4 India, from 501 to 1200

India, from 501 to 1200

Hephthalites and Declining Trade | Islam Arrives, 711 to 1200 CE | Stagnation and Economic Decline in Hindu Society

Islamic Ghaznavids and subsequent Ghurids into India, 1000 to 1200 CE

Hephthalites and Declining Trade

The Hephthalites were a nomadic people who lived in tents and were often in search of pasture, moving to coolness in summer and to warmth in the winter. In the late 400s they defeated the Persians, and they moved eastward into Transoxiana. In India, dissension within the Gupta royal family weakened its empire. Samudra Gupta had repelled an invasion by the Hephthalites, but in the early 500s the Hephthalites returned, perhaps aware that India was an easier take. The Hephthalites moved across the Hindu Kush and into the Punjaband Kashmir, and they advanced into the Ganges Valley. For plunder they ruined cities, towns, trading centers and Buddhist monasteries. The great city Pataliputra was reduced to a mere village of people.

The Hephthalites withdrew from the Ganges Valley, but they continued to hold territory in the Punjab and Kashmir, with Piandjshent, sixty-five kilometers south of Samarkand, as the center of their rule. And, with the Gupta empire gone, the Hephthalites became the superpower in Middle Asia.

Their power didn't last long. Soon they were attacked by an alliance of Persians and Turks. In the late 550s this coalition defeated them militarily, the Persians pursuing the Hephthalites in revenge for the defeat the Hephthalites had given their forefathers a century before, and the Hephthalites vanished from history.

India, meanwhile, was divided into numerous small kingdoms, which meant military weakness. Economic decline had come to some of India's cities. Profitable trade with the Roman Empire had ended, and by the mid-500s India's trade with Persia had also declined.

Islam Arrives, 711 to 1200

Pirate raids by Indians against Muslim shipping on the Indian Ocean were followed by a reprisal invasion of the Sind – near the Indus River delta. The first Muslim state in India was founded there in 711. The conquered area was not rich enough in agricultural potential to induce the Arabs to establish themselves there permanently, and they left on their own accord. But Arabs returned. The Habbari family acquired an agricultural estate in the village of Baniya, which later became an important town. The Habbari family engaged also in commerce and achieved a prominent status among the Arab settlers. The Habbari family began to rule in the Sind in 841, creating a semi-independent state loyal to the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad.

In the 800s, Hindu intellectuals were aware of Muslim criticism of their faith. Led by a philosopher named Shankara (788-850), a few Hindu thinkers set out to defend Hinduism, especially against the Muslim charge that Hinduism was idolatrous. Shankara systematized the intellectual tradition of the Upanishads. Defenders of Hinduism claimed that, properly understood, Hindu rites helped simple folk along the path to a pure and transcendent belief in one God and to an absolute truth beyond sensory experience. Shankara gave a new impetus to orthodox Brahmanism. He traveled about India, founding many religious schools, and he became a most revered Hindu leader. He imagined a unified reality and described Hinduism as about the realization of a single god in all things. He claimed that salvation came through philosophical speculation and meditation leading to the realization that God and one's self were the same.

The Ghaznavid Incursions

However much Shankara brought unity to Hindu ideology, politically India remained disunited. India was without an army capable of defending against Muslim invasions. Here and there were little armies, but nothing like the force that existed when India was united by the Gupta Empire.

In the late 900s, Mahmud, the Sunni Muslim Turkish sultan ruled the Ghaznavid Empire, an empire across Iran and what today is Afghanistan. From Ghazni he began sending men on horseback through the Khyber Pass. They raided temple towns in northwest India. These Muslims terrorized Hindus and carried back as much booty as they could, much of it from temples. The raiding stopped around 1010 after the Hindus agreed to pay tribute. Here was the traditional act of submission, the Indians sending to Ghazni annual trains of elephants laden with gifts

The agreement between the Muslims and the Indians broke down and raiding resumed, the Muslims believing they were wielding the sword of Muhammad. They smashed more Hindu temples. They slaughtered or enslaved thousands, leaving survivors shocked and disappointed that they were not being protected from harm by their god Shiva.

Mahmud broke the power of the local rulers in areas that he raided. He shattered the economy of northeastern India. Precious metals taken from India's temples went into circulation (much as Alexander's conquests had freed the gold of Darius III and stimulated the economy in his time). With his new wealth, Mahmud erected buildings and magnificent mosques in Ghazni. He turned Ghazni into a world center of Islamic culture, and he financed more military campaigns.

In 1024 he defeated the Habbari Dynasty in the Sind and he annexed that area. In 1025 he invaded Somnath and looted its temple on the coast of Saurashtra.

The Ghurids

In the year 1030 Sultan Mahmud died, at age 59, and his sultanate passed to one of his sons, who fought a brother. The sultanate had the instability common to other dynastic systems. By 1151 Ghazni was in ruins, and in 1187 the Ghaznavid Empire collapsed. In its place a new Turkish dynasty arose: the Ghurids. With the Hindu reputation for weakness, a Ghurid army invaded India and fought its way to Delhi, reaching that city in 1193, overwhelming fierce Hindu opposition along the way. By 1202 the Ghurids had conquered the larger kingdoms along the Ganges River. The Ghurid invaders were Muslims and unimpressed by Indic civilization.

Coming across Buddhism, they saw it as debased idol worship and tried to destroy it. They sacked Buddhism's major centers – including the center of learning, Nalanda, at Bihar – slaughtering many, destroying Buddhism in northern India and sending Buddhists fleeing to Nepal and Tibet, where Buddhism was to flourish.  

The Ghurids despised Hinduism, but their slaughter and enslavement of Hindus and the ruination of Hindu holy places was ineffective in diminishing that faith.  The Hindus were too numerous for them, and only on the fringe of Hindu society were people attracted to Islam.

Muslims in northern India refused to allow Hindu temples to be rebuilt, and without temples Hindu ceremonies became more public and plebeian. Ceremonies were often performed in a town's public square, with amassed worshipers passing along the town's streets. Without temple ritual, communion with God through ecstasy increased, and Sanskrit remained a language of a learned few – the language of the Brahmins.

Stagnation and Economic Decline in Hindu Society

In Hindu society since the early 900s, feuds over possession of land were common between families and between principalities. Vendettas developed between families. Wars arose. Potentates had risen to power through violence, and many of them wished to perpetuate an image of military prowess and to acquire more land – land being the major source of status. A disparaging remark by a rival was justification for starting a war, and wars were made into grand pageants.

Wars were also glorified in literature – as they had been in the story of Krishna in a chariot with Arjuna. Death on the battlefield was seen as the highest possible honor. And the dead warrior's wife was obliged to join her husband in death – a ritual sacrifice called suti. In suti, the spirit of the woman put to flames snatches her husband from the hands of Yamdoot (the messenger of death) and takes him toSwarglok (paradise).

Landowners with great power were accumulating more land at the expense of their more humble neighbors. More people were becoming hired workers on the land of the wealthy. Estate owners lived in splendor while others did the work. A few princes had thousands of servants and hangers-on. A few had harems. Their families wore extravagant clothes and jewels. Owners gave land to others to manage, while those who worked their lands were denied freedom and relegated to the Shudra caste – the caste of menials.

It wasn't the best system for maximizing agricultural development. Agriculture on the big estates remained inefficient, and a large part of the rest of agriculture in Hindu society was subsistence farming – farming without trade. There was no beef industry that was supplementing the diet of people as in Europe. In India the veneration of cattle was inimical to this kind of meat industry.

Enough surplus was produced by the great estates that some trade with foreigners flourished. Indians continued to export rice, other cereals, coconuts, spices, sugar, woods, dyes and precious stones. They imported perfumes, finished cloth including silk, wax, precious stones, gold, medicinal herbs, ceramics and metal wares, not much that benefitted common people. And much of this trade was handled by foreign merchants who were mainly Muslims.

Brahmins were much like the Confucians in their opposition to trade, the Brahmins making involvement in foreign trade, as well as farming and overseas travel, forbidden to their class. Generally, religious contemplation was esteemed while people with power had little interest in improving conditions for the merchant or in improving technology.

There was an improvement in the method of working cotton – the Carter's bow – an improvement over beating the cotton with switches. It was introduced by Muslims. The spinning wheel also appeared and increased cotton production.

By the 13th century, many trade guilds were disappearing, and many trade connections were coming to a close. Trade within India had diminished as wealth was hoarded rather than invested – hoarded either by wealthy individuals or by religious establishments. And, with diminished trade, roads deteriorated. In India's towns were merchants and there had been bustle and hard work, but this economic class was suffering. Big landowners, princes and potentates, would remain the most influential – a conservative influence as in Spain, Russia and eastern Europe. The landed wealthy in India would wield a conservative authoritarianism. India would remain as conservatively religious as Spain and eastern Europe, with taboos inhibiting modernization. Brahmin priests encouraged obscurantism among India's elite. Rodents and insects could not be killed and vast amounts of foodstuffs were lost. Rules about handling refuse and excreta contributed to disease. The caste system choked initiative. The great Gupta prosperity and society of a few centuries before was no more, and in the centuries to come rather than India sending investments and soldiers abroad, investments and soldiers would be arriving from abroad