From the planned cities of the Indus to the Mughals and the British Raj — how South Asia was united, divided and united again.
Stop 01 · c. 2600–1900 BCE
The Indus Valley Cities
Between about 2600 and 1900 BCE, cities like Harappa and Mohenjo-daro flourished along the Indus River, in what is now Pakistan and north-western India. More than 1,000 settlements are known, but only five were major cities, among them Dholavira in Gujarat and Rakhigarhi in Haryana. They had grid-planned streets, standardised baked bricks and weights, and drainage systems unmatched elsewhere for centuries; even ordinary houses had water and drains. Unlike Egypt or Mesopotamia, they left no clear palaces or great temples. Seals like theirs turn up in Mesopotamia, a sign of long-distance trade. Their script has never been deciphered, and why the cities declined, perhaps as monsoon rains shifted, is still debated.
Between about 2600 and 1900 BCE, cities like Harappa and Mohenjo-daro flourished along the Indus River, in what is now Pakistan and north-western India. More than 1,000 settlements are known, but only five were major cities, among them Dholavira in Gujarat and Rakhigarhi in Haryana. They had grid-planned streets, standardised baked bricks and weights, and drainage systems unmatched elsewhere for centuries; even ordinary houses had water and drains. Unlike Egypt or Mesopotamia, they left no clear palaces or great temples. Seals like theirs turn up in Mesopotamia, a sign of long-distance trade. Their script has never been deciphered, and why the cities declined, perhaps as monsoon rains shifted, is still debated.
More than a thousand years after the Indus cities faded, new cities rose in the Ganges plain. Buddhist texts list sixteen great states of this age, the Mahajanapadas; most were kingdoms, but two were probably aristocratic republics. New movements challenged the old Vedic religion. Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, was born by tradition at Lumbini, reached awakening at Bodh Gaya and taught across the region; Mahavira, the great teacher of the Jains, lived at the same time. Both were contemporaries of Bimbisara of Magadha, whose first capital was Rajagriha. Magadha swallowed its rivals, moved its capital to Pataliputra on the Ganges, and under the Nanda dynasty came to dominate northern India. The Buddha's own dates are uncertain.
Around 321 BCE Chandragupta Maurya overthrew the Nanda dynasty of Magadha and founded the first empire to unite most of the subcontinent, ruling from Pataliputra and reaching west into Afghanistan after a war with Seleucus I, one of Alexander's successors. His grandson Ashoka conquered Kalinga, on the east coast, around 261 BCE. By Ashoka's own count 100,000 people were killed and 150,000 deported. Horrified by the bloodshed, he embraced Buddhism and dhamma, or righteous conduct, and had edicts on ethics and tolerance carved on rocks and pillars across his realm, most in Brahmi script but some in Greek and Aramaic. Ashoka's lion capital from Sarnath is India's national emblem today. The dynasty fell in 185 BCE.
BattlesDhauli: presumed site of the Kalinga battle
Chandragupta I was crowned in 320 CE, and under his son Samudragupta and grandson Chandragupta II the Gupta Empire came to rule much of northern India. From the 4th to 6th centuries CE it presided over a golden age of Sanskrit literature, art and science. The poet Kalidasa wrote his plays, and the mathematician Aryabhata, born in 476, calculated the value of pi to four decimal places and explained eclipses. The decimal place-value numerals, later taken up by Arab mathematicians by the 9th century and carried west, took shape in India in this era. The Chinese monk Faxian, visiting between 405 and 411, praised its mild laws. Invasions by Huna peoples from Central Asia hastened its end.
In the far south, the Tamil Chola dynasty built a maritime power. Rajaraja I, who reigned from 985 to 1014, took northern Sri Lanka in 993 and seized the Maldives. He raised the great granite Brihadisvara temple at Thanjavur (completed 1010), whose tower is among the tallest in South India. His son Rajendra I marched north to the Ganges, built a new capital, Gangaikonda Cholapuram, to celebrate it, and around 1025 sent a naval expedition across the Bay of Bengal against Srivijaya, which controlled the Malacca Strait. His fleet sacked its capital Palembang and then Kedah and captured its king: one of the few overseas military campaigns by any Indian state. The Chola dynasty lasted until 1279.
BattlesAnuradhapura, taken 993 · Palembang, sacked 1025 · Kedah
In 1206 Qutb ud-Din Aibak, a Turkic former slave-soldier of the Ghurid conqueror Muhammad of Ghor, founded the Delhi Sultanate, bringing Islamic rule to northern India; his line is known as the Mamluk, or slave, dynasty. Five dynasties ruled from Delhi until 1526. Its armies repeatedly turned back Mongol invasions that devastated much of Asia: Alauddin Khalji beat them off at Delhi in 1303 and elsewhere, and his generals, among them Malik Kafur, pushed deep into the south. Muhammad bin Tughlaq even forced Delhi's Muslim elite to move to a second capital at Daulatabad. Indo-Islamic architecture such as the Qutb Minar dates from this period. In 1398 Timur sacked Delhi.
In 1336 the brothers Harihara I and Bukka, perhaps former Hoysala army commanders, founded Vijayanagara on the Tungabhadra River, with its capital at what is now Hampi. It fought long wars with the sultanates to its north. Under Krishnadevaraya, who reigned from 1509 to 1529, it reached its height, and by about 1500, some scholars argue, Vijayanagara was the world's second-largest city after Beijing. The Portuguese visitor Domingo Paes, who came from Goa in 1520, judged it as large as Rome. On 23 January 1565 an alliance of Deccan sultanates defeated it at Talikota, beheaded the regent Rama Raya and pillaged the city for six months. The empire lingered until 1646.
In 1526 Babur, a prince from the Fergana valley and a descendant of both Timur and Genghis Khan, won the Battle of Panipat and founded the Mughal Empire. On 21 April his 12,000 men, with firearms and cannon, routed the far larger army of Ibrahim Lodi, the last Sultan of Delhi. His grandson Akbar governed through religious tolerance, hosting debates between faiths at Fatehpur Sikri, and an efficient administration. Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal at Agra for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, completed around 1653. At its height the empire ruled some 150 million people and was among the world's richest states: until 1750 India produced about a quarter of the world's manufactured goods.
In the western Deccan, Shivaji led the Marathi-speaking Marathas in revolt against the Bijapur Sultanate and the Mughals, and in June 1674 he was crowned Chhatrapati at Raigad. The long Maratha insurgency cost the emperor Aurangzeb dearly in men and money. After his death in 1707 Mughal power crumbled. Under the peshwas, hereditary chief ministers ruling from Poona, Maratha armies pushed deep into northern and central India, while the Mughal emperor became largely a figurehead. On 14 January 1761 the Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah Durrani halted them at the Third Battle of Panipat, thought to be the largest battle of the 18th century, where tens of thousands of Marathas died. They recovered, but by 1818 the British had defeated them.
The British East India Company expanded from trading posts to territorial rule, above all after Robert Clive defeated the Nawab of Bengal at Plassey on 23 June 1757. In May 1857 Indian soldiers rose at Meerut and marched on Delhi, proclaiming the aged Mughal Bahadur Shah Zafar emperor. After the uprising was crushed, the British Crown governed India directly as the Raj from 1858. A mass independence movement led by Gandhi and the Indian National Congress grew; in 1930 Gandhi's 24-day Salt March to Dandi defied the British salt monopoly. Freedom came in 1947, but the subcontinent was partitioned into India and Pakistan, uprooting between 12 and 20 million people. Estimates of the dead range from 200,000 to 2 million.