The Indian early medieval age (600 CE to 1200 CE) is defined by regional kingdoms and cultural diversity.[42] When Harsha of Kannauj, who ruled much of the Ganges plain from 606 to 647 CE, attempted to expand southwards, he was defeated by the Chalukya ruler of the Deccan.[43] When his successor attempted to expand eastwards, he was defeated by the Pala king of Bengal.[43] When the Chalukyas attempted to expand southwards, they were defeated by the Pallavas from farther south, who in turn were opposed by the Pandyas and the Cholas from still farther south.[43] No ruler of this period was able to create an empire and consistently control lands much beyond his core region.[42] During this time, pastoral peoples whose land had been cleared to make way for the growing agriculture economy were accommodated within caste society, as were new non-traditional ruling classes.[44] The caste system consequently began to show regional differences.[44]
The Brihadeeswarar Temple in Thanjavur, in the state of Tamil Nadu, was built by the Cholas in 1010 CE.In the sixth and seventh centuries CE, the first devotional hymns were created in the Tamil language.[45] These were imitated all over India and led both to the resurgence of Hinduism and to the development of all the modern languages of the subcontinent.[45] Indian royalty, big and small, and the temples they patronized drew citizens in great numbers to the capital cities, which became economic hubs as well.[46] Temple towns of various sizes began to appear everywhere as India underwent another urbanisation.[46] By the eight and ninth centuries, the effects were evident elsewhere as well as South Indian culture and political systems were being exported to Southeast Asia, in particular to what today are Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia and Java.[47] Indian merchants, scholars, and sometimes armies were involved in this transmission, and south-east Asians took the initiative as well with many sojourning in Indian seminaries and translating Buddhist and Hindu texts into their languages.[47]
After the tenth century, Muslim Central Asian nomadic clans, using swift horse cavalry and raising vast armies united by ethnicity and religion, repeatedly overran South Asia's north-western plains, and led eventually to the establishment of the Islamic Delhi Sultanate in 1206.[48] The Sultanate was to control much of North India, and to make many forays into South India. Although at first disruptive for the Indian elites, the Sultanate largely left its vast non-Muslim subject population to its own laws and customs.[49] By repeatedly repulsing the Mongol raiders in the thirteenth century, the Sultanate saved India from the destruction seen in west and central Asia, and set the scene for centuries of migration of fleeing soldiers, learned men, mystics, traders, artists, and artisans from that region into India, thereby creating a syncretic Indo-Islamic culture in the north.[50] The Sultanate's raiding and weakening of the regional kingdoms of South India, paved the way for the indigenous Vijayanagara Empire.[51] Embracing a strong Shaivite tradition and building upon the military technology of the Sultanate, the empire came to control much of peninsular India,[52] and to influence the society and culture of South India for long afterwards.[51]
Scribes and artists in the Mughal court, 1590–1595.In the early sixteenth century, northern India, being ruled then mainly by Muslim rulers,[53] fell again to the superior mobility and firepower of a new generation of Central Asian warriors.[54] The Mughal empire, which resulted, did not stamp out the local societies it came to rule, but rather balanced and pacified them through new administrative practices,[55] and diverse and inclusive ruling elites,[56] leading to more systematic, centralized and uniform rule.[57] Eschewing tribal bonds and Islamic identity, especially under Akbar, the Mughals united their far flung realms through loyalty, expressed through a Persianized culture, to an emperor who had near divine status.[56] The Mughal state's economic policies, deriving most revenues from agriculture,[58] and mandating that taxes be paid in the well-regulated silver currency,[59] caused peasants and artisans to enter larger markets.[57] The relative peace maintained by the empire during much of the seventeenth century was a factor in India's economic expansion,[57] and resulted in greater patronage of painting, literary forms, textiles, and architecture.[60] Newly coherent social groups in northern and western India, such as the Marathas, the Rajputs, and the Sikhs gained military and governing ambitions during Mughal rule, which, through collaboration or adversity, gave them both recognition and military experience.[61] Expanding commerce during Mughal rule gave rise to new Indian commercial and political elites in the southern and eastern coastal India.[61] As the empire disintegrated, many among these elites were able to seek and control their own affairs.[62]
By the early 18th century, with the lines between commercial and political dominance being increasingly blurred, a number of European trading companies, including the English East India Company, had established outposts on the coast of India.[63] The East India Company's control of the seas, its greater resources, and its army's more advanced training methods and technology, led it to increasingly flex its military muscle and caused it to become attractive to a portion of the Indian elite; both these factors were crucial in the Company becoming the ruler of the Bengal region by 1765, and sidelining the other European companies.[64] Its further access to the riches of Bengal and the subsequent increased strength and size of its army enabled it to annex or subdue most of India by the 1820s.[65] India was now no longer exporting manufactured goods as it long had, but was instead supplying the British empire with raw materials, and most historians consider this to be the true onset of India's colonial period.[66] By this time also, with its economic power severely curtailed by the British parliament and effectively now an arm of British administration, the Company began to more consciously enter non-economic arenas such as education, social reform, and culture.[67]
Map of the British Indian Empire from the Imperial Gazetteer of India, Oxford University Press, 1909Depending upon the historian, India's modern age begins variously in 1848, when with the appointment of Lord Dalhousie as Governor General of the Company rule in India, changes essential to a modern state, including the consolidation and demarcation of sovereignty, the surveillance of the population, and the education of citizens, were put in place, and technological changes, among them, railways, canals, and telegraph were introduced not long after being introduced in Europe;[68] 1857, when disaffection with the Company's rule, set off by diverse resentments, which included British social reforms, harshness of land taxes, and the humiliation of landed and princely aristocracy, led to the Indian rebellion of 1857 in many parts of northern India;[69] 1858, when after the suppression of the rebellion, the British government took over the direct administration of India, and proclaimed a unitary state, which on the one hand envisaged a limited and gradual British-style parliamentary system, but on the other hand protected India's princes and large landlords as a feudal safeguard;[70] and 1885, when the founding of the Indian National Congress marked the beginning of a period in which public life emerged at an all-India level.[71]
Jawaharlal Nehru (left) became India's first prime minister in 1947. Mahatma Gandhi (right) was a political and ideological leader during the Indian Independence Movement.Although the rush of technology and the commercialization of agriculture in the second half of the 19th century was marked by economic setbacks—many small farmers became dependent on the whims of far away markets,[72] there was an increase in the number of large-scale famines,[73] and, despite the Indian taxpayers enduring the risks of infrastructure development, little industrial employment was generated for Indians,[74]—there were also salutary effects: commercial cropping, especially in the newly canalled Punjab, increased food production for internal consumption,[75] the railway network provided critical famine relief,[76] reduced notably the cost of moving goods,[76] and helped the nascent Indian owned industry.[75] After the first world war, in which some one million Indians served,[77] a new period began, which was marked by British reforms, but also repressive legislation, by more strident Indian calls for self-rule, and by the beginnings of a nonviolent movement of non-cooperation, of which Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi would become the leader and enduring symbol.[78] During the 1930s, slow legislative reform was enacted by the British and the Indian National Congress won victories in the resulting elections.[79] However, the next decade would be beset with crises, which included, the second world war, the Congress's final push of non-cooperation, and the upsurge of Muslim nationalism—all capped by the independence of India in 1947, but tempered by the bloody partition of the subcontinent into two states.[80]
Vital to India's self-image as an independent nation was its constitution, completed in 1950, which put in place a sovereign, secular, democratic republic.[81] In the 60 years since, India has had a mixed bag of successes and failures.[82] On the positive side, it has remained a democracy with many civil liberties, an activist Supreme Court, and an independent press;[82] economic liberalization in the 1990s, has created a large urban middle-class, transformed India into one of the fastest-growing economies in the world,[83] and increased its global clout; and Indian movies, new music, and spiritual teachings, have increasingly contributed to global culture.[82] However, on the negative side, India has been weighed down with seemingly unyielding poverty, both rural and urban;[82] by religious and caste-related violence,[84] by the insurgencies of Maoist inspired Naxalites,[85] and separatists in Jammu and Kashmir;[86] India has unresolved territorial disputes with the People's Republic of China, which escalated into the Sino-Indian War of 1962,[87] with Pakistan which resulted in wars in 1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999,[88] and nuclear rivalry which came to a head in 1998.[89] India's sustained democratic freedoms, for over 60 years, are unique among the world's new nations; however, in spite of its recent economic successes, freedom from want for its disadvantaged population, remains a goal yet to be achieved.[90]
After the tenth century, Muslim Central Asian nomadic clans, using swift horse cavalry and raising vast armies united by ethnicity and religion, repeatedly overran South Asia's north-western plains, and led eventually to the establishment of the Islamic Delhi Sultanate in 1206.[48] The Sultanate was to control much of North India, and to make many forays into South India. Although at first disruptive for the Indian elites, the Sultanate largely left its vast non-Muslim subject population to its own laws and customs.[49] By repeatedly repulsing the Mongol raiders in the thirteenth century, the Sultanate saved India from the destruction seen in west and central Asia, and set the scene for centuries of migration of fleeing soldiers, learned men, mystics, traders, artists, and artisans from that region into India, thereby creating a syncretic Indo-Islamic culture in the north.[50] The Sultanate's raiding and weakening of the regional kingdoms of South India, paved the way for the indigenous Vijayanagara Empire.[51] Embracing a strong Shaivite tradition and building upon the military technology of the Sultanate, the empire came to control much of peninsular India,[52] and to influence the society and culture of South India for long afterwards.[51]
Early modern India
By the early 18th century, with the lines between commercial and political dominance being increasingly blurred, a number of European trading companies, including the English East India Company, had established outposts on the coast of India.[63] The East India Company's control of the seas, its greater resources, and its army's more advanced training methods and technology, led it to increasingly flex its military muscle and caused it to become attractive to a portion of the Indian elite; both these factors were crucial in the Company becoming the ruler of the Bengal region by 1765, and sidelining the other European companies.[64] Its further access to the riches of Bengal and the subsequent increased strength and size of its army enabled it to annex or subdue most of India by the 1820s.[65] India was now no longer exporting manufactured goods as it long had, but was instead supplying the British empire with raw materials, and most historians consider this to be the true onset of India's colonial period.[66] By this time also, with its economic power severely curtailed by the British parliament and effectively now an arm of British administration, the Company began to more consciously enter non-economic arenas such as education, social reform, and culture.[67]
Modern India
Vital to India's self-image as an independent nation was its constitution, completed in 1950, which put in place a sovereign, secular, democratic republic.[81] In the 60 years since, India has had a mixed bag of successes and failures.[82] On the positive side, it has remained a democracy with many civil liberties, an activist Supreme Court, and an independent press;[82] economic liberalization in the 1990s, has created a large urban middle-class, transformed India into one of the fastest-growing economies in the world,[83] and increased its global clout; and Indian movies, new music, and spiritual teachings, have increasingly contributed to global culture.[82] However, on the negative side, India has been weighed down with seemingly unyielding poverty, both rural and urban;[82] by religious and caste-related violence,[84] by the insurgencies of Maoist inspired Naxalites,[85] and separatists in Jammu and Kashmir;[86] India has unresolved territorial disputes with the People's Republic of China, which escalated into the Sino-Indian War of 1962,[87] with Pakistan which resulted in wars in 1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999,[88] and nuclear rivalry which came to a head in 1998.[89] India's sustained democratic freedoms, for over 60 years, are unique among the world's new nations; however, in spite of its recent economic successes, freedom from want for its disadvantaged population, remains a goal yet to be achieved.[90]
No comments:
Post a Comment