Resistance, resilience and the first invasions

This chapter covers the centuries from 1000 CE to 1700 CE. It was a time of repeated invasions and wars, often with religious discrimination and hardship. The book uses two key words to understand it.

Imagine someone tries to take over your house:

• If you fight back to keep it, that is resistance: actively opposing a force or threat to protect power, land, interests or cultural and spiritual identity. It can be war, but also alliances, diplomacy and negotiation.
• If, even after losing a room, your family holds together, recovers and keeps its way of life, that is resilience: the ability to survive, adapt and keep one's inherited traditions through hard times. Communities showed it by restoring places of worship, changing customs to suit the times and living side by side across religions.

The book puts it simply: resilience is the backbone of resistance. A leader or a cause starts a resistance; the strength to keep going comes from resilience. The period was not only war; it had conflict and cooperation both.

Why invasions came. From the 7th century onwards, waves of invasions were driven by the wish for more territory and by religious motives. The rich harvests of the fertile river plains (the agrarian surplus) made people prosperous, and that wealth also drew invaders.

The first waves. From the mid-7th century, Arab forces attacked by sea and land, and were pushed back by Indian rulers in the Deccan, Malwa, Kashmir and Rajasthan. (So do not write that the first attack was by Mahmud of Ghazni.) Then:

• 1001: Mahmud, Sultan of Ghazni (in present-day Afghanistan and north-eastern Iran), attacked Jayapala of the Hindu Shahi dynasty.
• In the 11th and 12th centuries the Hindu Shahis, Chandellas, Solankis and Chauhans fought the Turkish invaders.
• 1178: Queen Naiki Devi of the Chaulukya kingdom defeated Muhammad Ghuri at Kasahrada, near Mount Abu.
• 1192: Ghuri defeated Prithviraj Chauhan in the Second Battle of Tarain.

By the end of the 12th century the Chauhans, Gahadavalas and Senas came under Turkic control, but Gujarat, Malwa and the Chandellas of Bundelkhand held out for about a hundred years more. Present-day Odisha and parts of Assam were never conquered by the Turks, and Rajputana stayed a centre of resistance. In short: northern and western India bore the brunt, while peninsular India stayed free of Turkic rule.