History of Medieval India

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About the Book This book gives a comprehensive, analytical and critical account of the political and military history of medieval India. This age of Indian history was marked by the onslaught of Turkish invasions and the establishment of Muslim rule in northern India, first at Lahore and then at Delhi. The Sultanate of Delhi lasted from 1206 to 1526 when it was overrun and replaced by a fresh wave of the Muslim adventurers, called Mughals, under the leadership of Babar. The sultans of Delhi set up 'an Islamic state' in India. Of the all-told thirty- two sultans of Lahore and Delhi, thirteen died a natural death, two by accidents and four were killed on the battlefields, while one of the sultans was deposed and died a private citizen and as many as twelve of them were assassinated or died in confinement.

Like the Turko-Afghan sultans of Delhi the Mughals were also foreign conquerors but Akbar the Great (1556-1605), transformed his ruling house into a national monarchy and laid the foundation of a 'secular nation-state'. Aurangzeb (1658-1707) discarded the state policy of Akbar and brought about the ruin of his ruling dynasty, leading to the rise of the Marathas as a short-lived national power.

About the Author Dr. J. L. Mehta is an alumnus of the Punjab University, Lahore/Chandigarh. He has published a number of research papers. monographs and books, including his four serial publications, under the caption, Advanced Study in the History of Medieval India and Modern India.

Dr. Sarita Mehta, now settled in U.S.A., was educated from Punjab University, Chandigarh and Patiala. Now formally engaged in teaching Hindi in a prestigious college of New York. She is a Director of the Vidyadham, an educational institute of the migrant Indians in New York. She obtained the Master's degree in Religious Education in June 2003. She has contributed a number of articles, research papers and monographs in the fields of ancient Indian history and culture and sociology.

Preface This is the second volume of our study on the history of India, the first volume of which was brought out by the Lotus Press, Publishers & Distributors five years ago; it gives a comprehensive, analytical and critical account of the political and military history of the medieval period. It makes a modest attempt to reconstruct and preserve for the posterity a concise and objective national history of our country during the period under review by making liberal use of the Persian and Arabic literary sources, particularly, as left by the contemporary Muslim historians and chroniclers. It has been repeatedly emphasised by us in our earlier publications that the ancient Indians took little interest in recording the political, social and other material developments of their times in proper sequence as their sages and scholars preoccupied themselves primarily with the moral, spiritual and higher values of human attainments and did not bother much about. the mundane affairs of this materialistic world. The credit for introducing the art of historiography, as it is understood today, was brought to India by the Muslims, and the Indian historiography is essentially an Islamic heritage. It were the Muslim ulema and chroniclers who showed a keen sense of history and wrote detailed accounts of the day-to-day happenings and political upheavals. The Muslim generals and rulers employed chroniclers, diarists and court historians to maintain profuse records of their military exploits, conquests of new lands and subjugation of the new peoples in their bid to transform the Dar-ul-Harb of this world into Dar-ul-Islam by the conversion of 'infidels' to the Islamic faith. Their primary object in doing so was, of course, the glory of Isam; but even otherwise, they were men of this world who valued their material possessions and strove hard to multiply their worldly gains; this instinct helped them in keeping track of the past and present. Some of the great Muslim warriors and rulers, like Amir Timur, Babar and Jahangir, even wrote personally or with the assistance of their scribes, autobiographical memoirs to pass on to the next generations. Accordingly, historiography flourished in all of its forms under the patronage of the Muslim rulers of medieval India; and the age produced a number of professional historians, chroniclers and men of letters who have bequeathed to us a rich treasure of historical literature.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages