INDIA’S GEOGRAPHICAL DILEMMA - The Revenge of Geography - page 173

by trade and tribute to the Ganges core. It was from the non-Gupta south that the devotional
form of Hinduism spread north to the Ganges. Southern peninsular India, marked heavily
by Dravidian languages, as opposed to the Sanskritic languages spoken in the north, was
truly a region unto itself, separated from the north by the Deccan plateau and under the
maritime influence of the Middle East and Indochina. For more than six centuries follow-
ing the Gupta decline, which was hastened by the influx of Huns from Central Asia, came a
congeries of small states indicating, yet again, that India was not quite China, with the lat-
ter's greater propensity for centralization and political unity. Indeed, the post-Gupta king-
doms, in Stein's words, were “defined less by administration than by language, sectarian
affiliations and temples.” 12
From the seventh through sixteenth centuries, writes Fairgrieve, Muslim peoples suc-
cessively entered India. “The Arabs, as was natural, came first by land along the coast, and
by sea coasting along the shores, but they effected nothing permanent; the Turks next,” he
goes on, “from a little before A.D . 1000 onward, over the plateau of Iran and through Afgh-
anistan. In little over a century, largely because of disputes between Hindu rulers, the whole
northern plain had acknowledged Mohammedan rule.” 13 In the south, Baluchistan and
Sindh were part of the same “desert girdle” that extended unto Mesopotamia. 14 The Indian
Subcontinent was indeed grafted to the Greater Middle East. Among the highlights: Iraqi
Arabs in the early eighth century occupied parts of Sindh, Punjab, Rajasthan, and Gujar-
at. The Turkic Mamluk warrior Mahmud of Ghazni, headquartered in eastern Afghanistan,
united in his early-eleventh-century empire present-day Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran, Afghanistan,
Pakistan, and northwestern India as far as Delhi, and raided Gujarat to the south on the Ar-
abian Sea. From the thirteenth to the early sixteenth century, the so-called Delhi Sultanate
featured rule over northern India and parts of the south by the Turkic Tughluq, the Afghan
Lodi, and other dynasties from Central Asia.
The choice of Delhi as the capital of India for these invaders was very much a function of
geography. As Fairgrieve writes, “Sind and the Indus Valley, including the Punjab … form
but the antechamber to India, to which there is a comparatively narrow passage, 150 miles
wide, between the Indian desert and the Himalayas. At the exit from this passage stands
Delhi.” 15 At Delhi's back was the Islamic world; in front of it the Hindu world. (By this
time Buddhism had virtually disappeared from India, the land of its birth, to move eastward
and northeastward.) Geography has determined that the subcontinent in the northwest is
less a fixed frontier than an interminable series of gradations, beginning in Iran and Afgh-
anistan, and ending in Delhi: again, proof of McNeill's idea in his grand history of human
civilization.
The Mughal Empire was a cultural and political expression of this fact. Few empires
have boasted the artistic and religious eclecticism of the Mughals. They ruled India and
parts of Central Asia vigorously from the early 1500s to 1720 (after which the empire de-