cities depended on, the Saraswati, dried up. Crops failed. People started moving. The cities were not destroyed in a battle. They just slowly emptied out as people moved east toward the Ganges plain, where there was still water. This is what the historian Michel Danino argues in his 2010 book The Lost River, and most modern scholars agree.

But here is the important thing. The Indus people did not disappear. Their genes are still in modern Indians, as DNA studies have confirmed. (DNA is what passes physical traits from parents to children — it can show who descended from whom.) Their cultural ideas, the mother goddess, the meditation pose, the sacred bull, the love of bathing, did not disappear. They got absorbed into the new culture that was forming.

This is the first lesson about India that you need to understand. India does not erase what came before. It absorbs it. It takes the old and folds it into the new. The Indus Valley did not get replaced by the Vedic culture that followed. It got mixed into it. This pattern of absorbing rather than erasing is one of the reasons Hinduism would survive everything that was about to be thrown at it.

2The Vedic Age and the Birth of an Idea That Refused to Die

After the Indus Valley civilisation faded, a new culture rose in north India. This was the Vedic culture, which lasted from about 1500 BCE to 500 BCE. This is when the foundations of what we now call Hinduism were laid down. But here is the thing. Hinduism is not actually one religion. It is more like a family of religions that share some common features. And this is exactly why it would prove so hard to destroy.

Who Were the Vedic People?

This is one of the most argued about questions in Indian history. Some scholars believe a group of people called the Indo Aryans migrated into India from Central Asia around 1500 BCE, bringing their language, their gods, and their rituals. They blended with the people already living there, who included the descendants of the Indus Valley civilisation. Out of this blending came the Vedic culture. This is called the Aryan Migration Theory.

Other scholars, mostly nationalist Indian historians, argue that the Vedic people were already in India, descendants of the Indus Valley people themselves, with no large migration from outside. This is called the Out of India Theory.

The truth, based on the most recent DNA evidence published in major scientific journals in 2018 and 2019, seems to be that both have some truth to them. There was a real migration of people from the steppes of Central Asia into India around 2000 to 1500 BCE. But these migrants did not replace the local population. They mixed with them. Modern north Indians have ancestry from both groups. South Indians have more of the older Indus Valley ancestry. North Indians have more steppe ancestry. But everyone is mixed.

The genetic study by David Reich of Harvard and his international team, published in Science in 2019, is the clearest evidence we have. This is not a political position. It is just what the DNA shows. The Vedic culture was a fusion of old Indian populations and incoming groups, and the result was something new and unique.

The Vedas: The Oldest Books Still in Use

The Vedic people had no cities at first, but they had something else. They had poems. Long, beautiful, complex religious poems. These poems were memorised by priests and passed down orally for over a thousand years before being written down. When they were finally written, they became the Vedas, the oldest sacred texts of Hinduism.

There are four Vedas. The most important and oldest is the Rigveda. It contains 1,028 hymns to various gods, organised into 10 books called Mandalas. Scholars believe the oldest parts of the Rigveda were composed around 1500 BCE, although some Hindu traditions claim it is much older. Then come the Yajurveda, the Samaveda, and the Atharvaveda, all composed over the next several centuries.

Now here is the part that should blow your mind. The Vedas have been transmitted orally for over 3,000 years with almost perfect accuracy. Vedic priests developed eleven different ways of reciting each verse, with the syllables in different orders, so that if one version got corrupted, the others could correct it. The system was so good that UNESCO recognised Vedic chanting as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2003.

Think about that. While the works of ancient Greek poets like Homer were partly forgotten and partly reconstructed over the centuries, the Vedas survived nearly word for word, in the original ancient Sanskrit language, simply by being recited by trained priests generation after generation. This is one of the great achievements of human memory and discipline.

The Vedic Gods: Old Friends in a New Land

The Vedas tell us who the Vedic people worshipped. And here is where it gets interesting for our story. The Vedic gods are very similar to the gods of pagan Europe.

The chief god of the early Vedic period was Indra, the god of thunder and rain. Sound familiar? Indra is a relative of the Norse Thor, the Slavic Perun, the Greek Zeus, the Roman Jupiter, and the Baltic Perkūnas. (These were the thunder gods we met in Part One.) All of these thunder gods come from the same Proto Indo European root. Indra fights serpents and demons, drinks the magic drink called Soma, and rides a chariot. Zeus fights serpents and demons, drinks ambrosia, and throws lightning. They are brothers, separated by time and distance.

Agni was the god of fire. Fire is central to Vedic ritual. Even today, Hindu weddings, funerals, and many religious ceremonies involve a sacred fire. The Vedic word for father is pitr. The Sanskrit word for sky father is Dyaus Pita. The Roman word is Jupiter, from Dyeus Pater. The Greek is Zeus Pater. Same word. Same god. Same ancient family.

Surya was the sun god. Soma was a sacred drink, and also a god. Vayu was the wind. Varuna was the cosmic order. Ushas was the dawn, related to the Greek Eos and the Roman Aurora. The Vedic religion was a sister religion to the religions of Europe before Christianity arrived.

The Upanishads: The Big Questions

Around 800 BCE, something extraordinary happened in India. Maybe people got tired of just performing rituals. Maybe they started asking deeper questions. Whatever the cause, a new set of texts began to appear. These were the Upanishads.

The Upanishads are not hymns to gods. They are philosophical conversations. A student sits with a teacher in the forest, and they discuss the deepest questions humans can ask. What is real? What is the self? Why do we suffer? What happens when we die? Is there a god?

The answers the Upanishads gave became the philosophical foundation of all later Hindu thought, and they influenced Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and even later Christian and Islamic mystical traditions. Two of the most important ideas were:

Brahman. This is the idea that behind all the apparent variety of the universe, there is one single underlying reality. All the gods, all the stars, all the people, all the animals, all of it is just different forms of one underlying thing. This idea is similar to what philosophers call monism, the idea that everything is one.

Atman. This is the idea that the deepest part of yourself is also Brahman. The self inside you is the same as the cosmic self. The famous phrase from the Chandogya Upanishad is Tat tvam asi, which means "You are that." You are not separate from the universe. You are the universe looking at itself.

These are not simple ideas. They take years to understand properly. But the point is, Indian thought was already producing this level of philosophy in 800 BCE. Compare this to Europe at the same time, which was still in the early Iron Age, with mostly oral tribal religion and no written philosophy that survives. Indian thinkers were asking questions about the nature of reality that European philosophers like Plato would not ask for another 400 years.

Why This Matters for Our Story

I am taking time on this because it is important. When Islam and Christianity later tried to convert India, they were not coming to a place that had no sophisticated religious thinking. They were coming to a place that had already spent over 1,000 years developing some of the deepest philosophy in human history. Indians had already asked all the big questions. They had thought about the nature of God, the soul, suffering, salvation, and ethics. They had multiple competing schools of thought already.

This made conversion very hard. Imagine trying to convert a country full of philosophy professors to a new religion. They are going to ask hard questions. They are going to compare your ideas to ideas they already know. They are not going to just accept things on faith because the foreign missionary says so. This is one of the reasons India proved so resistant to mass religious conversion, even under centuries of foreign rule.

The Buddha and the Great Religious Explosion of 500 BCE

Around 500 BCE, India experienced what some historians call its great religious revolution. In a single century or so, two major new religions appeared. Both were responses to perceived problems with the older Vedic religion, especially its emphasis on ritual sacrifice and the rising power of the Brahmin priestly caste.

Mahavira, born around 599 BCE, founded Jainism. Jainism taught extreme non violence (called ahimsa — the principle of not harming any living being). Even today, traditional Jain monks sweep the ground in front of them so they do not accidentally step on insects. They cover their mouths so they do not accidentally inhale small living beings. The Jain commitment to non violence influenced everything in Indian thought after them.

Siddhartha Gautama, born around 563 BCE in what is now Nepal, founded Buddhism. He was a prince who left his palace to find the cause of suffering. After years of meditation, he claimed to have found enlightenment under a tree in Bodh Gaya, in what is now Bihar. He spent the next 45 years teaching the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. His teachings would spread across all of Asia. By 200 BCE, Buddhism was the most popular religion in India. By 1000 CE, it was the dominant religion in China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Tibet, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia.

Both Mahavira and the Buddha taught without violence. They did not need royal marriages or armies to spread their ideas. They convinced people through argument, example, and personal charisma. Their religions spread across most of Asia in just a few centuries, largely peacefully. This is an interesting contrast to how Christianity later spread across Europe with armies and royal decrees.

What India Had Built by 500 BCE

Let me sum up where India was 2,500 years ago. It had:

•Memorised libraries of religious poetry going back over 1,000 years •A philosophical tradition (the Upanishads) asking the deepest questions about reality •Three major religions side by side (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism), all peacefully

•A sophisticated language, Sanskrit, with grammar rules so precise that they have been

•Cities, kingdoms, trade routes, and a writing system (Brahmi script) that was the

When Europe was still mostly tribal, India was a network of kingdoms with universities, libraries, and centuries of philosophical tradition. This is not bragging. This is the historical record. And it sets up the next chapter, where we look at the actual golden ages of classical Indian civilisation.

3The Golden Ages: Mauryas, Guptas, and a Civilisation at Its Peak

Now we get to the parts of Indian history that should be taught in every school in the world, but mostly are not. These are the periods when India was, by most measures, the most advanced civilisation on Earth. Not just the richest in absolute size, though it was that. But also the most innovative in mathematics, the most refined in art, the most ambitious in philosophy.

The Mauryan Empire: India Unified

In 326 BCE, Alexander the Great invaded the north western edge of India. He fought one major battle against an Indian king named Porus on the banks of the Jhelum river. Alexander won the battle, but barely. According to the Greek historians who travelled with him, Alexander was so impressed by Porus's courage that he gave him back his kingdom and even added more territory. Alexander's own soldiers refused to march further into India. They had heard about even larger Indian armies waiting in the east, and they were tired. They turned back.

Within a few years of Alexander's departure, an Indian general named Chandragupta Maurya overthrew the existing Nanda dynasty and founded what would become the largest empire India had ever seen. By 300 BCE, the Mauryan empire stretched from modern Afghanistan in the west to Bangladesh in the east, from the Himalayas in the north to most of south India.

We know about the Mauryan empire from several sources, including a Greek ambassador named Megasthenes who lived at the Mauryan capital Pataliputra (modern Patna) around 300 BCE. Megasthenes wrote a book called Indica. The book itself is lost, but other Greek writers quoted from it. He described Pataliputra as being larger than any city he had seen, with wooden walls 30 kilometres around, 64 gates, and 570 towers. The population was somewhere between 250,000 and 400,000 people. By comparison, Rome at the same time had maybe 150,000 people, and Athens had about 100,000.

Chanakya: The Ancient Strategist Who Wrote the Book on Power

The man who advised Chandragupta and helped him conquer the empire was named Chanakya, also called Kautilya. Chanakya was a teacher at the ancient university of Takshashila (sometimes spelled Taxila), in what is now Pakistan. He wrote a book called the Arthashastra, which is one of the most important books on politics, war, economics, and statecraft ever written.

The Arthashastra was written around 300 BCE, which makes it 1,800 years older than Machiavelli's famous The Prince. And honestly, the Arthashastra is more thorough. Machiavelli's book is about 100 pages. The Arthashastra is over 600 pages. It covers everything from how to run a spy network, to how to manage trade routes, to how to inspect mines, to how to grow crops, to how to choose ministers, to how to deal with traitors.

Chanakya's basic philosophy was that the king has one job: to ensure the welfare of his subjects. Everything else, including morality in the conventional sense, can be set aside if it helps the welfare of the people. This is realist political thinking at its hardest. Modern political scientists still study the Arthashastra.

Ashoka the Great: A Conqueror Who Stopped Conquering

Chandragupta's grandson was named Ashoka. He ruled from 268 BCE to 232 BCE. Ashoka started out as a typical aggressive king. He fought a brutal war to conquer the kingdom of Kalinga, which is roughly modern Odisha. According to his own later inscriptions, 100,000 people were killed and 150,000 were taken as captives. Many more died from starvation and disease after the war.

But then something strange happened. Ashoka was horrified by what he had done. He converted to Buddhism. He renounced violence as a tool of state policy. He carved his new philosophy onto rock pillars and cliff faces across his empire, in multiple languages including the local script and Greek. Some of these pillars and rocks still stand today, and you can read his words. They are the oldest surviving large pieces of writing in India.

Ashoka's edicts ask people to respect all religions, treat servants well, take care of animals, and avoid violence. He set up hospitals not just for humans but for animals. He banned animal sacrifice in his palace. He sent Buddhist missionaries to Sri Lanka, Burma, Egypt, Syria, Greece, and Macedonia.

Think about this. While most of the world was still ruled by warlords who measured their greatness by how many people they killed, India had a king who carved into stone that he was sorry for the people he had killed and that he wished he had not. There is no other ancient ruler quite like Ashoka.

The Ashoka emblem, with four lions on top of a stone pillar, is now the national emblem of modern India. The wheel from that pillar is in the centre of the Indian flag. That is how important Ashoka still is to Indian identity today.

The Gupta Empire: India's Classical Golden Age

The Mauryan empire eventually collapsed about 50 years after Ashoka's death. India broke into smaller kingdoms again. But then, around 320 CE, another great dynasty rose. This was the Gupta dynasty, sometimes called India's Golden Age.

The Gupta empire was not as territorially huge as the Mauryan empire, but it was richer, more culturally creative, and more scientifically advanced. The Gupta period, roughly 320 CE to 550 CE, is when India produced some of its greatest works of art, mathematics, astronomy, and literature.

Some of the things that happened during the Gupta period:

•The mathematician Aryabhata, born 476 CE, wrote a book called the Aryabhatiya. In it,

•The poet Kalidasa wrote his great plays and poems, including Shakuntala. When it was

•The system of Indian classical music with its ragas and talas began to take its final

•Indian medicine reached high refinement. The Sushruta Samhita describes over 300

•The university of Nalanda was founded in what is now Bihar. We will come back to

Fa Xian: The Chinese Monk Who Visited

How do we know India was rich and peaceful during the Gupta period? Because we have eyewitness accounts. A Chinese Buddhist monk named Fa Xian travelled from China to India between 399 CE and 414 CE. He came to collect Buddhist texts and to visit the holy sites of Buddhism. He spent about ten years in India and then went home and wrote a detailed account of his travels.

Fa Xian described India as a peaceful and prosperous place. He said the roads were safe. He said people did not need to lock their doors. He said the government was light handed. People did not have to register with the authorities or carry papers. The punishments were mostly fines, not corporal punishment. Most people were vegetarian. There were public hospitals where the sick could go for free care.

Two hundred years later, another Chinese monk named Xuanzang made the same journey. He spent fifteen years in India, from 630 CE to 645 CE, and his account is even more detailed. He studied at Nalanda University for years. His travel writings give us one of the best windows we have into classical India.

Nalanda: The Greatest University of the Ancient World

I want to spend some time on Nalanda University because it is one of the most amazing institutions in history, and most people, even most Indians, do not know much about it.

Nalanda was founded around 427 CE in what is now Bihar, India. By the 600s CE, when Xuanzang visited, it had over 10,000 students and around 2,000 teachers. Yes, you read that right. Ten thousand students. In one university. In the 600s CE.

To put that in perspective, the University of Oxford was founded in 1096 CE, almost 700 years after Nalanda was already running. When Oxford got started, it had a few dozen students. Nalanda had been operating with thousands of students for centuries.

Nalanda was a residential university (students lived there). Students from all over Asia came to study there. They came from China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Persia, and Turkey. They had to pass entrance exams. Xuanzang said only about 30 percent of applicants got in. The campus had multiple temples, libraries, dormitories, lecture halls, and gardens, all built of brick on a planned grid. It was its own little city.

What did they teach? Almost everything. Buddhist philosophy was the main subject, but they also taught Hindu Vedic studies, logic, grammar, medicine, astronomy, mathematics, metaphysics, and probably much more. The library, called Dharmaganja, was housed in three buildings. One of them was nine stories tall. It was said to contain hundreds of thousands of manuscripts.

Nalanda kept running, with ups and downs, for almost 800 years. Then in 1193 CE, it was destroyed. The Turkic invader Bakhtiyar Khalji burned it to the ground as part of the early Islamic conquest of north India. According to the Persian historian Minhaj e Siraj, the library burned for three months. Thousands of monks were killed. The university was never rebuilt.

We will come back to this destruction in the next chapter. For now, just understand what was lost. Imagine if a foreign army today destroyed Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Yale all at once, and burned every book in them. That is what happened to Nalanda. We do not know how much of Indian mathematics, science, and philosophy died in those flames.

How Big Was the Indian Economy?

Let me give you some economic numbers, because this part is rarely taught and is important. The British economist Angus Maddison spent his career estimating the size of historical economies. His research is the standard reference used by historians and the World Bank.

According to Maddison's estimates, in the year 1 CE, India had roughly one third of the world's total GDP. China had another quarter. Together, India and China made up about 60 percent of the world economy. Europe was a small player. Rome at its peak was rich, but the whole western Roman empire combined was probably no bigger than India alone.

By 1000 CE, India still had roughly 25 to 30 percent of world GDP. By 1500 CE, it was still around 24 percent. When the British were just starting to build their empire in the 1700s, India was still the largest economy in the world, with about 24 percent of world GDP, slightly more than China and far more than any European power.

Then comes the British conquest, the deindustrialisation of India, the famines, the wealth extraction, and by 1947, when the British left, India's share of world GDP had collapsed to about 4 percent. But that is a story for Part Three of this book.

The point is, for almost 2,000 years of recorded history, India was one of the two richest civilisations on Earth. It was not a backwater. It was not poor. It was not technologically behind. It was, for most of human history, ahead of Europe in almost every measurable way.

4What India Gave the World

Let me take a chapter to focus on specific contributions India made to human knowledge. This is not bragging. This is just the historical record. Many of these things are so common today that we forget they had to be invented somewhere. They were invented in India.

The Number Zero

I am going to start with the biggest one. India invented zero.

Other civilisations had concepts of nothing. The Babylonians used a placeholder. The Mayans had a symbol for empty. But India was the first to treat zero as a real number that you could do math with. Zero plus five is five. Zero times five is zero. You can have negative numbers because of zero. You can have decimals because of zero. You can do algebra because of zero. Without zero, modern mathematics is impossible. And without modern mathematics, modern science is impossible. And without modern science, modern technology is impossible.

The first clear use of zero as a number, with all its mathematical rules, is found in the work of an Indian mathematician named Brahmagupta. In his book Brahmasphutasiddhanta, written in 628 CE, Brahmagupta laid out the rules for how zero works. He defined what happens when you add, subtract, multiply, and divide by zero. He also worked with negative numbers, which were also an Indian innovation.

The Indian number system, with its ten digits including zero, then made its way to the Arab world around 800 CE through Persian and Arab traders. From there it spread to Europe, where it slowly replaced the awkward Roman numeral system. That is why we call our number system Arabic numerals today, even though they are really Indian numerals that travelled through Arabia. The Arabs themselves called them Hindi numerals. They knew where they came from.

Without Indian numerals and the concept of zero, you would not have computers. You would not have rockets. You would not have your phone. Almost every piece of modern technology depends on math that depends on zero. India gave the world this.

The Decimal System

Connected to zero is the decimal place value system. This is the way we write numbers today. The position of a digit tells you its value. The 5 in 50 means fifty. The 5 in 500 means five hundred. This is so obvious to us now that we cannot imagine writing numbers any other way. But for most of human history, no one used this system.

The Romans wrote 1,847 as MDCCCXLVII. Try multiplying MDCCCXLVII by CCXIV in your head. You can't. Roman numerals make complex math nearly impossible. This is one of the reasons advanced math was so hard in medieval Europe.

The Indian decimal system makes math easy. That algorithm we all learned in school was developed in India and then translated into Arabic by a Persian mathematician named Al Khwarizmi around 825 CE. His book was later translated into Latin, and the European word "algorithm" comes from his name. So even the word algorithm has Indian and Persian roots.

Trigonometry and the Sine Function

When you studied math in school, you probably hated sine and cosine. But you should know that these functions, which are essential for everything from architecture to GPS satellites, were developed in India.

The Greek mathematician Hipparchus had developed a basic version of trigonometry using chords of circles. But the modern sine function, which is much more useful, was developed by Aryabhata around 500 CE. The word sine itself is interesting. Aryabhata called this concept jya, which means "bowstring" in Sanskrit. Arab mathematicians translated it as jiba, then misread it as jaib, which means "pocket" or "bay" in Arabic. When Europeans translated this from Arabic, they translated "bay" as sinus in Latin. And that became "sine" in English. So sine is a Latin translation of an Arab mistranslation of a Sanskrit word for a bowstring.

Surgery and Medicine

I mentioned the Sushruta Samhita earlier. Let me give you more detail. Sushruta is sometimes called the father of surgery. He lived in India sometime between 800 BCE and 600 BCE, which is incredibly early. His medical text, the Sushruta Samhita, was finalised in roughly its current form by around 500 CE.

The book describes 121 surgical instruments. It describes how to perform over 300 surgical operations, organised into eight categories. It includes plastic surgery, cataract removal, kidney stone removal, cesarean section, and many others. The plastic surgery technique for rebuilding noses, called the Indian method, is still used today and is the foundation of all modern rhinoplasty.

Indian doctors also developed advanced ideas about hygiene long before Europeans did. Surgical instruments were boiled before use. Patients were given alcoholic drinks to numb pain. Wounds were cleaned with antiseptic herbs. These ideas would not reach mainstream European medicine until the 1800s.

Yoga and Meditation

Modern people often see yoga as just exercise. But yoga is a very old Indian system of physical, mental, and spiritual practice. The earliest references to yoga appear in the Upanishads. Around 200 BCE to 400 CE, a sage named Patanjali compiled the Yoga Sutras, which laid out the eight limbs of yoga.

Yoga is now practised by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Modern scientific studies have confirmed that regular yoga practice reduces stress, improves flexibility, helps with chronic pain, and may even help with mental health conditions. What started as a spiritual practice in India over 2,000 years ago is now a global health phenomenon. Meditation, similarly, is now used by neuroscientists, therapists, and millions of ordinary people. All of this is rooted in techniques developed by Indian and Buddhist practitioners thousands of years ago.

Sanskrit Grammar: The First Linguistics

Around 500 BCE, an Indian grammarian named Panini wrote a book called Ashtadhyayi. This is a book of grammar for Sanskrit, and it is one of the most amazing works in the history of human thought.

Panini's Ashtadhyayi contains 3,959 rules that describe the grammar of Sanskrit. The rules are written in a very compact, technical style, almost like a computer program. Modern linguists in the 1900s were stunned when they realised that Panini had essentially invented formal linguistics 2,500 years before they had. Some computer scientists have argued that Panini's rules influenced the development of computer programming languages, because they showed how you could describe any sentence by combining a small number of basic rules.

Chess

The game of chess was invented in India around the 500s CE. It was originally called chaturanga, which means "four parts" or "four divisions of the army" in Sanskrit. These four divisions, infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariots, became the modern pawns, knights, bishops, and rooks. The game spread from India to Persia, where it was called shatranj. From Persia it spread to the Arab world, and from there to Europe by around 1000 CE. If you have ever played chess, you have played a game invented in India.

Spices and Cotton

On the practical side, India was the world's main source of spices for thousands of years. Black pepper, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, turmeric. These were all major Indian exports. European explorers like Vasco da Gama originally sailed for India specifically to find a sea route to these spices. Christopher Columbus was trying to reach India when he accidentally discovered America. He called the indigenous people he met "Indians" because he thought he had reached India.

India was also the source of fine cotton textiles. Indian muslin, made in Bengal, was famous for being so fine that an entire dress could be passed through a wedding ring. European traders in the 1600s and 1700s imported huge quantities of Indian cotton, which was better quality than anything European weavers could make. The British Industrial Revolution was partly driven by the British trying to mechanise textile production so they could compete with Indian cotton. They eventually succeeded, but only by deliberately destroying the Indian textile industry through high tariffs and broken supply chains. We will get to this in Part Three.

The Concept of Religious Pluralism

Finally, India gave the world something that is harder to point to but maybe more important than any specific invention. It gave the world the idea that many religions can be true at the same time.

In most of the ancient and medieval world, religions tended to be exclusive. The Christian believed Christianity was the only true religion. The Muslim believed Islam was the only true religion. The Jew believed Judaism was the chosen one. To disagree was to be wrong, and being wrong about religion could get you killed.

Indian religious thought, especially Hindu thought, took a different view. The basic Hindu teaching, found in the Rigveda itself, is that Ekam sat vipra bahudha vadanti, which means "truth is one, the wise speak of it in many ways." The same divine reality can be approached by many paths. Different religions are different routes up the same mountain.

This idea allowed Hinduism to coexist with Buddhism, Jainism, and later Sikhism inside India for thousands of years without religious wars between them. It also allowed small Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian communities to settle in India and live peacefully for centuries when they were being persecuted everywhere else. The Jews of Kerala have been there since possibly the time of King Solomon, around 1000 BCE. They were never persecuted in India. The Christians of Kerala, the Saint Thomas Christians, trace their origins to the apostle Thomas himself, who they say came to India in 52 CE. The Parsis, who are Zoroastrians from Persia, fled to India in the 700s CE to escape Muslim persecution in their homeland. India took them in.

This is important to remember. When Islam and Christianity later came to India with their certainty that they were the only true religion, they were coming to a place that had developed an entirely different way of thinking about religion. India did not see religions as rivals competing for the same truth. It saw them as different expressions of the same deeper reality.

This was either a strength or a weakness depending on how you look at it. It made Hinduism flexible and resilient. But it also made it slow to recognise threats. When invaders came who did not share this pluralist view, who believed their religion was the only one and that others should be destroyed, India sometimes did not know how to respond. We will see this dynamic play out in the next chapter.

5The First Wave: Islam Arrives in India

Now we get to one of the most difficult chapters in Indian history. The arrival of Islam. I am going to try to tell this story honestly. Some of it is brutal and painful. Some of it is more complicated than the simple version usually told. I will not soften the violence, but I will also not pretend that every Muslim who came to India came with a sword in his hand. The real history is messier than that.

Two Different Waves

Before we go further, I need to make an important distinction. Islam came to India in two very different ways, at very different times, with very different consequences.

The first way was peaceful. Arab traders had been doing business with the Malabar coast of south India for centuries, even before Islam was founded. When these traders converted to Islam in the 600s and 700s CE, they brought their new religion with them to India. They settled in port cities like Calicut, Cochin, and Quilon. They married local women. They built mosques. They lived peacefully alongside Hindu and Christian neighbours. The Muslim community of Kerala, called the Mappila Muslims, has been there for over 1,300 years. They are deeply Indian. They speak Malayalam. They eat Indian food. There was no conquest. There was no forced conversion. Just centuries of trade and cultural exchange.

The second way was violent. Starting in the 700s CE, and especially from the 1000s CE onward, Muslim armies began invading India from the northwest. These were not traders. They were soldiers, often led by Turkic, Persian, or Afghan generals. They came for conquest. And the consequences for India were massive.

Both stories are true. Both happened. We need to talk about both, honestly.

The First Invasion: Muhammad bin Qasim, 712 CE

The first major Muslim military expedition to India was led by a 17 year old Arab general named Muhammad bin Qasim in 712 CE. He was sent by the Umayyad Caliphate, which was the dominant Muslim power at the time, based in Damascus. His official reason for invading was to punish the Sindhi king Raja Dahir for attacks on Arab ships near the coast.

Muhammad bin Qasim's forces defeated Raja Dahir at the Battle of Aror. Dahir was killed. The conquered region was Sindh, which is now in southern Pakistan. What happened next is debated. Some sources say Muhammad bin Qasim massacred large numbers of non Muslims. Other sources say he was relatively tolerant, allowing Hindus and Buddhists to practise their religions in exchange for paying the jizya tax. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. There was violence during the conquest, but afterwards the new rulers mostly let people live their lives, because killing your subjects is bad for tax collection.

Importantly, the Arab invasion of 712 CE only got as far as Sindh. They did not penetrate into the rest of India. The Pratiharas, Palas, and Rashtrakutas, who were the main Indian dynasties of that time, successfully blocked any further Arab expansion. For the next 300 years, the Arab Muslim presence in India remained limited to Sindh and the coastal trading communities. India as a whole remained Hindu and Buddhist.

Mahmud of Ghazni: The Raider, 1000 to 1027 CE

The real shift began with a man named Mahmud of Ghazni. He was a Turkic ruler of an empire centered in what is now Afghanistan. Between 1000 and 1027 CE, Mahmud led seventeen separate raids into northern India.

Mahmud was not trying to conquer India in any permanent way. He was a raider. He would gather his army, sweep into India, attack a wealthy city or temple, loot everything he could carry, kill resistance, and then leave. His raids were enabled by the fact that India was politically divided. There was no central Indian state to coordinate defence. Each Hindu king defended only his own territory, and Mahmud could pick them off one at a time.

The most famous and most destructive of his raids was the sack of the Somnath temple in Gujarat in 1025 CE. Somnath was one of the holiest Hindu temples, dedicated to Shiva. It had been built and rebuilt for over a thousand years. According to Persian historians who wrote about Mahmud's raids, the temple was hugely wealthy, decorated with gold and jewels and visited by thousands of pilgrims.

Mahmud's army broke into the temple. The defenders were killed. Persian sources give numbers of 50,000 defenders killed, although this might be exaggerated. Mahmud personally smashed the main Shiva lingam idol with a mace. He loaded the temple's treasure onto camels and took it back to Ghazni. The temple was destroyed.

The Somnath raid became a wound in Hindu memory that has never fully healed. It is still talked about today, almost 1,000 years later. The temple has been rebuilt several times, most recently after Indian independence in 1951. Each time, it has been rebuilt as a statement that what was destroyed can be rebuilt.

It is important to note that Mahmud's raids were motivated by both religious zeal and pure greed. He was a Muslim and he believed destroying Hindu idols was a religious duty. But he was also a king who needed to pay his soldiers and finance his other wars. The wealth he took from India funded his entire empire. Both motivations were real. We should not pretend it was only religious. But we should not pretend religion played no role either.

Why Could This Happen? The Political Problem

Here is something important. By the year 1000 CE, India was the largest and richest civilisation in the world. It had brilliant mathematicians, beautiful art, thousands of temples, deep philosophy. Yet a Turkic warlord based in poor, mountainous Afghanistan could raid it almost at will. How?

The answer is political fragmentation. India in 1000 CE was not one country. It was dozens of competing Hindu kingdoms. The Pala empire in the east. The Pratiharas in the centre. The Chola empire in the south. These kingdoms spent most of their time fighting each other. When Mahmud invaded, each kingdom defended only itself. There was no coordinated all India response.

Add to this the caste system.

The actual fighting was supposed to be done only by the Kshatriya warrior caste, which was a small percentage of the population. Hundreds of thousands of farmers, merchants, and craftsmen lived in any kingdom that was invaded, but they were not trained to fight. They could not pick up swords and defend their homes. This was a structural weakness that India would not really solve until much later.

The historian Al Biruni, a Persian Muslim scholar who travelled with Mahmud of Ghazni and wrote a careful study of Indian culture called the Kitab al Hind, noticed this weakness himself. He wrote that the Hindus were brilliant in science and mathematics but politically and militarily disorganised. Al Biruni's book is one of our best sources on India in 1000 CE, and it is remarkably fair minded. He admired Indian achievements even as he served the man who was looting them.

Al Biruni was being critical, but the criticism contains a real insight. India's confidence in its own superiority, which was largely earned, also made it slow to take seriously the threat from poorer, less developed regions like Afghanistan. Why would the great Indian civilisation worry about some warlord from the mountains? It turned out to be a costly mistake.

The Big One: Muhammad of Ghor and the Battle of Tarain, 1192 CE

Mahmud of Ghazni's raids were just preview. The real conquest came almost 200 years later, with a man named Muhammad of Ghor. He was a Turkic Persian ruler from what is now Afghanistan.

Muhammad of Ghor began invading north India in the 1170s CE. The main Hindu power blocking him was a confederation of Rajput kingdoms led by a young king named Prithviraj Chauhan, who ruled from Delhi and Ajmer.

In 1191 CE, the two armies met at Tarain, near modern Karnal in Haryana. Prithviraj Chauhan won. The Rajput cavalry broke the Ghorid lines, and Muhammad of Ghor himself was nearly captured. He fled back to Afghanistan to regroup. If Prithviraj had pursued and finished him, much of Indian history might have been different.

Instead, Prithviraj let Muhammad of Ghor go. Why? Because in Rajput tradition, you did not chase a defeated enemy. You let him retreat with dignity. This was considered honourable. Muhammad of Ghor did not share this code. He went home, raised a bigger army, and came back the next year.

In 1192 CE, at the Second Battle of Tarain, the two armies met again. This time, Muhammad of Ghor used different tactics. He sent his light cavalry to harass the slow moving, heavily armoured Rajput forces. He attacked at dawn while the Rajputs were still preparing. He used feigned retreats to pull Rajput cavalry into traps. Prithviraj Chauhan was defeated and captured. According to Persian sources, he was eventually executed.

The Second Battle of Tarain in 1192 CE is one of the most important dates in Indian history. It opened the gates of north India to Muslim political rule that would last, in various forms, for over 600 years. From this point until 1857, when the British formally ended the last Mughal emperor's reign, large parts of India would be ruled by Muslim dynasties.

The Destruction of Nalanda, 1193 CE

One year after Tarain, Muhammad of Ghor's general Bakhtiyar Khalji marched east into Bihar and Bengal. In 1193 CE, he reached Nalanda, the great university we talked about in chapter twelve.

What happened next is one of the great tragedies of human history. Bakhtiyar Khalji's forces attacked Nalanda. The monks were killed or fled. The buildings were burned. The library, with its hundreds of thousands of manuscripts representing 800 years of accumulated knowledge, was set on fire. The Persian historian Minhaj e Siraj, writing about 70 years after the event, says the library burned for several months. Whole categories of human knowledge were lost forever in those flames.

Nalanda was not the only victim. Other great Indian universities, including Vikramashila and Odantapuri in the same region, were also destroyed around this time. The entire centre of Buddhist learning in north India was wiped out. Buddhism, which had been a major religion in India for over 1,500 years, essentially disappeared from its homeland in the next century. This is why Buddhism, the most peaceful and philosophical religion India ever produced, is now barely present in India itself, while it thrives in countries it spread to.

I want to be clear about something. The destruction of Nalanda was not a misunderstanding or an accident of war. It was deliberate cultural destruction. There was no military necessity to burn the library. The library posed no threat. It was burned because the books in it represented a rival worldview, and the conquerors wanted that worldview erased. When you burn a library, you are not just killing the present. You are killing the future.

Important Honest Notes

Before we move on, I want to put a few things in proper perspective, because the history of medieval Islamic conquests in India is often weaponised by people with political agendas in modern India. I do not want to be one of those people.

First. Muslim invaders and rulers did destroy many Hindu temples. This is a documented fact. The historian Richard Eaton, in his book Temple Desecration and Muslim States in Medieval India (2000), did careful research on this and identified about 80 temples that were definitely destroyed by Muslim rulers between 1192 and 1729 CE. Older Hindu nationalist sources sometimes claim numbers like 60,000 destroyed temples, which Eaton's research shows is not supported by evidence. The real number is far lower than the inflated claims, but still substantial and significant.

Second. Most temple destruction happened in the context of conquest. Conquering a region and destroying its main religious symbols was a way of saying "we are in charge now." This is brutal, but it was also a normal practice of medieval conquerors of all religions. Christians did this to pagan temples in Europe. The pattern was about establishing political dominance, not just about religion. Religion was the language in which that dominance was expressed.

Third. Not all Muslim rulers in India were destroyers. Many were great builders. The Mughals built the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort, and hundreds of other beautiful monuments that are now treasured parts of India's heritage. Akbar, the third Mughal emperor, made a serious effort to learn from Hindu, Christian, Zoroastrian, and Jain scholars and promoted religious tolerance. Many ordinary Muslims who lived in India for generations became as Indian as anyone else. Indian music, food, architecture, and dress all owe huge debts to Islamic influence.

Fourth. Most ordinary Indian Muslims today are not descendants of invaders. They are descendants of Indian Hindus and Buddhists who converted over centuries, often peacefully, sometimes under pressure but rarely at swordpoint. Many converted to escape the worst aspects of the caste system, since Islam was officially egalitarian even if it did not always live up to that in practice. Indian Muslims are as Indian as Indian Hindus. They share the same blood, the same land, and most of the same culture. Anyone who tells you Indian Muslims are foreign is lying.

Holding these four facts together honestly is hard. It requires acknowledging that real harms were done in the past, while also acknowledging that those harms cannot be visited on people living today. It requires distinguishing between what kings and armies did and what ordinary people did. It requires neither pretending the destruction did not happen nor exaggerating it for modern political purposes. This is the kind of honest history I am trying to do. I hope you will hold me to it.

6The Sultanate, the Mughals, and the Long Conquest

After Muhammad of Ghor's victory at Tarain in 1192 CE, north India entered a new phase. For the next 320 years, north India was ruled by a series of Muslim dynasties known collectively as the Delhi Sultanate. Then in 1526 CE, a new dynasty took over: the Mughals. They would rule, in effect, until 1857 CE. That is over 660 years of Muslim political rule in north India. This is roughly the same length of time that has passed since Columbus reached America. It is a huge stretch of history with many layers.

The Five Dynasties of the Delhi Sultanate

The Delhi Sultanate was not one continuous government. It was actually five different dynasties that succeeded each other in Delhi between 1206 and 1526 CE. Each had its own character. Let me run through them quickly.

The Slave Dynasty (1206 to 1290 CE). Also called the Mamluk Dynasty. The first ruler was Qutb ud din Aibak, a former slave who had been a general for Muhammad of Ghor. When Muhammad of Ghor died in 1206, Aibak set himself up as the Sultan of Delhi. Several of his successors were also former slaves who had risen through the military. The Slave Dynasty built the famous Qutub Minar in Delhi, a 73 metre tall minaret that you can still visit today.

The Khalji Dynasty (1290 to 1320 CE). The most famous Khalji ruler was Ala ud din Khalji. He was a brilliant general but also one of the most ruthless rulers in Indian history. He launched a series of military campaigns that pushed the Sultanate's territory deep into south India for the first time. He also implemented harsh economic controls, fixing prices and seizing wealth from his subjects. He is the king played by Ranveer Singh in the 2018 movie Padmaavat, although the historical accuracy of that film is highly questionable.

The Tughlaq Dynasty (1320 to 1414 CE). The Tughlaqs were Turkic Indian rulers. The most famous was Muhammad bin Tughlaq, who tried some incredibly ambitious projects. He moved his capital from Delhi to Daulatabad in central India, forcing the entire population of Delhi to march hundreds of kilometres. When that did not work, he forced them to march back. He also tried introducing a token currency made of copper, which collapsed when people figured out how to forge it. He is sometimes called the wisest fool in Indian history.

The Sayyid Dynasty (1414 to 1451 CE). A short and weak dynasty that only ruled a small area around Delhi.

The Lodi Dynasty (1451 to 1526 CE). The Lodis were Afghan rulers who briefly revived the Sultanate's power. The last Lodi ruler, Ibrahim Lodi, was killed at the First Battle of Panipat in 1526 CE, which we will come to in a moment.

The Timur Invasion, 1398 CE

I want to single out one event from the Sultanate period because it was catastrophic. In 1398 CE, the Central Asian conqueror Timur, also known as Tamerlane, invaded India.

Timur was a Turkic Mongol descendant of Genghis Khan, and he was already famous for his conquests across Persia, Iraq, Syria, and Central Asia. His invasion of India was brief but devastating. He swept into Delhi, defeated the Tughlaq armies, and sacked the city.

According to Timur's own court historian, Sharaf ad Din Ali Yazdi, Timur ordered the massacre of more than 100,000 Hindu and Muslim prisoners in Delhi before the city was sacked. He thought they might rise up during the looting. When the looting began, the death toll was much higher. Modern estimates suggest 200,000 or more people died in the sack of Delhi. The city was almost completely depopulated. It would not recover for over a century.

Timur did not stay. He took the loot back to his capital at Samarkand. This is important to remember when we talk about the Mughals next, because Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty, was a direct descendant of Timur on his father's side. The Mughals saw themselves as Timur's heirs.

The First Battle of Panipat, 1526 CE

The end of the Delhi Sultanate came on April 21, 1526, at a place called Panipat, about 90 kilometres north of Delhi.

A Central Asian prince named Babur, originally from the Fergana valley in modern Uzbekistan, had been carving out a kingdom for himself in Afghanistan. He was a descendant of both Timur (through his father) and Genghis Khan (through his mother). He had a small but well organised army with one important advantage: gunpowder weapons. He had cannons and matchlock muskets, which were still rare in India.

Babur invaded India and met Ibrahim Lodi's much larger army at Panipat. Babur had perhaps 12,000 to 15,000 men. Lodi had perhaps 50,000 to 100,000, including hundreds of war elephants. It should have been a Lodi victory. But Babur used his cannons to break the Lodi lines, sent his cavalry to circle around, and crushed the larger army within hours. Ibrahim Lodi was killed in the battle. Babur took Delhi and Agra. The Mughal dynasty was born.

The Mughals: Six Great Emperors, 1526 to 1707 CE

The Mughal Empire would become one of the wealthiest and most culturally productive empires in human history. At its peak, around 1700 CE, the Mughal empire ruled almost all of South Asia and had about 150 million subjects. Its GDP was, by some estimates, about a quarter of the entire world's economy.

The Mughals are traditionally counted as having six great emperors. Let me walk through them.

Babur (1526 to 1530 CE). The founder. He died only four years after his big victory at Panipat. He was a complex man: a brilliant general, an honest memoirist who wrote his autobiography the Baburnama, a poet, and also a drinker who eventually swore off alcohol. He never really felt at home in India and missed Central Asia.

Humayun (1530 to 1556 CE). Babur's son. He was a kind but not very effective ruler. He lost the empire to an Afghan rebel named Sher Shah Suri and spent 15 years in exile in Persia. He eventually returned and reconquered Delhi, only to die a year later by falling down the stairs of his library carrying an armful of books. Sher Shah Suri, by the way, was one of the most efficient administrators in Indian history. He built the Grand Trunk Road which still exists, reformed the tax system, and standardised the rupee, the currency that India still uses today.

Akbar (1556 to 1605 CE). Akbar was Humayun's son and is generally considered the greatest of the Mughals. He came to the throne at age 13 and ruled for 49 years. He expanded the empire to cover most of the subcontinent. But what makes Akbar special is his religious policy. Akbar invited scholars from every religion to his court for debates: Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, Jains, and Buddhists. He eventually tried to create his own syncretic religion called Din i Ilahi, which mixed elements from many faiths. It never caught on, but the attempt itself shows how seriously he took religious questions.

Akbar abolished the jizya tax on non Muslims in 1564 CE. He married Hindu Rajput princesses and made their relatives major figures in his court. His revenue minister, Raja Todar Mal, was a Hindu. His chief military commander, Raja Man Singh, was a Hindu Rajput. Akbar's son, the next emperor, was half Rajput. By the standards of his time and ours, Akbar was remarkably committed to religious tolerance. The historian Vincent Smith called him the first modern monarch in Indian history.

Jahangir (1605 to 1627 CE). Akbar's son. He continued most of his father's tolerant policies. He was a great patron of painting and gardens. He was also addicted to opium and alcohol, which weakened his governance late in life. His wife Nur Jahan was the actual power behind the throne for many years and is one of the most fascinating women in Indian history.

Shah Jahan (1628 to 1658 CE). The builder. He is the emperor who built the Taj Mahal in memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died giving birth to their fourteenth child. The Taj Mahal took 22 years to build and is still considered one of the most beautiful buildings on Earth. Shah Jahan also built the Red Fort in Delhi and the Jama Masjid (the largest mosque in India). The Mughal empire was at its richest during his reign, though there were also ominous signs that the empire was spending more than it could sustain.

Aurangzeb (1658 to 1707 CE). This is the one we have to talk about carefully, because he is the most controversial Mughal emperor.

Aurangzeb: The Reversal

Aurangzeb was the third son of Shah Jahan. He took the throne in 1658 after a brutal civil war against his brothers, killing two of them and imprisoning his own father in the Agra fort for the last eight years of Shah Jahan's life. Shah Jahan died staring at his wife's tomb, the Taj Mahal, from his prison window.

Aurangzeb ruled for 49 years, the longest reign of any Mughal. He expanded the empire to its greatest territorial extent. But he also reversed many of the tolerant policies of Akbar and his successors. He reimposed the jizya tax on non Muslims in 1679, after over a century of it being abolished. He destroyed several major Hindu temples, including the Vishwanath temple at Varanasi and the Keshavnath temple at Mathura (the birthplace of Krishna). He executed the ninth Sikh Guru, Guru Tegh Bahadur, in 1675 for refusing to convert to Islam. This act galvanised Sikh resistance to Mughal rule. The Sikhs' own Khalsa identity, formed by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699, was a direct response to Aurangzeb's religious policies.

At the same time, the picture is more complicated than just "Aurangzeb was a bigot." The historian Audrey Truschke, in her 2017 book Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth, points out that:

•Aurangzeb employed more Hindus in his administration than any earlier Mughal,

•Most of his wars were fought against other Muslims, especially in the Deccan. •He gave grants and protection to many Hindu temples even while destroying others.

•He banned the building of new temples but allowed existing ones to operate.

So which is it? Was Aurangzeb a bigot or was he politically pragmatic? The answer seems to be: both. He was a serious Sunni Muslim who believed his role was to enforce religious law as he understood it. He used religious policies as political tools when convenient. He was a complicated, brutal, effective emperor whose reign had real consequences for India's religious landscape.

What is clear is that under Aurangzeb, the social compact between the Mughal state and its Hindu majority subjects was strained in ways it had not been under Akbar. Rebellions broke out across the empire. The Marathas under Shivaji rose up in the west. The Sikhs militarised under their tenth Guru in the north. The Rajputs grew restless. The Jats rebelled. By the time Aurangzeb died in 1707 CE, the empire was financially exhausted and politically fractured.

The next century would see the slow collapse of Mughal power and the rise of regional Indian powers, leading eventually to the British takeover. But that is the story of the next part.

Important Things About the Mughal Period You Should Know

Before we close this chapter, let me give you some context that often gets lost in arguments about whether the Mughals were good or bad.

The Mughals were Indian. Babur was from Central Asia, but every emperor after him was born in India, raised in India, and died in India. They spoke Persian and Urdu and Hindi. They ate Indian food. Their mothers and grandmothers were often Indian (frequently Rajput Hindus). By Akbar's generation, the Mughals were as Indian as anyone else in the country, even if they were Muslim and culturally connected to Central Asia. To call them foreigners is to miss something important about Indian identity, which has always been about absorbing different peoples and making them part of the whole.

The Mughal period was when much of what we now think of as Indian culture took its modern form. Indian classical music and miniature painting reached new heights under Mughal patronage. Urdu emerged as a literary language. The Indian cuisine that includes biryani, kebab, paratha, and naan is largely Mughal influenced. The Taj Mahal is now the visual symbol of India to most of the world. Rejecting the Mughal contribution to India would mean rejecting much of what makes Indian culture distinct today.

Conversion to Islam was a slow, multi century process. Most Indian Muslims today are descendants of Indian Hindus and Buddhists who converted over the centuries. Why did they convert? Many reasons. Some were forced. Some converted to escape the caste system, which was extra brutal for the lower castes. Some converted because Sufi Muslim mystics offered a personal religion that competed effectively with Hindu devotional movements. (Sufism is a gentle, mystical, love centred strand of Islam.) Some converted because Muslim rulers offered tax breaks and government jobs to converts. Some converted by marriage.

Indian Hinduism survived because of its decentralised structure. Unlike European paganism, which depended on local priests and rulers, Hinduism had no central authority. There was no Hindu pope to convert. There was no single ritual centre to destroy. Even if a thousand temples were destroyed, ten thousand more existed in villages that the conquerors could not reach. Hinduism lived in the home as much as in the temple. Every Hindu family had a household altar. Every village had its own gods. You could not erase this by killing the priests or burning the libraries. It was too distributed.

India also had vast geography on its side. The Mughal empire ruled north India effectively, but its grip on the south was always weaker. The Marathas, the Vijayanagara empire before them, and the regional Hindu kingdoms of the south maintained their identity and their religion through the centuries of Muslim rule in the north. India is too big and too varied to be conquered totally. There were always regions that stayed Hindu, kept the old temples running, and preserved the texts. This geographical advantage is one of the most underappreciated reasons that Hinduism survived where European paganism did not.

We have now covered roughly 4,500 years of Indian history, from the planned cities of the Indus Valley to the death of Aurangzeb. We have seen India's golden ages and its disasters. We have seen the long, slow, complicated arrival of Islam, with both its violence and its eventual integration into Indian life.

In the next part of this book, we will look at the next great threat to Indian civilisation: the arrival of European powers, especially the British, who would do something the Mughals never quite managed. They would take all of India under one ruler, drain its wealth, restructure its economy, and try to convert it to Christianity. They would mostly fail at the last part, but they would succeed at the first three in ways that India is still recovering from today. We will see how, and why, in Part Three.