When last we left the history of India, Ashoka’s Mauryan Empire had just shattered into a dozen
pieces.
We hate to see it, but sometimes it be like that.
Unfortunately for my love of cartography, what follows are the Classical and Medieval
periods, where hundreds if not thousands of small local kingdoms change their borders
so rapidly that the map looks like 1700 years of TV static.
At first glance, this period looks like an absolute mess, for good reason, but this chapter
of Indian history actually tells a cohesive and consistant story.
From 200 BC to 1500 AD, small local territories (and the odd regional empire) competed for
power and prestige while participating in extensive trade.
The result was an intense cultural exchange that cemented India’s legacy of extraordinary
demographic, religious, and ideological diversity.
So, to see how this all went down, let’s do some History!
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India’s diversity starts with its geography, where there’s mountains and forests and
plains, oh my.
This regional variation made for a patchwork of distinct local territories, with their
own culture and even unique languages.
So while dynasties and empires bopped around rearranging the map, these small pockets proved
rather sturdy, and often maintained their local culture.
This made it pretty tricky for any one state to unify large parts of India for more than
a few decades at a time.
Before we touch on some notable examples, we should first zoom out to better understand
India’s geography.
Broadly speaking, we can divvy it up into 4 macro-regions: The Indus Valley, the Gangetic
Plain, the Deccan Plateau, and the Ghats.
Between the Indus and the Ganges rivers, northern India was fertile and easy to navigate, making
it well-suited to larger states and the occasional empire.
But sometimes that empire was other people, because the Indus Valley opened up to the
rest of Asia, and saw everybody from Greeks and Persians to Muslims and Mongols wandering
in over the centuries.
By sea, the coasts of Sindh and Bengal proved extremely popular for trade, as they provided
easy access to inland markets.
Speaking of inland, we’ll find the Deccan plateau further south along the peninsula.
Connected to the coasts by a series of smaller waterways, the Deccan served as a cultural
crossover between North and South, and that’s most apparent in Language.
Take, for instance, the linguistic variety of a place like Europe, which has Romance,
Germanic, and Slavic languages spread out over multiple different states, interacting
and evolving across time.
India isn’t terribly far off from that, but here, the two main language families at
work were Sanskritic (or Indic) and Dravidian, and the crossover between them happened predominantly
on the Deccan Plateau.
So from there, if we go south, or east, or west, we’ll run into the Ghats, two mountain
ranges that run up the eastern and western coasts of the peninsula, and converge on the
southern edge.
This area was an absolute hotbed for trade during the classical period, since it lay
smack in the middle of the maritime silk road between the East Indies, China, Africa, and
the Mediterranean.
Furthermore, in the immortal words of Bill Wurtz: And They’ve Got Spices.
So, now that I’ve spent a quarter of my runtime talking about geography, whoof, I
have a map problem, let’s actually talk about states and kingdoms and stuff.
Contrary to what my last video on Indian history might lead you to believe, Southern India
does in fact exist.
Let’s address that right now by taking a look at Tamilakam, at the tip of the peninsula.
Starting way back before even the Maurya empire, there were dozens of states nestled around
the foothills of the Ghats, but a few stand out.
The Chera, Chola, and Pandya dynasties became known as the Three Crowned Kings, and though
they remained fairly small through the classical period, they’re possibly India’s most
successful merchants.
With ready access to boatloads of spices, they were able to export their own wares as
well as control the traffic through one of the world’s busiest maritime trade routes.
Double nice.
And several centuries later, during the middle ages, the Chola dynasty was able to expand
to the island of Sri Lanka and conquer all the way up the eastern coast.
While the Tamil Kingdoms unfortunately didn’t leave much in the way of historical documentation,
they had a strong poetic tradition, and they made huge contributions to Indian architecture
— I mean literally, these things are massive.
Temple complexes steadily grew over time with donations from wealthy patrons, and developed
into ornate megastructures.
Every layer features a sculpted and vibrantly painted representation of a mythical story,
and these temples are tall bois too so there’s a lot of narrative meaning packed into each
one.
And while we’re talking about temples and religion, we should jump back a few centuries
to mention the Pallava dynasty, who ruled over parts of the East Indian coast from the
4th through the 9th centuries.
The Pallavas were talented architects, and also generous patrons of their minority Buddhist
and Jainist populations — sponsoring their monasteries and also incorporating their art
into the Hindu temples.
This taste for religious tolerance may have been an artifact of the Pallavas former fealty
to the SAtavAhana dynasty, who ruled most of the Deccan Plateau since the collapse of
the Maurya empire up through the 3rd century CE.
Though they were primarily Hindu, they had a deep respect for the Buddhism of emperor
Ashoka.
The SAtavAhanas were the first to start building temples out of stone rather than wood, but
funnily enough, it’s all designed to mimic the construction of the wooden temples, so
these stone versions were deliberately sculpted to have beams and nails sticking out.
Territorially speaking, the SAtavAhanas stretched all the way across the Deccan and onto both
coasts, so they were an integral link in the maritime trading network between Asia and
the Mediterranean.
Though the empire was broken into pieces in the early 3rd century by incursions of Scythians
from the north, many of its successor states continued to be extremely prosperous in the
middle ages, as we saw with the Pallavas.
And speaking of north, let’s return to the Indus Valley and Gangetic Plain.
Annoyingly, sources from the post-Mauryan period don’t do us many favors, since lots
of the architecture hasn’t survived, and most royal inscriptions are so wildly self-congratulatory
and embellished that they don’t end up recording anything of historical value.
When two rival kingdoms both claim to have won the same battle, you know that someone
is lying.
So let’s take this occasion to be thankful for how much easier our lives can be when
historians take the time to write things down.
In this case, our most helpful source is coinage.
For instance, some Indian coins were minted bilingually between an Indic language and
Greek, which shows strong trade links between northern India and the multiple Indo-Greek
kingdoms that splintered out of Alexander’s empire.
Also, many Roman coins found their way into northern India as well — some were melted
and reminted, but others were allowed to circulate if a gash was carved into the emperor’s
face, to show that Nero had no authority in India.
This actually makes India the second civilization to stab Nero.
Good on ‘em.
So, while the avenues of trade between northern and southern India were distinct, business
was good on both ends of the peninsula.
The Indus Valley in particular remained engaged, for better and for worse, with their neighbors
to the northwest, over the Hindu Kush mountains.
From Alexander and the Indo-Greeks onward, it is a veritable revolving door of imperial
neighbors, with Scythians, Parthians, Kushans, Sassanids, Arabs, Persians, Mongols, and Timurids.
When these empires weren’t playing Villain-of-the-Week, they sometimes tried to integrate into Indian
society by marrying into royal families and adopting aspects of Indian culture.
Now, since we’re already up north, let’s discuss an Indian empire for a change.
Over on the Ganges river, transportation was easy, resources were plentiful, and it was
the ideal base to launch an empire — the problem was that lots of small kingdoms were
aware of this, so competition was fierce ever since the Maurya collapsed.
It wasn’t until the early 4th century that the Guptas slowly extended their control over
the Gangetic Plain, and by the year 400 their empire reached across the Ganges, down the
Indus, and along the Eastern Ghats.
Not Bad.
For the next century, the Gupta empire dominated the entirety of northern India, and all the
trade that came with it.
And lucky for all of us, they spent much of their empire money on art, literature, and
science.
We’re talking the apex of classical Indian sculpture, codified editions of the Ramayana
and Mahabharata, a decimal numbering system and the concept of Zero.
Good.
Stuff.
Even though the Gupta empire dwindled throughout the 500s because of external invasions, and
northern India went right back to imperial drawing board for the next several centuries,
India would continue to benefit from the cultural legacy of the Guptas.
So with our painfully un-chronological tour of Classical India complete, let’s take
a look at an easily overlooked source of India’s diversity, Religion.
Though it can seem like we’re just following the story of Hinduism with special cameo appearances
by Buddhism and Jainism, India’s extensive trade routes brought multiple unique religious
communities into the peninsula.
For instance, Persian refugees fleeing the Muslim Conquest settled in Gujarat in the
600s, and created a strong Zoroastrian diaspora culture.
Though they adopted many outward elements of Indian society, they maintained their core
religious beliefs, and they’ve remained the world’s largest Zoroastrian population
(*60,000, over half*).
Maritime trade also brought multiple Jewish communities to the peninsula, and they similarly
became a valued part of their local societies.
However, many Indian Jews migrated to Israel after its independence in 1948.
There was also a community of Nestorian Christians from the Sassanid Empire who made their way
to India.
But by far, the most consequential arrival was Islam.
Starting from the 600s, Muslim merchants brought their new religion along pre-existing Arabian
trade routes to the west Indian coast, and a century later, Muslims from the Abbasid
Caliphate arrived into the Indus Valley.
Now, this might go without saying, but Hinduism and Islam are rather distinct.
One is a polytheistic religion that draws from a plurality of traditions, cultures,
and beliefs, whereas Islam is a monotheistic religion that engages with the Quran as its
central text.
However, shocking as it may sound, these two communities typically got along very well,
and the cultural exchange between them was quite rich — But for the sake of my comments-section
I’m gonna leave it at that.
Jumping ahead a bit here, the third main way that Islam came to India was through the Delhi
Sultanate.
It was established in 1206 as an offshoot of a larger Muslim Empire (which collapsed
very soon after, it’s not super relevant) and ruled from, as the name suggests, the
city of Delhi.
Their main military advantage was Cavalry, since horses weren’t really a thing in India
before this, it was actually mostly Elephants, so they made short work of the land around
the Indus and Ganges rivers, and managed to actually repel the invading Mongols throughout
the 1200s.
That is no small feat, and Delhi in turn became a haven for merchants, artists, and aristocrats
who fled the Mongols, so double nice.
For the next 300 years, the 5 dynasties of the Delhi Sultanate ruled over India’s north,
and for a couple decades there in the 1300s, most of India’s south too.
Though many Indians in the Sultanate did convert to Islam, their Muslim population mostly resided
in the north and around the coasts.
All told, the Delhi Sultanate had a pretty solid run through the 12 and 1300s, but unfortunately,
all empires are mortal, and in 1398, the Molgol-ish, Persian-ish, Turkish-ish emperor Tamerlane
sacked Delhi and yoinked their artisans, administrators, and most of the imperial treasury.
So the Sultanate languished through the 1400s and was later conquered— (*MGS alert, Portugal
sails in from the south*) OH!
Hey there Portugal, fancy seeing you on the other side of Africa…
Is it Colony Time already?
Geez, we covered a lot in this video, let’s recap shall we?
SO, between the classical and medieval periods of Indian history, a lot went down.
I’ll be honest here, whether you look at a map, or a timeline, even just a list of
the states that are active at any given time, this period is tough.
The players to keep track of are numerous, small, and somehow always on the move for
1700 straight years.
But as I hope I’ve been able to show, the picture becomes a lot clearer when we zoom
out, take it one piece at a time, focus on geography, and look at the overarching trends.
Classical Medieval India is interconnected, prosperous, and fantastically diverse.
Look, sometimes history can feel almost deliberately incomprehensible, especially in cases like
this, but in those scenarios, we have a responsibility to try and puzzle it out, because sometimes
the outcome is not only unique, but also exceptional.
Thank you so much for watching.
After three straight videos about Renaissance Florence, it’s important to keep myself
humble, so I hope you enjoyed this video.
As I said before, super special thanks to the all of our patrons, whose names you can
see on the screen right now.
And I’ll see you all in the next video!