MOHAMMEDAN PERIOD With northern India disrupted by the continual struggles of its warring Rajput chiefs, and southern India torn by its rival Dravidian principalities, all semblance of unity in the country had vanished before the sword of Islam was unsheathed. Warnings of the new danger came, and passed unheeded; for the Punjab was ravaged, and Sind was conquered by the Arabs, within a century of the death of the Prophet Mohammed. When at last India was seriously invaded by Subaktagin, Amir of Ghazni, a hurried effort was made to unite the Rajput powers, but it came too late, and Peshawar was thenceforth the advanced base for Muslim inroads. Subaktagin's son, Mahmud, extended the limits of his father's kingdom from Persia on the east to the Ganges on the west; and it is related that he led his armies into the plains of India no fewer than seventeen times. In 'oar he defeated Raja Jaipal a second time, and took him prisoner. But Anandpal, son of Jaipal, raised again the standard of national independence, and gathered an army of Rajput allies from the farthest corners of Hindustan. The decisive battle was fought in the valley of Pesha war. Mahmud won the day by the aid of his Turkish horsemen, and thenceforth the Punjab has been a Mohammedan province, except during the brief period of Sikh supremacy. The most famous of Mahmud's invasions of India was that undertaken in 1025-1026 against Gujarat. The goal of this expedition was the temple dedicated to Siva at Somnath. Tradition tells how Mahmud marched through Ajmere to avoid the desert of Sind; how he found the Hindus gathered on the neck of the peninsula of Som nath in defence of their holy city; how the battle lasted for two days; how in the end the Rajput warriors fled to their boats, while the Brahman priests retired into the inmost shrine; how Mahmud, introduced into this shrine, rejected all entreaties by the Brahmans to spare their idol, and all offers of ransom; how he smote the image with his club, and forthwith a fountain of precious stones gushed out. Until the British invasion of Afghanistan in 1839, the club of Mahmud and the wood gates of Somnath were pre served at the tomb of the great conqueror near Ghazni. The club has now disappeared, and the gates brought back to India by Lord Ellenborough are recognized to be a clumsy forgery. The Ghazni dynasty was a short one, and the Afghans of Ghor rose on its ruins. A cadet of this family, generally known in history as Mohammed Ghori, is the second of the great Mohammedan conquerers of India. In 1175 he took Multan and Uchch; in 1186 Lahore fell into his hands; in 1191 he was repulsed before Delhi, but soon afterwards he redeemed this disaster. By 1193 he had extended his conquests as far east as Benares, and the defeated Rajputs migrated in a body to the hills and deserts now known as Rajputana. In 1199 one of his lieutenants, named Bakhtiyar, advanced into Bengal, and expelled by an audacious stratagem the last Hindu raja of Nadia. The entire northern plain, from the Indus to the Brahmaputra, thus lay under the Mohammedan yoke. But Mohammed Ghori never settled permanently in India. His favourite residence is said to have been the old capital of Ghazni, while he governed his Indian conquests through the agency of a favourite slave, Kutb-ud-din.
In 1294 Ala-ud-din Khilji, the third of the great Mohammedan conquerors of India, raised himself to the throne of Delhi by the treacherous assassination of his uncle Feroz II. who had himself supplanted the last of the slave dynasty. Under the extensive schemes of conquest which he planned, one army was sent to Gujarat, to conquer and expel the last Rajput king of Anhalwar or Patan. Another army, led by the sultan in person, marched into the heart of Rajputana, and stormed the rock-fortress of Chitor, where the Rajputs had taken refuge with their women and children. A third army, commanded by Malik Kafur, a Hindu renegade and favourite of Ala-ud-din, penetrated to the extreme south of the peninsula, scattering the unwarlike Dravidian races, and stripping every Hindu temple of its accumulations of gold and jewels.
The earliest of the Mohammedan dynasties in the Deccan was that founded by Ala-ud-din in 1347, which has received the name of the Bahmani dynasty. The capital was first at Gulbarga, and was afterwards removed to Bidar, both which places still possess magnificent palaces and mosques in ruins. Towards the close of the r4th century the Bahmani empire fell to pieces, and five independent kingdoms divided the Deccan among them. These were—(i) the Adil Shahi dynasty, with its capital at Bijapur, founded in 1490 by a Turk; (2) the Kutb Shahi dynasty, with its capital at Golconda, founded in 1512 by a Turkoman adven turer; (3) the Nizam Shahi dynasty, with its capital at Ahmed nagar, founded in 1490 by a Brahman renegade; (4) the Imad Shahi dynasty of Berar, with its capital at Ellichpur, founded in 1484 also by a Hindu from Vijayanagar; (5) the Barid Shahi dynasty, with its capital at Bidar, founded about 1492 by one who is variously described as a Turk and a Georgian slave. In 1 565 they combined against the Hindu raja of Vijayanagar, who was defeated and slain in the decisive battle of Talikota. But.
though the city was sacked and the supremacy of Vijayanagar for ever destroyed, the Mohammedan victors did not themselves advance far into the south. The Naiks or feudatories of Vijaya nagar everywhere asserted their independence. One of the blood royal of Vijayanagar fled to Chandragiri, and founded a line which exercised a prerogative of its former sovereignty by granting the site of Madras to the English in 1639. Another scion claiming the same high descent lingers to the present day near the ruins of Vijayanagar, and is known as the raja of Anagundi, a feudatory of the nizam of Hyderabad. Despite frequent internal strife, the sultans of the Deccan retained their independence until conquered by the Moghul emperor Aurangzeb in the latter half of the 17th century. To complete this sketch of India at the time of Baber's invasion it remains to say that an independent Mohammedan dynasty reigned at Ahmedabad in Gujarat for nearly two centuries ,(from 1391 to 1573), until conquered by Akbar; and that Bengal was similarly independent, under a line of Afghan kings, with Gaur for their capital, from 1336 to The Moghul Dynasty.—In 1525 there descended upon India the most romantic figure in all her history, Babur, the young king of Kabul, who "laid the first stone of the splendid fabric" of the Moghul empire. On the famous field of Panipat he met the im mense host of the Delhi Sultan; his own army was almost insig nificant, but it was supported by artillery, seen for the first time in India, and it was brilliantly led. Prompt and complete was the triumph of the invader; Delhi and Agra were occupied; and Babur set himself to the task of subduing Hindu India, with the help of his Moghul comrades. A Rajput confederacy had been estab lished, under the gallant Rana of Udaipur; and Babur met it in battle at Sikri near Agra. Before the attack, Babur solemnly abjured wine, his besetting sin, and then led his forces to victory. Thence-forward he never turned back; and by his death in 153o his dominions extended from the Oxus to the frontier of Bengal and from the Himalayas to Gwalior. He was succeeded by his son Humayun, who is chiefly known as being the father of Akbar. In Humayun's reign the subject Afghans rose in revolt under Sher Shah, a native of Bengal, who for a short time established his authority over all Hindustan. Humayun was driven as an exile into Persia; and, while he was flying through the desert of Sind, his son Akbar was born to him in the petty fortress of Umarkot. But Sher Shah was killed at the storming of the rock-fortress of Kalinjar, and Humayun, after many vicissitudes, succeeded in re-establishing his authority at Lahore and Delhi.
When his father died he was ab sent in the Punjab, fighting the revolted Afghans, under the guardianship of Bairam Khan, a native of Badakshan, whose mili tary skill largely contributed to recover the throne for the Moghul line. For the first seven years of his reign Akbar was perpetu ally engaged in warfare. His first task was to establish his authority in the Punjab, and in the country around Delhi and Agra.
In 1567 he stormed the Rajput stronghold of Chitor, and conquered Ajmere. In 157o he obtained possession of Oudh and Gwalior. In 1572 he marched in person into Gujarat, defeated the last of the independent sultans of Ah medabad, and formed the province into a Moghul viceroyalty or subah. In the same year his generals drove out the Afghans from Bengal, and reunited the lower valley of the Ganges to Hindustan. Akbar was then the undisputed ruler of a larger portion of India than had ever before acknowledged the sway of one man. But he continued to extend his conquests throughout his lifetime. In Orissa was annexed to Bengal by his Hindu general Todar Mall, who forthwith organized a revenue survey of the whole province. Kabul submitted in 1581, Kashmir in 1587, Sind in 1592, and Kandahar in 1594. At last he turned his arms against the Mohammedan kings of the Deccan, and conquered Berar.
It is as a civil administrator that Akbar is remembered in India to the present day. With regard to the land revenue, the essence of his procedure was to fix the amount which the cultivators should pay at one-third of the gross produce, leaving it to their option to pay in money or in kind. As regards his military system, Akbar in vented a sort of feudal organization, by which every tributary raja took his place by the side of his own Moghul nobles. In theory it was an aristocracy based only upon military command ; but practically it accomplished the object at which it aimed by incorporating the hereditary chiefships of Rajputana among the mushroom creations of a Mohammedan despotism. The third and last of Akbar's characteristic measures were those connected with religious innovation, about which it is difficult to speak with pre cision. The necessity of conciliating the proud warriors of Raj putana had taught him toleration from his earliest days; and he was gradually led on by the stimulus of cosmopolitan discussion to question the truth of his inherited faith. The counsels of his friend Abul Fazl, coinciding with that sense of superhuman omnipotence which is bred of despotic power, led him at last to promulgate a new state religion, based upon natural theology, and comprising the best practices of all known creeds. In this strange faith Akbar himself was the prophet, or rather the head of the church. Every morning he worshipped the sun in public, as being the representa tive of the divine soul that animates the universe, while he was himself worshipped by the ignorant multitude.
Akbar died in 1605, in his sixty-third year. He was buried beneath a plain slab in the magnificent mausoleum which he had reared at Sikandra, near his capital of Agra.
This object was not accomplished without many hard-fought campaigns, in which Sivaji, the founder of the Mahratta con federacy, first comes upon the scene. In name Sivaji (whom Aurangzeb called the "mountain rat") was a feudatory of the house of Bijapur, on whose behalf he held the rock-forts of his native Ghats; but by sheer ability and courage he built up a great military power, based on masses of mobile horsemen, unequalled in guerilla warfare. A master of stratagem, he fought the Moham medan generals with their own weapons, and carved out a kingdom which was to bulk largely in later history. As an enemy he was merciless and often treacherous : as ruler of his own people he was just and often generous. His memory is revered to this day as the acme of Hindu patriotism. In 168o Sivaji died, and his son and successor, Sambhaji, was betrayed to Aurangzeb and put to death. The rising Mahratta power was thus for a time checked, and the Moghul armies were set free to operate in the eastern Deccan. In 1686 the city of Bijapur was taken by Aurangzeb in person, and in the following year Golconda also fell. No inde pendent power then remained in the south. Early in his reign Aurangzeb had fixed his capital at Delhi, while he kept his de throned father, Shah Jahan, in close confinement at Agra. In 1682 he set out with his army on his victorious march into the Deccan, and never again returned to Delhi. In this camp life Aurangzeb may be taken as representative of one aspect of the Moghul rule, which has been picturesquely described by European travellers of that day. They agree in depicting the emperor as a peripatetic sovereign, and the empire as held together by its mili tary highways no less than by the strength of its armies. The Grand Trunk road running across the north of the peninsula, is generally attributed to the Afghan usurper, Sher Shah. The other roads branching out southward from Agra, to Surat and Burhanpur and Golconda, were undoubtedly the work of Moghul times. Each of these roads was laid out with avenues of trees, with wells of water, and with frequent sardis or rest-houses.