Summary of Richard M. Eaton's India in the Persianate Age

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 In the early second millennium, two armies marched from opposite directions and raided north India. The first was led by a general acting on the authority of Rajendra I, maharaja of the Chola empire, towards the extreme southern end of the Indian peninsula. In 1022, his army marched 1,600 kilometers north from the Cholas’ royal and ceremonial capital of Tanjavur.
#2 The Cholas were the dominant power in the eastern Indian Ocean at this time. In October 1025, the son of a Turkish-speaking Central Asian slave marched out of Ghazni in eastern Afghanistan with 30,000 cavalry behind him. He headed south-east through the craggy ravines of the Sulaiman Mountains and descended into the low, lush Indus valley.
#3 The raid on Somnath, which was recorded in Persian chronicles, was never mentioned in the local Hindu inscriptions. The silence of these sources suggests that the raid was either forgotten altogether or viewed as just another unfortunate attack by an outsider.
#4 The invasions of Rajendra Chola and Mahmud of Ghazni had many similarities, but their differences highlight the radically different political cultures in early-eleventh-century South Asia. The older political culture, informed by a body of Sanskrit texts, had existed for many years before the rise of Chola power in south India.

Sujets

• Politique
• Histoire
• South Asia
• History
• Asia
• India

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 14 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822509719
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Richard M. Eaton's India in the Persianate Age
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

In the early second millennium, two armies marched from opposite directions and raided north India. The first was led by a general acting on the authority of Rajendra I, maharaja of the Chola empire, towards the extreme southern end of the Indian peninsula. In 1022, his army marched 1,600 kilometers north from the Cholas’ royal and ceremonial capital of Tanjavur.

#2

The Cholas were the dominant power in the eastern Indian Ocean at this time. In October 1025, the son of a Turkish-speaking Central Asian slave marched out of Ghazni in eastern Afghanistan with 30,000 cavalry behind him. He headed south-east through the craggy ravines of the Sulaiman Mountains and descended into the low, lush Indus valley.

#3

The raid on Somnath, which was recorded in Persian chronicles, was never mentioned in the local Hindu inscriptions. The silence of these sources suggests that the raid was either forgotten altogether or viewed as just another unfortunate attack by an outsider.

#4

The invasions of Rajendra Chola and Mahmud of Ghazni had many similarities, but their differences highlight the radically different political cultures in early-eleventh-century South Asia. The older political culture, informed by a body of Sanskrit texts, had existed for many years before the rise of Chola power in south India.

#5

The classical Indian political system was based on the idea that territory was like a large chessboard on which kings moved with allies and against rivals in order to create an idealized political space called the Circle of States. No single dynasty could achieve lasting dominance over large tracts of territory within India, nor over South Asia as a whole.

#6

Rajendra, the emperor of the Cholas, was the first Indian king to conquer overseas territories. He reconquered the Pandya kingdom to his south and the raja of Kerala to his west in 1017. In 1021, he attacked the Chalukyas of Kalyana.

#7

The Cholas were the most outward-looking Indian state in their day, joining Arabs, Persians, Malays, and Chinese in a transregional commercial system. They had diplomatic contact with China since 1015.

#8

The mandala theory not only informed inter-state relations, but also sowed the seeds of India’s decline. By the end of the twelfth century, India had become divided into many dynastic houses, and those houses were internally divided as vassals and smaller chieftains built up their own courts.

#9

The temple of Somnath in Gujarat was fortified in 1216 to protect it from attacks by Hindu rulers in neighbouring Malwa. In the early ninth century, King Govinda III of the Deccan’s Rashtrakuta dynasty invaded and occupied Kanchipuram in the Tamil country.

#10

Mahmud of Ghazni’s raid on Somnath in 1025 was different from Rajendra Chola’s raid on Bengal in that it was driven by different ideas. The core of Mahmud’s forces was made up of Turkish slaves or mamluks, who had been recruited from Central Asia. They were not attached to land or their natal kin, but to their masters.

#11

Central Asian Turks and Indian archers were both infantrymen, and their societies were based on different ideologies. The Turks had little attachment to their lands, which led them to view political space as open and unbounded.

#12

The Ghaznavid Turks were a special type of army that was based on mobile wealth. They would raid wealthy cities and temples in northern India, and take back the gold and silver to finance campaigns in Central Asia and Iran.

#13

The transregional circulation of wealth through Central Asia, the Iranian plateau, and north India was the material counterpart to a growing canon of Persian texts that spread through those same regions. These texts provided the ideological scaffolding that supported an emerging Persianate world.

#14

The Ghaznavid sultans, who ruled from 1040 to 1186, were the first to introduce Persian culture into north India. They were also the first to launch raids into the Gangetic plain.

#15

The Ghaznavids were a regional north Indian state, and they were not seen as a threat to Indian culture. They brought Persianate institutions and practices to the Punjab, such as the salaried bureaucracy and elite slavery.

#16

The institution of military slavery was also inherited from earlier practice in Iraq. From the ninth century, rulers in Baghdad had recruited Turks in Central Asia to serve the Abbasid caliphate.

#17

The sultanate in India was not the only claimant to worldly authority. Persianized Turks brought with them two competing visions of legitimate authority and power: a Sufi discourse that circulated mainly among Muslims, and a courtly discourse that claimed validity across all communities.

#18

The Seljuqs and Ghaznavids ruled over Khurasan and Afghanistan from the mid-twelfth century to the mid-thirteenth century. But in the latter half of the twelfth century, the Ghaznavids’ steady decline created a power vacuum in eastern Afghanistan and the Punjab.

#19

The Ghurids were a ruling family that originated from Turkish slaves who cultivated and patronized Persian culture. They burst on to the world stage in the mid twelfth century, building a multicultural empire that straddled both sides of the Hindu Kush range.

#20

The Ghurid dynasty, led by Mu‘izz al-Din Muhammad Ghuri, began attacking political centres in north India in 1175. They secured their southern flank to India by capturing the Sindi port of Debal in 1186. In 1191 they engaged the Chauhan maharaja, Prithviraj III, at Tarain, 120 kilometres north of Delhi.

#21

The Ghurids were a Muslim dynasty that emerged from the power vacuum created by the decline of their two powerful neighbours, the Seljuq Turks of Khurasan and the Ghaznavids of Lahore. They initially attacked Muslim states, but eventually conquered Hindu ones as well.

#22

After the conquest, Muhammad Ghuri sought to minimize the disruption of the conquest by establishing continuities with the pre-conquest order. He sent signet rings with his name engraved in Sanskrit to his subordinate Indian rulers.

#23

The Ghurid state was based in what is now Afghanistan, and they issued coins that depicted a bull on one side and a horseman carrying a spear on the other. The coins’ reverse side bore the name of the sultan in Devanagari script, prefaced with the Sanskrit honorific title śri.

#24

The Delhi sultanate was launched in 1206, when Muhammad Ghuri died. But the state did not become unified until four years later, when Aibek was killed in a freak polo accident. The deeper issue was the nature of kingship in north India. Would the throne of Delhi follow the Persian model of hereditary monarchy, in which a single royal family was sovereign, generation after generation.

#25

In Delhi, these issues were settled when Aibek’s favorite slave, Iltutmish, defeated both his fellow slave cohorts and his former master’s son, Aram Shah, in 1210. Iltutmish then claimed the throne. However, a contradiction lies at the heart of Iltutmish’s reign, which lasted from 1210 to 1236.

#26

Iltutmish consolidated his power in India in 1215, and by 1229, the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad had recognized him as the only legitimate Muslim monarch. The Delhi sultanate had become the dominant power in north India.

#27

The Delhi sultanate was a complex society that was not made up of just Muslims and Hindus. There were ethnic Turks, Khalaji tribesmen, and even some remnants of the old military aristocracy who served in the sultanate’s armed forces.

#28

The sultanate fell into another crisis of governance in 1236, when Iltutmish’s son Rukn al-Din was deposed and replaced by his sister Raziyya. The loyalty of Iltutmish’s junior slaves was dubious, and they replaced Rukn al-Din with his brother Bahram.

#29

The institution of hereditary monarchy, launched so hopefully by Iltutmish, fared little better than had the institution of elite slavery. In fact, what preserved Sultan Nasir al-Din Mahmud on the throne for two decades was not his strength of character, but dissensions among the remaining corps of military slaves and the growing influence of one exceptionally powerful slave, Ulugh Khan.

#30

Balban’s reign saw the tension between elite slavery and hereditary monarchy come to a head. He continued to recruit elite slaves, whom he appointed as governors and military commanders, but he sought to replace the latter by grooming his sons to succeed him.

#31

The Delhi sultanate also gave refuge to people who had been displaced by the Mongol invasion of 1258. These people provided the sultanate with a moral authority that it lacked, as they were widely believed to possess miraculous powers.

#32

The sultanate’s non-Muslim subjects apparently had no problem with their rulers, as they continued to enjoy their traditional social privileges and Hindu religious practices flourished under their rule.

#33

The author of the inscription quoted above praise Balban for supporting the weight of the globe, and for the stability and contentment he brought to India. It did not matter to them that the sultan was Muslim and Yogishvara a Hindu, as long as the rulers in Delhi were seen as legitimate and protective.

#34

The inscription at the base of the pillar, however, suggests how far the Persian and the Sanskrit worlds had already begun to overlap and even penetrate each other.

#35

The conquest of north India had two immediate consequences: the larger dynastic houses of northern India were either annihilated or assimilated to the new order, while attacks by Bakhtiyar K