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Hephthalites and Declining Trade

The Hephthalites were a nomadic people who lived in tents and were often in search of pasture, moving to coolness in summer and to warmth in the winter.  In the late 400s they defeated the Persians, and they moved eastward into Transoxiana. Dissension within the Gupta royal family weakened the Gupta empire. Samudra Gupta had repelled an invasion by the Hephthalites, but in the early 500s the Hephthalites returned, perhaps aware that India was an easier take. The Hephthalites moved across the Hindu Kush and into the Punjab and Kashmir, and they advanced into the Ganges Valley in search of plunder. There they ruined cities, towns, trading centers and Buddhist monasteries. The great city Pataliputra was reduced to a mere village of people.

The Hephthalites withdrew from the Ganges Valley, but they continued to hold territory in the Punjab and Kashmir, with Piandjshent, sixty-five kilometers south of Samarkand, as the center of their rule. And, with the Gupta empire gone, the Hephthalites became the superpower in Middle Asia.  

It did not last long. Soon they were attacked by an alliance of Persians and Turks. In the late 550s this coalition defeated them militarily, the Persians pursuing the Hephthalites in revenge for the defeat the Hephthalites had given their forefathers a century before.  The Hephthalites vanished from history, and it is believed that they reappeared later in Central Asia as those called Avars.

India, meanwhile, was divided into numerous small kingdoms, which meant military weakness. And economic decline had come to some of India's cities. Profitable trade with the Roman Empire had ended, and by the mid-500s India's trade with Persia had also declined.     [COMMENT]

More Variation in Hinduism

Hinduism, meanwhile, remained a religion with much variety. It was less organized and less concerned with heresy than Christianity, and it developed new trends. A movement called Bhakti - meaning devotion - had arisen among some of the poor in southern India and it would spread to the north. It was another move away from the religion of aristocrats. Bhakti worshipers rejected Brahmin scholarship and ritual Brahmin sacrifices, for which they lacked time as well as money. And being of lower caste, Bhakti adherents rejected, or at least minimized, caste. The followers of Bhakti practiced humility and sang of their adoration and love for a generous, merciful, supreme God. As in Christianity, women were encouraged to participate and Bhakti had some upper class devotees. And some within the Bhakti movement were made saints.

Hinduism changed again when Krishna became a god apart from Vishnu. Rivalry between Vishnu worship and the worship of another god, Shiva, had grown. The worshipers of Shiva tended to be rural, more intense in their devotion and more concerned with sin, especially the sin of carnality, while the worshipers of Vishnu were more urbane and moderate. The rural Shiva worshippers were closer to fertility worship than the worshippers of Vishnu, and some devoted to Vishnu derided the followers of Shiva as phallus worshipers. The priests of Vishnu worship tended to be Brahmins and saw their god Vishnu as both a god of love and a protector of order. They thought themselves more dignified than the priests of Shiva, and they saw themselves as maintaining Hinduism's noble tradition.

More variety came in the 600s after twelve worshipers of Vishnu began wandering through southern India singing songs in praise of Vishnu. These singers believed that worldly enjoyments were ultimately unprofitable and that only a loving surrender to Vishnu was durably satisfying. They sang in temples, villages and markets. The number of singers grew. A book of four thousand of their songs was to be compiled in the 900s and would become the prayer book called the Tamil Veda.

Also in the 600s some Hindus, including worshipers of Vishnu, became involved in rituals called Tantrism. While acknowledging the supreme authority of the Vedas, the Tantrists brought offerings of fruit and sweets to the icons of their gods. Their rituals celebrated the power of motherhood, and they saw birth as the highest form of divine strength.

The Rule of Harsha Vardhana

In the 600s Buddhism made a comeback after a warrior-king from north of Delhi, Harsha Vardhana, managed to unify much of India's far north. Harsha supported Buddhism and tried to emulate the Buddhist monarch Asoka. He made the killing of any creature or the eating of any flesh within his empire a capital offense - with possibility of a pardon.

Harsha's rule began in 606 and extended to the Himalayas in the north, to Punjab and Bengal. He wanted to India as had the Maurya or Gupta empires, but in 630 he was stopped at the Narbada River by Pulakeshin II, of the Chalukyan dynasty, centered at Badami (Vatapi).

Harsha died in 648, after which no heir was able to hold together his empire. Fragmentation of his empire ensued, while in southern India the Pallava dynasty, centered at Kanchipuram, often warred against the Chalukyan dynasty, the Chalukyan dynasty coming to an end in 767.

Islam Arrives

Pirate raids by Indians against Muslim shipping on the Indian Ocean were followed by a reprisal invasion of the Sind - near the Indus River delta. No Indian force drove the Muslims out of the Sind. The conquered area was not rich enough in agricultural potential to induce the Arabs to establish themselves there permanently, and the Muslims left on their own accord.  

In the 800s, Hindu intellectuals were aware of Muslim criticism of their faith. Led by a philosopher named Shakara (788-850), a few Hindu thinkers set out to defend Hinduism, especially against the Muslim charge that Hinduism was idolatrous. Shankara systematized the intellectual tradition of the Upanishads. Defenders of Hinduism claimed that, properly understood, Hindu rites helped simple folk along the path to a pure and transcendent belief in one God and to an absolute truth beyond sensory experience. Shankara gave a new impetus to orthodox Brahminism. He traveled about India, founding many religious schools, and he became a most revered Hindu leader. He imagined a unified reality and described Hinduism as about the realization of a single god in all things. He claimed that salvation came through philosophical speculation and meditation leading to the realization that Dow and one's self were the same.

However much Shankara brought unity to Hindu ideology, politically India remained disunited and therefore militarily weak. without an army capable of defending against a Muslim army out of Afghanistan. In the late 900s, from an independent kingdom centered at Ghazni, through the Khyber Pass, Muslim Turks on horseback began raiding temple towns in northwest India. These Muslims terrorized Hindus and carried back as much booty as they could, much of it from temples. The raiding stopped around 1010 after the Hindus agreed to pay tribute to the ruler of Ghazni - Mahmud. Here was the traditional act of submission, the Indians sending to Ghazni annual trains of elephants laden with gifts.

The agreement between the Muslims and the Indians broke down and raiding resumed, the Muslims believing they were wielding the sword of Muhammad. They smashed more Hindu temples. They slaughtered or enslaved thousands, leaving survivors shocked and disappointed that they were not being protected from harm by their god Shiva.

Mahmud broke the power of the local rulers in the areas that he raided. He shattered the economy of northeastern India. The precious metals taken from India's temples went into circulation. And much as Alexander's conquests had freed the gold of Darius III and had stimulated the economy in Alexander's time, the riches taken from India's temples gave rise to economic activity in Mahmud's empire. Mahmud erected buildings and magnificent mosques in Ghazni. He turned Ghazni  into a world center of Islamic culture, and he financed more military campaigns in Central Asia.

Mahmud was the greatest of rulers of the Ghaznavid Dynasty, ruling from 999 CE to the year 1030. Eventually his empire collapsed. Civil war left Ghazni in ruins by 1151. In Afghanistan a new Turkish dynasty arose: the Ghurids. With the Hindu reputation for weakness, a Ghurid army invaded India and fought its way to Delhi, reaching that city in 1193, overwhelming fierce Hindu opposition along the way. And by 1202 the Ghurids had conquered the larger kingdoms along the Ganges River.

The Ghurid invaders were Muslims and unimpressed by Indic civilization. They did not adopt culturally as had invaders prior to Islam. Coming across Buddhism, they saw it as debased idol worship and tried to destroy it. They sacked Buddhism's major centers, slaughtering many, destroying Buddhism in northern India and sending Buddhists fleeing to Nepal and Tibet, where Buddhism was to flourish.  

The Ghurids despised Hinduism, but their slaughter and enslavement of Hindus and the ruination of Hindu holy places was ineffective in diminishing that faith.  The Hindus were too numerous for them. Only on the fringe of Hindu society were people attracted to Islam.

Muslim rulers in northern India refused to allow Hindu temples to be rebuilt, and, without temples, Hindu ceremonies became more public and plebeian. Ceremonies were often performed in a town's public square, with amassed worshipers passing along the town's streets. Without temple ritual, communion with God through ecstasy increased, and Sanskrit remained a language of a learned few - the language of the Brahmins

Stagnation and Economic Decline

In Hindu society since the early 900s, feuds over possession of land were common - between families and between principalities. Vendettas developed between families. Wars arose. Potentates had risen to power through violence, and many of them wished to perpetuate an image of military prowess and to acquire more land - land being the major source of status. A disparaging remark by a rival was justification for starting a war, and wars were made into grand pageants.  

Wars were also glorified in literature - as they had been in the story of Krishna in a chariot with Arjuna. Death on the battlefield was seen as the highest possible honor. And the dead warrior's wife was obliged to join her husband in death - a ritual sacrifice called suti. In suti, the spirit of the woman put to flames snatches her husband from the hands of Yamdoot (the messenger of death) and takes him to Swarglok (paradise).

Landowners with great power were accumulating more land at the expense of their more humble neighbors. Less land was available to free peasants, and more people became hired workers on the land of the wealthy. Estate owners lived in splendor while others did the work. A few princes had thousands of servants and hangers-on. A few had harems. Their families wore extravagant clothes and jewels. Owners gave land to others to manage, while those who worked their lands were denied freedom and relegated to the Shudra caste - the caste of menials.

Agriculture on the big estates remained inefficient, and a large part of the rest of agriculture in Hindu society was subsistence farming - farming without trade. There was no beef industry that was supplementing the diet of people as in Europe. In India the veneration of cattle was inimical to this kind of meat industry.

Enough surplus was produced by the great estates that some trade with foreigners flourished. Indians continued to export rice, other cereals, coconuts, spices, sugar, woods, dyes and precious stones, while importing perfumes, finished cloth including silk, wax, precious stones, gold, medicinal herbs, ceramics and metal wares. But much of this trade was handled by foreign merchants - mainly Muslims. Brahmins were much like the Confucians in their opposition to trade, the Brahmins making involvement in foreign trade, as well as farming and overseas travel, forbidden to their class. Generally, religious contemplation was esteemed while people with power had little interest in improving conditions for the merchant or in improving technology.

There was, however, an improvement in the making of cotton. Muslims introduced India to a new method of working cotton - the Carter's bow - an improvement over beating the cotton with switches. The spinning wheel also appeared and increased cotton production.

By the 13th century, many trade guilds were disappearing, and many trade connections were coming to a close. Trade within India had diminished as wealth was hoarded rather than invested - hoarded either by wealthy individuals or by religious establishments. And, with diminished trade, roads deteriorated. In towns were merchants with a spirit of enterprise. There was bustle and hard work, but in India a centralized government was not benefiting the middle class. Big landowners, princes and potentates, would remain most influential - a conservative influence as in Spain, Russia and eastern Europe in general. The landed wealthy in India would wield a conservative authoritarianism. India would remain as conservatively religious as Spain and eastern Europe, with taboos inhibiting modernization. Brahmin priests encouraged obscurantism among India's elite. Rodents and insects could not be killed and vast amount of foodstuffs were lost. Rules about handling refuse and excreta contributed to disease. The caste system choked initiative. And rather than send investments and soldiers abroad, India would be receiving them.

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