Class 8 Social Science Chapter 2: Reshaping India's Political Map

A borrowed word, and what we mean by it

Historians call these centuries the medieval period, but the word was invented for Europe, where it covered the stretch between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance. India's history ran differently, so the label fits awkwardly and historians disagree about which years it should cover here. In this chapter it means something simple and definite: the eleventh century to the seventeenth.

Why the map began to change

A new era opened in the early eleventh century, when invasions came from beyond the Hindu Kush. India had seen plenty of warfare before, but not at this rate or from this direction. Most of those who came were Turks or Afghans out of Central Asia. They came for the subcontinent's famous wealth and for territory, and often to spread their own versions of their religion, by force where they judged it necessary.

How the Sultanate began

The Delhi Sultanate was formed after the defeat in 1192 of Prithviraj Chauhan, who ruled parts of the northwest. Five dynasties followed one another at Delhi, all of Turkic or Afghan origin: the Mamluks, often called the Slave dynasty, then the Khiljis, the Tughlaqs, the Sayyids and the Lodis. Delhi itself grew into a far larger prize than it had been.

A throne that was rarely handed over

The Sultanate was unstable at its centre, and the figures say so bluntly. Roughly two sultans in every three took power by removing the man before them, and the average reign lasted barely more than nine years. A ruler who expects a short tenure governs for the short term, which shaped how revenue was raised and how campaigns were planned.

Expansion, and what expansion cost

Instability sat alongside constant efforts to expand. Campaigns raided villages and cities, carried off their wealth, and destroyed temples and seats of learning. Ala-ud-din Khilji, around the turn of the fourteenth century, led campaigns across north and central India and sacked many cities. He also turned back several Mongol invasions, at a time when the Mongol Empire covered most of Asia.

The push to the south

Ala-ud-din's slave-general Malik Kafur carried the Sultanate's reach southward, conquering kingdoms as he went. The wealth taken on those campaigns paid for the Sultanate's very large military establishment. Several Hindu centres were struck as well: Srirangam, Madurai and Chidambaram, and perhaps Rameswaram too.

One ruler, almost the whole subcontinent

A few decades later Muhammad bin Tughlaq pushed the borders further still. Not since Mauryan times had so much of the subcontinent obeyed one throne. The achievement did not last. He was a man of ambitious schemes that were often carried out badly, and two of them have been remembered ever since.

Moving a capital, and moving it back

The first was moving the seat of government south to Daulatabad, a place then named Devagiri, near what is now Sambhaji Nagar. A more central base may have promised better control. People were made to travel more than a thousand kilometres, the plan misfired, and a few years later the capital moved back. Some sources record great loss of life on both journeys.

Money that nobody trusted

The second was token currency. Cheap copper coins were declared to carry the value of silver or gold. The idea itself was sound and most money today works exactly that way, but it needed a state able to control who made the coins. Counterfeiting spread, trade grew confused, and the economy suffered.

Where the court's wealth came from

Sultans and their court elite lived in considerable luxury, with fine clothes, jewelled ornaments and elaborate food. That wealth came from three sources. The first was plunder taken on campaign, and the second taxes levied on ordinary people and on conquered regions. The third was the slave trade, in which people were made to work without payment or were sent to Central Asia to be sold.

The cost of taking rather than making

Plunder has a second effect that is easy to miss. Wealth seized from a region is wealth that region no longer invests, and campaigns disrupted both trade networks and the growing of crops. A treasury filled this way is filled at the expense of the economy that will be taxed next year.

Images, and the word we use for them

The period saw many attacks on sacred images in Buddhist, Jain and Hindu temples, driven by plunder and also by iconoclasm, the rejection or destruction of religious images held to be idolatrous. This book says image rather than idol, because the other words carry a judgement. India's classical texts used murti, vigraha, pratima and rupa for the figures kept in temples and homes.

A tax that was also a message

Some sultans levied the jizya. It fell on those subjects who were not Muslim, and in return they were protected and excused from military service. How it worked depended entirely on the ruler. In practice it could be both an economic burden and a public humiliation, and it gave subjects a financial and social reason to convert.

Timur, and the end of a thriving city

At the end of the fourteenth century Timur, a Turkic-Mongol conqueror from Central Asia, invaded the northwest and fell on Delhi. His memoirs state his aims plainly: war against those he called infidels, and plunder. Thousands died, thousands more were carried off as captives, and the city itself was left a ruin. He withdrew with enormous loot and left chaos behind him.

A shrinking Sultanate

The Lodis rose out of that wreckage, and no house followed them at Delhi. By then its territory had shrunk a long way, because kingdoms and states within India were resisting it with growing success. Those kingdoms are where the next topic begins.

How to read a chapter like this one

The book sets out a rule for its own darker passages, and it is worth holding on to. These are facts about people in the past. The victims of cruelty deserve to be remembered, and the facts should be studied honestly rather than skipped. But nobody alive today carries responsibility for what was done hundreds of years ago, and reading history as a charge sheet against present-day communities misses the point of reading it at all.

Scenario:

A class is given three pieces of evidence from this period and asked what each one can and cannot prove. The first is a coin struck by Ala-ud-din Khilji carrying the words second Alexander in Persian. The second is a line from Timur's own memoirs naming his aims as war against those he called infidels and plunder. The third is a table showing that a sultan's average reign ran to a little over nine years. It also shows that roughly two in three took the throne by removing the man before them.

Analysis:

A coin shows intention, a memoir shows stated purpose, and an average shows a pattern no single reign would reveal. Together they describe a state that was ambitious, short-lived at the top, and funded by taking.

Activity:

Find one object or inscription from your own district and write down what it proves and what it only suggests.

Title:

Build the timeline, then read it

Safety:

Nothing sharp is needed; use a ruler's edge rather than a blade for folding.

What You Notice:

The dynasties are uneven in length, and the shortest stretches cluster where successions were most violent.

A sultan's average reign was barely more than nine years, because roughly two in three took the throne by removing the man who held it.

Token currency, which failed so badly in the fourteenth century, is how almost all money works today. A note is worth what the state says it is worth.

Ala-ud-din Khilji had a coin struck calling him the second Alexander, in Persian, which tells you how he wished to be seen.

The five dynasties in order — My King Took Six Lions — Mamluks, Khiljis, Tughlaqs, Sayyids, Lodis - the first letters follow the order of rule.

Where the court's wealth came from — TAKE, TAX, TRADE — Take is plunder from campaigns, tax is what fell on subjects and conquered regions, and trade is the trade in enslaved people.

The half of the story that is easy to miss

A chapter about the Delhi Sultanate can read as though the Sultanate was the only thing happening. It was not. Through its whole existence it met resistance, and several kingdoms it never subdued were themselves thriving centres of art, administration and learning. The map of this period is a map of many powers, not one.

Kalinga, and a king who held the east

Delhi never took Kalinga, the Eastern Ganga kingdom, whose lands reached across what is now Odisha and into Bengal and Andhra Pradesh. In the middle of the thirteenth century its ruler Narasimhadeva I was noted both for military strength and for cultural brilliance. He turned back several inroads and defeated the Sultanate's governor of Bengal.

A temple built to remember a victory

Partly to mark those victories, Narasimhadeva I built the Surya temple at Konark in present-day Odisha. It is worth pausing on what that means. A kingdom under repeated attack had the resources, the confidence and the craftsmen to raise one of the most ambitious temples in India, which is itself evidence about how strong the eastern resistance was.

Seventy-five chieftains, one confederacy

In the Tughlaq period the Musunuri Nayakas, Telugu chieftains, did something harder than winning a battle. They brought together more than seventy-five chieftains of their region into a single confederacy. The confederacy beat Delhi's troops in the field and drove the army of Muhammad bin Tughlaq out of Warangal, a city in today's Telangana, somewhere between about 1330 and 1336.

Why an alliance is the difficult part

Any one of those chieftains could be defeated alone. Together they could not. But bringing seventy-five leaders to agree, in a time of slow travel and no common administration, meant settling rivalries, arranging supplies and trusting neighbours with one's own safety. The military result followed from the political work.

The Hoysalas in the south

The Hoysalas ruled much of what is now Karnataka and for a time were the only independent kingdom left in the south, fending off attack after attack from the Sultanate. Their temples at Belur and Halebidu are among the finest in India. Their name comes from a Kannada story about a young man, Sala, who fought a lion to save his teacher: hoy, strike, Sala.

How a kingdom wears down

The Hoysalas were not conquered in a single defeat. Repeated attacks wore them down and quarrels at home finished the work, so that by the mid-fourteenth century the kingdom had failed and Vijayanagara, to its south, took it in. Resistance can succeed for a century and still end, and what replaced them carried much of their strength forward.

Rebellion from inside the system

The Sultanate also lost ground to powers that grew out of it. Governors who had served Delhi declared themselves independent, and regional sultanates appeared. The Bahmani Sultanate appeared around the mid-fourteenth century and held a large part of the Deccan for some decades. Powerful sultanates also emerged in Gujarat, in Bengal and elsewhere.

A crowded, shifting map

The result was not a simple contest between Delhi and the rest. It was a tangle of shifting alliances and repeated war among many powers, any of which might be a friend in one decade and an enemy in the next. That is what the word reshaping in this chapter's title is pointing at.

Rajasthan beyond reach

Parts of Rajasthan stayed outside the Sultanate's control altogether. In the fifteenth century Rana Kumbha, ruler of the Mewar kingdom, offered stiff resistance, and he repelled invasions by the later regional sultanates as well. Rana is a title often used by Rajput kings.

A wall thirty-six kilometres long

Rana Kumbha raised Kumbhalgarh Fort in the Aravalli hills during the fifteenth century, and Mewar's rulers used it as their refuge. Surrounded by forest and steep slopes, it is famous for a wall that runs for thirty-six kilometres, one of the longest continuous walls anywhere in the world.

Why forts stood where they did

The choice of such sites was not about the view. Height and steep approaches force an attacking army to climb under fire. Forest hides movement and slows supply wagons. The same features cut both ways: a fort that is hard to reach is also hard to resupply, and a siege can be won by patience rather than assault.

What the resisting kingdoms had in common

Look across them and a pattern appears. They used terrain they knew, built alliances their enemies could not match, and kept building temples and administering their regions while fighting. Resistance here was not only military. It was the continuation of ordinary government under pressure, which is why these kingdoms left monuments and not just battles.

Where this leads

One of these southern powers grew into something much larger. The kingdom that absorbed the Hoysalas became the Vijayanagara Empire, and for two centuries it was the major power of the south. That is the subject of the next topic.

Scenario:

A class compares two kingdoms that both resisted the Delhi Sultanate. The Eastern Gangas of Kalinga were never subdued, defeated the Sultanate's governor of Bengal, and built the Surya temple at Konark partly to mark their victories. The Hoysalas of present-day Karnataka held out as the last independent kingdom in the south and built the temples of Belur and Halebidu. Yet repeated attacks and internal conflict wore them down. They were absorbed into the Vijayanagara Empire in the mid-fourteenth century.

Analysis:

Both kingdoms resisted and both built while resisting. The difference lay in internal conflict added to outside pressure, and even then what the Hoysalas had built carried forward.

Activity:

Choose any fort or temple near you and find out what was happening in the region at the time it was built.

Title:

Map the powers of one century

Safety:

This is a paper exercise, so nothing needs to be cut or heated.

What You Notice:

The resisting kingdoms sit at the edges and in the hills, where distance and terrain both worked against an army from Delhi.

Kumbhalgarh's wall runs for about thirty-six kilometres, which makes it one of the longest continuous walls anywhere in the world.

The Hoysala name comes from a Kannada story about a young man called Sala who struck a lion to save his teacher: hoy, strike, Sala.

Bringing seventy-five chieftains into one confederacy was done without any shared administration and at the speed a horse could carry a message.

Where the resistance came from — EAST, SOUTH, WEST, WITHIN — Eastern Gangas in the east, Hoysalas in the south, Rana Kumbha in the west, and governors breaking away from inside the Sultanate itself.

What the resisting kingdoms shared — GROUND, ALLIES, GOVERNING — They used terrain they knew, built alliances their enemies could not match, and kept administering and building while they fought.

Two governors who stopped obeying

While the Delhi Sultanate grew less stable, a new power rose in the south. Two brothers, Harihara and Bukka Raya, had served as governors under Muhammad bin Tughlaq. They rejected Delhi's authority, set up an independent kingdom, and that kingdom grew into the Vijayanagara Empire, the major force in southern India for the next two centuries.

A capital chosen by a story

Folklore explains the site. At Hampi, in present-day Karnataka, the brothers are said to have seen a hare turn and chase a pack of hounds. Their guru Vidyaranya read the sight as a sign of unexpected courage and told them to build their capital on that spot. The story matters less as fact than as a statement about how the kingdom saw itself.

The rival to the north

Vijayanagara's chief rival was the Bahmani Sultanate, directly to its north. The Bahmani state eventually broke into five independent states known as the Deccan Sultanates: Bijapur, Golconda, Berar, Ahmednagar and Bidar. Each was founded by a former governor or tarafdar who declared autonomy, which is the same pattern by which Vijayanagara itself began.

Fighting on more than one front

The Vijayanagara rulers fought the first two of those sultanates, Bijapur and Golconda, and also the Gajapati rulers of Odisha away to the east. An empire with rivals on two sides has to divide its attention, and much of Vijayanagara's history is the management of that problem.

What a title tells you

Rulers of this period took titles ending in pati, meaning lord or master, and the choices are revealing. The Vijayanagara kings were called Narapati, the Bahmani rulers Ashwapati, and the Maratha rulers later took Chhatrapati. Each points at a different idea of what a king is and where his power rests.

Krishnadevaraya

In the sixteenth century the empire reached its height under Krishnadevaraya, who extended and secured its dominance over the Deccan. His reign combined military strength with a flowering of culture, and he is remembered for both. Under him Vijayanagara was the leading power of the south in a way no rival could seriously dispute.

A king who wrote

Poets and scholars working in Sanskrit, Telugu and Kannada all found support at his court, and he wrote himself. His epic poem in Telugu, Amuktamalyada, tells the story of the Tamil poet-saint Andal. One section of it is a Rajaniti, a statement of royal policy, in which he set out his own ideas about good government.

Grants, temples and a capital

Krishnadevaraya endowed a great many temples. Tirupati, in today's Andhra Pradesh, was one of them, and another was the Vitthala temple standing in his capital. The city itself held grand temples, palaces and other buildings. The Vitthala temple carries finely sculpted monolithic pillars whose smaller columns sound different musical notes when struck, which is how they came to be called musical pillars.

Horses, and why the Portuguese were welcome

Foreign travellers came to Vijayanagara to trade. The Portuguese were treated particularly well, and the reason was practical rather than sentimental: they sold horses, and the king did not want those horses sold to rival kingdoms instead. Good treatment of a merchant can be a calculation about supply.

A visitor's description

Domingo Paes, one of those Portuguese travellers, left a long record of his stay. He compared the city in size to Rome, described groves of trees in the gardens of houses and water channels running through it, and said the streets and markets were full of laden oxen. He called it the best provided city in the world.

How an empire can end in one battle

Illness killed Krishnadevaraya in 1529. Then, in 1565, the Deccan Sultanates put their quarrels aside, joined together, and beat the Vijayanagara army under Ramaraya, who was Krishnadevaraya's son-in-law, at Talikota. Rivals who had fought one another for generations found that together they could do what none had managed alone.

What happened to the city

Plundering of the city went on for months. Dwellings, shops, public buildings, palaces and nearly every temple were pulled down, and a great part of the people living there were killed. What had been compared to Rome was left in ruins, and the ruins at Hampi are what a visitor sees today.

After the empire

Vijayanagara did not vanish on the day of the battle. It broke into smaller territories, each under a Nayaka who had served it as a military governor, and the empire itself finished around the middle of the seventeenth century. An empire can be destroyed in one season and still take a century to finish dying.

What this topic has settled

Vijayanagara began as a rebellion by two governors and became the south's great power, ruling from a capital that visitors compared to Rome. It fell not because any one rival overmatched it, but because several rivals stopped fighting each other long enough to combine.

Scenario:

A Vijayanagara official is asked to explain the court's policy towards Portuguese merchants. They are foreigners, they drive hard bargains, and they are not subjects of the king. Yet they are lodged well, given safe passage and granted audiences. The official points out that the Portuguese bring horses by sea and that cavalry decides battles in the Deccan. Bijapur and Golconda would buy every horse the Portuguese could land if Vijayanagara did not. The court keeps them close for that reason alone. The official adds that the arrangement will last exactly as long as the Portuguese have no better buyer.

Analysis:

Good treatment of a merchant can be a calculation about keeping a supply away from an enemy. The policy lasts exactly as long as the calculation holds.

Activity:

Find one thing your household buys that has only one supplier, and say what changes if a second appears.

Title:

Read a traveller like a historian

Safety:

A reading and writing exercise, with nothing to handle.

What You Notice:

Eyewitness detail is strong evidence for what a place looked like and weak evidence for how it was governed or taxed.

The Vitthala temple's pillars are carved from single blocks of stone, and the smaller columns around them sound different musical notes when they are struck.

Portuguese traders were treated especially well for a very practical reason: they sold horses, and the king did not want those horses reaching rival kingdoms.

Domingo Paes thought Vijayanagara was about the size of Rome and called it the best provided city in the world.

The five Deccan Sultanates — Big Goats Browse And Bleat — Bijapur, Golconda, Berar, Ahmednagar, Bidar - the first letters in order.

Why Talikota was different — RIVALS, THEN ALLIES — The sultanates had failed separately for decades. What changed in 1565 was that they combined.

A man without a kingdom

Babur was a Turkic-Mongol ruler and a descendant of Timur who had been driven out of Samarkand, in present-day Uzbekistan. Having lost the throne he wanted, he turned towards India. In 1526 he defeated Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat in what later became known as the First Battle of Panipat, ended the Delhi Sultanate and founded the Mughal Empire.

Why that battle went the way it did

What won it for Babur was gunpowder: guns in the field and matchlocks in the hand, all of them new to fighting in India. A smaller force with artillery could break a larger one without it. The battle is a reminder that a change in technology can decide a political question that armies had been arguing over for centuries.

A conqueror who kept a diary

Babur left an unusually candid autobiography, the Baburnama. In it he reads as cultured and curious, with a real eye for architecture, poetry, animals and especially fruit trees. The same book records a brutal conqueror who slaughtered whole city populations, enslaved women and children, and took pride in building towers of skulls from the people of plundered cities.

Both things, in one person

It would be easier if the two halves belonged to different men, and they do not. The Baburnama is valuable precisely because it is his own account of both. He found India a country of few charms and missed Central Asia. Yet he noted its masses of gold and silver, its fine air after the rains and its countless artisans, and decided to stay.

A reign interrupted

Babur died in 1530, and Humayun, his son, could barely keep the empire in one piece. Sher Shah Suri, a formidable Afghan leader, used the opening to set up the Sur Empire across much of northern India. His reforms outlasted the short-lived state that made them. Humayun eventually reconquered the lost ground.

A brief reign between empires

Before that, Himu took Delhi and held it for a short while as Hemchandra Vikramaditya. He had been an able commander and the chief minister of one of the later Suri rulers. He won some military successes. At the Second Battle of Panipat he was injured, captured and beheaded on the orders of Babur's grandson Akbar, who then took Delhi back for the Mughals.

A boy emperor

Akbar was declared emperor at thirteen, after his father Humayun died accidentally, and set out to bring the whole subcontinent under Mughal control. His reign mixed brutality with tolerance, and it is usually told as a change from the first to the second over many years.

Chittor

The brutality is not in doubt. At the fort of Chittor in Rajasthan he met determined Rajput resistance through a siege of more than five months, and his army took heavy losses. When the fort was breached the defenders died fighting in large numbers and hundreds of women committed jauhar. Akbar ordered some thirty thousand of the townspeople killed, and the women and children who lived were taken as captives. He was twenty-five.

When invading armies took a territory, women were often enslaved or abused. There are historical examples of Rajput women entering mass fires to avoid capture, an act called jauhar, which was understood as a final resistance and a way of preserving honour. At Chittor hundreds of women, led by their queens and noblewomen, did this.

A change of method

As the empire grew, Akbar increasingly governed by political means rather than force alone. He married princesses of the neighbouring kingdoms and brought Rajput and other regional nobles into his court. He abolished the jizya and promoted sulh-i-kul, which means peace with all, or tolerance of every faith.

His own account of the change

His court historian Abul Fazl records him saying that he had once persecuted men into conformity with his faith and thought that was Islam. As he grew in knowledge, he said, he was overwhelmed with shame, and no constancy can be expected from people converted under compulsion. Whatever weight one gives such a statement, it is the ruler describing his own change of mind.

Fifty years, and what filled them

Akbar reigned nearly fifty years, from 1556 to his death in 1605. The middle stretch was relatively peaceful; the last fifteen brought new campaigning, in Kashmir and Sindh, in the Deccan and in Afghanistan. Though illiterate, he was drawn to Persian and Indian texts and established a house of translation at Fatehpur Sikri, where the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, the Bhagavad Gita and the Panchatantra were rendered into Persian.

Art, and a famous tomb

Akbar's son Jahangir shared his father's love of art and architecture and tried to extend the empire into the Deccan. Shah Jahan, who followed Jahangir, put down a number of revolts, and the Taj Mahal at Agra is what he is remembered for. Art and building reached their height in these years. The same period raised Humayun's tomb and the Red Forts at Delhi and Agra, and left calligraphy and miniature painting of the first order.

A succession decided by force

Shah Jahan sickened in 1657, and he wanted his eldest son Dara Shikoh to have the throne. His younger brother Aurangzeb beat him in one battle after another, put him to death in the end, and had the head carried to their father. Of the two brothers left, one was seized and put to death and the other fled the country. Shah Jahan himself was shut up in the Agra Fort, and he died there.

Alamgir

Aurangzeb crowned himself emperor in 1658, taking the name Alamgir, conqueror of the world, and ruled for almost forty-nine years. He was skilled in military matters and under him the empire reached its greatest extent, while facing constant rebellion. He spent his last twenty-five years fighting war after war in the Deccan.

What those wars cost

Keeping armies that size in the field emptied the treasury and overstretched the administration. Historians often count this as one of the key reasons Mughal power declined so quickly after his death in 1707. An empire at its largest can be an empire at its weakest, if holding that size costs more than it brings in.

Religion and rule

Aurangzeb, of Islam's Sunni sect, was deeply religious and lived austerely. He banned practices he regarded as un-Islamic, including music and dance at court. He also reimposed the jizya on non-Muslims and a pilgrimage tax on Hindus travelling to sacred places, both of which Akbar had abolished.

A dispute among historians

Some scholars hold that his reasons were mainly political, intended to make the empire firmer, and they cite the endowments and the promises of safety he made to certain temples. Politics did play a part. In 1669 he ordered governors to demolish the schools and temples of those he called infidels, and his own farmans make a personal religious motive clear. Temples at Banaras, Mathura and Somnath among many others were destroyed, as were Jain temples and Sikh gurudwaras, and he persecuted Muslims of other sects, including Sufis, as well as Zoroastrians.

The numbers behind the reigns

One comparison is worth holding. A Delhi sultan's average reign was about nine years. For Mughal emperors up to Aurangzeb it was twenty-seven, and sixteen across all Mughal rulers to the empire's end in the nineteenth century. Longer reigns allowed longer plans, which is part of why the Mughal state built and administered on the scale it did.

Scenario:

A class is given three passages written or dictated by rulers of this period. In the first, Babur describes India as a country of few charms and then lists its gold and silver, its fine air after the rains and its countless artisans. In the second, Akbar is recorded by his historian saying that he once persecuted men into conformity with his faith. He grew ashamed as he learned more, and doubts the constancy of anyone converted by force. In the third, Aurangzeb's farman of 1669 orders governors to demolish schools and temples.

Analysis:

A memoir shows what a ruler thought worth recording, a court historian shows how he wished to be seen, and an edict shows what he commanded. Each is strong evidence for a different question.

Activity:

Find one rule or notice in your school and ask what it proves about what the school wants, and what it does not.

Title:

Three averages, one conclusion

Safety:

A drawing and writing exercise; no equipment is needed.

What You Notice:

The longest average belongs to the period of the largest building projects, which is the link the chapter asks you to notice.

Akbar could not read, yet he set up a house of translation at Fatehpur Sikri where the Mahabharata and the Ramayana were turned into Persian for his court.

Babur thought India a country of few charms and missed Central Asia, but stayed for its wealth and its countless artisans and workmen.

A Delhi sultan reigned about nine years on average; a Mughal emperor up to Aurangzeb reigned twenty-seven, which is part of why the Mughals could build so much.

The order of the emperors — Babur Had A Jolly Strong Army — Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, Aurangzeb, in order of rule.

Akbar's two halves — CHITTOR, then COURT — The siege stands for rule by force; the court filled with Rajput and regional leaders stands for rule by politics.

Who pushed back, and from where

Mughal power was eroded by rebellions from many directions at once. Peasants rose in the north, tribal communities in forests and hills, Rajput clans in the west, the Ahoms in the northeast and the Sikhs in Punjab. The Marathas belong to this story too, and the book keeps them for the next chapter.

Peasants who fought a tax collector

Farming communities rose against hard treatment again and again over these centuries. In the seventeenth century the Jat peasantry of what is now western Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and eastern Rajasthan killed a Mughal officer who had been oppressing them. In the battle that followed, twenty thousand men faced the Mughal army and fought hard, but their leader was killed and the rebellion was put down.

Communities the empire could not absorb

Tribal groups including the Bhils, the Gonds, the Santhals and the Kochs fought attempts to annex their territory or tax them. Some were put down, or drawn by degrees into the Sultanate or into the Mughal Empire. Others held on to a measure of independence, above all those living in forest, in hills or simply far away, because distance and terrain did what armies could not.

Rani Durgavati

Rani Durgavati held Garha, one of the Gond states of central India, and every account says she governed it well and left it prosperous. She kept an army of twenty thousand soldiers and a thousand elephants and repelled several attempted invasions with it.

Outnumbered, and not surrendering

When a general sent by Akbar attacked in 1564 she was outnumbered and outmatched in weaponry, and she led her troops herself. Hurt in the fighting, she chose to die by her own hand on the field instead of being taken. She was forty. What she did became a mark of local pride and of refusal, and her name is still honoured.

Why the Rajputs were so often at war

The Rajputs lay in the northwest, directly in the path of forces coming from beyond the subcontinent. They had traditions behind them too, from houses such as the Pratiharas, who had held off the Arab attacks on Sindh centuries earlier. They rebuilt their kingdoms after the Khiljis' conquests, and two major clans emerged in the Mewar and Marwar regions.

Rana Sanga

Among the rulers those clans produced, Rana Kumbha appeared in an earlier topic. Early in the sixteenth century Rana Sanga brought several Rajput clans together and beat one sultan after another, until Babur defeated him at Khanwa.

Maharana Pratap

Mewar's ruler Maharana Pratap inherited a wounded kingdom and refused to accept Mughal suzerainty, becoming the face of Rajput resistance. In 1576 his forces met the imperial army at Haldighati, a pass through the Aravallis, where the Mughals held the advantage; he himself got away. For years afterwards he waged guerrilla warfare from the hills, living in harsh conditions and holding to his independence.

Guerrilla warfare, and who made it work

Guerrilla warfare means small groups who know the ground making surprise attacks and ambushes to defeat much bigger armies. The Bhils backed Maharana Pratap strongly. They fought in his army as archers and brought with them a knowledge of the country that no map could supply. Mewar has honoured them in its military tradition ever since, and that is why a Bhil warrior stands on its emblem.

Rajasthan, divided in its answer

Several Rajput states came to terms with the Mughals in the end, by negotiation and by marriage. Others, Mewar above all, never conceded. Several Rajput nobles took up arms in Aurangzeb's time, Durga Das Rathore of Marwar among them, who fought for Jodhpur's independence. Mughal authority in Rajasthan stayed limited.

The Ahoms in the northeast

In the thirteenth century the Ahom people migrated from what is now Myanmar into the Brahmaputra Valley and founded a kingdom there. Through both the Sultanate and the Mughal periods they resisted attempts to expand into the northeast, and they did it with an arrangement that is worth understanding in itself.

The paik system

Under the paik system every able-bodied man owed the state service, as labour or as military duty, in exchange for rights over land. This let the rulers build public infrastructure and raise a large force at need without maintaining a permanent standing army. The Ahoms took up the culture around them over the generations, built up farming, left room for many faiths, and added much to what Assam counts as its own.

Saraighat

In the seventeenth century Aurangzeb sent Mughal forces, who briefly took the Ahom capital Garhgaon. The Ahoms fought in thick forest, in hills and on water they knew, wearing down an enemy who brought more men and a bigger fleet of river craft. Ten thousand men under the commander Lachit Borphukan beat a Mughal force of thirty thousand at the Battle of Saraighat in 1671, fought near present-day Guwahati on the Brahmaputra. The Ahoms kept their independence.

A tribute from the other side

Ram Singh, who commanded for the Mughals, wrote that an Assamese soldier could be relied on at all four things at once: an oar, a bow, a trench and a gun. He had seen such versatility nowhere else in India. Praise from a defeated commander is unusually strong evidence.

The Sikhs: a spiritual movement first

Guru Nanak taught in fifteenth-century Punjab that all people stand equal, that compassion is owed to everyone, and that God is one, which Ik Onkar states. Those who followed him came to be called Sikhs. The movement began purely as a spiritual one. The Gurus who came after had to answer a hardening intolerance, and persecution under certain Mughal rulers.

From teaching to defence

Jahangir learned that Guru Arjan had backed his own rebel son, and had the Guru tortured until he died. Guru Hargobind, who followed his father Guru Arjan, brought in military training and raised a Sikh army. It met Mughal forces in the field more than once. Guru Arjan made the first collection of the sacred text, the Guru Granth Sahib, and the hymns of Guru Tegh Bahadur went in afterwards.

1675

A party of Kashmiri Pandits came to Guru Tegh Bahadur and asked him to shield them from persecution for their faith. He decided to stand with them. Arrested and ordered by Aurangzeb to convert, he refused despite torture and despite seeing three of his disciples tortured to death, and was publicly beheaded at Chandni Chowk in Delhi. His son Guru Gobind Singh, tenth and last of the Gurus, answered by founding the Khalsa: an order of soldier-devotees sworn to fairness, to equal treatment and to the protection of the faith.

From confederacies to an empire

As Mughal power declined, several Sikh confederacies emerged in Punjab, and at the turn of the nineteenth century Maharaja Ranjit Singh unified them. His military skill, diplomacy and religious tolerance built a strong, centralised Sikh Empire across much of the northwest, including parts of Kashmir. It held off both Mughal remnants and, until the mid-nineteenth century, British expansion.

Scenario:

A commander has ten thousand soldiers and knows the river, the forest and the hills of his own country. Facing him is an army of thirty thousand with a larger fleet of boats, which has already taken his capital once. His officers argue for a pitched battle on open ground, where discipline and numbers will decide the day. He refuses, keeps to the narrow water near present-day Guwahati, and fights where the bigger fleet cannot spread out. His officers warn that the enemy outnumbers them three to one, and that no help is coming from any other kingdom.

Analysis:

Lachit Borphukan fought where the Mughal fleet could not spread and where his men's knowledge counted for more than numbers. The Ahoms kept their independence as a result.

Activity:

Find a place near you where the land itself would make movement difficult, and say what it would be good or bad for.

Title:

Who resisted, and with what?

Safety:

A reading and writing exercise.

What You Notice:

Terrain and local knowledge appear in most of the rows, which is the pattern the chapter wants you to see.

A Bhil warrior stands on the Mewar emblem because Bhil archers fought with Maharana Pratap and brought the knowledge of the hills that made guerrilla war work.

At Saraighat ten thousand Ahom soldiers defeated a Mughal force of thirty thousand that also had a larger fleet of river boats.

The Mughal general Ram Singh wrote that every Assamese soldier could row, shoot arrows, dig trenches and handle guns, and that he had seen such versatility nowhere else in India.

Where the resistance came from — FIELDS, FORESTS, HILLS, RIVERS, PUNJAB — Jat peasants in the fields, tribal groups in the forests, Rajputs in the hills, Ahoms on the rivers, and the Sikhs in Punjab.

The Ahom advantage — LAND FOR SERVICE — The paik system traded land rights for labour or military duty, so forces could be raised without keeping an army all year.

Who actually ran the country

Battles decide who sits on a throne. Administration decides what happens in a village the week afterwards. This topic is about the second thing: how the Sultanate and then the Mughals collected revenue, kept armies, and left or did not leave local life alone.

The sultan at the centre

The Delhi Sultanate built a system centred on the sultan, who held absolute authority as political and military head. The chronicles of the time set out three duties for him. He was to hold the lands of Islam against attack and to gather the dues and the taxes. He was also to find out for himself, in person, how the state and its people actually stood. A council of ministers ran the departments under him.

The iqta system

Territory was assigned to nobles called iqtadars, who collected taxes and, after deducting expenses, were supposed to send the balance to the sultan's treasury. The money was needed above all for the army. What it produced was a web of local officers who owed their position to the centre. The posts did not pass from father to son, which matters: no iqtadar's family ever came to own a district.

Where the weight fell

Trade was taxed at each step along the way, and even so it was the peasantry who carried the weight. More than one account of the time describes real brutality in getting the revenue off the land. A system that needs money urgently and judges officials by what they send upward puts pressure exactly where the people have least power to resist it.

Akbar reorganises

Aiming at greater control and efficiency, Akbar rebuilt the administrative machinery. The Diwan took charge of finances and the Mir Bakhshi of military matters. The Khan-i-Saman handled public works, trade, industry and agriculture as well as the royal household, and the Sadr took justice and religious and educational matters.

Twelve provinces, and checks between officials

Offices of these four kinds were set up in each of the twelve provinces, the subahs, and each subah was divided again beneath that. Checks and balances were enforced between government officials, so that no one officer held all the threads. In the villages, the old ways of governing themselves carried on much as they always had, and that is a real limit on how far down the empire actually reached.

The mansabdari system

Akbar also instituted the mansabdari system, recorded by Abul Fazl in the Ain-i-Akbari. An officer called a mansabdar held a mansab, which was a rank. The rank fixed exactly how many elephants, horses and camels he kept, and exactly how many soldiers he brought when the state asked. Regular inspections checked that they did.

An army without a standing army

The effect was that an army could be assembled at short notice without the state keeping a permanent centralised force. A mansabdar was usually paid with an assignment of land, a jagir, which is why the same men are called jagirdars. It is worth comparing this with the Ahom paik system: two very different states solving the same problem.

Who held the senior posts

Akbar grew more tolerant, and yet those who were not Muslim stayed a minority in the senior ranks of his administration. Officials who were not Muslim seldom made up more than a third of the whole, and the figure was frequently far lower. Among the Muslim officials themselves, a man born outside India was usually preferred to one born in it.

Measuring before taxing

Akbar's finance minister, Todar Mal, put the revenue on a working footing. He had yields and prices surveyed in detail, set a price for each crop from what the surveys showed, and started measuring the land itself across the whole empire. Measurement made collection more predictable, which boosted revenue and strengthened the state.

A wealthy subcontinent, unevenly

For all the political turmoil of the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, few parts of the world were richer than India. That wealth rested on farming, on crafts that did very well, on what communities and temples ran between them, and on trade reaching a long way. None of it was directed from one place: shrenis served as guilds, jatis grouped people by the work they did, and credit moved through arrangements of its own.

Building went forward under the Sultanate, roads in the north above all, with bridges too, a canal here and there, other irrigation work, and new cities. All of this expanded considerably under the Mughals. Coins were issued in several metals and denominations; the Mughal system used a silver rupaya and a copper dam.

What the land produced

Agriculture was the mainstay. What a ruler paid his administration and his army with came off the land. A fifth of the crop was the usual demand, and there were sultans who pushed it to a half. Expanded irrigation increased productivity and allowed multiple crops: food such as rice, wheat, barley, pulses, sugarcane and spices, and non-food crops such as cotton, silk, wool, dyes, timber and jute.

The limits of abundance

Output varied by region and by period, and the peasantry suffered several severe famines in these centuries, with relief depending on a particular ruler's benevolence. A country can be wealthy in total and still leave the people who grow its food exposed, which is a distinction worth keeping in mind.

Crafts, ships and ports

Beyond textiles, craftspeople made weapons, utensils, ornaments and jewellery. Shipbuilding developed considerably, since river and overseas trade depended on it. Goods went out of the country through the ports and river towns: Calicut and Mangalore, Surat, Masulipatnam and Hooghly. Far less came in than went out. Silk, horses, metals and costly goods arrived, and traders from Arabia, Persia and Central Asia made homes in Indian ports.

Money that could cross a border

The hundi system let merchants transfer funds across political boundaries without carrying currency, which made them far less vulnerable to plunder. A hundi was a written instruction to pay a named person. Parallel systems of credit and trust, built to work without the ruling classes taking part, let trading communities such as the Marwaris operate expertly across different political regimes.

Temples as economic centres

Many temples were more than places of worship, learning, social gathering and performance. They created ecosystems with busy markets around them. Ruling classes donated land and wealth as dana to temple deities, held in trust by managers who developed irrigation systems and tanks and built pilgrim accommodation such as dharmashalas and chhatrams. Temples also provided merchants with credit and funded internal and maritime trade.

Stress at the end of the period

Early prosperity gave way to economic stress in the late 1600s. Once the taxes were paid and the middlemen had taken their cut, a farming family was frequently left very little of its own crop. Many lost the land itself and ended as bonded labourers. Historians suggest craftspeople and labourers often faced harsh conditions too. Arab and European travellers alike described a land of plenty. The plenty, though, sat with rulers, courtiers, senior officials and merchants, and war came often enough to drive people from their homes.

Living side by side

There were instances of clashes among ordinary people, especially over sacred sites desecrated or destroyed with the rulers' sanction. In the main, though, neighbours of different faiths and communities got along, and each depended on the other to make a living. Communities worked to maintain or revive their traditions, and the interaction between them created a shared heritage. India came through the period economically prosperous on the whole and politically unstable, and the story is one of hardship and of resilience together.

Scenario:

A cloth merchant in Surat must pay a supplier in Hooghly, on the other side of the subcontinent. The territory between them is divided among several rulers, and armies are on the move. Carrying silver means hiring guards and risking the lot on one road. His family has traded through three changes of ruler and has never moved coin that distance. He writes an instruction to pay instead, and sends it with an ordinary traveller. The paper is worthless to a robber and binding on the correspondent who will honour it at the far end of the route.

Analysis:

The hundi moved value while the coin stayed still, which is why trade continued through warfare and changes of ruler. Institutions like this are why the economy survived the politics.

Activity:

Ask how money is sent today between two cities, and list what is the same as a hundi and what is different.

Title:

Chart the chain of revenue

Safety:

A drawing exercise, with nothing to handle.

What You Notice:

Most of what is collected is deducted or spent before it reaches the top, and the person with least power is at the bottom of the chain.

A hundi could be carried across a border and honoured on the other side, so a merchant's wealth travelled without a single coin being exposed to robbery.

Beneath all the imperial machinery, village self-governance carried on much as it always had, which is a measure of how far the empire actually reached.

The Mughal currency used a silver rupaya and a copper dam, while the Sultanate had issued coins in several metals and denominations.

Akbar's four ministers — MONEY, MEN, MAKING, MORALS — Diwan for money, Mir Bakhshi for men, Khan-i-Saman for making and supplying, Sadr for justice and religious matters.

Why the economy survived upheaval — GUILDS, HUNDIS, TEMPLES — Three institutions that handled organisation, credit transfer and investment without depending on who held the throne.