The North

North India 

Many changes took place in north India between 600 and 400 B.C.  New cities and towns grew up. People stopped moving from place to place, settled down and gave the place that they settled in a name. There are stories of the travels and the lives of common people. People took up different occupations and were willing to listen to the advocates opposing rituals, the caste system and the Brahmanas. New religious ideas and religions emerged.

The teachings of Buddha and Mahavira formed the basis of Buddhism and Jainism. Goshala and Ajita died out after some time. Small states existed in the Later Vedic period. They became larger, with clearer boundaries. These states came to be formed with kings or ruling councils. Each state had a capital city and army.  They exchanged goods and traded with each other. Trade was by sea and land. Merchants and traders became very important. Trade made the kingdom prosperous.

Towns and Cities 

After about a thousand years urban centres and cities in these states people settled in the new areas came up on the fertile, alluvial Ganga plains.  Iron came to be used widely.  People who lived in cities were administrators, crafts persons or traders. Literary texts tell us about artisans and crafts. Writing was known as from Asoka’s inscriptions of the third century

Houses were built of wood, fired brick and mud brick. Buddhist texts describe these cities. Some towns were well planed with grid patterned roads i.e. arranged at right angles. There was a street of ivory workers in Varanasi and 500 potter’s shops in Vaishali. Ring wells were a new type of well built by fixing terracotta rings together near houses and in cities. There were innovations in crafts.  Artisans and merchants were organised in guilds which laid down rules for production, marketing and trade.

A new type of pottery, shiny black, named Northern Black Polished Ware, has been found at many places. The pottery could be steel-blue, silvery or a mud brown. 

There is evidence to show that there was trade over long distances. As of about the fifth century B.C., punch marked coins, pieces of silver or copper have been found.  Copper wire was used to mend broken pots. Items made of bone, ivory, silver, copper, iron, topaz, crystal, carnelian, shell and glass have been found. Cotton cloth was woven.

Kashi and Koshala

These two kingdoms fought many wars with each other. The Koshalas conquered and took over Kashi in about 500B.C.

Magadha 

Magadha is rich in mineral deposits, and economically, it had many resources, both copper and iron. The soil is fertile and all main trade routes passed through. Consequently Magadha rose in importance.

Bimbisara

Bimbisara of the Haryanka dynasty ruled between B.C. 546 and 494. He made alliances with Avanti and Gandhara and defeated the king of Anga to gain control over the sea ports of the east. His kingdom had 80, 000 villages.

Bimbisara’s marriage to Chellanna, a Licchavi princess (Nepal) and Khema of Madra Punjab helped him expand his influence. He married Koshaladevi of Koshala. He received Kashi as dowry. The princess of Videha, Vasava, was another wife. It is said that Bimbisara had 500 wives. Four wives are known.

Ajatashatru

Bimbisara’s son, Ajatashatru took over the kingdom and ruled from B.C. 494 to 460. Perhaps Bimbisara was imprisoned or murdered by his son. Kashi-Koshala joined the Licchavis and together they fought against Ajatashatru for sixteen years. 

Ajatashatru used two new weapons – a knife-edged chariot and a large catapult that could hurl boulders. He won the battles. Ajatashatru’s son, Udayin, killed him. Three more kings killed their fathers. The people were unhappy with the state of affairs and made one of the ministers, Shishunaga, the king.  He had been an efficient minister.

Shishunaga kings ruled for seventy years. There were twelve and some ruled at the same time. They conquered Avanti and shifted their capital to Vaishali. They had a large empire and added Kalinga to their territory. Their army had 60,000 cavalry and 6,000 war elephants.

The Greek king, Alexander invaded north-west India at this time. The Nandas took over around 360 B.C. There were nine Nanda kings. The Puranas say there were a father and eight sons while Buddhist books say that they were all brothers. 

The first ruler was Mahapadma and the last was called Danananda. The Nandas ruled until about B.C. 321. They were the first Indian kings to form a large kingdom or an empire.

The South and Deccan

The Mughal Empire was only the second empire in Indian history to extend across the entire Subcontinent. Descendants of Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, the Mughals combined a sterling military pedigree with dynastic prestige unrivalled.

The cultural history of the Deccan is complex, and must be set against what begins as a episodic political framework inaugurated by a Mauryan presence in the region as far south as Chitaldrug district near Mysore in the 3rd century BC, but followed not long after by the emergence of the Satavahanas. 

The Satavahanas developed relations with local lords and client-states in key sub-regions to the east and south of their capital at Paithan, leading to the first powerful regional polity of the Deccan, lasting until the beginning of the 3rd century AD. 

As a result of the Gupta consolidation of power in north and central India in the 4th century A.D., is partly in collaboration and rivalry with the Vākāṭakas of the Deccan, smaller lineages. The kingdoms appeared throughout the subcontinent imitating Gupta political culture. 

By the 6th century, a variety of royal lineage polities emerged in the Deccan with some powerful kingdoms able to challenge the ruling houses of northern India. A  Cālukya ruler based in Badami (modern-day Karnataka), defeated the north Indian king Harṣavardhana and sent embassies to the Sasanian court.

The empire’s advance south was fiercely resisted by the Deccan sultanates of Ahmednagar, Golconda and Bijapur as well as the Marathas.  It was only under Aurangzeb that Mughal rule finally extended into the deep south of India. By examining South India’s geopolitical landscape and the Mughal state of the 17th century. 

The reasons lie behind the Mughals’ southern campaigns. Explaining how these were achieved, the paper then assesses the impact of the conquests on the South Indian political milieu and the challenges they posed to the Mughal polity itself.