The greatest divide in South Asia's physical and human geography is between north and south. The environment of the north has been shaped by the Himalayas, a geologically young set of mountains with extraordi­narily high crests such as Mt. Everest (in Nepal), the highest mountain in the world at 8,850 meters (29,028 feet), and Kanchenjunga (in India) at 8,586 meters. The weight of this massive mountain system caused the land lying to its south to sink and form a vast low plain. The melting snows of the Himalayas feed numerous streams that have contributed a fertile overlay of soil to this plain, named the Indo-Gangetic after the two major river systems. The Indus river and its four tributaries lie at the western end of the plain; the Ganges with its many tributaries such as the Yamuna, which joins the Ganges river at the city of Allahabad, form the central portion. At the eastern end, the panges is approached by the Brahmaputra river originating in Tibet. Large sections of these perennial rivers of north India are navigable and were major routes of transport in the past. The Vindhya range and the adjacent Narmada river are the traditional boundaries between the north and peninsular south India.

North and south are also differentiated by language, although this cultural contour does not correspond exactly with the geographic divide of the Vindhya range and Narmada river. Linguistically, modern Maharashtra in the western Deccan is part of the northern zone, reflect­ing its historic character as an area of transition between the two. South of Maharashtra the languages belong to the Dravidian family found only in India, whereas Maharashtra's Marathi language and all the major lan­guages to its north belong to the lndo-Aryan family, a subset of the larger Indo-European group. While totally different in their origins, the Dra­vidian and lndo-Aryan languages have developed some common features through long interaction, including a large body of joint vocabulary.

Most parts of both north and south India share a climate dominated by the seasonal monsoon winds. In the middle of the year, the prevailing southwest winds carry moisture from the Indian Ocean and drench most of South Asia with heavy rains. The winds reverse direction in the winter and blowout of the dry, cold interior of inner Asia. This system of alter­nating monsoon winds produces three main seasons: the rainy period of the southwest monsoon (mid June to early October) when the weather is hot and wet; the cool, dry weather 'from early October to February corresponding to winter; and the hot dry season, or summer, from about March to mid June.

The coming of the rains, which almost instantly transforms the parched brown landscape into a lush expanse of green, is critical to Indian agriculture. Both the quantity and timing of the southwest monsoon can vary considerably from year to year, leading to large differences in crop yields and occasional flooding.

The heartland of South Asia has long been the western and central por­tion of the Gangetic plain, where the bulk of the Hindi-speaking population resides today. When we refer to north India, this is the area we most often have in mind. Travel and communication is easy in the Gangetic plain, with its large, open expanse of land, as well as many navigable rivers. Perennial sources of water, adequate rainfall, and good soils were a boon to settled agriculture, the economic mainstay of the region. The greatest empires of ancient India were based in the Gangetic plain which, along with the Indus plain, boasted the earliest urban centers of the sub­continent. In south India, in contrast, settled agriculture was confined to relatively small pockets, although it had a longer history there than in western or eastern India. Because of its more difficult terrain, dispersed agrarian zones, and localized social circles, the peninsula's kingdoms were typically smaller than those of the Gangetic north prior to 1000 CE. The only states that had ever extended their power across the Vindhyas were those based in the north. Eastern and western Indian states were even later to develop than those in the south and were similarly restricted in size, for the most part.

In contrast to China 1000 CE however, on S.Asia’s sub­continent's territory instead, one finds the presence of numerous kingdoms at the time. Covering such a vast area as we do here, a general overview at first, as we do on this page is absolutely necessary. Like Europe, South Asia had a common elite "civilization" that served to unify it culturally in a general sense prior to 1200, although there were many different local practices and beliefs. From 1200 onward, the pan-Indic civilization was increasingly eclipsed in importance by regional cultures that had evolved their own distinctive variations on the Indic theme. Just as in Europe, regionaliza­tion occurred at the expense of a cosmopolitan language and culture, in South Asia's case, Sanskrit, and was a sign of the growing relevance of more localized concerns and identities among the elite populations. These regional cultures also interacted with or were affected by aspects of the cosmopolitan culture of Persia and the Middle East in differing ways in the centuries after 1200. It is thus to a discussion of the unity and diversity of South Asia's internal physical and cultural landscapes of this period that we now turn, as we will cover the earlier Muslim invasion in an article to go on-line on tomorrow.

For much of India's ancient history, the earlier development, greater wealth, and larger population of the Gangetic north gave it political and cultural dominance. This explains why it was the Sanskrit language once spoken in the north that eventually developed into the pan-Indic liter­ary medium. For a period of approximately a thousand years beginning in 300 CE, the prestige of classical Sanskrit was so great that it eclipsed all other languages and literatures. It created what Sheldon Pollock has called a Sanskrit cosmopolis, a far-flung realm of shared aesthetics, polit­ical discourse, and religious knowledge. The Sanskrit cosmopolis was chiefly embodied in the person of the learned Brahmin, who occupied the preeminent position in the four-fold varna or caste system of social classification. Traditionally priests and religious scholars, Brahmins had for centuries also served as court poets, ministers of state, scribes, and record-keepers. Brahmins were crucial propagators of the ideologies and rituals of kingship and so were heavily patronized throughout the subcon­tinent, and even in parts of Southeast Asia, by kings and warriors who belonged to the class known as kshatriya.

Although the religious beliefs and practices of India were never sys­tematized by a central institution or spiritual authority, the circulation of Sanskrit and Brahmins throughout the subcontinent did produce some semblance of a unified religious culture at the elite level by 1000 CE. Over the previous millennium, numerous local gods and goddesses had been appropriated and subsumed into the three main deities of classical Hinduism: Shiva, Vishnu, and the Goddess (Devi). Shiva, often worshipped in the form of the cylindricallinga, is an ascetic lord dwelling in the Himalayas whose dance of destruction brings about the periodic end of all life so that the universe might be renewed. Shiva is also depicted in sculpture in multiple forms, including as a happily married husband and father. Vishnu is even more complex, for his personality includes those of his ten incarnations among which are the well-known gods, Krishna and Rama, to whom we will refer a number of times in this text. In general, Vishnu is a rather more benevolent god than Shiva; medieval Indian kings particularly liked him in his Boar incarnation, when he rescued the earth from the depths of the ocean where she had been dragged by a fierce demon. The Goddess is worshipped by many names and in many forms, both benevolent and wrathful, sometimes in association with a male god, but often alone.

By 1000 CE, stone temples for the elite worship of the major Hindu deities had been built in many localities of the subcontinent. The rituals of worship followed the same fundamental format regardless of location: the enshrined image of the god or goddess was bathed, dressed, decorated with ornaments, and fed at least twice a day. The layout of temple com­plexes also bore a rough resemblance to each other, enough so that they would have been immediately recognizable as temples to visitors from a different region. The most important deity dwelt in the inner sanctum, over which a high superstructure known as a shikhara reached toward the heavens. One or more pillared porches (mandapa) were adjoined to the front of the main building that contained the inner sanctum. Devotees could enter the porches and even the main building but not the inner sanctum itself, for that was the domain of the deity and the Brahmin priests who served the gods and goddesses.

Within this basic template found all over India, there were significant regional divergences in style. Just as the numerous scripts for the regional languages of India prior to 1200 were all derived from the same ancient Brahmi script, so too regional idioms in temple architecture increasingly deviated from classical prototypes. Variation in temple styles is a mani­festation of the growing regionalization ofIndian culture, a phenomenon that we have already stated becomes more important after approximately 1200. As each regional society developed, its political leaders who spon­sored the creation of monuments and its artisans who constructed them chose somewhat different ways of making their vision of an abode for the gods into a physical reality. Architecture is only a single aspect of culture, of course, and one that may not have affected the lives of many peo­ple. However, temple styles are the most readily recognizable marker of regional identity in the medieval era. A good way to illustrate the cultural diversity that existed in the subcontinent within the larger overall unity is by looking at two temples dating to around 1000 CE, one from south India and the other from the north.

The largest temple in eleventh-century India was located in Tanjavur, the capital of the mighty Chola dynasty of the far south. Consecrated in 1010, the temple housed a form of Shiva named Rajarajeshvara after the Chola ruler Rajaraja, who was its main patron. As was standard in the south Indian or Dravidian style of architecture, the temple was demarcated as a sacred space by a walled enclosure. Entry into the enclosure was through a large towered gate known as a gopura, which in the temple architecture of later centuries would grow so large as to dwarf the temple itself. At this eleventh-century site, however, the temple was still the dominant feature in the complex. Made of carved granite, the exterior of the temple hosts a variety of complex figural images and inscriptions intended to praise both the god Shiva and the king who so ostentatiously made his piety known to the world. An unusually large mandapa (porch) fronts the temple's inner sanctum which in turn is topped by a shikhara (pyramidal superstructure) that soars to a height of 65 meters. Its tightly stepped pyramidal spire adorned with a smooth circular cap is typical of superstructures on south Indian temples and provides an imposing profile.

While the far south of India was thriving under the Chola dynasty, political power in the northern half of the subcontinent continued to devolve to an increasing number of small states. Despite their more lim­ited resources, north Indian kings were also vigorous patrons of temples and the artistic creativity of the region remained high. A good example is the Kandariya Mahadeva temple at the site of Khajuraho, on the southern edge of the Gangetic plain, in the modern state of Madhya Pradesh. It is dedicated to Shiva but stands among a group of more than twenty extant structures, constructed over three centuries, which house Jain deities as well as other Hindu ones. Gains, like Hindus, believe in continuous rebirth until the soul achieves perfection and are staunch adherents of non-violence, but they reject the authority of Brahmins.) We have no information on who built this largest and most elaborate monument at Khajuraho, but given its size and scale it is gener­ally assumed to have been the reigning king of the Chandela dynasty that ruled this area during the ninth through early twelfth centuries. Built at about the same time as Tanjavur's Rajarajeshvara temple, the Kandariya Mahadeva is the most acclaimed temple to survive from the eleventh­ century north and provides a striking contrast to the southern style of architecture. Once again, as we noted previously in relation to terrain and language, north and south India can be sharply differentiated.

The Kandariya Mahadeva, richly covered with carved gods and god­desses, sits on a high plinth and the inner sanctum is approached by three porches, each increasingly larger than the previous one. The porches are surmounted by elaborate corbelled roofs; what might be an otherwise dark interior is illuminated by open balconies. Its superstructure, one of the most beautiful examples of the north Indian style, is radically differ­ent from the south Indian type exemplified at Tanjavur. The Kandariya Mahadeva's superstructure is composed not of a series of separate stories that gradually recede as they ascend, as in the case with the Rajarajeshvara temple, but rather of reduplicated clusters of small spires that line a cen­tral core. This gives the temple's roof line a jagged outline not unlike a great mountain range. Since it can be considered a replica of Mt. Kailasa, the Himalayan abode of the god Shiva, the temple's visual reference to mountains is highly appropriate. While the Kandariya Mahadeva is only about half the height of the Rajarajeshvara temple, the progressively rising spires of the roof emphasize the vertical dimension and give the temple a sense of considerable height. The temple's height is also emphasized by the extremely steep stairs that lead from the ground level to the elevated entrance and climbing them gives the devotee the sense of scaling Mt. Kailasa, an intended reference to Shiva's home.

Eastern and western India also had their own distinctive types of tem­ple architecture by 1000 CE, within the broader northern style. The four regions of India - south, north, east, and west - thus each had their own separate interpretation oftemple architecture within a common template that consisted of one or more porches in front of an inner sanctum sur­mounted by a tall spire. The exterior of the temple was generally the most heavily decorated portion, usually embellished with images of gods and demi-gods that could be contemplated and worshipped as the devo­tee circumambulated the exterior, before and after paying homage to the interior deity. To see the deity's image was considered an especially auspi­cious act known as darshana or darshan, that might be loosely translated as beholding.

The Indian focus on a religious structure's exterior stands in contrast to Muslim practice in the larger Islamic world, where it is not until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that magnificent exteriors become the norm. While Muslim prayer can be performed anywhere as long as the believer faces in the direction of Mecca, it is often done in the interior of a mosque - in the prayer chamber itself or in the mosque's interior courtyard, which serves as an overflow area. Ritual at Indian temples and Indian mosques would always remain specific to each religion, but over time the different building styles of temples and mosques merged to create structures that were Islamic in appearance but not in function. In addition, by around 1600 the Indian practice of beholding a deity was extended to royalty, both Hindu and Muslim.

By the year 1000, as we have seen, the different regions of the sub­continent had begun to exhibit distinctive elite cultures. Another notable trend was the rise of south India, whose historical development had long lagged behind that of the north. The soaring height of the superstructure of Tanjavur's Rajarajeshvara temple reflected the stature of the dynasty that sponsored its construction, for under Rajaraja (r. 985-1014) and his son Rajendra (r. 1014-1044), the Chola kingdom became the greatest Indian state of its era. This was not due to any advance in political or military organization, since the eleventh- and twelfth-century kingdoms of South Asia were all roughly comparable in their decentralized political structures and small standing armies supplemented with troops supplied by subordinate lords. However, the Cholas had the advantage of being based in the richest agrarian zone of the peninsula, the Kaveri river delta area, at a time when south India's economic development had finally caught up with and even surpassed the level of the north. This gave them the resources to extract tribute from the entire far south and even send an army all the way to the Ganges in the north Indian heartland.

The Cholas also had the advantage of proximity to the most active sector of long-distance trade within the Indian Ocean in this period, the eastern stretch extending from southeastern India through Southeast Asia and into south China. Rajaraja most likely desired more control over international trade when he annexed the northern half of the neighboring island of Sri Lanka, on the sea route between India and regions to its east. His successor Rajendra completed the conquest of Sri Lanka and went on to dispatch a naval expedition against Shrivijaya, a maritime trading kingdom based on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. The victory of the Chola fleet led to fifty years of Indian dominance over the Strait of Malacca, the vital sea passage between the Malayan peninsula and Indonesia through which all trade to and from China was funneled. This was the apex of Indian influence in Southeast Asia, which had assimilated many elements of Indian civilization over the past six or more centuries, including the Sanskrit language, south Indian scripts, and the religions of Hinduism and Buddhism.

At the same time that King Rajaraja I of the Chola dynasty was making plans to build his enormous temple at Tanjavur, another great king had emerged in far-off Afghanistan. Known to posterity simply as Mahmud of Ghazni (r. 998-1030) after the Afghan city that was his capital, he is usually regarded as the first Muslim king to have a major impact on the subcontinent. Muslim rule had in fact been introduced centuries earlier, when Arab forces seized control of the Sind region of the southern Indus plain (now in Pakistan) in 711. Muslims continued to rule over Sind for centuries but the presence of the great Thar desert to their east made further penetration into the subcontinent difficult. Developments in Sind had little effect on the rest of South Asia, and Muslim influence was confined primarily to this backwater region. Even Indo-Muslim chronicles of a later time ignore the Arabs of Sind and begin their narrative of Muslim rule in India with Mahmud of Ghazni.

Mahmud lived about 350 years after the inception of Islam, at a time when many in the Islamic world feared that their centuries of political supremacy might be at an end. In the years immediately after the death of the Prophet Muhammad (d. 632), Muslims had given their allegiance to a single caliph or head of state. Under the Umayyad dynasty of caliphs (661-750) based in Damascus and then the Abbasids of Baghdad, much of the Islamic world had been politically unified, at least in theory. This unity had fragmented by the tenth century, with three different rulers ­one in Umayyad Spain, another in Abbasid Baghdad, and yet another in Fatimid Cairo - each claiming to be the sole caliph. While all Muslims would never again be brought together in one state, the tenth-century fear that Muslim dominance was on an irreversible decline proved to be wrong. Instead, the influx of a new group of people, the Turks, would politically reinvigorate much territory ruled under the banner of Islam. From the ninth century onward, Muslim rulers had increasingly relied on personal troops composed of enslaved Turks from the Central Asian steppes. These military slaves or mamluks were considered more loyal than other soldiers because they were taken captive at a young age and owed loyalty only to their master. Many mamluks went on to become prominent generals and leaders in the Islamic world in this era; at the same time, various tribes of Turks were gradually migrating into Muslim lands and becoming Islamicized. Due to their nomadic background, the Turkic peoples were skilled at cavalry warfare.

Mahmud of Ghazni's ascendance occurred in this context of rising Turkic military and political power. His grandfather, Alptigin, was a Turk who began as a military slave and ended his career as governor of Ghazni, a city in the center of what is now Afghanistan. Sebuktigin, Mahmud's father, was also a slave at one time, before he married Alptigin's daughter and succeeded to Alptigin's position as governor. He eventually declared his independence and annexed much of modern Afghanistan, becom­ing the first in the Ghaznavid line of Turkic rulers. After Mahmud, the Ghaznavids lost their base in Afghanistan to the Seljuq Turks, a group of nomadic tribes who went on to conquer a huge swath of territory encompassing modern Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and much of Central Asia. The Ghaznavids and Seljuqs were conscious of their status as newcomers to Islam and so never sought symbolic leadership over the entire Islamic world. Instead of claiming the ultimate authority as caliphs, Mahmud and other Turkic rulers were called sultans, a title for Muslim kings that spread widely in later centuries. After several centuries during which the Islamic frontiers had hardly advanced, the Turkic sultans of the eleventh century initiated major expansions of the Islamic realm, the Ghaznavids toward the east and the Seljuqs toward the west.

Mahmud of Ghazni started making frequent campaigns into the Indian subcontinent in 1001. Keen on building up his prestige within the inter­national Muslim community, Mahmud portrayed his entry into the sub­continent as an instance of jihad, in this case a war against infidels. Making this claim also allowed him to legitimately take booty, which Mahmud did in great quantities. Mahmud commenced by taking territory around the Indus river in what is today Pakistan and eventually made his way large majority of Muslims are Sunni, the sense of an ummah was almost readymade. Also significant in creating unity among Muslims was the existence of a common language, Arabic, for religious purposes, as well as common cultural practices and constructs.

Islam requires that Muslims adhere to a certain set of beliefs and practices. Among these are the five messages of the Quran, the divinely revealed Muslim holy book. These include the beliefs in god's mono­theistic nature, his creation of the entire world, the need for all people to be good and generous, the coming of a Day ofJudgment, and the fact that Muhammad was the final prophet. In addition, there are a set of practices that all Muslims should engage in: the profession offaith in a single god, paying of a tithe, fasting during the month of Ramadan, a pilgrimage to Mecca if at all possible, and prayer five times a day. It is the act of praying that most immediately binds the ummah. While praying can be done indi­vidually, the Friday noon prayer should be done as a congregation. For this reason, each town has a mosque or in some cases multiple mosques, where Muslims can gather together in a visible reminder that they form part of a single community of faith. The brotherhood of all Muslims is further affirmed by the lack of a religious hierarchy in comparison to Hin­duism. Islam has a class of religious scholars called ulama whose status is based solely on their knowledge of religious texts and practice. They give informed advice and are held in great esteem but do not hold any formal religious institutional office.

Upon hearing the call to prayer from a tall minaret on Fridays around noon, the devout Muslims of Mahmud of Ghazni's realm would have flocked to the mosque for congregational prayer. Leaving their shoes at the mosque's austere brick exterior, the devout would enter into the court­yard. In its middle would be an ablution tank where ritual cleansing was performed. The courtyard's interior perimeters were lined with arched galleries used for multiple purposes, including teaching. The gallery on the side of the compound that faced the direction of Mecca, known as the qibla, was deeper than the other galleries, for here was the prayer cham­ber. Pointed arched entrances led into the prayer chamber's interior while arched niches called mihrabs, symbolic reminders of the Prophet Muham­mad's role in teaching the messages of Islam, would mark the qibla wall. Although mihrabs might be inscribed with verses from the Quran or abstract floral or geometric forms, they would never bear human or ani­mal imagery as you would find in a Hindu temple, for such figural rep­resentation is very strongly discouraged in the Muslim religious context. The prayer chamber would be surmounted by domes and/or vaults.

Very little intact architecture from the Ghaznavid period survives, but we do have existing examples from their Seljuq successors that are quite similar to the Ghaznavid style. The most notable example of a Seljuq monument is the Great Mosque of Isfahan in Iran, which adheres closely to the hypothetical model described in the previous paragraph (Figure 1. 3). Adapting earlier pre- Islamic Iranian techniques, Muslim architecture in Iran and Afghanistan was arcuated - that is, employing arches, vaults, and domes - regardless of whether the building was a tomb, palace, fort, or mosque. Due to a lack of stone quarries, almost all of this building was done in brick. While this figure shows the mosque's original brick facade, much of it was later covered with elaborate blue tile. This use of brick contrasts to the largely stone-built architecture found in India which is trabeated, based on the principle of stacking or corbelling where height is achieved by piling one stone on top of another. Another difference is that the only surviving building type in India from this era is the temple. Secular buildings must have been largely built in wood, and tombs were not required, since Indian religions prescribe cremation of the dead rather than the Islamic practice of burial. The merger of the eastern Islamic and indigenous Indic building techniques and traditions would create highly original and creative forms after 1200.

Although Mahmud could claim to belong to a worldwide Muslim com­munity, the Ghaznavid Turks had adopted an ideology and style of king­ship that originated in just one part of the Islamic world, its eastern segment. This mode of kingship drew heavily on the pre-Islamic tra­ditions of Persia and cast the king as an all powerful autocrat deemed superior to other mortals. The elevated position of a ruler in later Perso­Islamic society was a far cry from the egalitarian ethos of the early days of Islam, when the ruler was simply an esteemed man who was elected from a body of equals just as an Arab chief had been chosen from the elders of the tribe. The Perso-Islamic king had great responsibilities, including the execution of justice and the maintenance of Islam. Rulers such as Mahmud of Ghazni were considered shadows of god on earth and, as such, merited great respect and awe.

The fact that Mahmud of Ghazni used Persian as a court language also differentiated him and other contemporary rulers in Iran and Central Asia from their counterparts in Spain, Egypt, and Baghdad who spoke Arabic. Persian increasingly came into its own during the eleventh century. One example is provided by the famous Shahnama (Book of Kings) written by the poet Ferdowsi and dedicated to Mahmud of Ghazni. This lengthy epic, composed of some 60,000 verses, is not only written in Persian but also deals with a subject, the rise and fall of pre-Islamic Iranian kings, that would only have interested those who felt they were heirs to a long­standing Persian culture. In spite ofthe increasing importance of Persian, Arabic remained an important language, especially for scholars and religious specialists. Al-Biruni, the famous scientist and scholar who lived for some time in Ghazni and served at Mahmud's court, wrote much of his voluminous scholarship in Arabic, including his Kitab al-Hind (Book of India) which was then translated into Persian. This work was based on research he did in India when he accompanied Mahmud there in the 1020s, and was considered one of the most important books on India even into the sixteenth century.

These intertwined traditions of Turkic military prowess, Islamic religion, and Persian culture were introduced into the Indian subcontinent by Mahmud of Ghazni and his successors. Mahmud's son had to yield most of the Ghaznavid realm to the much larger and more powerful Se1juq Turks, but the dynasty managed to retain a small stronghold around Lahore, today in Pakistan. There the Ghaznavids survived for almost two hundred years, until they were dislodged by another upstart dynasty from Afghanistan, the Ghurids, who further spread Perso-Is1amic culture in South Asia. Although Arab sailors and merchants, as well as the early Muslim Arabs who conquered Sind, were no strangers to South Asia, the Muslims who became politically dominant in the subcontinent would typically be Turco-Mongo1 in ethnic background, horse-riding warriors in occupation, and Persian in cultural heritage.

In the year 1000, two kings at the extremities of the greater South Asian world region had been poised for expansion. There was Rajaraja Cho1a of Tanjavur, on the one hand, who envisioned an extension of power into Southeast Asia that would be realized by his son Rajendra. At the same time, Mahmud of Ghazni, situated in the borderland between the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia, was setting his sights on the area of northwestern India. By 1200, however, the Cho1a dynasty had withered away along with Indian influence in Southeast Asia, whereas a second wave of Turkic warriors following in Mahmud of Ghazni's footsteps was overrunning much of north India. The Cho1as flourished toward the end of one long phase, a period of roughly a thousand years when Indian culture had spread far beyond the confines of the modern region not only into Southeast Asia but also into central and eastern Asia. Mahmud of Ghazni, on the other hand, stood at the inception of a second phase, during which Islamic religion and culture were transmitted as far east as the southern Philippine islands. What happened subsequently in India was not so much a clash of civilizations as a revitalization of its politics and an enrichment of its already diverse culture. That is the story to which we now turn our attention.  
 

Birth of the Delhi Sultanate

The origins of the Delhi Sultanate can be traced to the career of Muham­mad Ghuri, so-called after the mountainous region in Afghanistan where his family was based. His full name was Shihab al-Din Muhammad bin Sam, but he is also known in the historical sources as Muizz al­Din. Muhammad Ghuri was based in Ghazni, the former capital of the renowned Mahmud, and from there he turned his attention eastward toward India beginning in 1175. Like Mahmud, Muhammad Ghuri spent years campaigning in the Indian subcontinent and won victory after victory. Unlike Mahmud, however, Muhammad's goal was to annex territory and not merely to carry out profitable raids. Muhammad's first conquest in South Asia was the region of Punjab, held by the Muslim descendants of Mahmud of Ghazni. For two decades from 1186, the main city in the Punjab, Lahore, served as the primary Ghurid base in South Asia for a series of successful attacks on north India proper.

Muhammad's two chief targets in north India were the powerful Hindu kings Prithviraj Chauhan of Ajmer and Jayachandra Gahadavala of Kanauj. After their victory in 1192 against Prithviraj Chauhan at the battlefield of Tarain, about 120 kilometers northwest of modern Delhi, the Ghurid armies immediately set off toward Prithviraj's capital at Ajmer, seizing forts along the way. In the following year, Ghurid forces under Qutb aI-Din Aibak set up a permanent garrison in Delhi, which would become the future center of Muslim power in north India but was then a town of minor military and political significance. The Ghurid forces next moved into the Gangetic valley and defeated King Jayachandra by 1194. While Muhammad Ghuri directed these major battles himself, most of the other campaigns in the heartland of north India were directed by his Turkic slave-general, Qutb al-Din Aibak. Bengal and Bihar in the east, on the other hand, were acquired by a military adventurer, Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji.

Muhammad Ghuri, Qutb aI-Din Aibak, and Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji amply illustrate the ethnic diversity found among the warriors in the victorious Ghurid armies. Muhammad Ghuri was an aristocrat from a people who were culturally and linguistically Persian; he was a member of the urbane, civilized world. Other elite men from Ghur served as com­manders for Muhammad Ghuri in his early years of expansion, but they were replaced almost entirely by military slaves ofTurkic origin like Qutb aI-Din Aibak after the Battle of Tarain in 1192. Military slaves were more reliable in their loyalties than aristocratic warriors because they had no family allegiances. They were typically non-Muslims enslaved as young boys and converted to Islam. Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji, on the other hand, was a member of a nomadic people who lived to the east of the Ghur region of Afghanistan and were considered of humble social status by others. Turks who were not slaves also fought for Muhammad Ghuri and his successors in India, as did a number of mounted warriors from Khurasan, a Persian-speaking region encompassing modern eastern Iran, western Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan. The men fighting under Muham­mad Ghuri's banner in India were a highly eclectic group: they came from a variety of ethnic communities, spoke several different languages, were sometimes but not always of nomadic background, and could be either enslaved or free. The multiplicity of their origins reflects the turbulent recent history of the lands to the west of the subcontinent, which served as a crossroads for peoples converging from all over Asia and the Middle East.

The sophisticated military system of their native Afghanistan was the principal reason for the success of the Ghurid armies in India. The ease of the Ghurid conquest has puzzled historians in the past, given the far greater agrarian wealth and population of the conquered Indian king­doms that should have provided them with ample resources for military defense. Hence, early twentieth-century scholars often pointed to the lack of unity among Indians as the chief explanation for their defeat. Since the concept of India as a nation was still centuries away, Prithviraj Chauhan and Jayachandra Gahadavala - Muhammad Ghuri's opponents - had no incentive to forge a united front and indeed are depicted as mortal en­emies in a later ballad that champions Prithviraj. Similarly, there was no sense of a common religious identity among Indian warriors at the time, for the notion of a unified Hinduism is a modern one. In the premodern period a variety of distinct sects, many of them focusing on a single deity rather than multiple ones, comprised what we group together today under the rubric of Hinduism. Recent historical scholarship instead attributes the victory of the Ghurid armies to a number of concrete advantages that gave them a distinct military edge.

The Ghurids were in a better position than Indian rulers in this age of cavalry warfare both in terms of the supply of horses and of trained manpower. Coming from Afghanistan, the Ghurids had easy access to the high-quality horses of Central Asia, Persia, and the Arabian Penin­sula. The Indian subcontinent was, in contrast, ill suited for the breeding of horses. Since indigenous horses were inferior, Indian rulers had long imported horses from the regions to its west by various overland and maritime routes. Imported horses soon deteriorated in quality, however, because most of the subcontinent lacked good fodder and pasture lands. The Ghurids (and the later sultans of Delhi) were highly skilled in deploy­ing horses in warfare. Employing a classic nomadic tactic of the Central Asian steppes, their light cavalry could fan out and flank the enemy from all sides, but still retreat quickly out of range of the enemy's heavy cavalry charge. The damage inflicted by the mounted archers of the Ghurid light cavalry was considerable, whereas Indian armies had few men accom­plished enough to wield a bow while riding, according to the recent work of Andre Wink. Indian armies instead generally engaged in mass frontal attacks and employed rows of war-elephants to break enemy lines. Slow and cumbersome, the elephant, if panicked, might also inflict serious damage on its own troops.

Other factors also worked to the benefit of the Ghurid forces. Foremost among these was the highly centralized organization of their armies, for the Ghurids had a permanent core of professional soldiers who were accustomed to fighting together. Indian armies, on the other hand, were coalitions composed of the separate fighting forces under individual lords who were called for duty when required. As a consequence, they often failed to coordinate on the battlefield. All of these elements in conjunction resulted in a superior military system or complex that enabled the Ghurid armies to extend the political and cultural frontiers of the crossroads zone of Afghanistan, eastern Iran, and Uzbekistan well beyond the Punjab, where it had remained stationary for nearly two centuries.

Their intention to stay permanently in South Asia is indicated by the building of numerous monuments. Islamic texts on statecraft that would have been well known to the Ghurids required that kings establish large fortified palaces to display their power and wealth to the populace. In addition, mosques are essential for congregational prayer during which all Muslim men gather together around noon on Friday, the Muslim holy day. For a new ruler to achieve legitimate status, he needed to have his name proclaimed during the Friday prayer as well as on coins. Inscrip­tional and textual evidence indicates that Aibak constructed many struc­tures on behalf of his Ghurid lord including fine palace complexes, but the two most important surviving structures are the J ami (congregational) mosques in Delhi and Ajmer. The names by which these mosques are known today are not their original ones. The popular name of the Delhi Jami mosque, the one on which we focus our discussion since it was built first, is the Quwwat aI-Islam, meaning the Might of Islam (Figure 2.1). If this name is accepted as its original one then there is an implicit sugges­tion that the mosque was intended as a victory statement over indigenous Indian religious traditions. However, as Sunil Kumar indicates, Quwwat aI-Islam is simply a corruption of Qubbat aI-Islam (Sanctuary of Islam), the title given to Delhi later in the thirteenth century and then subse­quently applied to the Jami mosque and a nearby dargah (tomb-shrine) of an important Muslim saint.

The first phase of both the Delhi and Ajmer mosques used recycled materials, predominantly temple pillars, following building patterns used elsewhere in the Muslim world when Islam was initially introduced in a new region. These mosques had to be quickly built for practical and political reasons, especially in order to promote new dynastic authority. The most expedient method was to use precut materials taken from local temples. But all the same, a mosque that appeared as a rearranged temple must have seemed like an affront to those who had previously worshipped in those buildings. And perhaps a mosque built from pre-existing reli­gious structures caused discomfiture to the mosque's patrons. This may be why a large five-arched free-standing screen was placed before the prayer chamber of the Delhi mosque in 1198, just a few years after its initial construction. Not using any spolia, that is, recycled material, this exquisitely carved work employing indigenous vegetal motifs combined with passages in Arabic from the Quran was clearly intended to evoke the arched appearance of the prayer chambers of contemporary mosques in the Ghurid homeland.

The second addition to the Delhi congregational mosque was com­menced in 1199. Known today as the Qutb Minar, it is modeled on and intended to surpass freestanding Iranian and Afghan minarets, in particular one built by the brother of Muhammad bin Sam in the Ghurid capital of Firuz Kot (today Jam) shortly before the construc­tion of the Delhi minaret. By the time of its completion in the thirteenth century, the Qutb Minar was about 83 meters high, making it the tallest minaret in the world, and it served multiple purposes. Too tall for the call to prayer, its practical function was as a watch tower from whose top any approaching army could be seen for miles. Second, it may have been intended as a warning to those who did not convert to Islam, for the Arabic inscriptional bands that embellish its facade tell of the doom that awaits disbelievers on the day of judgment. But the fact that the script was alien in a land where only Brahmins were literate suggests its message went largely unnoticed.

The remaining inscriptions in Persian which proclaim the Ghurid over­lord as the king of the Arabs and Persians, coupled with its vast scale, suggest that this minaret was less a religious symbol than one of political import. It was intended not only to legitimize Ghurid rule locally but also in the larger Islamic world. Through the establishment of religious sites, the alien territory of India was gradually assimilated into the far­flung Islamic civilization, and the diverse Muslim warriors of the Ghurid armies were provided a sacred space in common. This marked a radi­cal break with the practice of Mahmud of Ghazni, who had no desire to absorb into his empire the localities of western and northern India that he repeatedly plundered for their wealth. And as home to numerous warriors from Afghanistan and its vicinity, India's course of historical development was now inextricably interwoven with that of its western neighbors.

The seemingly strident tone expressed in this state-sponsored mosque was not the only voice of Islam in the subcontinent. Sufis, Muslim mys­tics dedicated to seeking an immediate and personal relationship with god, had arrived in India even prior to the Ghurids. Sufis often served as a bridge between the new Muslim overlords and the large Indic pop­ulation. The most important of these mystics, Muin aI-Din Chishti (d. 1236), still generally regarded as India's supreme Sufi, came from Chisht in Afghanistan around the time of Prithviraj Chauhan's defeat by the Ghurids, and settled in the Chauhan capital, Ajmer. Hagiographies claim Muin aI-Din, who achieved the status of a saint, attracted scores of fol­lowers charmed by his message of remembering and experiencing god through intense love. Because there are no contemporary sources or writ­ings surviving from the time of Muin aI-Din, early Chishti practice is unknown. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Chishtis perfected an approach to spiritual union with god through a combina­tion of zikr (recollection of god's ninety-nine names) and sama (music and song). Their extensive use of music in a religious context must have been appealing in the Indian setting, where poem-songs were often part of religious ceremony.

Carl Ernst and Bruce Lawrence have pointed out that, contrary to much popular belief, Sufism is not at odds with orthodox Islam but is rather part of it. The early Chishti mystics had to negotiate a diffi­cult course of following orthodox Islamic practice, such as marrying and praying five times a day, while maintaining a vow of poverty and prac­ticing an ecstatic form of Islam. Over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Chishti order became a uniquely South Asian one, producing four significant spiritual heirs to Muin aI-Din, among whom only Nizam aI-Din Auliya (d. 1325) has earned the title Beloved of God. The early Chishtis, in particular Nizam aI-Din, made a conscious effort to avoid the patronage of rulers; therefore, this mystic order can be seen as an alternative voice to the state, but not necessarily to orthodoxy. Prominent Sufis were buried in their humble abodes, which were then transformed into dargahs, that is, shrines replete with teaching facilities and kitchens for feeding the poor. Thus, the power of these saintly mystics to transform the lives of ordinary people endured even after death.

But Muhammad Ghuri's sudden death in 1206 precipitated an intense con­test for power among the leading Turkic military slaves upon whom Muhammad had so heavily relied. In that year Qutb aI-Din Aibak, a slave of Turkic origin, seized control of the armies from Afghanistan that were occupying numerous forts in the heartland of north India. Qutb aI-Din Aibak's act was but the first in a series of struggles for dominance among the leading members of the Turkic forces in India. This event easily could have been relegated to the status of a footnote in history had the occupying Turkic armies eventually retreated back to their area of origin, as had Mahmud of Ghazni two hundred years earlier, or had the fledgling Islamic state torn itself apart in internal conflict. Instead, Qutb al-Din's political successors were able to entrench themselves in India for centuries thereafter and, in doing so, ushered in momentous changes not only in the political makeup of the subcontinent but also in its culture. The importance of the date 1206, when the first of a series of dynasties collectively known as the Delhi Sultanate was founded, is thus clear.

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