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The processes which define the transition from ancient to medieval Indian history are all encompassing. One reason for positing a feudal epoch in India is a supposed decline of cities. Urban centres of commerce and of centralized state authority are thought to have declined from about the fourth century CE, leaving rural institutions in a dominant position during Gupta times, when agrarian production and therefore the power of landed interests became ascendant. De-urbanization suggests similarity with Europe, but the evidence for this thesis is somewhat thin.

What is clear, however, is the spread of field agriculture, and the dominance of agrarian over pastoral, if not over urban-based industrial and commercial, interests. Whether or not it resembled changes in Europe at about the same time, there is broad agreement that agricultural settlement spread more rapidly then ever before, from the scattered zones of secure riverine irrigation to ever larger areas. These enlarged agrarian zones consisted of mixed wet and dry cultivation and mixed agriculture and herding.

As landed communities proliferated and spread, the status enjoyed by brahmans increased. They were beneficiaries of income from donors whose gifts were recorded on stone and copper-plate inscriptions, which constitute a major historical source of medieval times and describe both the donors and recipients of the land grants made. The beneficiaries could be individuals or groups numbering up to a hundred or more households, who were settled in newly designated villages thenceforth to enjoy secure incomes and often exclusive residence. Although unarmed priests seem strange counterparts to European medieval knights, the rise to prominence of these brahman landed communities has been accepted as a marker of the Indian medieval age, if not a sign of Indian feudalism.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CASTE

A second perceived process that demarcates the medieval from the ancient pertains to caste. As a system of hierarchical social and cultural relations among groups defined by birth, caste was a major preoccupation of the dharma texts from the early centuries of the present era onward. The dharmashastras took caste as a social totality and defined relations among persons according to their varna, a Sanskrit term literally meaning color but Substantively referring to a limited set of ranked social categories into which each Actual birth group (jati) was fitteed, with some anomalies. Ranking birth groups according to purity, was one of the, ancient Indian preoccupations since it was first expressed in the vedic hymn of creation of the four varnas: brahmans, kshatriyas, vaishyas and shudras, or priests, warriors, commoners and servants. From ancient times the first three were considered purer than the fourth and were designated as 'twice-born' because males born into each underwent a ritual rebirth in a ceremony officiated by brahmans. This ritual of initiation, or investment with the sacred thread, was performed at different ages for each group: brahman males at the earliest age and vaishyas several years later, a reflection of the relative purity of the groups. By medieval times, if not before, groups who did not fit into the fourfold social and moral division - such as those whom British census officials later called tribal people living in societies far removed from the agrarian settlements where the twice born resided - were deemed even less pure than shudras; some were deemed so impure as to be untouchable.

Untouchable households within the medieval agrarian world and forest peoples who had never belonged to the life of peasant villages alike were excluded from the normative world of brahmans and were affected in two ways by the spread of settled agriculture in early medieval times. Individuals and groups could fall into the degradation of untouchability if they were or became landless and therefore were obliged to labour in the fields of others. The number of such households increased during the medieval age. As forests were felled to make way for cultivation and pastures, hunters and shifting cultivators of forested places were forced into dependency upon landed households of shudra and higher standing.

Why this dependence carried with it the degradation of untouchability is not obvious. It did not arise from cultivation is such, because all castes except Brahmans were permitted to till the soil, and even Brahmans could do so if life depended upon it. Rather, untouchability was explained in dharma texts as result of practices considered polluting or else by generalization from captives taken in warfare, aliens without claims to the community protection enjoyed by others, who were reduced to such dependency. Persons and groups considered polluted for whatever reason were frequently prohibited from living in the main settlements of even shudra villages, and were excluded from participation in the ordinary communal religious life of

such settlements including worshipping the protective deities - usually goddesses - of agrarian localities.

Military service, however, was opened to previously forest and pastoral peoples, and many may have escaped the indignity of exclusion by becoming martial castes and claiming the title and name of 'Rajputs' (from rajaputra, son of a king or chief). The Rajput claims were recorded in Sanskrit inscriptions that constituted, as well as recorded, community charters in Rajasthan during the seventh century, when Rajput clans began to make themselves lords of various localities. These were relatively modest records, but called 'herostones', because the stones on which they were inscribed were planted in the chief villages of one or another of the traditional thirty-six Rajput clans to celebrate some hero who had defended the settlement from raiders. Just where these Rajputs had come from and who their enemies were, however, has been controversial, because while some historians have assumed their vedic antiquity as the first kshatriyas, others have insisted that they either emerged from below as tribal groups transformed themselves, or migrated from outside the subcontinent. Perhaps they even began as Hunas in Central Asia and were converted to Rajput status. Such transformations were common, and achieved by adopting titles and enlisting Brahman ritualists a scribes for the purpose.

Sanskrit inscriptions assert the simultaneity of state and community formartion, and provide new legitimacy to both. As in the south, the Sanskrit inscriptions frequently dealt with grants of land and with local politics. Sometimes, for example, Rajput grandees made grants to their subordinate kinsmen, thereby creating local hierarchies where none has existed among previously egalitarian pastoralists. Extending the new stratified communities yet further were marriages among the elites of different clans, which strengthend shared political interests and the process of Rajput state formation.

MEDIEVAL KINGDOMS

The early medieval age is also defined by new states and religious ideologies. Evidence of these political and religious changes dates from the time of the Gupta kings, beginning in the fourth century. That theirs was considered a classical age for near contemporaries is suggested by the practice of some succeeding dynasties of dating inscriptions in accordance with the Gupta era, but for many modem historians the Guptas were special because many practices and ideas that were to distinguish Indian society for the next thousand years are traced to the time of their age. Indeed, the medieval millennium can, be demarcated by the widely separated reigns of two kings: Samudragupta, 335-75 CE, and Krishnadevaraya of Vijayanagara, 1509-29. Each represented a model of his age and within his own dynastic tradition, as well as in the judgement of modern historians.

From The Guptas To Harsha

Samudragupta's court poet, Harisena, declaimed the grandeur of his patron's, conquests in a 360 CE inscription placed upon a pillar that already bore two of Ashoka's edicts. The use of the same advertising space as the original world conqueror is as magnificent a gesture of self-glorification as the actual words of the later inscription.The text itself records that forty kings and kingdoms were conquered by Samudragupta: fourteen kingdoms were incorporated into the central portion of his own rapidly, enlarging realm; another twelve defeated kings were reinstalled as his subordinates, and these included the Pallava kings of the southeastern coast of the subcontinent.

The destinies of two other classes of defeated sovereigns were also noted in the inscription. Some whose lands adjoined the Gupta capital at Pataliputra (modern Patna) were permitted to retain their positions subject to their attendance at Samudragupta's court. From those in more distant lands, such as Sri Lanka or the northwesten kingdom of the Kushanas, tribute was demanded and apparently received instead.

Samudragupta attributed his conquests to the divine favour he enjoyed, bringing to mind Ashoka, the Buddhist who claimed the title of beloved of the gods', and whose pillar he shared. Samudragupta, for his part, boasted of per-forming the royal horse sacrifice, which his panegvnst went so far as to assert made him the equal of Indra and other gods. This claim, recited in the Allahabad inscription, is mirrored in a contemporary dharma text, the Naradasmriti, as well. In one of the latest of the major dharmashastras, thought to have been created around 300 CE, its author, Narada, went beyond Manu's prototypic dharma text by speaking of the king as a god and denying that there was a difference between kings and Brahmans: the protection that both conferred upon mankind, he said, stemmed from karma earned through austerities in prior lives. The conception of a kingship made sacred by legendary austerities, both in Samudragupta's Allahabad inscription and the Narada dharmashastra, harks anachronistically to a notion of ritual supremacy in the ancient Brahmana period, a millennium before. In any case, claims of divine kingship were rarely made after Gupta times.

Samudragupta's vaulting pretensions masked another political story. Contemporaneous with the king and his successors were several kingdoms whose sovereignty endured as long or longer over a substantial part of the subcontinent. The Vakataka kings of the northern part of the Deccan plateau ruled independently from around 300 to 525 CE, although they seem never to have challenged Gupta hegemonic claims. Other kingdoms with similar autonomy for much of fourth to sixth centuries included the Hunas in the far north the shakas of the west and the Kdambas and Pallavas on the west and east coasts of the peninsula respectively. And it was not long before yet other dynasties arose, among them the Chalukvas and Cholas in the south, the Rashtrakutas in the west, and the house of Harshavardhana in the western Gangetic valley by, the middle of the seventh century.

Between 5oo and 1700 CE, several dozen kingdoms succeeded in extending their sovereignty for a time at least beyond their linguistic and cultural heartlands. We may call these 'imperial states'. As a rough measure of the regions they encompassed, the subcontinent can be divided into five historical macro-regions approximating the very large nineteenth-century provinces of British India. (The presidencies of Madras, Bombay and Bengal were three such historic regions, to which were added the combined United Provinces and Central India in the north-centre of the subcontinent and Punjab-Sind-Baluchistan in the north-west.)

Of these 'imperial states', two out of three were ruled by Hindu dynasts, but the most durable was the Muslim Mughal kingdom, which persisted from the in middle of Akbar's reign, around 1580, to the reign of Muhammad Shah in I 73o. Dominance in more than one cultural region by almost all of these states was usually the accomplishment of a single ruler, a great conquering warrior such as the sixth-century Huna invader Mihirikula, who established a large realm in the northwest.Other examples are Pulakeshin II ,ruler of 17^th Century Chalukyan kindom in the deccan , and the mid-tenth-century Krishna III of the Rashtrakutas,also in the Deccan.

During those centuries , there was a steady ,but small, migration of nomads such as the Hunas , from the central Asian steppes .This trickle became more substantial and dangerous following conversion to Islam in the tenth century.Between 1000 and 1450 CE ,there were other conquerors as well: Mahmud of Ghazni ; Balban the Mamluk or ‘slave’ ruler of Delhi,and his two successor ,the Khaliji Siltan Aladdin and Muhammad the Tughluq, who subdued all of the Gangetic plain and much of the Deccan Plateau.

In addition to these kingdoms, which for a time at least spanned two or more large regions of the subcontinent, there were numerous others, the scale of whose authority was far more limited but whose duration could nevertheless be considerable. Inscriptions from this early medieval period reveal over forty regional dynasties, and other literary sources confirm them. Among the latter were in chronicles of temples (mahatmya or sthala purana) and royal genealogical text (rajavamsavali). In some cases oral traditions persists about some quite local and minor cheifly families who claimed royal status.

Though this multiplicity of rulers, with their dispersed sovereignties, testifies to a new state form which contributed to the dynamism of the early medieval period, there is little agreement among historians about the character of such states. Even those who have adopted the feudal conception for India have never specified the structure of the ‘’feudal state’ that crowned the so called feudal relations and institutions, except by implication in the example of the kingdom of Harshavardhana.

REGIONALIZATION

A defining and central process of the early Indian medieval age was the consolidation of regional societies, in which process political forms were more important elements than hard territorial boundaries. The kingdoms of that age had fluid boundaries; they were states defined less by administration than by language, sectarian affiliations and temples. Political treatises continued an older rhetoric of pragmatic alliances among polities aimed at averting the violent swallowing of small states by larger ones. However, within the limited regions defined by royal claims, new political, linguistic, literary and social histories and boundaries were taking a shape that remains recognizable even in contemporary modern India. At the core of this regionalizing process were two forces: one was socioeconomic and had to do with the widespread displacement of pastoral by agrarian economics and less stratified societies by more hierarchical ones; the other was cultural, involving gods, temples, inspired poets and philosophers. But political forms mediated these directive influences of the post-classical world of India.

It is impossible to decide which of the components of the regionalizing process was the most important or determining: political, religious or cultural. It cannot be said that the emergence of smaller, more compact monarchies caused the religious, linguistic and literary developments of these centuries. At any rate, there is no evidence of any such intentions on the part of the new monarchs, and it seems that these kings were as much made by as makers of these developments. Possibly, the three aspects of regionalization were complexly related to other causal factors. Speculatively, it can be suggested that this was an age of rapid and generalized development of commodity production and also of town life, both of which contributed to India's reputation for fabulous wealth and elegance. Its products were sought by traders of the dynamic and expanding orders of the time in Tang China and the now Islamicized Arabian Peninsula. Traders from both areas found their ways to Indian emporia or met Indian traders in other zones of commercial activity in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

In addition to the production of goods, there was the explosion of Indian literary production, of Sanskrit productions of puranas and dramas, as well as a flowering of literatures in other languages. Both forms of productions were attractive to people throughout and beyond the subcontinent. Where once Buddhist and Jaina ideologies flourished, in part by providing a moral justification for the pragmatic values of merchants and moneyed men, as well as by providing an institutional framework that linked Buddhist and Jaina monasteries with the high commerce of the age, these functions were now readily assumed by Hindu temples.

Buddhism and Jainism were displaced after Mauryan times, with considerable difficulty in some places. In Bengal, Buddhist institutions continued to enjoy supporters until Muslim iconoclasts destroyed many of their holy places in the twelfth century; a large proportion of Bengal's Buddhists converted to Islam; others were won to a form of regional devotional Vishnu worship. Far away in the Tamil cultural region, religion had long before become involved with both linguistic and political developments that moulded the regionalization process lying at the heart of medieval Indian historical change. And driving the Tamil cultural process was a deadly struggle between a new sort of brahrnanical worship and the older religious hegemony of Buddhists and jainas.

Sectarians of both sorts found political support from some Tamil rulers around the sixth century about whom little is known (and that mostly from hostile commentators who decried them as 'evil' rulers). They may have been hill chieftains who obtruded political control over the rich agricultural plains in which they found and patronized Buddhist and Jaina institutions and teachers. Even when these so-called usurpers of plains authority were driven off by kings such as the Pallavas, the victors continued to support Jainism until converted by teachers of the new devotional faith. Pallava Mahendravarman, for example, renounced his affiliation with Jainism, and turned against and persecuted its followers after becoming a Shiva worshipper. Other Tamil rulers followed suit as the Shiva cult armed itself with a powerful theology to compete against Buddhists and Jainas.

HINDU RESURGENCE AND LINGUISTIC FLUORESCENCE

A major formulator of the reinvigorated Hindu thought was Shankara, a brahman who combined philosophical adroimess with impressive organizational acumen. To oppose what he castigated as blasphemy, he returned to the ancient Upanishads (from which Buddhist doctrines had also evolved), and offered explanations of salvation as compelling as those of the hegemonic heterodoxies of his time and earlier. Besides incorporating and transcending Buddhist doctrines, he mimicked their institutions by establishing the monaster-v (matha) as a key institution in a number of sites. Four of these held special status as major missionary centres, each under a successor-teacher (sankaracharya).

The religious reforms were not wholly intellectual. In addition to borrowing and incorporating Buddhist and Jaina institutions, Shankara adopted a popular song form to compose praises to Shiva. These hymns of devotion became the foundation for the new and popular worship, one that has endured to the present throughout India under the name of Hinduism.

The religious devotionalism called bhakti which first took shape in Tamil country during the sixth century was anticipated earlier by the Krishna devotionalism found in the Bhagavad Gita, composed around the first century CE and incorporated into the Mahaharata around a century prior to Shankara's time. Further developments of the Tamil bhakti religion were the work of later poet devotees and theologians. According to tradition, between the sixth and tenth centuries, sixty-three Shiva and twelve Vishnu worshipping poets created a large corpus of Tamil devotional songs, and all are now revered as saints. Nor did theology lag far behind. Shankara's work in providing an intellectual base for popular worship of Shiva was also intended to maintain and strengthen Brahman leadership, and this feature was imitated by the Vishnu cult as well.

Religious developments spurred the development of first Tamil and subsequentlv other languages between 1000 and 1300 CE. In the twelfth century, bhakti hymns were composed in Bengali by the saint Jayadev and in what is now called Hindi by Nimbarka of Mathura. Nimbarka was originally a south Indian Brahman whose devotion to Krishna inspired him to a missionary vocation that helped to make Mathura the centre of the Krishna cult. In the same period, literary works, along with such technical auxiliaries as grammars and dictionaries, were written in Marathi, Bengali and several other languages.

Languages and literatures underwent a regionalization tha t made possible the spread and particularization of popular devotion to Vishnu, Shiva and the goddesses. Everywhere devotees imitated the Tamils, the first of the devotional worshippers to create a corpus of hymns in their own language. These compositions launched the development of all the modem languages of the subcontinent, those based on Sanskrit throughout the north, and others based upon a mix of Dravidian and Sanskrit words and grammatical forms in the south.

In addition to the bhakti songs, two other literary projects assumed special importance. One genre preserved or invented myths about the gods who were the divine objects of the songs and theology and were installed in temples devoted to their worship. These temples, along with the mathas, gave institutional focus to the religious reformation. The other stimulus to the literature of the early medieval age was the chronicles of ruling families of the time.

URBANIZATION AND THE COUNTRYSIDE

Temples and kings were crucial institutions of regional cultures during early medieval times, and both had the further effect of stimulating urbanization. Again, the Tamil country provides early examples. The major Shiva temples of Tanjavur and Madurai became the royal chapels of the Chola and Pandya kings respectively. Both ruling families lavished treasure on adorning and worshipping the deities enshrined, attracting a large permanent population of priestly officiants at each temple and throngs of pilgrims whose needs created the foundations for substantial urban centres.

We know all this from documents inscribed on the stone basements and walls of both temples and from the chronicles eulogizing the gods and demonstrating in the process that many of them were transformed local guardian spirits who were assimilated by stories to Shiva legends found in Sanskrit puranas or an even earlier time. This sort of 'Sanskritization', the assimilation of previous territorial spirits to the most august of gods, was also a necessary part of a process of 'regalization'. Would-be kings intent on converting their status from that of ambitious -warriors and local chieftains into chakravartins aided in the metamorphosis of often minor, popular gods and goddesses into manifestations of Shiva or Vishnu, worthy of royal adoration.

In early medieval times, kings' temples were also palaces where royal business was conducted and royal rituals were enacted. Political capitals inevitably were or became temple centres, and many also became major urban centres. Royal worshippers and their gods attracted subjects and devotees in large numbers, and the servicing of both made each capital citvy an economic centre as well. In due course, lesser chiefs - grandees and magnates to whom the title 'Samanta' was applied and who maintained smaller courts in the scores of kingdoms of the early medieval age - began to imitate their superiors; we have another of India's moments of urbanization to mark.

The early medieval, commercial- and religious-led urbanization is one reason for scepticism regarding the notion of feudalism, which is conceptually related to deurbanization and decommercialization, to India. No where is this clearer than in the manner in which the city of Kanauj in the western Gangetic plain became the focus of north Indian politics for several centuries, during which competing conquerors from the north, south, east and west strove to seize and hold it: the city had become the emblem of the chakravartin. But all over the subcontinent other cities were created as the centres of lordships; in most of them still survive the impressive monumental ruins that have made the archaeology of historical places a major intellectual enterprise in India. The pronounced urban character of the early medieval age accounts in part for the allure of India for the Turkic invaders from the steppes. For them, cities could be made to provide the means to sustain the new institutions of Islam and a new elite of Muslim fighters and rulers.

This was India's third urbanization, if we take the first to have been that of the Indus and the Indian northwest, and the second that of the Gangetic plain in pre-Mauryan times. In contrast to the first two moments of urban development, when towns were sparse and uniquely the sites of state-level authority, those of the earlv medieval age appeared in rich profusion, reflecting a wide dispersion of authority and close relations between political centres and the community base upon which the states were founded.

The relationship was variably manifested over the length and breadth of the subcontinent. In places relatively less well endowed by nature - such as Rajasthan in the northwest or Karnataka in the central peninsula - there appeared one sort of configuration of community, and kingdom, while in the Gangetic plain and the Coromandel plain in the south there was another. In Rajasthan and Karnataka, the caste culture of the medieval age was known, but the hierarchical practices of caste relations were attenuated by the principles of clan organization of the farming communities and their artisan and priestly clients that now characterized the countryside.

In the core zones of the early medieval age, Gangetic towns and communities from the sixth to the twelfth centuries, powerful landed groups had separated their identities from the older clan collectivities whence they emerged or whom they conquered. Thereupon, the older penates and vedic rituals of Aryan clansmen were shunned by the arriviste dominant peasantries of diverse clan origins. Instead, large holdings of land were granted to learned and priestly brahman adepts of the new bhakti faiths.

There is also evidence of the new enstructuration of communities in the other major medieval riverine loci of civilization in the subcontinent, the Palar and Kaveri basins in the south. Large rural settlements were created during the reigns of the Pallava and Chola kings of the seventh to thirteenth centuries, sometimes by the kings themselves, but more often by wealthy and powerful landed groups. The latter consisted of local communities of often hundreds of villages, who managed their economic, social and political affairs through their councils. For them, connections with Brahmans conferred a status that others, such as artisans and merchants, could not hope to attain until several centuries later. Then, around the twelfth century, craftsmen and merchants organized an extensive oppositionary alliance and fought for a degree of parity with the landed. The southern communities provide rich documentation on the complex and competitive alignments of social groups of the early medieval age and also on the increasingly complex commercial world that was intruding upon medieval societies. Clan organization had no more importance here than in the Gangetic countryside.

IDEOLOGY AND AUTHORITY IN SOUTH INDIA

In south India, royal authority was claimed both within the riverine cores of realms and sometimes also at considerable distances from the royal capitals. The Chola kings boasted of their overseas conquests, including the northern portion of the island of Sri Lanka, the Maldive Islands located to the west of India and the kingdom of Srivajaya in southern Sumatra. Rajarajachola boasted of the treasure taken from overseas and the more remote parts of the Indian peninsula, with which he built a magnificent royal temple in his capital Tanjavur. (Me god of this shrine was Rajarajesvara, meaning the Shiva phallus worshipped by King Rajaraja.) His son Rajendrachola I claimed to have sent an army to conquer the Ganges, so that its sacred waters could be added to, and thus sanctify, the tank of his royal temple at Gangaikondacholapuram, on the north bank of the Kaveri river. Again, the name commemorated the conquest: it means 'the city of the Chola that seized the river Ganges'.

COMMUNITY AUTONOMY AND INSTITUTIONS

Despite these overweening claims, and apart from the immediate hinterlands of their royal precincts, the subjects of the Pallava, Chola and other southern kings between the seventh and the twelfth centuries managed their own affairs. Community institutions were the means of autonomy. Some were ancient institutions, such as the village and locality assemblies and chieftaincies; others, such as temples and the seminaries often attached to them, were more recent. In both the older and newer institutions, diverse customary arrangements were recognized and preserved, and most locales allocate a part o their wealth for the support of brahmans and the worship of both august puranic gods and humble, local guardian deities, who were principally goddesses.

An instance of the process of cultural generalization and elaboration was the incorporation by 'marriage' to Shiva of the autonomous goddess Minakshi. Marriage meant that Minakshi became assimilated to Shiva's consort-deity Parvati. The same example illustrates a second mechanism as well, for Minakshi's 'wedding' was first celebrated in a temple festival sumptuously sponsored by the kings whose capital, Madurai, was built around Minakshi's temple. This sort of synthesizing of religious, cultural and political elements was a central feature of regionalization and produced a diverse medieval cultural heritage that contrasts with the assumed unity of the classical Gupta age.

RELIGION IN SOUTHERN KINGSHIPS

Tamil devotees of Shiva had been the first to transform the stories of the gods in Sanskrit puranas by retelling them in ordinary Tamil beginning in the sixth century; by means of hymns in praise of Shiva, places and stories previously sacred to some tutelary, deity were transformed into loci in which Shiva himself was manifested. One of the earliest of the Shiva hymnists was the poet Appar who, around 6oo CE, had renounced the Jainism he had previously professed and went on to persuade the Pallava king MahendravarmanI to abandon his Jaina teachers. Somewhat later, Sambandar, another Shiva hymnist, reputedly converted the Pandyan king in Madurai and persuaded him to rid his capital of the numerous jaina teachers previously honoured and supported there by royal generosity. Sambandar may even have convinced the king to complete his conversion by impaling the heads of 8000 jaina teachers, an event long celebrated at the major Shiva temple of Madurai.

Chola kings were especially devout Shiva worshippers and may even have engaged in the rare religious persecution of the worshippers of Vishnu, who had meanwhile been carrying out a similar programme of hymn-making and theology. The traditions of Tamil Vishnu devotees refer to the desecration of some Vishnu temples by the late Chola king Kulottunga III. However, priestly and lay followers of Vishnu found other royal houses more sympathetic. One of the major theologians of Vishnu devotionalism, the Tamil brahman Ramanuja, succeeded in converting the king who was later known as Vishnuvardhana of the Hoysala dynasty of Karnataka, which was then engaged in displacing the Cholas in the far south. Nevertheless, Jainism - its doctrines and its shrines and seminaries - continued to enjoy support for a lengthy period in Karnataka, similar to the widespread support it enjoyed in Rajasthan owing to the patronage of the Solanki-Chaulukyan dynasty of the middle of the twelfth century..

Devotional worship became a major ideological element throughout early medieval India. Doctrinally, theism opposed itself to the ethical and atheistic traditions of Jainism and Buddhism, while at the same time incorporating elements of both. But there was a significant difference in practice: personal devotion was offered to gods whose daily life was celebrated as if they were Kings, and this worship was conducted within buildings constructed to shelter the god as a palace sheltered a king. Devotions of this magnitude and the conspicuous support of devotee kings found favour in all parts of the subcontinent, as kings between the seventh to twelfth centuries sought ways to extend their sovereignty beyond the often narrowly circumscribed core territories of their realms. There was little evidence of awareness among most of the major longs of the subcontinent that a new and vigorous political force in the shape of Islam was establishing itself in northern India. Soon there would be a shift in historical developments substantial enough to warrant the designation of a new phase of medieval Indian history.

MUSLIM HISTORIES

For the details of the cruelty and other aspects of the Khalji and Tughluq regimes, paradoxically we owe much to historical writings in Persian, often commissioned by Muslim rulers themselves. One of the earliest of the writers was Ziauddin Bami, whose mid-four-teenth-century account of the reign of Firuz Shah Tughluq showed a lively appreciation of the value of history, though perhaps not of the sort modem historians would admit to :

Some of these Persian-language chroniclers were born in India and others were migrants seeking their fortunes there. One of the migrant historians during Tughluq times was the famous Moroccan traveller, Ibn Battuta while one of the native historians was Isami, grandson of one of the learned men who died when Muhammad Tughluq marched the population of Delhi to his distant new capital of Daulatabad. Isami duly chronicled his grandfather's martyrdom in his history of the Bahmani sultans who succeeded the Tughluqs and were a part of their undoing.

Other writers followed in increasing number, reflecting two important changes noticeable in the fourteenth century. One was the appearance of native-born Muslim intellectuals who, whether in the service of some sultan or not, wrote about their own times. These 'Hindustanis' or 'Deccanis' were differentiated by these labels from sojourners from other places. The term 'Hindustan' as a Muslim designation for the area of the Indo-Gangetic plain dates from roughly this time.

Muslims from Iran, Central Asia and East Africa were attracted to India by military service, but also by opportunities in commerce or professions such as teaching or law. Some became judges. These migrants, too, wrote contemporary accounts of their times and the events in the lives of illustrious rulers, accounts that have made it possible for historians to portray the Delhi sultanate with a vividness rarely possible before.

But it is not simply an artefact of contemporary accounts that rivets attention upon the biographies of Mahmud of Ghazni, Alauddin Khalji or Muhammad TughIuq. They were men of great energy and imagination as well as utterly ruthless - all qualities needed for the creation of a new state system, which for a time at least reached from the Himalayas to the southern shores of the Indian Ocean. In time, these regimes were transmuted from foreign despotisms that destroyed the existing ruling households and plundered their temples, into regimes that incorporated indigenous peoples, however much the likes of Maulana Muzaffar Shams Balkhi might inveigh against the practice. Turkic fighters intermarried with their non-Muslim subjects from the beginning, and this was one form of incorporation of, or perhaps by, indigenous groups; others were persuaded to accept the new conquerors and their religion because of the advantages that accompanied close association with the powerful, or swayed by the example and preaching of the Sufis or other Islamic schools.

The peripheral parts of Muhammad's realm soon made themselves independent. The process began in the far south, when Madurai was proclaimed a separate sultanate in 1334. It was followed in 1346 by Bengal, Not long after,

most of the conquered territories around the new Daulatabad were declared an independent sultanate, called Bahmani after its founder, an Afghan or Turkish soldier formerly in Tughluq service.

MUSLIM ARCHITECTURE

The process of community formation in medieval India now included Muslim communities. In the cities, neighbourhoods were formed around the mansions of Muslim grandees, soldiers and officials, and also around the great mosques and madrassahs which architecturally dominated the locality. In these buildings, an architectural vocabulary was adopted consisting of what had become typical Islamic elements, such as the graceful decoration Of doorways and walls with lines from the Koran written in the angular 'kufic' script. Beginning in the twelfth century, mosques in the imperial style were constructed by successive Muslim regimes centred on Delhi; but simultaneously, provincial styles emerged whose varied features were shaped by the availability of construction materials such as stone and the experience of local artisans, who were not necessarily Muslims and whose different traditions were imprinted on mosques found in Bengal, Kashmir or Gujarat. In Bengal, for example, the independent fourteenth-century sultans built their mosques in brick, the usual construction material for temples there, and had the brick work covered with plaster.

Modifications were made in the layout as well. From western Asia had come the template of the Arabian mosque with its pillared, domed roof and enclosed courtyard. 'Me fully developed format actually covered three courtyards with three domes - the larger central dome flanked by smaller replicas on either side, but it too was altered by local building practices. Instead of an interior courtyard, Bengali rulers installed a grassy forecourt in which was dug a large tank for the ablutions of the faithful, and mounted a single dome upon a square building. In the Kashmiri capital, Srinagar, in 1395 Shah Hamadan built a wooden Mosque with wooden walls enclosing a courtyard for prayer . Like the contemporary temples there, its two, stories were supported by hundreds of decorated wooden pillars, and the whole was set on the masonry foundation of an ancient temple. Ahmadabad in Gujarat received its great egational mosque in 1423 though it had been a province of Delhi since 1297. It was built by Ahmad Shah, a converted Rajput, who, when governor, declared the province an independent sultanate in 1411. His mosque was of stone, like the local temples and its entry resembled the temple gateways of the region. The central prayer hall was of stone, with the sculpted pillars also found in contemporary temples.