Chapter 5 India 169villages across the subcontinent, their temples, mosques, saints’ tombs, and
shrines patronized by everyone.
By the eleventh century, India had become “an ocean world-economy”
with important trade to West Asia and to China (Bose and Jalal 1998). Arab
traders settled along India’s west coast, bringing the first inklings of Islam but
not really intent on religious proselytizing. Mahmud of Ghazni invaded India
17 times between 1000 and 1027, primarily going after treasure from India’s
great temples and monasteries, slaughtering “shaven-headed (Buddhist)
monks” along the way. By the end of this period, Buddhism had disappeared
from India, the surviving monks fleeing north to Nepal or south to Sri Lanka.
These invaders were ethnic Turks, who were moving from Central Asia not
only into India but also westward, where they founded the Ottoman Empire.
In 1192 Mohammad Ghori, a Turk, established the first Sultanate in Delhi.
This was the beginning of cultural assimilation and fusion that grew into Indo-
Islamic culture. Though as Muslims they brought Sharia law with them, they did
not impose it on the indigenous population, who continued to be governed by
local traditions. They brought other new ideas from West Asia: a fierce egalitari-
anism that resisted the caste system and therefore made Islam appealing to
many of the lowest social orders, although they could not entirely resist the hier-
archizing influence of caste, especially in relation to low-caste converts to Islam.
They contributed a strong belief in monotheism, in contrast to India’s polythe-
ism. The newcomers were mostly Sunni, but the mystical form of Islam known
as Sufism better suited Indian sensibilities. They brought new forms of architec-
ture: the dome, the mosque, the tomb. Kings were not god-kings, as in Indic
forms of kingship, but humans who ruled by Allah’s will, as the Prophet
Muhammad himself had been not only the final Prophet but also a warrior chief.
The Mughals replaced the Sultanate in 1526, when a Turk named Babur,
who was descended from the Mongol Genghis Khan on his mother’s side,
defeated the last of the Delhi sultans. The Mughals expanded their control over
India through a century of acquisitions and created a rich and brilliant court in
Delhi where the so-called “Great Mughals” patronized poetry, art, and archi-
tecture for the next two centuries.
No personality radiates from Indian history with the vibrancy of Akbar. He
was a contemporary of Elizabeth I and part of a new cultural strand in India
for whom the actions of kings were worthy themes to write about; therefore,
we know a great deal about him. At the age of 13, in 1556, he inherited the
Mughal Empire founded by his grandfather Babur. By his 20s, he had consoli-
dated and expanded the empire by conquest north and south so that, by his
death in 1605, his domain stretched from Afghanistan to Bengal, from the
Himalayas to the Deccan. India has had conquerors aplenty; it is not Akbar the
warrior who leaps from the pages of history, but a vivid personality whose
actual face is known from dozens of paintings and whose life and times were
recorded in admiring detail by contemporary writers. His biography, the Akbar-
nama, was written in his lifetime by Abu’l Fazl and illustrated by court painters