Emperors of the Sangoku,

, the "Three Kingdoms,"

of India, China, & Japan

India and China are the sources of the greatest civilizations in Eastern and Southern Asia. Their rulers saw themselves as universal monarchs, thereby matching the pretensions of the Roman Emperors in the West. The only drawbacks to their historical priority were that India suffered a setback, when the Indus Valley Civilization collapsed (for disputed reasons), and China got started later than the Middle Eastern civilizations. By the time India recovered, it was a contemporary of Greece, rather than Sumeria, with many parallel cultural developments, like philosophy. And, curiously, China reached a philosophical stage of development in the same era, the "axial age," 800 to 400 BC.

Later, when the West, India, and China all had contact with each other, it was at first India that had the most influence on China, through the introduction of Buddhism. Indian influence on the West, though likely through the skepticism of Pyrrho, and possibly evident in the halos of Christian saints (borrowed from Buddhist iconography), did not extend to anything more substantial -- unless the whole world-denying character of Christianity was due, as Schopenhauer might have thought, to Indian influence. While China then made Buddhism its own, India later endured the advent of Islâm, which introduced deep cultural and then political divisions into the Subcontinent. The only comparable development as distruptive in China was the application of Marxism by the Communist government that came to power in 1949.

While China instituted a liberal economic vision and has outgrown India, it retains the political dictatorship of Communism. India, with a successful history as a democracy, found its growth hampered by socialist expectations and regulations (the stifling "Licence Raj"), with some, but not enough, economic liberalization in the 1990's. Since the 19th century, if not earlier, however, emigrants from China and India have distinguished themselves with their entrepreneurial spirit and economic success, sometime dominating economies where they are then resented, often with violence, by the local majority. This is a valuable lesson, rarely noticed, for those who think that economic power is a function of political power, or that minorities are necessarily poor because of their powerlessness. Successful Chinese or Indians may have been hated, or ignored, but never understood, in the blizzard of leftist ethnic ideology.

The idea that there are "Three Kingdoms," Sangoku, is a Japanese conceit, placing those peripheral islands on equal standing with the great centers of civilization, India and China. Until the 20th century, there would not have been a shadow of justification for that, except perhaps in subjective judgments about the creativity or originality of Japanese culture, which I am sure would be disputed by Koreans and Vietnamese. However, after a process of self-transformation sparked by American intervention, Japan leapt to the status of a Great Power by defeating Russia in 1905. The Empire then spent the next 40 years throwing its weight around, occupying Korea and invading China, ultimately taking on the United States in a disastrous bid for hegemony (1941-1945). Catastrophic defeat slowed Japan down a little, but by the 1980's, the country had vaulted to the highest per capita income in the world, with wealth and economic power that deeply frightened many, even in the United States. Japan remains the only Great Power, in economic terms (as the Japanese military establishment remains low profile), not directly derived from European civilization. Even after a decade of economic stagnation in the 1990's, Japan remained the second largest economy in the world (about 40% the size of the United States, more than 1.7 times the size of Germany, and finally reviving a bit in 2004), although in per capita terms declining from 3rd in the world in 2003 to 11th in 2007 [The Economist Pocket World in Figures, 2007 Edition].

However, by 2010 the economy of China had surpassed Japan in absolute size, although, of course, far behind Japan in per capita terms. China is thus in the position that Russia was in 1914 -- underdeveloped in per capita comparisons but the fourth largest economy in the world (after the United States, Germany, and Britain) because of its relative development and absolute size. The level of success of Japan, despite its relative decline, might still be thought to justify the Japanese view of themselves as unique, or at least special, certainly of the first order of geopolitical importance, giving us some motivation for the inclusion of Japan in a "Sangoku" page.

Philosophy of History

Index Introduction

Emperors of India The Nandas, c.450-c.321 The Mauryas, c.322-184 BC Ceylon, Kings of Lanka & Kandy The Macedonian Kings of Bactria, 256-c.55 BC The Sakas/Parthians, 97 BC-125 AD The Saka Era, The Indian Historical Era, 79 AD The Calendar in India The Kushans, c.20 BC-c.260 AD The Guptas, c.320-550 AD Vardhanas of Thanesar, c.500-647 AD The Deccan, Carnatic, & Maharashtra, 543-1317 AD Classical Indian Women's Dress Kârkoṭas of Kashmir, 711-810 AD Gurjara-Pratîhâras of Ujjain & Dantidurga, 725-1017 AD the Chola Kingdom, c.846-1279 Sulṭâns of Delhi, 1206-1555 Mu'izzî or Shamsî Slave Kings, 1206-1290 Khaljîs, 1290-1320 Tughluqids, 1320-1414 Sayyids, 1414-1451 Lôdîs, 1451-1526 Sûrîs, 1540-1555 Râjâs and Sulṭâns of Mysore, 1100-1949 Vijayanagar, 1336-c.1660 Sikh Gurûs and the Khâlsâ, 1469-1849 The Punjab Moghul Emperors, 1526-1540, 1555-1858 Moghuls and Mughals: South Asia in World History , by Marc Gilbert Diacritics Maratha (Mahratta) Confederacy/Empire, 1674-1848 Nawwâbs of the Carnatic, at Arcot Nawwâbs of Bengal, 1704-1765 Titular Nawwâbs of Bengal, to 1969 British Governors of Bengal and Governors-General of India, 1765-1858 Nawwâbs of Oudh, 1722-1856 Niẓâms of Hyderabad, 1720-1948 British Coinage of India, 1835-1947 British Emperors and Viceroys, 1876-1947 (1858-1950) Index of Princely States & Protectorates of British India Ceylon, British Governors Burma, British Governors Culmen Mundi The Himalayan Realms, Nepal, Bhutan, & Sikkim Prime Ministers of India Prime Ministers of Pakistan Prime Ministers of Ceylon/Sri Lanka

Emperors of China The Chinese Historical Era, 2637 BC Eras ( Nien-hao ) of Chinese History Shang Dynasty, 1523-1028 Chou Dynasty, 1027-256 Monarchical Acclamations Chinese Feudal Hierarchy Spring and Autumn Period Warring States Period States of the Eastern Chou Ch'in Dynasty, 255-207 BC Nan Yüeh, 204-211 BC Former Han Dynasty, 206 BC-25 AD Later Han Dynasty, 25-220 AD The Three Kingdoms, 220-265 Red Cliff , , 2008, Red Cliff II , 2009 Northern and Southern Empires, 266-589 The Six Southern Dynasties, 266-589 The Sixteen Kingdoms of the Five Barbarians, 304-439 The Barbarians The Five Northern Dynasties, 386-581 The Pilgrim Fa-hsien Sui Dynasty, 590-618 T'ang Dynasty, 618-906 The Pilgrim Hsüan-tsang The Pilgrim I-ching Judge Dee (630-700) The Five Dynasties, 907-960 The Ten Kingdoms, 896-979 Tartar Dynasties Liao (Khitan) Dynasty, 907-1125 Hsi-Hsia (Tangut) State, 990-1227 Sung Dynasty, 960-1126 Tartar Dynasties Northern Liao (Khitan) Dynasty, 1122-1123 Western Liao (Qara-Khitaï) Dynasty, 1125-1218 Kin/Chin (Jurchen) Dynasty, 1115-1234 Southern Sung Dynasty, 1127-1279 Yüan (Mongol) Dynasty, 1280-1368 Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644 The Voyages of Admiral He, 1405-1433 Southern Ming Dynasty, 1644-1662 Manchu Ch'ing Dynasty, 1644-1911 Foreign Encroachments The Barbarians Macao Hong Kong Kwangchouwan Tibet Republic of China, First Republic, 1912-1928 Second Republic, 1928-present Communist China, Third Republic, 1949-present Chef Ho and the Names of Chinese Restaurants Categories of Chinese Characters The Dialects of Chinese Examples of Dialect Differences Between Peking, Shanghai and, Canton Pronouncing Mandarin Initials Mandarin Finals and Syllables The Contrast between Classical and Modern Chinese The Solar Terms and the Chinese Calendar The Chinese 60 Year Calendar Cycle The Occurrence of the Solar Terms Groundhog Day and Chinese Astronomy

Emperors, Shoguns, & Regents of Japan The Japanese Historical Era, 660 BC Eras ( Nengô ) of Japanese History The Japanese "Emperor" Monarchical Acclamations The Legendary Period, 660 BC-539 AD The Historical Period, 539-645 The Yamato Period, 645-711 The Nara Period, 711-793 The Heian Period, 793-1186 Fujiwara Chancellors and Imperial Regents, 858-1868 Genealogy of the Fujiwara Dan-no-Ura Shrines and Temples The Kamakura Period, 1186-1336 Hôjô Regents The Nambokuchô Period, 1336-1392 Ashikaga Shôguns The Muromachi Period, 1392-1573 The Azuchi-Momoyama Period, 1573-1603 Himeji Castle The Edo Period, 1603-1868 Edo Castle, Tôkyô Imperial Palace The Modern Period, 1868-present Prime Ministers, 1885-present

The Periphery of China -- Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Tibet, and Mongolia Kings of Korea Kings of Koguryo Kings of Paekche Kings of Silla and Korea Kings and Emperors of Vietnam Kings of Champa Kings and Emperors of Annam and Vietnam Kings of Thailand Kings of Sukhothai, c.1240-1438 Kings of Lan Na, 1259-1774 Chao of Chiang Mai, 1781-1939 Kings of Ayudhya, 1351-1767 King of Thonburi, 1767-1782 Kings of Bangkok, Chakri Dynasty, 1782-present Kings of Laos Kings of Vientiane, 1353-1778 Kings of Luang Prabang, 1707-1975 Kings of Cambodia, 6th century AD-present Kings of Burma Kings of Arakan, 788-1784 Kings of Pagan, c.900-1325 Kings of Pinya, 1298-1364 Kings of Ava, 1364-1555 Kings of Shan, 1287-1757 Kings of Taungu, 1531-1751 Kings of Konbaung/Burma, 1753-1885 British Governors, 1862-1948 Heads of State of Burma, 1948-present World War II in Burma Kings of Tibet and the Dalai Lamas First Kingdom of Tibet Mongol Regents Second Kingdom of Tibet The Dalai Lamas The Panchen Lamas The Himalayan Realms, Nepal, Bhutan, & Sikkim Culmen Mundi Straits Settlements Governors of Singapore Sulṭâns of Johor, 1528-present Singapore, Prime Ministers The Mongol Khâns Index The Conquests of Chingiz Khân, 1227 The Great Khâns and the Yüan Dynasty of China The Grandsons of Chingiz Khân, 1280 The Chaghatayid Khâns The Khâns of the Golden Horde The Khâns of the Blue Horde The Khâns of the White Horde The Khâns of the Golden Horde The Khâns of Kazan The Khâns of Astrakhan The Khâns of the Crimea The Il Khâns The Jalâyirids, 1340-1432 The Qara Qoyunlu, 1351-1469 The Timurids, 1370-1501 The Aq Qoyunlu, 1396-1508 Shibânid Özbegs, 1438-1599 Kazakhs, 1394-1748 Toqay Temürids, 1599-1758 Mangıts of Bukhara, 1747-1920

Philosophy of History Home Page Copyright (c) 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2012, 2018, 2020 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved Emperors of India India has had less of a tradition of political unity than China or Japan. Indeed, most of the names for India ("India," "Hind," "Hindustân") are not even Indian. As Yule & Burnell say in their classic A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases ["Hobson-Jobson," Curzon Press, 1886, 1985, p. 433]: It is not easy, if it be possible, to find a truly native (i.e. Hindu) name for the whole country which we call India; but the conception certainly existed from an early date. Bhâratavarsha is used apparently in the Purânas with something like this conception. Bhâratavarṣa, , meant the "division of the world" (varṣa) of the Bhâratas -- the heroes of the great Mahâbhârata epic. An independent India in 1947 decided to officially become Bhârat, (the short final "a" not being pronounced in Hindi), with the earlier word emerging as Hindi Bhâratvarsh. Probably India did not have a clear local name earlier because, like China, it seemed to be the principal portion of the entire world, and so simply the world itself. As essentially constituting the world, there was another early name for India, Jambudvîpa, , the "Island of the Jambu Tree." In Buddhist cosmology, this was the great Southern Continent in the sea around the cosmic Mt. Sumeru (or Meru), the only one inhabited with humans identical to us. Thus, despite the existence of the other continents, Jambudvîpa constituted our world for all practical purposes. The only question was how much of it was taken up by India. Since the name often seems to be used interchangeably with India, there was early on not much sense that much existed beyond what we still call the "Subcontinent"; and since Jambudvîpa was thought to be triangular in shape, this was consistent with the form of India, which is roughly triangular. Indeed, India was once an island in the Mesozoic Ocean, but it moved north and collided with Asia. The use of Jambudvîpa for India may have declined as the size of Asia became more apparent from the reports of traders, travelers, and conquerors. Eventually, Buddhist cosmology was that Jambudvîpa consisted of "sixteen major countries, five hundred middle-sized countries, and a hundred thousand minor countries, as well as countless island countries scattered in the sea like 'millet grains or dust motes'." Since these numbers are vastly larger than the membership of the United Nations today, Jambudvîpa was ultimately conceived as larger than what we now know of the whole of Planet Earth. In Chinese, we get various ways of referring to India. The modern form, , renders the name phonetically with characters of no particular semantic significance ("print, stamp, or seal" and "a rule, law, measure, degree"). This rendering, of course, is based on a name from Greek, Ἰνδία , or Arabic, (ʾal-Hind; , Hindî, "Indian," in Devanagari), that would have been unknown in China until modern times. The older practice, however, was dedicated characters that might have a larger meaning. Thus, we get or , in which can be a kind of bamboo but otherwise is just used for India. Semantically stronger is , where is primarily used for the Indian god Brahmâ ( ) and then for compounds involving India or Buddhism. Thus we get expressions like , "Sanskrit," , "Sanskrit writing," and , "Sanskrit characters." In Japan, India was sometimes called the Yüehchih, , the "Moon Tribe." This appealed because of the contrast with Japan, the , "Sun Source." The Japanese knew from Chinese histories that the Yüehchih were in the West, and since they were a bit vague about what was in the West, but they knew that India was also, the connection got made. They might not have known that the Yüehchih actually did enter India as the Kushans When a unified state has occurred in Indian history, it has had varying religious, political, and even linguistic bases: e.g. Hindu, Buddhist, Islâmic, and foreign. The rule of the Sulṭâns of Delhi and the Moghul Emperors was at once Islâmic and foreign, since most of them were Turkish or Afghani, and the Moghul dynasty was founded directly by incursion from Afghanistan. The supremely foreign unification of India, of course, was from the British, under whom India achieved its greatest unity, although that was lost upon independence to the religious division between India and Pakistan. The Moghuls and British, of course, called India by its name in their own languages (i.e. "Hindustân," , [with "n" written as a nasalization], or , and "India"). With a unified state in India a rare phenomenon, often under foreign influence, and with only a derivative indigenous name for the modern country as a whole, one might wonder if the term "Emperor," with its implications of unique and universal monarchy, is aptly applied to Indian rulers. However, from an early date there was a notion of such monarchy, which depended only on a conception of the world, particularly as Jambudvîpa, , whether India itself was clearly conceived or not, but with some actual examples, beginning with the Mauryas. The universal monarch was the Cakravartin, , "Who Turns the Wheel of Dominion." He could also be called the "One Umbrella Sovereign," after the parasol carried to mark the location of royalty. The Cakravartin rules, or at least has authority, over all of Jambudvîpa. In Chinese, Cakravartin could be rendered as , "Wheel [i.e. Cakra] King," , "Wheel Turning King," or , "Wheel Turning Sacred King." The first Chinese Emperor who thought of his universal dominion in these Buddhist terms was Yang Chien, founder of the Sui Dynasty. Thus, the prophecy was that Siddhartha Gautama might have become the Buddha or a Cakravartin, a world ruler. The word was ambiguous, since the term can mean simply a sovereign, but its use is paralleled by the Latin word Imperator, which simply means "Commander" and grew, by usage, into a term for a unique and universal monarch. As it happened, many of the monarchs who began to claim ruler over all of India did usually use titles that were translations or importations of foreign words. Thus, the Kushans used titles like Râjatirâjâ, "King of Kings," and Mahârâjâ, "Great King," which appear to be translations from older Middle Eastern titles. While the original "Great King" long retained its uniqueness, thanks to the durability of the Persian monarchy, the title in India experienced a kind of grade inflation, so that eventually there were many, many Mahârâjâs. With Islâm came a whole raft of new titles. One was Sulṭân, which originally was an Arabic title of universal rule itself but had already experienced its own grade inflation. Persian titles, like Pâdeshâh, centuries after the Achaemenids, were now borrowed rather than translated. With the Moghuls, however, the names of the Emperors, more than their titles, reflected their pretensions: like Persian Jahângir, "Seize (gir) the world (jahân)." The most remarkable title borrowed from the West is probably Kaisar, but the Latin title itself arrived with Queen Victoria, IND IMP , Indiae Imperatrix, in 1876. The last Indiae Imperator was King George VI, until 1947. In addition to these complications, Indian history is also less well known and dated than that of China or Japan. Classical Indian literature displays little interest in history proper, which must be reconstructed from coins, monumental inscriptions, and foreign references. As Jan Nattier has said recently [A Few Good Men, The Bodhisattva Path According to the Inquiry of Ugra (Ugraparipṛcchâ), University of Hawai'i Press, 2003]: ...the writing of history in the strict sense does not begin in India until the 12th century, with the composition of Kalhaṇa's Râjataraṅgiṇî. [p.68] Because of this, even the dating of the Mauryas and the Guptas, the best known pre-Islâmic periods, displays small uncertainties. The rulers and dates for them here are from Stanley Wolpert's A New History of India [Oxford University Press, 1989], the Oxford Dynasties of the World by John E. Morby [Oxford University Press, 1989, 2002], and Bruce R. Gordon's Regnal Chronologies. Gordon had the only full lists I'd ever seen for the Mauryas, Kushans, and Guptas until I found the Oxford Dynasties, which has the Mauryas and Guptas but nothing else until the Sulṭanate of Delhi. Besides Wolpert, another concise recent history of India is A History of India by Peter Robb [Palgrave, 2002]. It is becoming annoying to me that scholarly histories like these are almost always but poorly supplemented with maps and lists of rulers, let alone genealogies (where these are known). Both Wolpert and Robb devote much more space to modern India than to the ancient or mediaeval country, and this preference seems to go beyond the paucity of sources for the earlier periods. More satisfying than Wolpert and Robb is another recent history, A History of India by John Keay [Harper Perennial, 2000, 2004]. Keay has an apt comment for the phenomenon just noted in the other histories: In contriving maximum resolution for the present, there is also a danger of losing focus on the past. A history which reserves half its narrative for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may seem more relevant, but it can scarcely do justice to India's extraordinary antiquity. [p.xxi] Keay thus does a better job of dealing with the eras (and their obscure events) that fall between the Mauryas, Guptas, and the Islamic states with their new, foreign traditions of historiography. One drawback of Keay's book is its total innocence of diacritics. Indeed, it is even innocent of any acknowledgement of this, which would leave the reader wondering why a word is given as "Vidisha" in one citation and "Vidisa" in another [cf. p.90]. Keay also exhibits the occasional ignorance of Indianists for the Persian and Arabic backgrounds of some words, where here I explain the difference between Ghazna and Ghaznî and between Moghul and Mughal. We also find Keay carelessly referring to the capital of the Caliph al-Walîd as Baghdad, a city that was not yet founded [p.185]. The "Saka Era," , as the Indian historical era, significantly starts rather late (79 AD) in relation to the antiquity of Indian civilization. Indeed, like Greece (c.1200-800 BC) and Britain (c.400-800 AD), India experienced a "Dark Ages" period, c.1500-800 BC, in which literacy was lost and the civilization vanished from history altogether. Such twilight periods may enhance the vividness of quasi-historical mythology like the Iliad, the Arthurian legends, and the Mahâbhârata. The earliest history of India is covered separately at "The Earliest Civilizations" and "The Spread of Indo-European and Turkish Peoples off the Steppe." The affinities of Indian languages are also covered at "Greek, Sanskrit, and Closely Related Languages." Readers should treat with caution some scholarship and a great deal of the material on the internet about the Indus Valley Civilization and its relationship to Classical Indian civilization, or all of civilization. The claims have progressed to the point now where not only are all of Indian civilization and all of its languages regarded as autochthonous (with Indo-European languages said to originate in India, and derived from Dravidian languages, rather than arriving from elsewhere and unrelated to Dravidian), but the civilization itself is said to extend back to the Pleistocene Epoch (before 10,000 BC), with any ruins or artifacts conveniently covered by rising sea levels. The urge towards inflated nationalistic claims is familiar. Particular claims about India are treated here in several places but especially in "Strange Claims about the Greeks, and about India."

THE NANDAS, c.450?-c.321 Mahapadma Nanda c.450?-c.362? Pandhuka c.362-? Panghupati Bhutapala Rashtrapala Govishanaka Dashasidkhaka Kaivarta Dhana Nanda

(Argames) ?–c.321 BC

THE MAURYAS, ,

c.322-184 BC

Chandragupta;

Greek, Sandrákottos,

c.322-301

Bindusâra 301-269

Ashoka, Aśoka 269-232 Kunala ? 232-225 Dasharatha 232-225 Samprati 225-215 Shâlishuka 215-202 Devadharma/

Devavarman 202-195 Shatamdhanu/

Shatadhanvan 195-187 Br.hadratha 187-185

Below we have a sculpted image of Ashoka from the extraordinarily well preserved Buddhist Stupa complex he built at Sanchi. He is surrounded by court women, whom we clearly see are lacking underwear, with the pudendal cleft (rima pudendi) not only shown, but conspicuous in a way that is contrary to human anatomy. This is a vivid example of how the Indian tradition of dress (and art) initially had no problem displaying female genitals. I know of no other example of this in world history. The Egyptians and the Greeks, for all their comfort with various kinds of undress and nudity, nevertheless drew the line at female genitals. Greek and Rome sculpture typically doesn't even allow space between the legs for female genitals. Otherwise, the hips and breasts of the female figures here are familiar from all later Indian art. There is also the curious feature of this image that Ashoka seems to have an oversized head, and he also seems to be positively supported by two of the women, as though he is weak or stumbling. Is this some evidence of illness or deformity? We have no other information or indication of such things, so it will likely remain mysterious. The sensuality of a court with only all-but-naked female attendants in evidence may not be surprising in the nation of the Kama Sutra, but it may now seem a little incongruous at a sacred Buddhist site.

Ashoka can be rather well dated because he sent missionaries or letters to the contemporary Hellenistic monarchs, Antiochus II Theos (Antiyoka) of the Seleucid Kingdom, Ptolemy II Philadelphus (Turamaya) of Egypt, Antigonus II Gonatas (Antikini) of Macedonia , Magas (Maga) of Cyrene, and Alexander II (Alikasudara) of Eprius, urging them to convert to Buddhism themselves and apparently receiving the impession, one way or another, that they had. Greek history contains no record of these efforts. There is also an attested eclipse in 249 dated with a regal year date. Ashoka's reign is used to date the life of the Buddha, since tradition in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) is that the Buddha died 218 years before Ashoka came to the throne. That would put his death in 487 BC, which is close to the generally used date. The Ceylonese chronology is now often questioned, with alternative reckonings placing the Buddha's death about a century later. John Keay's history inclines in this direction [cf. op. cit. p.62].



Among Ashoka's many works for Buddhism, one has come in for recent prominence. In 1898, an amateur archaeologist, William Claxton Peppe, excavated a stupa at Piprahwa on his land near Birdpore -- itself near one of Ashoka's pillars. This was in Uttar Pradesh, in the ancient lands of the Shakya Clan of the Gautama Buddha. Relics, identified as those of the Buddha on one reliquary, were recovered by Peppe. In 1971 K.M. Srivastava excavated further at the site and discovered more relics, at a deeper layer, which findings were not formally published until 1991. The actual bones and ashes of the Peppe discovery had been donated by the British Government of India to the Buddhist King of Siam; but the inclusions of hundreds of small jewels, including gold leaf flowers and other treasures, had been divided between the Peppe family and the Government, with the family only keeping things that were duplicates. It is worth recalling the Buddhist belief that cremation itself produces jewels as part of the ashes of saints, including the Buddha himself. The speculation now is that the Piprahwa relics consisted of the original 1/8th share of the Buddha's relics that had been given to the Sakyas, and that Piprahwa can be identified with the site of Kapilavastu that had been recorded as where the Shakyas kept the relics. The lower layer of excavation was from the original burial, while the stupa excavated by William Peppe was a later work, with reburial, of Ashoka himself. Nepal believes that Kapilavastu is a site in that country, but nothing like the Piprahwa relics has ever been discovered anywhere else. That the stupa itself was built by Ashoka is a determination that relies on its date, since there are no inscriptions on site, except for the short text on the reliquary -- which itself is of the language and alphabet (the Brahmi) of Ashoka's age.

While the Mauryas are the beginning of historical India, a great deal had already been going on (like the life of the Buddha) that in a Greek or Chinese context we would expect to be within historical time. In traditional Indian terms, such events were already covered by the "Fifth Veda," the historical Epics of the Mahâbhârata and the Râmâyaṇa. One reason for the lack of interest in history in Indian secular literature may have been the feeling that, as only eternity is significant and all other time is cyclical and repetitive, the Epics thus represent everything that can possibly happen in history. There is even a saying, "Everything is in the Mahâbhârata." Our lack of knowledge of individual Indian philosophers from this early period, even though we possess much of an undoubted early date in the Upaniṣads, may also be due to the idea that such texts, as parts of the Vedas, were actually part of eternal revelation and were not originated by their authors.

Indian Philosophy

Buddhist Philosophy



MACEDONIAN KINGS OF BACTRIA

256-c.55 BC

THE SAKAS,

c.130 BC Maues 97-58 BC Vonones Spalyris Spalagademes Spalirises Azes I c.30 BC Azilises Azes II THE PARTHIANS/SUREN Pakores Orthagnes Gudnaphar

(Gondophernes) c.19-45 AD Abdagases Sasas Arsaces Theos Nahapa 119-124 AD

There are no historical documents or preserved narratives from this period, and the rulers are mostly known from coins, which may have dates,

THE SAKA ERA,

THE INDIAN

HISTORICAL ERA 79 AD 2000 AD - 78 = 1922 Annô Sakidae

The Calendar in India

Simultaneously with the descent of Sakas into India, Parthians (Pahlavas) or Suren appear from the west, and some of them become established in India independent (or not) of the Parthian King. The Parthians spoke a "North-Western" Iranian language, though its origin was far south of the Scythians. The sources are sometimes confused about which Indian rulers are Sakas and which are Parthians, since they are never attested as which. Gudnaphar (Greek Gondophernes), who traditionally is supposed to have welcomed the Apostle Thomas to India, seems to have been Parthian. The legend of the mission of Thomas to India is now of renewed interest because of the discovery of the text of the Gospel of Thomas, one of the Gnostic Gospels, in Egypt in 1945.



THE KUSHANS Kujula Kadphises c.20 BC-c.30/64 AD Wima/Welma Taktu c.30-c.80 Welma Kadphises c.80-c.103 Kanishka I c.103-c.127 AD Vasishka I c.127-c.131 Huvishka I c.130-c.162 Vasudeva I c.162-c.200 Kanishka II c.200-c.220 Vasishka II c.220-c.230 Kanishka III c.230-c.240 Vasudeva II c.240-c.260 Vasu late 3rd century Chhu late 3rd century Shaka 3-4th century Kipanada 4th century

Κοσσανοί

The Hsiung-nu, , probably the later Huns, drove the Yuèzhi back into the Tarim Basin (170 BC). These were the "Lesser" Yüeh-chih, . Some continued on into Transoxania, where they become the "Greater" Yüeh-chih, ). They dominated these areas c.100 BC-300 AD. The language of the Lesser Yüeh-chih is attested in Buddhist texts in two dialects of Tocharian (A and B).

The Greater Yüeh-chih, as the Kushans, followed other steppe people down into India. Some small uncertainty perisisted over the identification of the Yüeh-chih with the Kushans and the writers of Tocharian, but the debate over Tocharian seems to have been resolved with a positive identification. The recent discovery of well-preserved, European-looking mummies along the Silk Road serves to affirm the European and so Indo-European bona fides of the still illiterate (from a period long before Tocharian) local culture. Unfortunately, the Tocharian texts do not include historical works, which might have removed uncertainties and added an invaluable framework for understanding the area.



Although the dates are still very uncertain, historical information in India is rather better than for the preceding period. Of special importance is King Kanishka, under whom the Fourth Great Buddhist Council is supposed to have been held, as the Third was under Ashoka. Kanishka is said to have been converted to Buddhism by the playwright Ashvaghosha. The earliest actual images of Buddhas and Boddhisattvas date from his reign. Also of interest are the Kushan royal titles, Maharaja Rajatiraja Devaputra Kushâṇa. Rajatiraja, "King of Kings," is very familiar from Middle Eastern history, since monarchs from the Assyrians to the Parthians had used it. Maharaja, "Great King," is very familiar from later India but at this early date betrays its Middle Eastern inspiration, since it was originally used by the Persian Kings. Devaputra, "Son of God," sounds like the Kushans claiming some sort of Christ-like status, which is always possible, but it may actually just be an Sanskrit version of a title of the Chinese Emperor, "Son of Heaven."

The Roman trading posts in Kushan India bespeak a great deal of trade and contact, about which we get the occasional notice in Greek and Roman writers, but which do not become a source of any extensive knowledge of India or its history recorded by either. Something else overlooked by Classical historians nevertheless turns up in Chinese history. That is, a Roman Embassy made its way by way of India by sea to the China of the Later Han Dynasty. It is recorded that in the year 166 AD (in the time of King Vasudeva I) an embassy arrived in Lo-Yang from a ruler of , "Great Ch'in," named Andun, which looks like a rendering of Antoninus. The year 166 was in the early days of Marcus Aurelius (Antoninus). Since we know, besides the presence of Romans in India, that there were well traveled sea routes to China (see the voyage of Fa-hsien below), this Roman Embassy easily passes the test of credibility. It is a shame that such a project, like the letters written by Ashoka to Hellenistic monarchs, escaped the notice of Greek and Roman historians.

While the imperial maps here until 1701 are based on Stanley Wolpert's A New History of India [Oxford University Press, 1989], the map for the Kushans is based on the The Anchor Atlas of World History, Volume I [1974, Hermann Kinder, Werner Hilgemann, Ernest A. Menze, and Harald and Ruth Bukor, p.42], which now has been reissued in identical form as The Penguin Atlas of World History, Volume I [Penguin Books, 1978, 2003].



The rule of the Guptas was one of the classic ages of Indian history, for whose culture we have a rather full description by the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Fa-hsien (Fǎxiǎn, d.c.422), who was in India between 399 and 414 (see map below), in the time of Chandra Gupta II. This was the last time that the North of India would be united by a culturally indigenous power. The Guptas patronized the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religions equally. Consequently, they now become celebrated, like Ashoka and Akbar, as examplifying a modern liberal ideal of tolerance and enlightenment. This is anachronistic but not inappropriate as long as we realize the limitations of such an identification. The Indian monarchs, however relatively enlightened, were autocrats, and thus comparable less to liberal democracy than to "Enlightened Despots" like Frederick the Great of Prussia. Thus, their magnanimous patronage of religions certainly did not extend to the toleration of political opposition.



THE GUPTAS, ,

c.320-551 AD Gupta 275-300

Ghaṭotkaca 300-320 Chandra Gupta I 320-335

Samudra Gupta 335-370 Rama Gupta ? 370-375

Chandra Gupta II 375-415

Kumâra Gupta I 415-455

Skanda Gupta 455-467 Kumâra Gupta II 467-477

Budha Gupta 477-496 Chandra Gupta III ? 496-500

Vainya Gupta 500-515

Narasimha Gupta 510-530 Kumâra Gupta III 530-540

Vishṇu Gupta 540-551

While the name of Chandragupta, the founder of the Mauryas, is usually given as one word, the "Gupta," ("guarded, protected"), element in names of the Gupta dynasty is usually, but not always, written as a separate word. The Oxford Dynasties writes them together. Classical Sanskrit, of course, like Greek and Latin, ordinarily did not separate words at all.

One of the unique monuments of the Gupta dynasty is the Iron Pillar of Delhi, seen at right. This is a solid piece of wrought iron more than 22 feet tall. Delhi may not have been its original location, but exactly where that would have been and when or why the pillar was brought to Delhi is a matter of conjecture. The pillar is dedicated to Vishnu, but any other Hindu structures around it were demolished by the Sulṭâns of Delhi, who built the nearby Qutub Minar tower and the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque. Dating the pillar is also a matter of some uncertainty, since its inscription merely mentions a King named "Chandra." This is generally taken to mean Chandra Gupta II, reinforced by the evidence of the style and language of the pillar, in comparison to known art of the Guptas, like the coins of Chandra Gupta II. It is also sometimes said that the pillar was erected to commemorate Chandra Gupta by his successor Kumâra Gupta I. The Pillar, however, is such an extraordinary artifact that some people reject the mundane historical explanations and prefer that the object is much, much older, or even the work of extra-terrestrials. The Pillar does testify, however, to the sophistication of Indian iron work, of which there is much other evidence. The steel of the famous Damascus steel swords of the Middle Ages was actually manufactured and exported from India, with techniques that had been used for centuries. The Pillar, although not itself steel, does exhibit the technique that leaves it appearing to be a single piece of iron -- forge welding, where hot iron is hammered and fused together. This is the technique that produced the bars of steel that were exported.

The pilgrimage of Fa-hsien is noteworthy for many things, but one feature in particular evident from the map is that the entire homeward leg of the journey was by sea. This reminds us of the sea routes that had been busy since the Greeks and extended all the way from Egypt to China. We have frustratingly little in the way of historical documents about this business, but when we do get an account, as with Fa-hsien, we realize how routine the communication was (with understandable hazards and misadventures).

Towards the end of the period, the Guptas began to experience inroads from the Huns (Huna), the next steppe people, whose appearance in Europe (it is supposed that these are the same people), of course, pressured German tribes to move into the Roman Empire. By 500, Huns controlled the Punjab and in short order extended their rule down the Ganges. They don't seem to have founded any sort of durable state and eventually suffered defeats. The Huns were the last non-Islamic steppe people to invade India.



Vardhanas of Thanesar Naravardhana? c. 500-? Rajyavardhana I? Pushyabhûti Adityasena Vardhana c.555-580 Prabhakaravardhana c.580-c.605 nephew of Mahâsenagupta Rajyavardhana (II) c.605-606 Harsha Vardhana 606-647

The Later Guptas, of

Magadha, c.550-700 AD Kumâragupta c.550-560 Dâmodaragupta c.560-562 Mahâsenagupta c.562-601 vassals of Kâlachuris,

595/6-c.601 Mâdhavagupta c.601-655 Âdityasena c.655-680 Devagupta c.680-700 overthrown by Yashovarman

of Kanauj, 725-730

Harsha Vardhana, from Thanesar, north of Delhi, was one ruler who for a while united most of the North of India again, and, as luck would have it, we have the account of Hsüan-tsang (Xuanzang, 600-664), another Chinese Buddhist pilgrim, who went to India between 629 and 645, during his time. In his A History of China [Basic Books, 2009], John Keay says, "Indeed, most of what is known of Harsha and his empire, and of India in the seventh century, derives from Xuanzang's Record of the Western Regions" [p.241]. There is a remarkable sequel to this:



In the mid-nineteenth century, armed with a French translation of Xuanzang's itinerary (the first to appear in any European language), Alexander Cunningham, a Scots general in British India, devoted his retirement to rediscovering the long-forgotten sites associated with the Buddha's life and early Buddhism; from this exercise there grew the Archaeological Survey of India, whose responsibilities now probably exceed those of any other heritage body and of which Cunningham was both founder and director. [ibid., p.241]

Thus, the ancient Chinese pilgrim allows the modern British general to initiate the modern archaeology of Indian Buddhism, and then that of all India.

Hsüan-tsang's account follows a story we have from the other direction, that of a Greek sailor, Cosmas Indicopleustes, Κοσμᾶς ὁ Ἰνδικοπλεύστης , who visited India, Ceylon, and even Axumite Ethiopia some time before 550 AD, during the reign of the Roman Emperor Justinian. Unfortunately, Cosmas was a bit of a crackpot who seemed just as concerned with proving, despite widely accepted evidence (recounted in detail by Aristotle), that the Earth was flat rather than spherical. Thus, we can imagine that Cosmas, whose book was the Christian Topography, was hostile to a round earth for much the same (religious) reasons that contemporary anti-Darwinians are hostile to Evolution.

Harsha enjoyed a long reign but, when he attempted to expand south into the Deccan, he was defeated by Pulakeshin II of Vâtâpi (or Badami). Subsequently, we get dynasties whose power occasionally spans the country, but none are able to secure hegemony for long.



Indian Buddhism, although patronized by Harsha, already seemed to be in decline to Hsüan-tsang, and some important Buddhist sites were already neglected or abandoned. John Keay cites the Pala Dynasty of Bengal (8th-9th centuries AD) as the "last major Indian dynasty to espouse Buddhism" [India, op.cit. pp.192-193]. Indeed, I think the contemporary development of Tantrism was obscuring the differences between Hinduism and Buddhism -- Keay agrees with this [p.194, in a comment marred by the rationalism he attributes to the pure original Buddhism of the Buddha]. It was also during this period that we begin to get identifiable individual Indian philosophers, like Shankara (c.780-820), from whom we have a classic formulation of the doctrine of the Vedanta School. With the period of the Classical Empires over, it is striking that only now do individuals appear in the light of history in Indian philosophy. There is speculation that Shankara already represents a reaction to the arrival of Islâm on the borders of India.



the Deccan,

the Carnatic, & Maharashtra Châlukyas of Vâtâpi Pulakeshin I c.543-566 Kîrtivarman I c.567-597 Mangalesha c.597-609 Pulakeshin II c.609-642 overthrows Kâlachuris, c.620; killed in battle by Narasimha Varman I of Pallava, 642; interregnum, 642-655; Arab attacks, 644 Vikramâditya I 654/5-681 Arab attacks, 677 Vinayâditya c.680-696 defeats Later Gupta Devagupta, 695 Vijayâditya c.696-733/4 Vikramâditya II c.733-744/5 defeat and explusion of Arabs from India, 737 Kirtivarman II 744/5-753 Râṣṭrakûṭas

of Ellora & Malkhed Dantidurga c.735-744 Krishna I c.755-772 Dhruva Dhârâvarsha c.780-793 defeats Gangetic powers but abandons North Govinda III c.793-814 occupies North again, height of Râṣṭrakûṭa power Amoghavarsha c.814-880 Krishna II c.878-914 Indra III c.914-928 Amoghavarsha II c.928-929 Govinda IV c.930-935 Amoghavarsha III c.936-939 Krishna III c.939-967 Khoṭṭiga c.967-972 Karkka II (Amoghhavarsha IV) c.972-973 Châlukyas

of Kalyâṇî Taila II Ahavamalla 973-997 Satyasraya Irivabedanga 997-1008 invasions of Mahmud of Ghaza, 1001-1024 Vikramaditya I 1008-1014 Ayyana 1014-1015 Jayasimha 1015-1042 Somesvara I 1042-1068 Somesvara II 1068-1076 Vikramaditya II 1076-1127 Somesvara III 1127-1138 Jagadekamalla 1138-1151 Tailapa 1151-1156 Kâlachuris Bijjala 1156-1168 Somesvara 1168-1177 Sankama 1177-1180 Ahavamalla 1180-1183 Singhana 1183-1184 Châlukyas Somesvara IV 1184-1200 Yâdavas Singhana 1200-1247 Krishna 1247-1261 Mahadeva 1261-1271 Amana 1271 Ramachandra 1271-1311 Sankaradeva 1311-1313 Harapaladeva 1313-1317 To Delhi, 1317-1336;

then Vijayanagar, 1336

Initial invasions by the Arab Omayyad Caliphs, starting in 644, were repulsed by 737, after episodes of the Arabs slaughtering local populations or deporting them as slaves. Curiously, these Muslims were at first called "Greeks," i.e. Yavana, . This is rather like the way the Chinese called the Portuguese "Hui," , i.e. Muslims, when they first arrived in China.

The following period, then, is the calm before the full force of Islâm burst on the country with the invasions of Maḥmûd of Ghazna, from 1001 to 1024. While Shankara's views were later criticized as too influenced by Buddhism, they are more faithful to the Upanishads than the theism of the critics, who themselves seem increasingly influenced by the monotheism of Islâm.

The period of the Arab invasions of India (644-737) corresponded to the residence of an important Chinese pilgrim in India, I-ching (635-713), from 673 to 687. While previously pilgrims, and Indian missionaries, had traversed Central Asia for at least one leg of their journey, I-ching went entirely by sea. We also might notice that his travels in India did not extend to the Western part of the country, as had those of previous pilgrims. We therefore might harbor the suspicion that he avoided an area where warfare that attended the invasions was raging. This is at least a portent of the later Islamic Conquest, which will help eliminate Buddhism from India. Also, I-ching spends several years at a Buddhist center in Indonesia, whose Buddhism, still flourishing, will also be eliminated by the advent of Islâm there.

Later there appears to be a decisive influence from Islâm on Indian dress. While in Classical India women are typically shown bare breasted, as at left, the rigors of the Middle Eastern nudity taboo came into full force in modern India, at least for women. I am not aware just when this transition occurs. John Keay cites several references from the 13th to the 15th century on the nudity of the Indians, including a Russian traveler, Athanasius Nikitin, who around 1470 described Indians going about all but naked, with "their breasts bare" [op.cit. p.277]. By the 19th century Krishna's lover Radha is shown in a full shoulder to floor woven dress or sari. Someone could easily chronicle the transition by cataloguing such sculpture and portraiture. While it is not difficult to find bare breasts in Classical Indian art, after a while one begins to notice something rather more shocking. Female figures appear wearing little more than a belt around their hips, with the labia majora and pudendal cleft (rima pudendi) plainly visible. While this is now mainly preserved in the figures of goddesses and spirits, such as the yakshini spirit at right, who may represent hightened sexuality, it also appears among the women of the Court of Ashoka, and so for a while seems to have been acceptable in ordinary costume. The name of the semi-divine Sîtâ, the wife of the Avatar Râma, of the epic Râmayâna, , actually has the basic meaning "furrow." This is explained by the story of her miraculous birth from the furrow of a plowed field, but it is not hard to see it as a reference to the actual rima pudendi. Metaphors of sexual intercourse as plowing, and of female genitals as furrows, are common in all agricultural societies. This minimal dress varies with other representations where the narrow band of a loincloth (a dhoti) may extend down to the feet, front and back, both on goddesses and others, without our having any clue on the reason for this variation. When the vulva is shown, there does not seem to be any effort to portray pubic hair, which actually would be comparable to the Egyptian practice, which survives even in the modern Middle East, of shaving pubic hair. This exposure of female genitals seems to me very unusual in world history. Even in cultures that today tolerate little or no dress, the female genitals usually seem to be the first thing covered, or the last thing uncovered, sometimes with folk beliefs that unwary males looking directly at the vulva might be blinded. Egyptian hieroglyphics, which when dealing with sexual organs at first seem quite explicit, nevertheless appear to shy away from representing the structures of the vulva. In Western art, female nudes became common from the Mediaeval period on, and Modern art contains female nudes in abundance, often as Neo-Classical references to Greek and Roman nudes. Nowever, the rima pudendi is all but never visible in the whole expanse of this art. Nor is there ever the sort of "thigh gap" at the top of the legs that would render the labia and rima more conspicuous. There is something about all these structures that has made Western artists, from the Greeks on, very nervous.

We know that the Romans, at least, were aware of the explicitness of Indian art because a statue of the goddess Lakshmi was found at Pompeii, in what is actually called "the House of the Indian Statuette," between 1930 and 1935, and held at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale de Napoli. The description of the statue is that it is "naked," but we know from our other examples that it is not, as this was reckoned in India. This Lakshmi is wearing as much as the women of Ashoka's Court, even if that mostly consists of jewelry. As far as I know, this is a unique object. Portraying the rima pudendi obviously did not catch on in Greek or Roman art, and if there were other such imports from India around, they must have been destroyed in the Christian moralization of artworks. But we also might note in this example of sculpture that the placing of the vulva is more exaggerated and unnatural than in the other examples here: the rima pudendi is really not going to be evident, from the front, in natural anatomy; and all Indian art, but especially this statue, takes increasing liberties to make it explicit. Japanese manga figures, amid their various bodily exaggerations, do not misplace the vulva like this, even as it is generally present. Equally curious is the treatment of Indian dress in history and scholarship on India. For instance, the Indian Art volume of the "Oxford History of Art" [Partha Mitter, 2001] has only a single large image of a Classical figure with both breasts and vulva bare [p.18], but the breasts are actually broken off and the genital area is photographed in shadow, with the pudendal cleft invisible. Since the caption speaks of the "'full-moon' face" of the figure, where the head is simply missing from the sculpture shown, I am left with the impression that the example was not chosen with particular care that it illustrate the attributes, like "rounded breasts," that are described. And it is as close as we get in the whole book to the level of exposure that is evident in so much of the early art. Otherwise, although we do see occasional comment about the bare torsos of Classical Indian dress, I have never seen actual discussion of the bare female pudenda. This all would seem to make people uneasy. A clue about an intermediate stage in the evolution of female dress in India may be in the Mahâbhârata. When Duḥshâsana tries to humiliate Draupadî by pulling off her clothes, we might wonder exactly what is going to be exposed. In terms of the modern sârî, it will not be her breasts; for these are covered by a separate garment, the bodice or choli, which may not antedate the 10th century AD. Duḥshâsana is clearly pulling off a long piece of cloth, the sârî proper, which is miraculously extended to protect Draupadî's modesty. This is what would cover her genitals and buttocks, which in modern India, or even China and Europe, would be considered something to be concealed. If the Mahâbhârata was completed by about 300 AD, then we might imagine that the custom of female genital exposure must have largely disappeared by the time of the Guptas. However, we get perhaps a contrary, but ambiguous, indication from the sculpture at left, from the Rani ki Vav step well at Patan in Gujarat. This dates from the 11th century. The goddesses in the well wear the ancient belt, and all that seems to cover the pudenda is a long tassle, one of several around the belt. In the figure shown, although not on the others, the belt seems merely rope-like, and it has come down, perhaps pulled by the monkey. We get the faintest hint of the rima pudendi here; and one wonders, at this late date, if there is a sense of naughty humor in this, like the dog pulling down the girl's bathing suit in the old Coppertone tanning lotion ads. If so, it may mean that the old level of exposure is no longer quite acceptable -- but still not positively banned. This is the era, indeed, when Islâm is beginning to make its inroads. The monkey still represents a bit more erotic fun than Islâm will tolerate. My source for the list of the rulers from the fall of the Guptas (551) to the dominance of the Sulṭanate of Delhi (1211), beginning with the line of the Châlukyas, was originally from Bruce R. Gordon's Regnal Chronologies. I took details of the period from Stanley Wolpert's A New History of India [Oxford, 2000, pp.95-103]. There was clearly uncertainty about the dates, since Wolpert has Krishna I Râṣṭrakûṭa, patron of the remarkable Kailasanatha temple to Shiva, reigning 756-775, while Gordon has 768-783. This is, of course, not too surprising, given the problems with Indian historiography. Later, however, I found a much more thorough treatment of the period in Ronald M. Davidson's Indian Esoteric Buddhism, A Social History of the Tantric Movement [Columbia University Press, 2002], which has an extensive summary of the whole period [pp.25-62], with maps and lists of many of the rulers. Here we find Krishna I with the dates c.755-772, in much closer agreement with Wolpert, but still, of course, residual uncertainties. John Keay's A History of India [Harper Perennial, 2000, 2004] covers the period with similar thoroughness.



Kârkoṭas

of Kashmir Candrâpîḍa c.711-720 asks for alliance

with China, 713 Târâpîḍa c.720-725 Lalitâditya

Muktâpîḍa c.725-756 overthrows Yashovarman of Kanauj, 733; secures Ganges Valley, 747; dies in Tarim Basin Kuvalayâpîḍa ? Vajrâditya ? Prthivyâpîḍa ? Samgrâmâpîḍa ? Jayâpîḍa

Vinayâdirya c.779-810

The Gurjara-Pratîhâras

of Ujjain & Dantidurga Nâgabhaṭa I c.725-760 helps defeat Arabs, 725 Devarâja c.750-? Vatsarâja ?-c.790 Nâgabhaṭa II c.790-833 occupies Kanauj and middle Ganges, 815 Râmabhadra c.833-836 Mihira Bhoja c.836-885 Mahendrapâla I c.890-910 Mahîpâla c.910-? Bhoja II ?-914 Vinâyakapâla I c.930-945 Mahendrapâla II c.945-950 Vinâyakapâla II c.950-959 Vijayapâla c.960-1018 invasions of Mahmud of Ghaza, 1001-1024 Râjyapâla c.1018-1019 Trilocanapâla c.1019-1017 Mahendrapâla III ?

More importantly, the history of India in this period is not the national history of linguistic communities. It is dynastic history, and dynasties like the Châlukya were much more interested in territory, anywhere, than in national origins, homelands, or languages. Thus, Châlukyas ruled elsewhere, without much regard for the local language, with branches of the dynasty in what is now Andhra Pradesh (Telugu speakers) and Gujarat (Gujarati). When the Vâtâpi Châlukyas were overthrown by their vassals, the Râṣṭrakûṭas of Ellora, this was a dynasty definitely seated in a Marathi speaking area of Maharashtra, though they subsequently moved their capital to Malkhed, virtually at the border between Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. The Râṣṭrakûṭas were in time displaced by a branch of the Châlukyas again, who in turn fell to the Kâlachuris, a dynasty from a region in modern Madhya Pradesh that now speaks Hindi. Thus, the language of their domain was not nearly as important to all these rulers as the possession of dominion.

As the Châlukyas moved, they could also take a geographical name with them. The British rendering of "Karnataka" was as the "Carnatic" (much like the word in Hindi, where a short final "a" would not be pronounced). The name "Carnatic" migrated south and south-east, with the movements of the Châlukya dynasts. On the Bay of Bengal, the Eastern Châlukyas became established, and we also find the name "Carnatic" applied there. That eastern "Carnatic" then also came to be associated with the large Vijayanagara realm, which straddled the modern states of Karnataka, Tamil Nâdu (the language is Tamil), and Andhra Pradesh. Thus, on old maps of India, the name "Carnatic" can sometimes be found adjacent to the west coast, and on others along the south-eastern coast. The name disappeared altogether for a while between Maharashtra to the north and the later state of Mysore to the south. The modern Indian state of Karantaka was originally itself called "Mysore," but this was changed in 1973 to "Karnâtaka" to reflect its linguistic character.

Pulakeshin II declared himself "Lord of the Eastern and Western Waters." Although the Châlukyas never united the north or dominated the country like the Guptas or Harsha, they would appear there, and I have focused on them and their successors as the best sequence to span the period down to the Sulṭâns of Delhi. There were many other states of similar size and power during this era, several often called "Empires." Now I include lists for Kashmir and for the Gurjara-Pratîhâras, whose realm centered on Ujjain in the western part of the modern Madhya Pradesh. All of these states contended at one time or another for the Ganges Valley and thus were candidates for achieving a North Indian hegemony. Their successes proved only temporary, often because of rebellions in their rear.



The Châlukya dynasty suffered a severe reverse when Pulakeshin II was killed in battle by Narasimha Varman I of Pallava, and Vâtâpi occupied. After reestablishing themselves, they most importantly planted cadet lines in the East and in Gujarat, which would eventually provide for the restoration of the dynasty.

Chola Kingdom Vijayalaya c. 846-c. 871 Asitya I c. 871-907 Parantaka 907-947 Rajaditya I 947-949 Gandaraditya 949-956 Arinjaya 956 Parantaka II 956 Aditya II 956-969 Madhurantaka Uttama 969-985 Rajaraja I Deva the Great 985-1012 Conquest of Ceylon, 993 Rajendra I Choladeva 1012-1044 Rajadhiraja I 1044-1052 Rajendra II Deva 1052-1060 Ramamahendra 1060-1063 Virarajendra 1063-1067 Adhirajendra 1067-1070 Rajendra III 1070-1122 Diplomatic mission to China, 1077 Vikrama Chola 1122-1135 Kulottunga II Chola 1135-1150 Rajraja II 1150-1173 Rajadhiraja II 1173-1179 Kulottunga III 1179-1218 Rajaraja III 1218-1246 Rajendra IV 1246-1279 Overthrown by Delhi, 1279

One of the "Empires" of the period was the Kingdom of Chola. As it happens, this is a realm in origin and history with a decidedly linguistic basis, in the Tamil language of modern Tamil Nâdu. The Chola Kings cultivated Tamil literature and are remembered as heroic patrons of Tamil power, learning, and religion. Chola is in the competition as an "Empire" because of it spread north, briefly all the way to the mouths of the Ganges, and, most strikingly, by its projection beyond the sea, initiated by King Rajaraja I Deva, whose name has the decidedly Imperial ring of "King of Kings, god." With grave portent for future history, the first such projection of Chola power was into Ceylon. Tamils had settled in Ceylon and briefly ruled there already, and even the Chola occupation was relatively short lived, but it all contributed to a durable Tamil ethnic presence that, in the modern day, exploded into a vicious and protracted civil war, whose appalling course and sobering lessons are examined elsewhere.

Of dramatic course and great portent in its own way is the other projection of Chola power, which was across the sea of the Bay of Bengal, through isolated land such as the Andaman Islands, all the way to Sumatra, Malaya, and the trade route of the Straits between those Indonesian islands. It is hard to know how much of the area was actually occupied and ruled. Some maps (optimisticly or nationalisticly) show a Chola domain over entire islands like Sumatra and over the entire peninsula of Malaya. Other maps (more realistically) show a Chola presence along the coastlines. In whichever form, this is the first example we know of an incursion that will be significantly mirrored in later history. Four hundred years after the Chola presence, the Chinese would arrive in the Straits from the opposite direction and initiate what was probably much the same kind of process, finally arriving themselves at Ceylon and the coast of Tamil Nâdu. As we will see below, this did not last long. Not long after the Chinese left, however, the Portuguese arrived from across the Indian Ocean, themselves occupied Ceylon and areas on the mainland of India, and then followed in the wake of the Chola voyagers into Indonesia. This produces occupations of considerable extent and duration, though mostly consumated by the Dutch and the British who replaced the Portuguese. The Chola "Empire" thus pioneers the colonial history of Indonesia -- though the hiatus between the Chola presence and the arrival of the Chinese will see a heavy Islamicization, by influence of trade alone, of the area.

Chola was finally broken up by the Sulṭanate of Delhi, which, however, was unable to retain a dominant position in the south. Thus, the small kingdom of Madura became the successor state at the southern tip of India, while the larger kingdom of Vijayanagar came to dominate much of the South, including the old metropolis Chola, Gangaikondacolapuram.



The map shows the aggressive powers of the 11th century in India. In the South, Chola looks on its way to making the Bay of Bengal into a Cholan lake, but apparently it never does have much success on the coast of Burma, where Pagan has grown into a powerful kingdom with its own brilliant civilization. The darker green in the image shows the conquests of Rajendra I, the son of Rajaraja I.

Otherwise, what we see is the domain of the conqueror Maḥmûd of Ghazna. He began raiding into India in the year 1001 (enough to warm the heart of any ordinalist). Eventually he established a presence in the Punjab, but he also continued raiding deeper into India, usually with the aim of plunder, to be sure, but practiced with particular relish in the sacking of Hindu and Jain temples. This allowed for the particuarly Islamic diversion of smashing idols -- where in most Islamic conquests, in Christian and Persian lands, there had actually been few to smash. This set a poor precedent in the area, since in recent years the savage vandals of the Tâlibân regime in Afghanistan determined to smash all the Buddhist art in the Kabul Museum and that present around the country on cliff-face sculpture, including two great cliff carved Buddhas in Bamian province, 175 and 120 feet tall. Subsequently, Jihadist forces have destroyed monuments in Palmyra, in Syria, and even Muslim tombs and libraries in Mali. These atrocities, along with human carnage, certainly represent the worst of Islamic Fascism. Given the fury of his own attacks, Maḥmud's treatment of the Hindu population was actually more conciliatory than one might expect, and it laid the groundwork, once the smashing was finished, for durable Islamic regimes in India.



A curious linguistic issue arises when we deal with Maḥmud. The name of the city of Ghazna, , is written in the Arabic alphabet with the letter "y" at the end. Ordinarily, this would indicate the long vowel "î"; but sometimes in Arabic, and originally in this case, the "y" is pronounced as the vowel "a." This is called alif maqṣura and occurs in some very common words in Arabic. Thus, sources that one might expect to be intimate with Arabic, like The New Islamic Dynasties,

Râjâs of Mysore Ballala I 1100-1110 Vishnuvardhana 1110-1152 Narasimha I 1152-1173 Ballala II 1173-1220 Narasimha II 1220-1238 Somesvara 1233-1267 Narasimha III 1254-1292 Ballala III 1291-1342 Vijayanagara rule after 1336 Virupaksha Ballala IV 1342-1346 Vacant, 1346-1399 Wadiyar, Wodeyar Dynasty Yadu Raya 1399-1423 Hiriya Bettada Chamaraja I 1423-1459 Timmaraja I 1459-1478 Hiriya Chamaraja II 1478-1513 Hiriya Bettada Chamaraja III 1513-1553 Timmaraja II 1553-1572 Vijayanagara broken up by Moghuls, 1565 Bola Chamaraja IV 1572-1576 Bettada Devaraja 1576-1578 Raja Wadiyar 1578-1617 Chamaraja V 1617-1637 Immadi Raja 1637-1638 effective independence, 1637 Kanthirava Narasaraja I 1638-1659 Kempa Devaraja 1659-1673 Chikkadevaraja 1673-1704 Kanthirava Narasaraja II 1704-1714 Krishnaraja I 1714-1732 Chamaraja VI 1732-1734 Krishnaraja II 1734-1766 Muslim Ḥaydarids Ḥaydar 'Alî Khân Bahâdur 1762-1782 First Anglo-Mysore War, 1766-1769; Second Anglo-Mysore War, 1780-1784 Wodeyar figureheads for Ḥaydarids Nanjaraja 1766-1770 Bettada Chamaraja VII 1770-1776 Khasa Chamaraja VIII 1776-1796 Tîpû Sulṭân 1782-1799 Third Anglo-Mysore War, 1789-1792; Fourth Anglo-Mysore War, 1798-1799 restoration of the Wodeyars Krishnaraja III 1799-1831,

d.1868 British rule, 1831-1881 Chamaraja IX regency,

1868-1881 1881-1894 Krishnaraja IV 1894-1940 Jayachama- rajendra Bahadur 1940-1949 Annexation to India, 1947

SULṬÂNS OF DELHI (DILHÎ) Muʿizzî or Shamsî Slave Kings ʾAybak Quṭb ad-Dîn Commander in India for the Ghûrids, 1192-1206 Malik in Lahore,

1206-1210 destroys Buddhist library and monastery at Nalanda, 1193/4 ʾÂrâm Shâh 1210-1211 ʾIltutmish Shams ad-Dîn Sulṭân in Delhi,

1211-1236 Fîrûz Shâh I 1236 Raḍiyya Begum Sulṭâna,

1236-1240 Bahrâm Shâh 1240-1242 Mas'ûd Shâh 1242-1246 Maḥmud Shâh I 1246-1266 Balban ʾUlugh Khân viceroy

since 1246 1266-1287 Kay Qubâdh 1287-1290 Kayûmarth 1290 Khaljîs Fîrûz Shâh ʾII Khaljî 1290-1296 ʾIbrâhîm Shâh I

Qadır Khân 1296 Muḥammad Shâh I

ʿAlî Garshâsp 1296-1316 ʿUmar Shâh 1316 Mubârak Shâh 1316-1320 Khusraw Khân Barwârî 1320 Tughluqids Tughluq Shâh I 1320-1325 Muḥammad Shâh II 1325-1351 Fîrûz Shâh III 1351-1388 Tughluq Shâh II 1388-1389 ʾAbû Bakr Shâh 1389-1391 Muḥammad Shâh III 1389-1394 Sikandar Shâh I 1394 Maḥmûd Shâh II 1394-1395,

1401-1412 Nuṣrat Shâh 1395-1399 Tamerlane sacks Delhi, 1398 Dawlat Khân Lôdî 1412-1414 Sayyids Khiḍr Khân 1414-1421 Mubârak Shâh II 1421-1434 Muḥammad Shâh IV 1434-1443 ʿÂlam Shâh 1443-1451 Lôdîs Bahlûl 1451-1489 Sikandar II

Niẓâm Khân 1489-1517 ʾIbrâhîm II 1517-1526 Moghul Rule, 1526-1540 Sûrîs Shîr Shâh Sûr 1540-1545 ʾIslâm Shâh Sûr 1545-1554 Muḥammad V Mubâriz Khân 1554 ʾIbrâhîm III Khân 1554-1555 ʾAḥmad Khân

Sikandar Shâh III 1555

While, Islâm came to India in great measure in the person of Maḥmûd of Ghazna, this progressed to permanent occupation under his successors, the Ghûrids. Their viceroys in India, originally from slave troops like the Mamlûks in Egypt, drifted into independence at the beginning of the 13th century. These "Slave Kings" thus founded the Sulṭânate of Delhi. This began an Islâmic domination of India, especially the North of India and the Ganges Valley, that lasted until the advent of the British.

The consequences of the Islâmic conquest of India can hardly be underestimated. Up to a quarter of all Indians ended up converting to Islâm. Buddhism disappeared. Some of the greatest monuments of Indian architecture, like the Taj Mahal, really reflect Persian and Central Asian civilization rather than Indian. Indian Moslems became accustomed, as was their right under Islâmic Law, to be ruled by a Moslem power. In practical terms, that meant that they did not want to be ruled by Hindus, when and if India should become independent. Today, the separation of Pakistan and Bangladesh from the Republic of India, with ongoing strife between them, and the occasional riot between Hindus and Moslems in India itself, are all the result of this.

Mysore (Mahisur, Maysûr, Mahishûru, Mysuru) began as a dependancy of the rulers of the Deccan to the North. In 1100, in the days of the Châlukyas of Kalyâṇî, Mysore became independent under the dynasty that had been in place since the 6th or 7th century. However, after the passage of the Sulṭâns of Delhi, Mysore then became a dependency of the Vijayanagara kingdom that was established in 1336. The Wodeyar Dynasty was a cadet line of Vijayanagara. The subordination of Mysore was broken up after Vijayanagara was defeated by the Moghuls in 1565. Moghul rule, such as it was, seems to have ebbed and flowed in presence and affectiveness. The domination by Aurangzeb was certainly a brief one, after which Mysore was independent.

Mysore lost its traditional Hindu rule and became a center of conflict when its own general, Ḥaydar Alî, who had defeated the Marathans, seized power in his own right. The Râjâs were retained as figureheads until deposed in 1796 by Ḥaydar's son, the celebrated Tîpû. The rule of these Muslim warriors quickly led to repeated conflict with the British. Ḥaydar Alî became an active ally of the French in the War of American Independence, 1778-1783 (the Second Anglo-Mysore War, 1780-1784), but his invasion of Madras, with some French troops, was defeated. However, after his death (1782), Tîpû crushed a British force of 2000, killing 500 and taking the rest prisoner. This made him the "Tiger of Mysore." Tîpû amused himself with a six-foot long mechanical figure of a tiger gnawing at the throat of an Englishman and snarling at the turn of a crank.

Continuing with the enemies of his enemy, Tîpû entered into relations with Revolutionary France, whose rationalists, deists, and atheists curiously found a kindred spirit in a fanatical and tyrannical Muslim -- a dynamic we may see today in the affinity of the Left for Islamic Fascism. When Napoleon landed in Egypt in 1798, it looked like help might be on the way; but there really wasn't much that the French Republic could do for "Citizen Tipu." The British whittled away at Tîpû's realm until he was killed in 1799. The Wodeyar Râjâs were restored, doubtless with some relief to Hindus who had undergone forced conversion and circumcision by Tîpû.

The first map below is based on Stanley Wolpert [op.cit.]; but the following map, and those of Harsha and of Chola above, are based on maps in The Harper Atlas of World History [Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Editor, Jacques Bertin, Cartographer, Harper & Row, New York, 1986, p.117]. In assembly information for the maps on this page, this is the only source I have that shows Chola or the Sulṭânate at its high water mark.





On the map of India in 1236, the Sulṭânate of Delhi has completed its conquest of the North of India, all the way down the Ganges to the Bay of Bengal. Although the fortunes of the state will vary, this area will generally be preserved until the coming of the Moghuls.



On the map for 1335, we see the Sulṭânate of Delhi astride the whole Sub-Continent. This is the largest Indian state in a long time, if not the largest ever. But it will not last long.

The following map below, for 1350, indicates the kingdoms in the South that are the result of the earlier states (like Maharashtra and Chola) being broken up by Delhi, which, then unable to remain dominant in the area, was driven out.

We also see the routes travelled by Zheng He, the Chinese admiral who led seven great voyages of exploration, trade, and military intervention during the early days of the Ming Dynasty, from 1405 to 1433. The military intervention became less a factor the further West we get. It was intense in Indonesia, where considerable battles were fought and kings were made -- or sent back to China for execution. A Chinese base was established and fortified at Malacca. In Ceylon, we still get some intervention, with King Vira Alakeshvara of Raigama (1397-1411) captured and sent back to China. But the Emperor apologized for this, and returned the King to Ceylon (though not, apparently, to his throne). Further West, trade and embassies seem to have been the rule. All this stopped abruptly in 1433, as China withdrew from foreign contact. When the Portuguese arrived in 1498, the Chinese were long gone.



Vijayanagar SANGAMA Harihara I 1336-1356 Bukka I 1356-1377 Harihara II 1377-1404 Virupaksha I 1404-1405 Bukka II 1405-1406 Devaraya I 1406-1422 Rama-

chandra 1422-1430 Vira Vijaya I

Bukka Raya 1422-1424 Devaraya II 1424-1446 Vijaya II 1446-1447 Mallikarjuna 1446-1465 Virupaksha II 1465-1485 Praudha Raya 1485 SALUVA Narasimha-

devaraya 1485-1490 Thimma Bhupala 1490-1491 Immadi Narasimha 1491-1505 TULUVA Vira Narasimha 1505-1509 Krishna-

devaraya 1509-1529/30 Achyota-

devaraya 1529/30-1542 Venkata 1542 Sadashi-

varaya 1542-1565 disrupted by Moghuls, 1565 ARAVIDU Tirumala Devaraya 1565-1572 Sriranga I Devaraya 1572-1586 Venkatapati I Devaraya 1586-1614 Sriranga II Raya 1614 vacant Rama-

devaraya 1617-1632 Venkatapati Raya 1632-1642 Sriranga III Raya 1642-1646 Venkatapati II Raya 1646-c.1660

The kingdom of Vijayanagar, based in the area of Kannada speakers again (stretching East in Telugu speaking country), originates in revolt against the Sulṭânate of Delhi, which only briefly dominated the South, but nevertheless broke up the older powers in the area. Vijayanagar reestablishes local independence. It will continue dominant until the arrival of the Moghuls. We do not, however, see a simple conquest any cleaner than what Delhi had managed to accomplish in the same area. In 1565, Akbar defeated and disrupted the power of the state, but the result was not Moghul occupation. Instead, a cadet line of Vijayanagar at Mysore begins to overshadow its parent state, as recounted above and shown on the maps below. By the time Aurangzeb returned to briefly conquer the area, Vijayanagar had faded away. In 1646 the capital itself was seized by the Sulṭâns of Bijapur and Golkonda. The last king, Venkatapati II, was thus himself an exile in some small fragment of the former kingdom.



Sikhism, from Pâli sikkha (Sanskrit ), "follower, pupil, disciple," was a new religion, founded in the days of the Sulṭânate of Delhi, that attempted to reconcile and replace Hinduism and ʾIslâm. Although there are some 18 million Sikhs today, this never made much of a dent in the numbers of Hindus or Moslems, and long earned the Sikhs little but hostility from both.

Sikh Gurûs 1 Nânak 1469-1539 2 Aṅgad 1539-1552 3 Amar Dâs 1552-1574 4 Râm Dâs Soḍhi 1574-1581 5 Arjun Mal 1581-1606 6 Hargobind 1606-1644 7 Har Râi 1644-1661 8 Hari Krishen 1661-1664 9 Tegh Bahâdur 1664-1675 10 Gobind Râi Singh 1675-1708 Khâlsâ, 1699 Bandâ Singh Bahâdur 1708-1716 Moghul campaign of extermination, 1716-1733 Nawab Kapur Singh Nawwâb, 1733-1753 recognized by Moghuls, 1733; attack on Nâdir Shâh, 1739; Sikh Confederacy, 1745; 11 Misls, 1748; Khâlsâ Râj, Punjab, 1761 Ranjît Singh Mahârâja, 1801-1839 Sikh column attacked by Wahhâbîs, "Hindustani fanatics," who are massacred, 1827; Sikhs defeated by Wahhâbîs, 1828; Peshawar occupied by Wahhâbîs, Pathans massacre Wahhâbîs, 1830; Sikhs annhilhate Wahhâbîs, Battle of Balakot, 1831 Kharak Singh 1839-1840 Nao Nehal Singh 1840 Chand Kaur 1840-1841 Sher Singh 1841-1843 Duleep Singh 1843-1849,

d. 1893 First Sikh War, 1845-1846;

Second Sikh War, 1848-1849;

annexed by British, 1849

Actually, I am curious about , which is said to mean "princess" in both Punjabi and Hindi. But the word of that spelling in the Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary [edited by R.S. McGregor, Oxford, 1993] only has the meaning "a mouthful (of food)" [p.219]. This is glossed as possibly being a Dravidian word, and indeed it does not occur in my Sanskrit lexicon [Practical Sanskrit Dictionary, by Arthur Anthony MacDonnell, Oxford, 1929, 1971, p.75]. I am surprised that there is this obscurity about it.

At first this transformation did not seem to improve things much. Gobind Singh and his temporal successor, Bandâ Singh Bahâdur, both died violent deaths, and the community fragmented. But with the decline of Moghul power, opportunity knocked. The Khâlsâ was soon again unified and installed in Lahore, under Ranjît Singh, who became Mahârâja of the Punjab. Henceforth the Sikhs, although never more than a minority, were the greatest military power in northern India. The death of Ranjît, however, led to a chaotic succession and conflict among his heirs. Two sharp wars with the British led to the annexation of the Punjab, after which Sikh warlike ambitions could be directed through membership in the British Indian Army, where the Sikhs stood out with their characteristic turbans and beards.

In the Punjab, we have a major crossroads of history. The name, "Five Rivers," we find in Persian, (i.e. "five," and , "water, river"). The "u" in the English name probably is the result of the "a" being a reduced vowel, as "schwa" [ ], in Hindi-Urdu, . Just what rivers these are is a matter of some small uncertainty. In Sanskrit, the area was the "Seven Rivers," ; and there are enough rivers, indeed, that these could be multiplied. However, the general idea is that the Indus, Ἰνδός , , and its five major tributaries constitute the Punjab.

The tributaries considered for this are (1) the Jhelum, (2) the Chenab, (3) the Ravi, (4) the Beas, and (5) the Sutlej. If the Indus itself is counted as one of the "Five," then the Sutlej might be dropped. This seems a little odd, since the Beas is a tributary of the Sutlej, which is a lot longer, flowing into the Indus. The answer may be that the road to the Ganges, such as followed by Alexander the Great, reaches the Beas before the Sutlej. All of these rivers have different names in multiple languages. What are shown on the map are the names, of course, in English, in Greek, and in both Hindi and Urdu (in the Arabic alphabet).

A curious case is the Beas (or Bëas, or Bias) River, whose name in Hindu or Urdu I had some difficulty finding. Wikipedia didn't have either on its "Beas" page. What is shown on the map is Sanskrit, , and Arabic, . The Arabic I only had a clue from "Hobson-Jobson," A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, by Henry Yule & A.C. Burnell [1886, 1985, Curzon Press, 1995, p.742]. Yule & Burnell quote al-Birûnî using "Biah" [c.1020] and, apparently, Tamerlane using "Biyâh" [c.1400], which I have used to produce the likely rendering, albeit speculative, in Arabic. An actual Hindi name I could only find on pages in Hindi about the Beas, fortunately with the name in the title and first line, which did not prevent my ignorance of Hindi from interfering with the identification. Thus, the basic Hindi name seems to be . A variant of this is , where we have a "v" instead of a "b." As it happens, this is often what we see in Sanksrit for a "b" in Hindi, and with a "v" this word looks like the name of the author of the Mahâbhârata. Thus, we seem to find a tradition that the river was actually named after him. The Greek names of the rivers are discussed in the relation to the campaign here of Alexander the Great, with relevant sites in purple. The cities in red are either ancient (Harappa) or modern (Delhi, Lahore, and Amritsar). In modern India a movement began for Sikh independence from India, with the Indian Punjab becoming Khâlistân. Led by Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindrânwale, this led to a catastrophic showdown in 1984 when the Golden Temple in Armitsar, the fortified center of the Sikh Faith, was stormed by the Indian Army, and Bhindrânwale killed. When Prime Minister Indria Gandhi was assassinated later the same year by Sikh bodyguards, few doubted that this was an act of revenge. Sikh nationalism continues to trouble India, although the historic Sikh kingdom lies equally in Pakistan.





MOGHUL EMPERORS Great Moghuls Bâbur, 1498-1500,

1500-1501

in Transoxania 1526-1530 Humâyûn, 1530-1540,

1555-1556 ʾAkbar I, 1556-1605 Jahângîr, 1605-1627 Dâwar Bakhsh 1627-1628 Shâh Jahân I,

,

Khusraw, 1628-1657,

d. 1666 ʾAurangzeb/ʾAwrangzîb,

,

ʿÂlamgîr I, 1658-1707 Shâh ʿÂlam I, ,

Bahâdur, 1707-1712 Jahândâr Muʿizz ad-Dîn 1712-1713 Farrukh-siyar 1713-1719 Shams ad-Dîn

Râfiʿ ad-Darajât 1719 Shâh Jahân II

Râfiʿ ad-Dawla 1719 Nîkû-siyar Muḥammad 1719 Muḥammad Shâh,

, Nâṣir ad-Dîn,

1719-1748 Looting of Delhi by Nâdir Shâh , 1739 Aḥmad Bahâdur Shâh I 1748-1754 ʿAzîz ad-Dîn ʿÂlamgîr II 1754-1759 Shâh Jahân III 1759 Shâh ʿÂlam II 1759-1788,

1788-1806 Diwani of Bengal granted to East India Company , 1765; Marathans eject Afghans from Delhi, 1770 Bîdâr-bakht 1788 Muʿîn ad-Dîn ʾAkbar II 1806-1837 Moghul authority replaced by Britain, 1827; English replaces Persian, 1828; Suttee illegal, 1829; suppression of Thugee launched, 1836 Sirâj ad-Dîn

Bahâdur Shâh II,

1837-1858,

d.1862 Great Sepoy Mutiny, 1857-1858;

British Rule, 1858-1947

γ

Many names were used for the Mongols, long before the advent of the Moghuls in India. In Marco Polo we see Mungul. In the 14th century there is Moccol in Portuguese and even Μουγουλίος , Mougoulíos, in Greek. Portuguese is still using Mogor in the 18th century.

Persian was the Court language of the Moghuls themselves. "Mughal" might have been strange to them. Although Arabic and Persian have variant writings that seem to have have included this, the "u" would have been pronounced "o" in proper Persian. The dominant language today, Hindi-Urdu or Hindustani, was simply the language that ended up adopted as the language of the Moghul army -- as it remained the language of command in the British Indian Army, which meant British officers had to learn to speak it, as did Indian recruits, like Punjabis, whose first language was something else. Thus, when William Slim, later the victorious commander in Burma, found himself about to be discharged from the British Army after World War I, he continued his career by moving to the Indian Army and, of course, learning Hindi.

Hindi has gone on, in turn, to be the principal language of India, although it is used as a first language mainly in the North. Hindi is also the national language of India, along with English. The original idea to replace English with Hindi has been stopped by States where Hindi is not an official language. The defining text of Indian law is still the one in English, and deliberations of the Indian Supreme Court are in English. Some States, like Maharashtra, have neither Hindi nor English as official languages, which has resulted in phenomena such as official replacement of English "Bombay" with Marathi "Mumbai" as the name of that city. This reflects Indian politics, not anti-colonialism. Marathi is the only official language of Maharashtra, despite a reported 38 other languages spoken there. The replacement of "Bombay" with "Mumbai" even in English is the result of politically correct confusion, i.e. asinine "virtue signaling," about place names.

As a center of the Indian movie industry, Bombay continues to be called "Bollywood," and its movies are mostly filmed in Hindi. A South Indian movie industry, with movies shot in Tamil or Telugu, has come to be called "Tollywood." One of its movies, the marvelous two part Bâhubali [2017], became an international sensation, in Tamil, Telugu, and Hindi versions; but the internationally available DVD is only the film dubbed in Hindi. The name, , "Strong Arm," is, of course, Sanskrit -- the equivalent name in European history, used for Baldwin I of Flanders and William de Hauteville, would be Bras de Fer, "Iron Arm."

We should reflect that the current preference among academics for Mughal is in part the result of a modern ideological preference for a "national" language, along with the political principle that we should use the name for a people that they use for themselves in their own language. This is something that the Moghuls would have found alien and perplexing. They certainly weren't speaking Hindi-Urdu. It thus verges on the anachronistic and may seem biased in a distractive, deceptive, and politically correct way. It is not a practice and does not reflect an attitude that is proper to a historian. And, ironically, this means that calling a Hollywood studio executive a "Mogul" may reflect a pronunciation that is more faithful to the Moghuls than the current "best practice" of historians -- the expression "Bollywood Mogul" might be the nicest taunt to the language police. We find similar political quibbles over the transcription of Greek [note].

Pretensions to universal rule, which figure in Indian mythology, in Persian imperial tradition, and in the titles of earlier Indian rulers,

Almost from the first, Moghul policy was to tolerate and win the cooperation of Hindus, especially the warriors of Rajasthan. With ʾAkbar, this approached a policy of positive toleration and religious syncretism, which earned Akbar the disfavor of Moslem clerics but, like Ashoka, the esteem of modern liberal opinion. Akbar even toyed with the idea of a universal syncretistic religion, to be called the Din-e Allâh, the "Religion of God." This was rather like what the Sikhs originally tried to do. But while Hinduism was open, more or less, to various kinds of syncretism (like adopting the Buddha as an Avatar of Vishnu), Islâm certainly was not.

The maps of Moghul India begin to feature European colonial possessions. Portugal is first, and for a good while they have the scene to themselves. Goa is the center of the operation, which then would extend all the way to China and Japan. St. Francis Xavier (d.1552) entered Japan and learned Japanese, and his reportedly incorrupt body is now still enshrined at Goa. Although nearly lost among the billion people of India, a fair number of Catholics survive from Portuguese missionary activity, often with Portuguese names, like D'Souza. Famous Portuguese missionaries in China, like Matteo Ricci (d.1610), also passed through Goa. The Kingdom of Kandy in Ceylon came to be in a rebellion against the Portuguese (1590) and then would survive in the mountains all through the Dutch tenure on the island, until the British took over (1815).



Until this point the maps of Imperial domains in India are based on Stanley Wolpert's A New History of India [Oxford University Press, 1989]. Now, however, they are largely based on the The Anchor Atlas of World History, Volume I [1974, Hermann Kinder, Werner Hilgemann, Ernest A. Menze, and Harald and Ruth Bukor] and Volume II [1978], and the Historical Atlas of the World [Barnes & Noble, 1972].

Even the most basic elements of Moghul policy were reversed by the fanatical ʾAwrangzîb (or ʾAurangzeb), who briefly brought the Empire to its greatest extent but whose measures against Hindus and Sikhs (the execution of the ninth Sikh Gurû) fatally weakened the state. Non-Moslems no longer had any reason to support the Moghuls, and in short order the Empire was only a shell of its former strength and vigor, with the Persians sacking Delhi itself (1739), under the Emperor, Muḥammad Shâh, who had otherwise done somewhat well at maintaining things.

A century after ʾAkbar, with the death of ʾAurangzeb, as the Moghul Empire totters at maximum extent a moment before fatally shrinking, things are getting a bit crowded, with Britain, the Dutch, the French, and even the Danes piling on. One of the earliest British toeholds was Bombay, which was actually a gift from Portugal in the dowry of Catherine of Braganza when she married Charles II of England in 1664. In 1701, it looks like the Dutch have the strongest hold, but as the 18th century progressed, and the Moghul domain crumbled, France and Britain would become the principal rivals for hegemony.



Henceforth, the shell of Moghul authority would stand just until a new conquering power would appear. After a surge of French influence under their brilliant governor Joseph Dupleix (d.1763), that turned out to be the British, who, however, only gradually conceived the notion of actually replacing nominal Moghul authority with an explicit British Dominion in India. Although the last Moghul was deposed in 1858, after the Great Mutiny, the full process was not complete until Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of Indian in 1876. The British Râj would then last exactly 71 more years -- testimony to the rapidity of modern events after the 332 years of the Moghuls.

How durable the British heritage will be is a good question. The form of government in India, which has in general remained democratic, is far more British than that of other former British possessions. And English, with its own distinctive Indian accent and vocabulary, remains the only official language of the country that does not provoke communal conflict. To many, the experience of British rule is a bitter memory, but it is only Hindus who may maintain the same kind of animus against the Moghuls. The removal of British monuments -- I've notice a statue of Edward VII transported to Toronto -- then dangerously suggests the removal of Moghul or Muslim monuments, which is now not unheard of.

The genealogy of the Moghuls is entirely from The New Islamic Dynasties, by Clifford Edmund Bosworth [Edinburgh University Press, 1996]. Some brief reigns given by Bosworth, which are so ephemeral as not to figure in most lists of the Moghuls, including the table above, are marked as "disputed." Otherwise, the title, Pâdishâh, , "Emperor," and an imperial crown are given.



The most memorable monument of the Moghuls is the Tâj Mahal, , , "Crown Palace." Shâh Jahân built this mausoleum in tribute to his favorite wife, Mumtâz-i-Mahal, , "Select of the Palace" (in Persian, this would be pronounced Momtâz-e-Mahal -- mumtâz is Arabic [root myz] and can mean "distinguished," "exquisite," "select," "excellent," etc.), the mother of Aurangzeb. Shâh Jahân lies there now with her, but his reign did not end well. He became ill and his sons then fell out among themselves, until Aurangzeb, the last of the Great Moghuls, gained control -- and imprisoned Shâh Jahân for the rest of his life.

One might say that Aurangzeb ruled with such force that the Empire shattered in his hands. For a good while, as the realm broke up, the Throne was passed between brothers and cousins. Some stability was achieved when it no longer made much difference.

The last, aging Moghul, Bahâdur Shâh II, threw his lot with the Mutineers and was deposed by the British. He was then exiled in Rangoon for the rest of his life. The image is of his arrest -- the old man with the white beard -- after he fled Delhi ahead of the British. Three sons are with him, Moghul, Khizr Sulṭan, and Abu Bakr. A British officer, Captain William Hodson, summarily executed -- i.e. murdered -- all or two of these -- some accounts place the execution of Abu Bakr a month later. This may have been to prevent their ever becoming a focus of resistance; but in the long run, of course, it made them martyrs, not to mention being a despicable way to treat defeated royalty. Bahâdur Shâh was still the nominal sovereign of India, and none of his family owed the British any loyalty; and other sons nevertheless survived. But it is clear from world history, the victors only tend to be magnaminous when they don't still feel treatened by those they defeat. Thus, the Romans spitefully pursued Hannibal, but the British public celebrated the defeated Cetshwayo, King of the Zulus. The murdered and then surviving Moghul sons may represent the intensity, and then fading, of British fears, respectively.



Maratha (Mahratta) Confederacy/Empire Chattrapatis, Kings Sivaji I the Great 1674-1680 Shambhuji I 1680-1689 Rajaram I 1689-1700 defeat and occupation by the Moghuls, 1700 Tara Bai regent,

1700-1708 Chattrapatis, Kings Peshwas, Ministers Shahu I 1708-1749 Balaji Vishvanath 1713-1720 Baji Rao I 1720-1740 Balaji Baji Rao 1740-1761 Ramaraja II 1749-1777 Madhava Rao Ballal 1761-1772 defeated by Afghans,

battle of Panipat, 1761,

occupation of Delhi, 1770 Narayan Rao 1772-1773 Raghunath Rao 1773-1774 Madhava Rao Narayan 1774-1796 Shahu II 1777-1808 Chimnaji Appa 1796 Baji Rao II 1796-1818 Pratap Singh 1808-1839 Shahji Raja 1839-1848

Nawwâbs of the

Carnatic, at Arcot Zû-l-Fiqâr ʿAli Khan c.1690-1703 Dâʾûd Khân 1703-1710 Muhammad Saʿâdat-Allah Khan I 1710-1732 Dost ʿAli Khan 1732-1740 Safdar ʿAli Khan 1740-1742 Saʿâdat-Allah Khan II 1742-1744 ʾAnwar ud-Din Muhammad 1744-1749 defeated by the French, 1744; defeated by the French & killed, 1749 Chanda Sahib 1749-1752 installed by the French under Dupleix, 1749; defeated by the British, surrendered, executed, 1752 Wala Jah Muhammad 'Ali 1749-1795 installed & supported by the British ʿUmdut ul-Umara 1795-1801 ʿAzim ud-Dawlah 1801-1819 ʿAzim Jah 1819-1825 Annexed to British India, 1825

Both the Nawwâb Anwar ud-Din of the Carnatic and the Ṣûbadâr Nâṣir Jang of Hyderabad were killed in battle with the French allied to pretenders to their positions. French forces were sent with Muẓaffar Jang to support his government in Hyderabad. However, in 1752 their candidate for the Carnatic, Chanda Sahib, was defeated in battle, surrendered, and then was executed by the British candidate, Muhammad 'Ali, who would then rule under British protection for many years.

By 1756, Dupleix had been recalled (in 1754), and his policies repudiated. His job, after all, was to make money, not to make war on the English or take over Indian states. He had done this with some justification during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) but his aggressive actions had continued after the Peace. This was a problem, and, indeed, the adventure in Hyderabad never did make any money for the French.

In retrospect, Dupleix's recall looks ill considered, as the Seven Years War (1756-1763) was about to begin; the local French forces would need to make war on the English; and France would need as strong a position as possible to do that. She wasn't going to have it, and the British would be just as victorious in the war in India as in the Americas. But that is in hindsight. Back in France in 1754, it would not have been appreciated that Dupleix had created a whole new dynamic in Indian history. Formerly, Moghul authority continued to external appearances and Europeans approached local officials deferentially with nothing but trade privileges in mind. Now, with some exceptions and setbacks, the European traders could make and unmake local authorities at will. This was at first discovered and exploited by the French, but the British would prove far better and more successful at the game.



Nawwâbs of Bengal, 1704-1765 Murshid Qulî Khân ʿAlâʾ ad-Dawla 1704-1725 Shujâʿ Khân Shujâʾ ad-Dawla 1725-1739 Sarfarâz Khân ʿAlâʾ ad-Dawla 1739-1740 ʿAlîwirdî Khân Hâshim ad-Dawla 1740-1756 Mîrzâ Maḥmûd Sirâj ad-Dawla 1756-1757 Defeated & dethroned by Robert Clive,

Battle of Plassey, 1757 Mîr Jaʿfar Muḥammad Khân

Hâshim ad-Dawla 1757-1760

1763-1765 Mîr Qâsim ʿAlî 1760-1763 Najm ud-Dawlah 1765-1766 Saif ud-Dawlah 1766-1770 British East India Company Rule,

1765-1858, Presidency of Calcutta;

Nawwâbs continue as pensioners Robert Clive Governor,

1755-1760,

1764-1767 Henry Vansittart 1760-1764 First Anglo-Mysore War, 1766-1769 Henry Verelst 1767-1769 John Cartier 1769-1772

In 1765, Clive obtained from the Moghul Emperor Shâh 'Âlam II, who was a fugitive in British care, a grant of the Diwani, or revenue responsiblity for the province of Bengal. This made the British East India Company, as the Diwan of Bengal, part of the consitutional order of the Moghul Empire, and it is often considered the beginning of British Rule, the "Râj," , in India. However, Clive had no intention of replacing the Nawwâbs, and the Company intended to leave local officials in place to collect the actual revenues of Bengal. This was consistent with Clive's previous policy of supporting local rule, when he installed Mîr Qâsim as Nawwâb in 1760. Mîr Qâsim was a competent ruler, but, after Clive left, he was essentially doubled-crossed by the enemies of both himself and Clive, manueuvered into a war, and then driven from Bengal. The incompetent Mîr Ja'far was restored, evidently with the intention of employing him only as a puppet. Clive, on his return, could not undo this coup, but he did try to retain the Nawwâb as a real factor in the governance of Bengal, with the East India Company as Dîwân.

The Nawwâb at least remained so in name until 1880, when Mansur Ali Khan, the last Nawwâb of Bengal, was deposed. His son, however, Hassan Ali Mirza Khan Bahadur, succeeded with the title Nawwâb of Murshidabad. The titular line of Nawwâbs actually continued until 1969, when the main line died out and the succession was left in dispute.

Bengal became one of the three "Presidencies" through which direct British rule in India was effected (with different arrangements for the Princely States, which remained nominally under local rule). The others were Bombay and Madras. However, Bengal was also the seat of general British authority; and when the Governor of Bengal became the actual Governor-General of India, his seat continued to be in Calcutta. The capital of India was not moved to Delhi until rather late in British rule, in 1912. New Delhi became the capital in 1931.

The British conquest of India was the first that progressed up rather than down the Ganges. Previous invasions had all come from Central Asia over the Hindu Kush and the Khyber Pass. This had happened so often, beginning with the Arya in the 2nd millennium BC, that is rather difficult to say just how many such invasions were there. The British, however, like all the European powers, had come by sea. Where the Persians or the Afghans, most recently, would head straight for Delhi, the British were coming up all the way from Calcutta. They wouldn't get to Delhi until 1803.



The situation in India in 1780 was with the British poised for conquest. At that point, wars had already been fought with Mysore and with the Marathans. More would come. The Punjab, in the distance, would be a project for some years later. Meanwhile, The French would shortly be down to four cities, which they would surrender to the newly independent India in 1947. The Portuguese, from their former hegemony, were reduced to three possessions, which they would retain until forcibly taken by India in 1961. The two Danish cities were sold to Britain in 1845. The British were unwilling to pay for the Danish Nicobar Islands, but then, after the Danes had left in 1837, they complained about piracy there. The Danes returned 1845-1848. After Denmark renounced sovereignty in 1868, the British occupied the islands.



British Governors-

General of India Warren Hastings Governor-General

1772-1785 First Anglo-Maratha War, 1776-1782; Second Anglo-Mysore War, 1780-1784 John MacPherson 1785-1786 Lord Cornwallis 1786-1793

& 1805 Third Anglo-Mysore War, 1789-1792 Sir John Shore 1793-1798 Lord Mornington 1798-1805 Fourth Anglo-Mysore War, 1798–1799; Second Anglo-Maratha War, 1803-1805 Sir G. Barlow 1805-1807 Lord Minto 1807-1813 Lord Moira

(Lord Hastings) 1813-1823 Gurkha War, 1814-1816; Third Anglo-Maratha War, 1817-1818 Lord Amherst 1823-1828 First Burmese War, 1824-1826; Moghul authority replaced by Britain, 1827 Lord Bentinick 1828-1835 English replaces Persian, 1828; Suttee illegal, 1829; name of Moghul Emperor removed from coinage, 1835 Lord Metcalfe 1835-1836 Lord Auckland 1836-1842 suppression of Thugee launched, 1836; famine, 1837; First Afghan War, 1839-1842 Earl of Ellenborough 1842-1844 Lord Hardinge 1844-1848 First Sikh War, 1845-1846 Earl of Dalhousie 1848-1856 Second Sikh War, 1848-1849; Punjab annexed, 1849; Second Burmese War, 1852; Oudh annexed, 1856 Lord Canning 1856-1858 Viceroy,

1858-1862 Great Sepoy Mutiny, 1857-1858;

Crown Rule, 1858-1947; General Cotton's campaign against Wahhâbîs, "Hindustani fanatics," 1858

Hastings thus inaugurates de facto direct Birtish rule over India, even if it is still really only the East India Company, and even if the fiction of Moghul sovereignty is retained for a while. British rule is often called "the Raj," from the Sanskrit and Hindi-Urdu word for "King." This is written in Urdu and in Hindi. There is no reason not to call the regime of the Moghuls or Guptas "the Raj" also, but the term seems to be restricted to the British dominion.

The very odd thing about this period is the ambiguity about just who owned British possessions in India and who the real sovereign authority was. The British constitutional authority in Bengal under Hastings was still based on authorizations from the Moghul Emperors. Some fiction of Moghul sovereignty was maintained at least until 1827 -- although the Moghul Emperor himself had been living under British rule since 1803. In 1813, when the charter of the East India Company was renewed, the British Parliament did formally assert the sovereignty of the British Crown over the Company's territories in India. This unilateral declaration, although recognized after 1815 by other European powers, was less obviously asserted in India itself. Lord Hastings did not meet with the Emperor Akbar II in 1814 because the Emperor expected to receive the Governor-General as a vassal rather than an equal. It woul