6

India

Though accompanied and advised by scholars and savants, Alexander the Great had only hazy ideas of what he would find in India; he seems to have thought that the Indus was part of the Nile and that beyond it lay more of Ethiopia. A fair amount had long been known by the Greeks about the Indian north-west, the seat of the Persian satrapy of Gandhara. But beyond that all was darkness. So far as political geography is concerned, the obscurity has remained; the relations between and, for that matter, the nature of the states of the Ganges valley at the time of Alexander’s invasion are still hard to get at. A kingdom of Magadha, based on the lower river and exercising some sort of hegemony over the rest of the valley, had been the most important political unit in the subcontinent for two centuries or more, but not much is known about its institutions or history. Indian sources say nothing of Alexander’s arrival in India and as the great conqueror never penetrated beyond the Punjab we can learn from Greek accounts of his day only of his disruption of the petty kingdoms of the north-west, not about the heartland of Indian power.

Under the Seleucids more reliable information became available in the West about what lay beyond the Punjab. This new knowledge roughly coincides with the rise of a new Indian power, the Maurya empire, and here the India of historical record really begins. One of our informants is a Greek ambassador, Megasthenes, sent to India by the Seleucid king in about 300 BC. Fragments of his account of what he saw were preserved long enough for later writers to quote him at length. As he travelled as far as Bengal and Orissa and was respected both as a diplomat and as a scholar, he met and interrogated many Indians. Some later writers found him a credulous and unreliable reporter; they dwelt upon his tales of men who subsisted on odours instead of food and drink, of others who were cyclopean or whose feet were so large that they used them to shelter from the sun, of pygmies and men without mouths. Such tales were, of course, nonsense. But they were not necessarily without foundation. They may well represent only the highly developed awareness shown by Aryan Indians of

the physical differences which marked them off from neighbours or remote acquaintances from central Asia or the jungles of Burma. Some of these must have looked very strange indeed, and some of their behaviour was, no doubt, also very strange in Indian eyes. Others among these tales may dimly reflect the curious ascetic practices of Indian religion which have never ceased to impress outsiders and usually improve in the telling. Such tales need not discredit the teller, and they do not mean that other things he reports must be wholly untrue. They may even have a positive value if they suggest something of the way in which Megasthenes’ Indian informants saw the outside world.

He describes the India of a great ruler, Chandragupta, founder of the Maurya line. Something is known about him from other sources. The ancients believed that he had been inspired to conquest by having as a youth seen Alexander the Great during his invasion of India. However this may be, Chandragupta usurped the Magadha throne in 321 BC and on the ruins of that kingdom built a state which encompassed not only the two great valleys of the Indus and Ganges, but most of Afghanistan (taken from the Seleucids) and Baluchistan. His capital was at Patna, where Chandragupta inhabited a magnificent palace. It was made of wood; archaeology still cannot help us much at this stage of Indian history. From Megasthenes’ account it might be inferred that Chandragupta exercised a sort of monarchical presidency but Indian sources seem to reveal a bureaucratic state, or at least something that aspired to be one. What it was like in practice is hard to see. It had been built from political units formed in earlier times, many of which had been republican or popular in organization, and many of these were connected to the emperor through great men who were his officers; some of these, nominally subjects, must often have been very independent in practice.

About the empire’s inhabitants, too, Megasthenes is informative. Besides providing a long list of different peoples, he distinguished two religious traditions (one the Brahmanical and the other apparently Buddhist), mentioned the rice-eating habits of Indians and their abstention from wine except for ritual purposes, said much about the domestication of elephants, and remarked on the fact (surprising to Greek eyes) that in India there were no slaves. He was wrong, but excusably so. Though Indians were not bought and sold in absolute servitude, there were those bound to labour for their masters and legally incapable of removal. Megasthenes also reported that the king diverted himself by hunting, which was done from raised platforms, or from the backs of elephants - much as tigers were shot in the twentieth century.

Chandragupta is said to have spent his last days in retirement with Jains, ritually starving himself to death in a retreat near Mysore. His son and successor turned the expansive course of empire already shown by his father to the south. Maurya power began to penetrate the dense rain-forests east of Patna, and to push down the eastern coast. Finally, under the third Maurya, the conquest of Orissa gave the empire control of the land and sea routes to the south and the subcontinent acquired a measure of political unity not matched in extent for over two thousand years. The conqueror who achieved this was Asoka, the ruler under whom a documented history of India at last begins to be possible.

From Asoka’s era survive many inscriptions bearing decrees and injunctions to his subjects. The use of this means of propagating official messages and the individual style of the inscriptions both suggest Persian and Hellenistic influence, and India under the Mauryas was certainly more continually in touch with the civilizations to the West than ever before. At Kandahar, Asoka left inscriptions in both Greek and Aramaic.

Such evidence reveals a government capable of much more than that sketched by Megasthenes. A royal council ruled over a society based on caste. There was a royal army and a bureaucracy; as elsewhere, the coming of literacy was an epoch in government as well as in culture. There seems also to have been a large secret police, or internal intelligence service. Besides raising taxes and maintaining communication and irrigation services, this machine, under Asoka, undertook the promotion of an official ideology. Asoka had himself been converted to Buddhism early in his reign. Unlike Constantine’s conversion, his did not precede but followed a battle whose cost in suffering appalled Asoka. Be that as it may, the result of his conversion was the abandonment of the pattern of conquest which had marked his career until then. Perhaps this is why he felt no temptation to campaign outside the subcontinent - a limitation which, however, he shared with most Indian rulers, who never aspired to rule over barbarians and one which, of course, was only evident when he had completed the conquest of India.

The most remarkable consequence of Asoka’s Buddhism has usually been thought to be expressed in the recommendations he made to his subjects in the rock-inscriptions and pillars dating from this part of his reign (roughly after 260 bc). They really amounted to a complete new social philosophy. Asoka’s precepts have the overall name of Dhamma, a variant of a Sanskrit word meaning ‘Universal Law’, and their novelty has led to much anachronistic admiration of Asoka’s modernity by Indian politicians of this century. Asoka’s ideas are, none the less, striking. He enjoined respect for the dignity of all men and, above all, religious toleration and non-violence. His precepts were general rather than precise and they were not laws. But their central themes are unmistakable and they were intended to provide principles of action. While Asoka’s own bent and thinking undoubtedly made such ideas agreeable to him, they suggest less a wish to advance the ideas of Buddhism (this is something Asoka did in other ways) than a wish to allay differences; they look very much like a device of government for a huge, heterogeneous and religiously divided empire. Asoka was seeking to establish some focus for a measure of political and social unity spanning all India, which would be based on men’s interests as well as upon force and spying. ‘All men,’ said one of his inscriptions, ‘are my children.’

This may also explain his pride in what might be called his ‘social services’, which sometimes took forms appropriate to the climate: ‘on the roads I have had banyan trees planted,’ he proclaimed, ‘which will give shade to beasts and men’. The value of this apparently simple device would have been readily apparent to those who toiled and travelled in the great Indian plains. Almost incidentally, improvements also smoothed the path of trade, but like the wells he dug and the rest-houses he set up at nine-mile intervals, the banyan trees were an expression of Dhamma. Yet Dhamma does not appear to have succeeded, for we hear of sectarian struggles and the resentment of priests.

Asoka did better in promoting simple Buddhist evangelization. His reign brought the first great expansion of Buddhism, which had prospered, but had remained hitherto confined to north-eastern India. Now Asoka sent missionaries to Burma who did well; in Ceylon others did better still, and from his day the island was predominantly Buddhist. Those sent, more optimistically, to Macedonia and Egypt were less successful, though Buddhist teaching left its mark on some of the philosophies of the Hellenistic world and some Greeks were converted.

The vitality of Buddhism under Asoka may in part explain signs of reaction in the Brahmanical religion. It has been suggested that a new popularization of certain cults, which dates from about this time, may have been a conscious brahman response to challenge. Notably, the third and second centuries BC brought a new prominence to the cults of two of the most popular avatars of Vishnu. One is the proteiform Krishna, whose legend offers vast possibilities of psychological identification to the worshipper, and the other Rama, the embodiment of the benevolent king, good husband and son, a family god. It was in the second century BC, too, that the two great Indian epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, began to take their final form. The first of these was extended by a long passage, which is now the most famous work of Indian literature and its greatest poem, the Bhagavad Gita, or ‘Song of the lord’. It was to become the central testament of Hinduism, weaving around the figure of Vishnu/Krishna the ethical doctrine of duty in the performance of the obligations laid upon one by membership of one’s class (dharma) and the recommendation that works of devotion, however meritorious, might be less efficacious than love of Krishna as a means to release into eternal happiness.

These were important facts for the future of Hinduism, but were to develop fully only over a period which ran on far past the crumbling of the Mauryan empire, which began soon after Asoka’s death. Such a disappearance is so dramatically impressive - and the Mauryan empire had been so remarkable a thing - that, though we are tempted to look for some special explanation, yet perhaps there is only a cumulative one. In all ancient empires except perhaps the Chinese, the demands made on government eventually outgrew the technical resources available to meet them: when this happened, they broke up. The Mauryas had done great things. They conscripted labour to exploit large areas of wasteland, thereby both feeding a growing population and increasing the tax base of the empire. They undertook great irrigation works which survived them for centuries. Trade prospered under Maurya rule, if we may judge from the way northern pottery spread throughout India in the third century BC. They kept up a huge army and a diplomacy which ranged as far afield as Epirus. The cost, however, was great. The government and army were parasitical upon an agricultural economy which could not be indefinitely expanded. There was a limit to what it could pay for. Nor, though bureaucracy seems at this distance to have been centralized in principle, was it likely to have been very effective, let alone flawless. Without a system of control and recruitment to render it independent of society, it fell at one end into the hands of the favourites of the monarch on whom all else depended and at the other into the gift of local elites who knew how to seize and retain power.

One political weakness was rooted deep in pre-Maurya times. Indian society had already sunk its anchors in the family and the institutions of caste. Here, in social institutions rather than in a dynasty or an abstract notion of a continuing state (let alone a nation), was the focus of Indian loyalties. When an Indian empire began to crumble under economic, external or technical pressures, it had no unthinking popular support to fall back upon. This is a striking indication of the lack of success of Asoka’s attempts to provide ideological integument for his empire. What is more, India’s social institutions, and especially caste, in its elaborated forms, imposed economic costs. Where functions were inalterably allocated by birth, economic aptitude was held back. So was ambition. India had a social system which was bound to cramp the possibilities of economic growth.

The assassination of the last Maurya was followed by a Ganges dynasty of Brahmanical origin and thereafter the story of India for five hundred years is once more one of political disunity. References in Chinese sources become available from the end of the second century BC, but it cannot be said that they have made agreement between scholars about what was happening in India any easier; even the chronology is still largely conjectural. Only the general processes stand out.

The most important of these is a new succession of invasions of India from the historic north-western routes. First came Bactrians, descendants of the Greeks left behind by Alexander’s empire on the upper Oxus, where by 239 BC they had formed an independent kingdom standing between India and Seleucid Persia. Our knowledge of this mysterious realm is largely drawn from its coins and has grave gaps in it, but it is known that a hundred years later the Bactrians were pushing into the Indus valley. They were the foremost in a current which was to flow for four centuries. A complex series of movements was in train whose origins lay deep in the nomadic societies of Asia. Among those who followed the Indo-Greeks of Bactria and established themselves at different times in the Punjab were Parthians and Scythians. One Scythian king, according to legend, received St Thomas the apostle at his court.

One important people came all the way from the borders of China and left behind them the memory of another big Indian empire, stretching from Benares beyond the mountains to the caravan routes of the steppes. These were the Kushanas. Historians still argue about how they are related to other nomadic peoples, but two things about them seem clear enough. The first is that they (or their rulers) were both enthusiastically Buddhist and also patronized some Hindu sects. The second was that their political interests were focused in central Asia, where their greatest king died fighting.

The Kushana period brought fresh foreign influences once more into Indian culture, often from the West, as the Hellenistic flavour of its sculpture, particularly of the Buddha, shows. It marks an epoch in another way, for the depicting of the Buddha was something of an innovation in Kushan times. The Kushanas carried it very far and the Greek models gradually gave way to the forms of Buddha familiar today. This was one expression of the developing complexity of Buddhist religion. One thing which was happening was that Buddhism was being popularized and materialized; Buddha was turning into a god. But this was only one among many charges. Millenarianism, more emotional expressions of religion and more sophisticated philosophical systems were all interplaying with one another. To distinguish Hindu or Buddhist ‘orthodoxy’ in this is somewhat artificial.

In the end the Kushanas succumbed to a greater power. Bactria and the Kabul valley were taken by Artaxerxes early in the third century ad. Soon after, another Sassanid king took the Kushana capital of Peshawar - and such statements make it easy to feel impatient with the narrative they provide. Contemplating them, the reader may well feel with Voltaire: ‘What is it to me if one king replaces another on the banks of the Oxus and Jaxartes?’ It is like the fratricidal struggles of Frankish kings, or of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of the Heptarchy, on a slightly larger scale. It is indeed difficult to see much significance in this ebb and flow beyond its registration of two great constants of Indian history, the importance of the north-western frontier as a cultural conduit and the digestive power of Hindu civilization. None of the invading peoples could in the end resist the assimilative power India always showed. New rulers were before long ruling Hindu kingdoms (whose roots went back possibly beyond Maurya times to political units of the fourth and fifth centuries bc), and adopting Indian ways.

Invaders never penetrated far to the south. After the Maurya break-up, the Deccan long remained separate and under its own Dravidian rulers. Its cultural distinction persists even today. Though Aryan influence was stronger there after the Maurya era and Hinduism and Buddhism were never to disappear, the south was not again truly integrated politically with the north until the coming of the British Raj.

In this confusing period not all India’s contacts with outsiders were violent. Trade with Roman merchants grew so visibly that Pliny blamed it (wrongly) for draining gold out of the empire. We have little hard information, it is true, except about the arrival of embassies from India to negotiate over trade but the remark suggests that one feature of India’s trade with the West was already established; what Mediterranean markets sought were luxuries which only India could supply and there was little they could offer in return except bullion. This pattern held until the nineteenth century. There are also other interesting signs of intercontinental contacts arising from trade. The sea is a uniter of the cultures of trading communities; Tamil words for commodities turn up in Greek, and Indians from the south had traded with Egypt since Hellenistic times. Later, Roman merchants lived in southern ports where Tamil kings kept Roman bodyguards. Finally, it seems likely that whatever the truth may be about the holy apostle Thomas, Christianity appeared in India first in the western trading ports, possibly as early as the first century ad.

Political unity did not appear again even in the north until hundreds of years had passed. A new Ganges valley state, the Gupta empire, was then the legatee of five centuries of confusion. Its centre was at Patna, where a dynasty of Gupta emperors established itself. The first of these, another Chandra Gupta, began to reign in 320, and within a hundred years north India was once more for a time united and relieved of external pressure and incursion. It was not so big an empire as Asoka’s, but the Guptas preserved theirs longer. For some two centuries north India enjoyed under them a sort of Antonine age, later to be imagined with nostalgia, India’s classical period.

The Gupta age brought the first great consolidation of an Indian art. From the earlier times little has survived before the perfection of stone-carving under the Mauryas. The columns which are its major monuments were the culmination of a native tradition of stonework. For a long time stone-carving and building still showed traces of styles evolved in an age of wood construction, but techniques were well advanced before the arrival of Greek influence, once thought to be the origin of Indian stone sculpture. What the Greeks brought were new artistic motifs and techniques from the West. If we are to judge by what survives, the major deployment of these influences was found in Buddhist sculpture until well into the Christian era. But before the Gupta era, a rich and indigenous tradition of Hindu sculptures had also been established and from this time India’s artistic life is mature and self-sustaining. In Gupta times there began to be built the great numbers of stone temples (as distinct from excavated and embellished caves), which are the great glories both of Indian art and architecture before the Muslim era.

Gupta civilization was also remarkable for its literary achievement. Again, the roots are deep. The standardization and systematization of Sanskrit grammar just before Maurya times opened the path to a literature which could be shared by the elite of the whole subcontinent. Sanskrit was a tie uniting north and south in spite of their cultural differences. The great epics were given their classical form in Sanskrit (though they were also available in translations into local languages) and in it wrote the greatest of Indian poets, Kalidasa. He was also a dramatist, and in the Gupta era there emerged from the shadowy past the Indian theatre whose traditions have been maintained and carried into the popular Indian film industry of the twentieth century.

Intellectually, too, the Gupta era was a great one. It was in the fifth century that Indian arithmeticians invented the decimal system. A layman can perhaps glimpse the importance of this more readily than he can that of the Indian philosophical resurgence of the same period. The resurgence was not confined to religious thought, but what can be gathered from it about general attitudes or the direction of culture seems highly debatable. In a literary text such as the Kama Sutra, a western observer may be most struck by the prominence given in it to the acquisition of techniques whose use, however stimulating to the individual, can at most have absorbed only a small fraction of the interest and time of a tiny elite. A negative point is perhaps safest: neither the emphasis on dharma of the Brahmanical tradition, nor the ascetic severities of some Indian teachers, nor the frank acceptance of sensual pleasure suggested by many texts beside the Kama Sutra have anything in common with the striving, militant puritanism so strong in both the Christian and Islamic traditions. Indian civilization moved to very different rhythms from those further west; here, perhaps, lay its deepest strength and the explanation of its powers of resistance to alien cultures.

In the Gupta era Indian civilization came to its mature, classical form. Chronology derived from politics is a hindrance here; important developments flow across the boundaries of any arbitrary period. Nevertheless, in Gupta culture we can sense the presence of the fully evolved Hindu society. Its outstanding expression was a caste system which by then had come to overlay and complicate the original four-class division of Vedic society. Within castes which locked them into well-defined groups for marriage and, usually, to their occupations, most Indians lived a life close to the land. The cities were for the most part great markets or great centres of pilgrimage. Most Indians were, as they are now, peasants, whose lives were lived within the assumptions of a religious culture already set in its fundamental form in pre-Maurya times. Some of its later developments have been mentioned already; others run on past the Gupta period and will have to be discussed elsewhere. Of their vigour and power there can be no doubt; with centuries of further elaboration ahead, they were already expressed in Gupta times in a huge development of carving and sculpture which manifest the power of popular religion and take their place alongside the stupas and Buddhas of pre-Gupta times as an enduring feature of the Indian landscape. Paradoxically, India, largely because of its religious art, is a country where we have perhaps more evidence about the mind of the men of the past than we have about their material life. We may know little about the precise way in which Gupta taxation actually weighed on the peasant (though we can guess), but in the contemplation of the endless dance of the gods and demons, the forming and dissolving patterns of animals and symbols, we can touch a world still alive and visible in the village shrines and juggernauts of our own day. In India as nowhere else, there is some chance of access to the life of the uncounted millions whose history should be recounted in such books as this, but which usually escapes us.

In the climax of Hindu civilization between Gupta times and the coming of Islam, the fertility of Indian religion, the soil of Indian culture, was hardly troubled by political change. One symptom was the appearance by 600 or thereabouts of an important new cult which quickly took a place it was never to lose in the Hindu worship, that of the mother-goddess Devi. Some have seen in her an expression of a new sexual emphasis which marked both Hinduism and Buddhism. Her cult was part of a general effervescence of religious life, lasting a couple of centuries or more, for a new popular emotionalism is associated with the cults of Shiva and Vishnu at about the same time. Dates are not very helpful here; we have to think of continuing change during the whole of the centuries corresponding to those of the early Christian era, whose result was the final evolution of the old Brahmanical religion into Hinduism.

From it there emerged a spectrum of practice and belief offering something for all needs. It ran from the philosophic system of Vedanta, an abstract creed stressing the unreality of the factual and material and the desirability of winning disengagement from it in true knowledge of reality - brahma - to the crudities of the village shrines at which local deities were worshipped which had been easily assimilated to the cults of Shiva or Vishnu by the belief that these two leading deities might appear in more than one incarnation. Religious effervescence thus found expression antithetically in the simultaneous growth of image worship and the rise of new austerity. Animal sacrifice had never stopped. It was one of the things now endorsed by a new strictness of conservative religious practice. So was a new rigidity of attitudes towards women and their intensified subordination. The religious expression of this was an upsurge of child marriage and the practice called suttee, or self-immolation of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres.

Yet the richness of Indian culture is such that this coarsening of religion was accompanied also by the development to their highest pitch of the philosophical tradition of the Vedanta, the culmination of Vedic tradition, and the new development of Mahayana Buddhism, which asserted the divinity of the Buddha. The roots of the latter went back to early deviations from the Buddha’s teaching on contemplation, purity and non-attachment. These deviations had favoured a more ritualistic and popular religious approach and also stressed a new interpretation of the Buddha’s role. Instead of merely being understood as a teacher and an example, Buddha was now seen as the greatest of bodhisattvas, saviours who, entitled to the bliss of self-annihilation themselves, nevertheless rejected it to remain in the world and teach men the way to salvation.

To become a bodhisattva gradually became the aim of many Buddhists. In part, the efforts of a Buddhist council summoned by the Kushan ruler Kanishka had been directed towards reintegrating two tendencies in Buddhism which were increasingly divergent. This had not been successful. Mahayana Buddhism (the word means ‘great vehicle’) focused upon a Buddha who was effectively a divine saviour who might be worshipped and followed in faith, one manifestation of a great, single heavenly Buddha who begins to look somewhat like the undifferentiated soul behind all things found in Hinduism. The disciplines of austerity and contemplation Gautama had taught were now increasingly confined to a minority of orthodox Buddhists, the followers of Mahayana winning conversions among the masses. One sign of this was the proliferation in the first and second centuries ad of statues and representations of the Buddha, a practice hitherto restrained by the Buddha’s prohibition of idol-worship. Mahayana Buddhism eventually replaced earlier forms in India, and spread also along the central Asian trade routes through Central Asia to China and Japan. The more orthodox tradition did better in south-eastern Asia and Indonesia.

Hinduism and Buddhism were thus both marked by changes which broadened their appeal. The Hindu religion prospered better, though there is a regional factor at work here; since Kushan times, the centre of Indian Buddhism had been the north-west, the region most exposed to the devastations of the Hun raiders. Hinduism prospered most in the south. Both the north-west and the south, of course, were zones where cultural currents intermingled most easily with those from the classical Mediterranean world, in the one across land and in the other by sea.

These changes provoke a sense of culmination and climax. They matured only shortly before Islam arrived in the subcontinent, but early enough for a philosophical outlook to have solidified, one which has marked India ever since and has shown astonishing invulnerability to competing views. At its heart was a vision of endless cycles of creation and reabsorption into the divine, a picture of the cosmos which predicated a cyclic and not a linear history. What difference this made to the way Indians have actually behaved - right down to the present day - is a huge subject, and almost impossible to grasp. It might be expected to lead to passivity and scepticism about the value of practical action, yet this is very debatable. Few Christians live lives wholly coherent with their beliefs and there is no reason to expect Hindus to be more consistent. The practical activity of sacrifice and propitiation in Indian temples survives still. Yet the direction of a whole culture may none the less be determined by the emphasis of its distinctive modes of thought and it is difficult not to feel that much of India’s history has been determined by a world outlook which stressed the limits rather than the potential of human action.

For the background to Islam in India we have to return to 500 or so. From about that time, northern India was once again divided in obedience both to the centrifugal tendencies which afflicted early empires and to the appearance of a mysterious invasion of ‘Hunas’. Were they perhaps Huns? Certainly they behaved like them, devastating much of the north-west, sweeping away many of the established ruling families. Across the mountains, in Afghanistan, they mortally wounded Buddhism, which had been strongly established there. In the subcontinent itself, this anarchic period did less fundamental damage. Though the northern plains had broken up again into warring kingdoms, Indian cities do not seem to have been much disturbed and peasant life recovers quickly from all but the worst blows. Indian warfare appears rapidly to have acquired important and effective conventional limits on its potential for destructiveness. The state of affairs over much of the north at this time seems in some ways rather like that of some European countries during the more anarchic periods of the Middle Ages, when feudal relationships more or less kept the peace between potentially competitive grandees but could not completely contain outbreaks of violence which were essentially about different forms of tribute.

Meanwhile, Islam had come to India. It did so first through Arab traders on the western coasts. Then, in 712 or thereabouts, Arab armies conquered Sind. They got no further, gradually settled down and ceased to trouble the Indian peoples. A period of calm followed which lasted until a Ghaznavid ruler broke deep into India early in the eleventh century with raids which were destructive, but again did not produce radical change. Indian religious life for another two centuries moved still to its own rhythms, the most striking changes being the decline of Buddhism and the rise of Tantrism, a semi-magical and superstitious growth of practices promising access to holiness by charms and ritual. Cults centred on popular festivals at temples also prospered, no doubt in the absence of a strong political focus in post-Gupta times. Then came a new invasion of central Asians.

These invaders were Muslims and were drawn from the complex of Turkish peoples. Theirs was a different sort of Islamic onslaught from earlier ones, for they came to stay, not just to raid. They first established themselves in the Punjab in the eleventh century and then launched a second wave of invasions at the end of the twelfth century, which led within a few decades to the establishment of Turkish sultans at Delhi, who ruled the whole of the Ganges valley. Their empire was not monolithic. Hindu kingdoms survived within it on a tributary basis, as Christian kingdoms survived to be tributaries of Mongols in the West. The Muslim rulers, perhaps careful of their material interests, did not always support their co-religionists of the Ulema who sought to proselytize, and were willing to persecute (as the destruction of Hindu temples shows).

The heartland of the first Muslim empire in India was the Ganges Valley. The invaders rapidly overran Bengal and later established themselves on the west coast of India and the tableland of the Deccan. Further south they did not penetrate and Hindu society survived there largely unchanged.

In any case, their rule was not to last long even in the north. In 1398 Timur Lang’s army sacked Delhi after a devastating approach march which was made all the speedier, said one chronicler, because of the Mongols’ desire to escape from the stench of decay arising from the piles of corpses they left in their wake. In the troubled waters after this disaster, generals and local potentates struck out for themselves and Islamic India fragmented again. None the less, Islam was by now established in the subcontinent, the greatest challenge yet seen to India’s assimilative powers, for its active, prophetic, revelatory style was wholly antithetical both to Hinduism and to Buddhism (though Islam, too, was to be subtly changed by them).

New Sultans emerged at Delhi but showed no power to restore the former Islamic empire. Only in the sixteenth century was it revived by a prince from outside, Babur of Kabul. On his father’s side he descended from Timur and on his mother’s from Chinghis, formidable advantages and a source of inspiration to a young man schooled in adversity. He quickly discovered he had to fight for his inheritance and there can have been few monarchs who, like Babur, conquered a city of the importance of Samarkand at the age of fourteen (albeit to lose it again almost at once). Even when legend and anecdote are separated, he remains, in spite of cruelty and duplicity, one of the most attractive figures among great rulers: munificent, hardy, courageous, intelligent and sensitive. He left a remarkable autobiography, written from notes made throughout his life, which was to be treasured by his descendants as a source of inspiration and guidance. It displays a ruler who did not think of himself as Mongol in culture, but Turkish in the tradition of those peoples long settled in the former eastern provinces of the Abbasid caliphate. His taste and culture were formed by the inheritance of the Timurid princes of Persia; his love of gardening and poetry came from that country and fitted easily into the setting of an Islamic India whose courts were already much influenced by Persian models. Babur was a bibliophile, another Timurid trait; it is reported that when he took Lahore he went at once to his defeated adversary’s library to choose texts from it to send as gifts to his sons. He himself wrote, among other things, a forty-page account of his conquests in Hindustan, noting its customs and caste structure and, even more minutely, its wildlife and flowers.

This young prince was called in to India by Afghan chiefs, but had his own claims to make to the inheritance of the Timurid line in Hindustan. This was to prove the beginning of Moghul India; Moghul was the Persian word for Mongol, though it was not a word Babur applied to himself. Originally, those whose discontent and intrigue called him forward had only aroused in him the ambition of conquering the Punjab, but he was soon drawn further. In 1526 he took Delhi after the Sultan had fallen in battle. Soon Babur was subduing those who had invited him to come to India, while at the same time conquering the infidel Hindu princes who had seized an opportunity to renew their own independence. The result was an empire which in 1530, the year of his death, stretched from Kabul to the borders of Bihar. Babur’s body, significantly, was taken as he directed to Kabul, where it was buried in his favourite garden with no roof over his tomb, in the place he had always thought of as home.

The reign of Babur’s son, troubled by his own instability and inadequacy and by the presence of half-brothers anxious to exploit the Timurid tradition which, like the Frankish, prescribed the division of a royal inheritance, showed that the security and consolidation of Babur’s realm could not be taken for granted. For five years of his reign, he was driven from Delhi, though he returned there to die in 1555. His heir, Akbar, born during his father’s distressed wanderings (but enjoying the advantages of a very auspicious horoscope and the absence of rival brothers), thus came to the throne as a boy. He inherited at first only a small part of his grandfather’s domains, but was to build from them an empire recalling that of Asoka, winning the awed respect of Europeans, who called him ‘the Great Moghul’.

Akbar had many kingly qualities. He was brave to the point of folly - his most obvious weakness was that he was headstrong - enjoying as a boy riding his own fighting elephants and preferring hunting and hawking to lessons (one consequence was that, uniquely in Babur’s line, he was almost illiterate). He once killed a tiger with his sword in single combat and was proud of his marksmanship with a gun (Babur had introduced firearms to the Moghul army). Yet he was also, like his predecessors, an admirer of learning and all things beautiful. He collected books and in his reign Moghul architecture and painting came to their peak, a department of court painters being maintained at his expense. Above all, he was statesmanlike in his handling of the problems posed by religious difference among his subjects.

Akbar reigned for almost half a century, until 1605, thus just overlapping at each end the reign of his contemporary, Queen Elizabeth I of England. Among his first acts on reaching maturity was to marry a Rajput princess who was, of course, a Hindu. Marriage always played an important part in Akbar’s diplomacy and strategy, and this lady (the mother of the next emperor) was the daughter of the greatest of the Rajput kings and therefore an important catch. None the less, something more than policy may be seen in the marriage. Akbar had already permitted the Hindu ladies of his harem to practise the rites of their own religion within it, an unprecedented act for a Muslim ruler. Before long, he abolished the poll tax on non-Muslims; he was going to be the emperor of all religions, not a Muslim fanatic. Akbar even went on to listen to Christian teachers; he invited the Portuguese who had appeared on the west coast to send missionaries learned in their faith to his court and three Jesuits duly arrived there in 1580. They disputed vigorously with Muslim divines before the emperor and received many marks of his favour, though they were disappointed in their long-indulged hope of his conversion. He seems, in fact, to have been a man of genuine religious feeling and eclectic mind; he went so far as to try to institute a new religion of his own, a sort of mishmash of Zoroastrianism, Islam and Hinduism. It had little success except among prudent courtiers and offended some.

However this is interpreted, it is evident that the appeasement of non-Muslims would ease the problems of government in India. Babur’s advice in his memoirs to conciliate defeated enemies pointed in this direction too, for Akbar launched himself on a career of conquest and added many new Hindu territories to his empire. He rebuilt the unity of northern India from Gujarat to Bengal and began the conquest of the Deccan. The empire was governed by a system of administration much of which lasted well into the era of the British Raj, though Akbar was less an innovator in government than the confirmer and establisher of institutions he inherited. Officials ruled in the emperor’s name and at his pleasure, they had the primary function of providing soldiers as needed and raising the land tax, now reassessed on an empire-wide and more flexible system devised by a Hindu finance minister. This seems to have had an almost unmatched success in that it actually led to increases in production, which raised the standard of living in Hindustan. Among other reforms, which were notable in intention if not in effect, was the discouragement of suttee.

Above all, Akbar stabilized the regime. He was disappointed in his sons and quarrelled with them, yet the dynasty was solidly based when he died. There were revolts nevertheless. Some of them seem to have been encouraged by Muslim anger at Akbar’s apparent falling-away from the faith. Even in the Turkish’ era the sharpness of the religious distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim had somewhat softened as invaders settled down in their new country and took up Indian ways. One earlier sign of assimilation was the appearance of a new language, Urdu, the tongue of the camp. It was the lingua franca of rulers and ruled, with a Hindi structure and a Persian and Turkish vocabulary. Soon there were signs that the omnivorous power of Hinduism would perhaps even incorporate Islam; a new devotionalism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had spread through popular hymns an abstract, almost monotheistic, cult, of a God whose name might be Rama or Allah, but who offered love, justice and mercy to all men. Correspondingly, some Muslims even before Akbar’s reign had shown interest in and respect for Hindu ideas. There was some absorption of Hindu ritual practice. Soon it was noticeable that converts to Islam tended to revere the tombs of holy men: these became places of resort and pilgrimage which satisfied the scheme of a subordinate focus of devotion in a monotheistic religion and thus carried out the functions of the minor and local deities who had always found a place in Hinduism.

Another important development before the end of Akbar’s reign was the consolidation of India’s first direct relations with Atlantic Europe. Links with Mediterranean Europe may already have been made slightly easier by the coming of Islam; from the Levant to Delhi a common religion provided continuous, if distant, contact. European travellers had turned up from time to time in India and its rulers had been able to attract the occasional technical expert to their service, though they were few after the Ottoman conquests. But what was now about to happen was to go much further and would change India for ever. The Europeans who now arrived would be followed by others in increasing numbers and they would not go away.

The process had begun when a Portuguese admiral reached Malabar at the end of the fifteenth century. Within a few years his countrymen had installed themselves as traders - and behaved sometimes as pirates at Bombay and on the coast of Gujarat. Attempts to dislodge them failed in the troubled years following Babur’s death and in the second half of the century the Portuguese moved around to found new posts in the Bay of Bengal. They made the running for Europeans in India for a long time. They were liable, none the less, to attract the hostility of good Muslims because they brought with them pictures and images of Christ, Mary and the saints, which smacked of idolatry. Protestants were to prove less irritating to religious feeling when they arrived. The British age in India was still a long way off, but with rare historical neatness the first British East India Company was founded on 31 December 1600, the last day of the sixteenth century. Three years later the Company’s first emissary arrived at Akbar’s court at Agra and by then Elizabeth I, who had given the merchants their charter of incorporation, was dead. Thus at the end of the reigns of two great rulers came the first contact between two countries whose historical destinies were to be entwined so long and with such enormous effect for them both and for the world. At that moment no hint of such a future could have been sensed. The English then regarded trade in India as less interesting than that with other parts of Asia. The contrast between the two realms, too, is fascinating: Akbar’s empire was one of the most powerful in the world, his court one of the most sumptuous and he and his successors ruled over a civilization more glorious and spectacular than anything India had known since the Guptas, while Queen Elizabeth’s kingdom, barely a great power, even in European terms, was crippled by debt and contained fewer people than modern Calcutta. Akbar’s successor was contemptuous of the presents sent to him by James I a few years later. Yet the future of India lay with the subjects of the queen.

The Moghul emperors continued in Babur’s line in direct descent, though not without interruption, until the middle of the nineteenth century. After Akbar, so great was the dynasty’s prestige that it became fashionable in India to claim Mongol descent. Only the three rulers who followed Akbar matter here, for it was under Jahangir and Shah Jahan that the empire grew to its greatest extent in the first half of the seventeenth century and under Aurungzebe that it began to decay in the second. The reign of Jahangir was not so glorious as his father’s, but the empire survived his cruelty and alcoholism, a considerable test of its administrative structure. The religious toleration established by Akbar also survived intact. For all his faults, though, Jahangir was a notable promoter of the arts, above all of painting. During his reign there becomes visible for the first time the impact of European culture in Asia, through artistic motifs drawn from imported pictures and prints. One of these motifs was the halo or nimbus given to Christian saints and, in Byzantium, to emperors. After Jahangir all Moghul emperors were painted with it.

Shah Jahan began the piecemeal acquisition of the Deccan sultanates though he had little success in campaigns in the north-west and failed to drive the Persians from Kandahar. In domestic administration there was a weakening of the principle of religious toleration, though not sufficiently to place Hindus at a disadvantage in government service; administration remained multi-religious. Although the emperor decreed that all newly built Hindu temples should be pulled down, he patronized Hindu poets and musicians. At Agra, Shah Jahan maintained a lavish and exquisite court life. It was there, too, that he built the most celebrated and the best-known of all Islamic buildings, the Taj Mahal, a tomb for his favourite wife; it is the only possible rival to the mosque of Cordoba for the title of the most beautiful building in the world. She had died soon after Shah Jahan’s accession and for over twenty years his builders were at work. It is the culmination of the work with arch and dome which is one of the most conspicuous Islamic legacies to Indian art and the greatest monument of Islam in India. The waning of Indian representational sculpture after the Islamic invasions had its compensations. Shah Jahan’s court brought also to its culmination a great tradition of miniature painting.

Below the level of the court, the picture of Moghul India is far less attractive. Focal officials had to raise more and more money to support not only the household expenses and campaigns of Shah Jahan but also the social and military elites who were essentially parasitic on the producing economy. Without regard for local need or natural disaster, a rapacious tax-gathering machine may at times have been taking from the peasant producer as much as half his income. Virtually none of this was productively invested. The flight of peasants from the land and rise of rural banditry is a telling symptom of the suffering and resistance these exactions provoked. Yet even Shah Jahan’s demands probably did the empire less damage than the religious enthusiasm of his third son, Aurungzebe, who set aside three brothers and imprisoned his father to become emperor in 1658. He combined, disastrously, absolute power, distrust of his subordinates and a narrow religiosity. To have succeeded in reducing the expenses of his court is not much of an offsetting item in the account. New conquests were balanced by revolts against Moghul rule which were said to owe much to Aurungzebe’s attempt to prohibit the Hindu religion and destroy its temples and to his restoration of the poll tax on non-Muslims. The Hindu’s advancement in the service of the state was less and less likely; conversion became necessary for success. A century of religious toleration was cancelled and one result was the alienation of many subjects’ loyalties.

Among other results, this helped to make it impossible finally to conquer the Deccan, which has been termed the ulcer which ruined the Moghul empire. As under Asoka, North and South India could not be united. The Mahrattas, the hillmen who were the core of Hindu opposition, constituted themselves under an independent ruler in 1674. They allied with the remains of the Muslim armies of the Deccan sultans to resist the Moghul armies in a long struggle which threw up a heroic figure who has become something of a paladin in the eyes of modern Hindu nationalists. This was Shivagi, who built from fragments a Mahratta political identity which soon enabled him to exploit the tax-payer as ruthlessly as the Moghuls had done. Aurungzebe was continuously campaigning against the Mahrattas down to his death in 1707. There followed a grave crisis for the regime, for his three sons disputed the succession. The empire almost at once began to break up and a much more formidable legatee than the Hindu or local prince was waiting in the wings - the European.

Perhaps the negative responsibility for the eventual success of the Europeans in India is Akbar’s, for he did not scotch the serpent in the egg. Shah Jahan, on the other hand, destroyed the Portuguese station on the Hooghly, though Christians were later tolerated at Agra. Strikingly, Moghul policy never seems to have envisaged the building of a navy, a weapon used formidably against the Mediterranean Europeans by the Ottomans. One consequence was already felt under Aurungzebe, when coastal shipping and even the pilgrim trade to Mecca were in danger from the Europeans. On land, the Europeans had been allowed to establish their toeholds and bridgeheads. After beating a Portuguese squadron, the English won their first west-coast trading concession early in the seventeenth century. Then, in 1639, on the Bay of Bengal and with the permission of the local ruler, they founded at Madras the first settlement of British India, Fort St George. The headstones over their graves in its little cemetery still commemorate the first English who lived and died in India, as would thousands more for over three centuries.

The English later fell foul of Aurungzebe, but got further stations at Bombay and Calcutta before the end of the century. Their ships had maintained the paramountcy in trade won from the Portuguese, but a new European rival was also in sight by 1700. A French East India Company had been founded in 1664 and soon established its own settlements.

A century of conflict lay ahead, but not only between the newcomers. Europeans were already having to make nice political choices because of the uncertainties aroused when Moghul power was no longer as strong as it once had been. Relations had to be opened with his opponents as well as with the emperor, as the English in Bombay discovered, looking on helplessly while a Mahratta squadron occupied one island in Bombay harbour and a Moghul admiral the one next to it. In 1677 an official sent back a significant warning to his employers in London: ‘the times now require you to manage your general commerce with your sword in your hands.’ By 1700 the English were well aware that much was at stake.

With that date we are into the era in which India is increasingly caught up in events not of her own making, the era of world history, in fact. Little things show it as well as great; in the sixteenth century the Portuguese had brought with them chilli, potatoes and tobacco from America. Indian diet and agriculture were already changing. Soon maize, pawpaws and pineapple were to follow. The story of Indian civilizations and rulers can be broken once this new connection with the larger world is achieved. Yet it was not the coming of the European which ended the great period of Moghul empire; that was merely coincidental, though it was important that newcomers were there to reap the advantages. No Indian empire had ever been able to maintain itself for long. The diversity of the subcontinent and the failure of its rulers to find ways to tap indigenous popular loyalty are probably the main explanation. India remained a continent of exploitative ruling elites and productive peasants upon whom they battened. The ‘states’, if the term can be used, were only machinery for transferring resources from producers to parasites. The means by which they did this destroyed the incentive to save - to invest productively.

India was, by the end of the seventeenth century, ready for another set of conquerors. They were awaiting their cue, already on stage, but as yet playing hardly more than bit parts. Yet in the long run the European tide would recede as well. Unlike early conquerors, though Europeans were to stay a long time, they were not to be overcome by India’s assimilative power as their predecessors had been. They would go away defeated, but would not be swallowed. And when they went they would leave a deeper imprint than any of their predecessors because they would leave true state structures behind.