In 1025 a Chola fleet from south India sailed across the Bay of Bengal and attacked the ports of Srivijaya, a trading empire based on Sumatra that controlled the straits leading to China. Few people outside India know this story, yet it shows how powerful and outward looking India's medieval kingdoms could be. The centuries between the Guptas and the Mughals are often told as a tale of invasions from the northwest. They were also an age of great regional states, magnificent temples and new religious movements.

Regional powers

In the north, Harsha ruled a large kingdom from Kanauj between 606 and 647; the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, who studied at Nalanda, left a vivid portrait of his court. After him, no single power dominated. The Palas of Bengal patronized Buddhist monasteries, the Rashtrakutas of the Deccan carved the Kailasa temple at Ellora out of a single hillside, and Rajput clans ruled much of the northwest. In the south, the Pallavas and then the Cholas built strong states. The Chola king Rajaraja I completed the great Brihadeeswarar temple at Thanjavur around 1010, and his son Rajendra I sent the naval expedition against Srivijaya. Temples in this era were not just places of worship but landowners, banks, employers and symbols of royal power, which matters for what comes next.

Arrivals from the northwest

Islam reached India by several routes. Arab and Persian merchants settled peacefully in coastal towns of Kerala and Gujarat. In 712 an Arab army under Muhammad bin Qasim conquered Sindh. Later came raids from Afghanistan. Mahmud of Ghazni raided northern India repeatedly between about 1000 and 1027, looting wealthy temples including Somnath in 1025, and carried the treasure back to adorn his capital. He did not try to rule the Ganges plain. That changed with Muhammad of Ghor. At the second battle of Tarain in 1192, Muhammad of Ghor defeated the Rajput king Prithviraj Chauhan, opening the road to Delhi.

The Sultanate

When Muhammad of Ghor died, his general Qutb al-Din Aibak, a former slave soldier, stayed on as ruler. The Delhi Sultanate was established in 1206 and lasted until 1526 under five successive dynasties: the Mamluks (or Slave dynasty), the Khaljis, the Tughlaqs, the Sayyids and the Lodis. Its rulers were Turkic or Afghan Muslims governing a mostly Hindu population, and they depended on Hindu officials, bankers and landholders to collect revenue.

Several rulers stand out. Razia Sultana, who reigned from 1236 to 1240, was the only woman to rule the Delhi Sultanate; she rode into battle and held court unveiled, which some nobles resented. Alauddin Khalji drove back repeated Mongol invasions and imposed strict price controls on grain and goods in Delhi to keep his large army affordable. Muhammad bin Tughlaq moved his capital from Delhi to Daulatabad in the Deccan and issued copper tokens to be used like silver coins; both schemes failed, the second because tokens were easy to forge. The Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta served as a judge at his court and described both his generosity and his cruelty. In 1398 the Central Asian conqueror Timur sacked Delhi, and the Sultanate never fully recovered.

In the south, the Vijayanagara Empire was founded in 1336 by the brothers Harihara and Bukka and became one of the largest and richest states in India. Vijayanagara fought the Muslim sultanates of the Deccan for two centuries and was finally defeated at the battle of Talikota in 1565. Meanwhile, devotional movements spread across India. Bhakti poets taught loving devotion to God over ritual and caste, Sufi mystics drew Hindu and Muslim followers to their shrines, and Guru Nanak, born in 1469, founded the Sikh tradition.

Debating temple destruction

Sultans did destroy temples, and the memory of that destruction remains politically charged. The historian Richard Eaton argued that sultans mostly targeted temples tied to rival kings, treating them as political symbols, and that his count of securely documented cases was in the dozens over several centuries, not thousands. Rulers who desecrated an enemy's royal temple often protected temples within their own domains. Critics reply that Eaton relied on a narrow set of sources, that chronicles celebrate destruction in openly religious terms, and that many cases went unrecorded. Both sides agree temples were destroyed; they differ on scale and motive.

Worked example: Somnath's many memories

Mahmud's raid on the Somnath temple in Gujarat is remembered in very different ways. Persian chronicles written after the raid celebrate it as a triumph of faith and turn the plunder into legend. Yet Sanskrit inscriptions from Gujarat in the following centuries barely mention the raid and show the temple rebuilt and functioning, and one inscription records a Muslim trader funding a mosque nearby with the help of local Hindu officials. In the nineteenth century, a debate in the British Parliament in 1843 about some supposed gates from Somnath helped spread the idea that the raid had left a thousand-year wound.

The historian Romila Thapar traced these layers and argued that the event's meaning grew over time. Others answer that trauma can be real even when contemporary records are thin. The lesson for any student is to ask who remembered an event, when, and why. Memory is evidence too, but evidence of the people doing the remembering.