@Virendra
That is exactly why I said we didn't have the aggressive zeal as others have. Our religion, scriptures and way of life teaches us to attend our dharma on our own.
There is no rallying behind prophets and even when dharma yudhha (remote cousin of jihad for some) happens, you'll find only the kshatriyas doing most of the fighting.
Agreed completely except only kshatriya part.
Right and the problem is, there are no signs of difference in statecraft, policies and decisions of the natives between dealing with native enemies and dealing with the foreigners
That is what I have been saying and it is a problem of ideology not of shortsightedness on part of individual rulers. Entire society is to be blamed( perhaps not as pagan society can not comprehend Abrahmic threat in pre modern age) for this.
I must add one thing here - though India was not a binding entity politico-militarily. It was still one civilization, one socio-cultural entity. Bit akin to what you call Aryavarta.
But political fragmentation nullified vastness of this civilization. Women of Peshawar were as ready to burn than lose honour as Rajasthan but because these two areas were not united, individual resistance was overcome easily by bearded ghazis.
They knew they were not dealing with one of the Aryavarta Kingdoms. Yet no special effort was made to psycho-analyze the enemy and his ideology. Result - we were always one step behind and reactive.
Correct. As I said, Europe had same disease but had a centre in form of papacy, we did not have. Even Europe did not act as one in face of Mongol invasions.
Thats the dommsday thinking. What happened to those who went with that thinking? Polity is not the only thing a King has to learn. There is world beyond Aryavarta. If we move our eyes away from it, it and its dangers don't cease to exist for us. I can somewhat understand for those Kingdoms who weren't sharing borders with Mlechhas but what about the NW Rajput states. They were neighbors of these recurring hordes.
In medieval age, people were not aware of areas outside their own civilization. The neighbours of recurring hordes treated them as hordes not as an enemy inspired by similar ideology and with objective of destruction of all of them just because they were Hindus. Jayachandra never thought that Ghuri would attack him as soon as he vanquished Chauhans for he thought in terms of normal diplomacy and was not aware of jehad concept. Also, conquering forces have never been stopped by sudden alliances.
Jaypala Shahi too? What are alliances for, if one doesn't have the required strength on their own. And they did happen. Jaypala did lodge a campaign that got interrupted by severe storm. Were there anymore attempts? No. It doesn't need prosperity to study your enemy and gauge the dangers he poses. It needs foresight, strategic mindset, practical policies and superb logistics. Our rulers dug deep in chivalry were a bit lagging in these areas.
What is distance between Peshawar and Kabul? I suppose 200 miles some 5-6 times less than Ghazanavid march from Ghazni to Somnath. Please note that Ghazanavi did this when he had looted entire Pakistan and UP so it is reasonable to argue that he could finance such a long march easily.
Llalitaditya had immense resources by looting North India and could afford to lose his mercenaries. Calculate cost of feeding 50,000 people for months and then you would get what I am saying. Our rulers did not have superb logistics for want of resources . Why you do not see Senas launching raid into South East Asia like Cholas? Senas were smaller is the answer not that he missed chances for want of aggressiveness.
I mentioned Lalitaditya to show how few rulers were actually willing to go deep into enemy territory. Do you really believe that medieval India didn't have anymore of as powerful Kingdoms up in northern half?
Not with great resources. Feudal and clannish based kingdoms suffer from paucity of central revenue so they can not undertake long and aggressive compaigns unless united by alliances.
Sorry, cultures based on slave trade and plunder don't appeal as complex and sophisticated to me.
I am myself moralistic and I hate them but I meant that materially they were quite sophisticated.
As far as the Math is concerned, they learned it in India.
Yeah, but they progressed further than us and in geometry and map making were better than both Europeans and Indians. Muslim astronomy was also quite advanced.
. Arabs were the most powerful empire in the world for almost a century. Obviously they would travel and progress in that time. How are they fairing after that spike?
Interestingly, Arabs ( arabized persians, maghrebis and spanish) became advanced only after Khalifa Harun Rashid and after him empire was no more.
When they were most powerful empire( I doubt that as Tangs had larger manpower and resources), they were quite backward.
What are the intellctual achievements these days?
That is like saying that Bihar was not advanced than Malaysia in Gupta age because it is now quite poor. I talked about history not said that they have some inherent superiority over us.
Banning women from driving .. raising fatwas that they shouldn't buy cucumbers because they look like the male organ.
I thought ban was for brinjal and Banana
Anyway, such things have not prevented Iran from developing indigenous aircrafts unlike liberal Phillipines.
Social backwardness has not much to do with intellectual backwardness. Harshavardhana's age India was much superior to England or Arabia, despite harsha's mother burning herself and no one stopping it( Mind you it was an ordinary Sati event not any act to protect honour).
We were not handicapped in the capability of critical strategic thinking. Somewhere a big mistake has been made.
Big mistake is neglect of farmers, oppressing them and not doing much on ideological fronts. Chinese took 10 percent of produce, we took anywhere between 16 to 30 percent from farmers. Mughals took 50 percent sometimes.
How does all that prove Indian kingdoms could not have competed with them? And where does administration come from? How many times large were these invaders Kingdoms when they invaded Indian Kingdoms? Weren't they themselves also fighting with each other?
We see so many Arab and other muslim travellers and geographers coming to India, passing off valuable info back home.
How many from India reciprocate?
So how exactly did the Indian Kingdoms manage to be so blissfully unaware of this enemy, despite of being more civilized.
Because you can overcome horse archers only by outnumbering them and you can not do it if you have loose feudal structure. Ghurids had a centralized rule over entire Pak and Afghanistan. What was extent of Prithviraj and was his empire centralized? Did he have central revenue to have a standing army of 60,000?
No I'm not saying that he was successful in Central Asia, but it takes good Generalship and military qualities to go through so many ups and downs and yet manage to strike gold. Nobody stopped his peers to sweep into India like he did. It should've been easier for them as they had defeated Babur.
Are you serious here? So just because Kushanas entered India and not Xiongnu ( who crushed kushans in their own homeland), Xiongnu becomes weak? Babur could not hold his own against his rivals so he sought fortune here. Simple as that.
If you want to brush aside Ferishta, that is fine. I know people don't highlight their defeats. But there are other instances of alliances.
However my argument was about how numeric advantage doesn't always work that well, not of proving whether Ferishta was right or not.
I agree about numeric advantage part but I would appreciate if you can throw some light on alliances.
We're going in circles. What is the percentage Rajputs made in that caste divided population? Did other castes train as good? Did they go out to with hold invasions?
Rajputs must have been around 5 percent on average( certainly 3 percent ). Other castes did not train as good as Rajputs but my point was that they were as much martial as other communities( non soldier) of sedentary world.
It is a falsity that Jats, Gurjars, Meenas and Brahmins were as militarized as Rajputs. How many of them joined ranks in what numbers at which battles?
These castes were primarily peasents, pastoralists and intellectuals. Seeing a Brahmin Minister with a small regiment of kinsmen once in a while doesn't mean they were as militarized as the kshatriyas.
Jats of Rajputana weren't heavily militarized till the advent of European technology. These caste were otherwise only as militarized and trained as a civilian or a village should for home self defense. It goes against the basic nature of Caste system to have replication of skills across castes.
Brother, please read my line . I said that these communities were as militarized as any other community in world. Now, we can exclude nomadic societies so what I meant was that a Rajput was as martial as a Chinese soldier, a Brahmin as martial as chinese intellectual and so on. I did not mean that they all were equal among themselves. I challenged notion of hindu cowardice or hindus lacking manhood by this example.
It is not about score, but about who can damage whom. Ghaznavids have left permanent marks on the Indian psyche. I need not remind people about what they did here. My objective was to explain how their nomadic lifestyle gave them an instinctive edge, in being successfully aggressive against sedentary agrarians like India.
Horse archery and heavy cavalry had more to do with this success but you are right horse archery is itself a nomadic art.
Caste was a very rigid system in medieval India, specially 9th-10th century onwards. yes gradually some castes move up and down at few places. But at one point of time the intercaste outlook still stays rigid.
Not at all. Gujarati forces intercepted a small contingent of Ghazanavi army and captured some women of Turks. The solankis took them all as wives with women of low rank being married to common soldiers and some noble women( in case they were "kumaris") were married by nobles . So a people marrying beef eating musalmanins can not be called as rigid at any cost.
And if the caste system wasn't there, or atleast the rigid birth based kind ?? Would the capping of 3 % still be there?
Yes. We have host of examples from places outside India.
Yes numbers are useful when you can overwhelm a zealot army by 6:1 ratio. They aren't useful when you match enemy man to man and there isn't a considerable edge.
Agreed.
Rome was decaying in its own way, while India was stagnating. I would not juxtapose Rome here in an Indian discussion.
The point I made was that caste free pagan societies have also fallen to Abrahmic ones so I do not hold caste responsible for our defeats.
Holds true for decisive victory and throwing enemy completely out of one's land. But if the first battles are already lost and the land is maruaded by hordes, survival becomes the next objective. That is when de-centralized clan based pocketed resistance plays its role.
But if you are centralized, you will always have option to spread yourself. I repeat that centralization does not mean no resistance at local levels, only that it has huge potential to mobilize army at one place .
That is the reason why I favored neither an overly centralized Imperial nor a post-Harsha age loose colony for India. Both have their own pros and cons. A trade-off striking balance between the two would be ideal.
OK I once again agree.
How is that related to my point about India again?
World is not Aryavarta my brother. You can not keep out losses of entire world from Xinjiang to Spain and at the same time holding caste responsible for no resistance. If caste was responsible, what about Iraq, Syria and Spain? Why they did not throw invaders out? You will have to address this point.
There is no mass resistance because of the very reason that society was divided in castes and hence could not be mobilized. Though I've still seen plenty of resistance against Turks or else I would be talking Farsi today.
No because mass resistance can not come from defunct kingdoms which were loose and feudal with being small.
We do not speak Farsi because we had strong agrarian patriarchal culture. Varanasi was ruled for 5 centuries less than Dhaka which had hindu kings at times, yet in 1900 , my district had only one eighth as Muslims unlike Dhaka where they were two thirds.
Yes and behaving that way might still not put us to harm from China (Himalayas natural defense) but is criminal neglect doing on western frontier against Arabs, Central Asian hordes etc. Compare the number of travellers and merchants that went out from India to west by land, against the numbers that came in here. Didn't they benefit the enemy by passing off crucial info of geography, routes, passes etc (whether deliberately or in good faith)
Hindus could not travel westwards because of Islam. Nikitin had to covert to come to India, do you think that Hindus would have eaten beef to travel these lands. My point is that Muslims did not allow hindus to travel to lands beyond Hindukush and not that insularity reflected in brahmanic texts stopped people.
SE Asia and Tibet were not dominated by Muslims so we travelled in these areas.
Kanhe Bhaiyya? Did I make some stupid statement?
I never said those areas are Aryavarta, but yes they were not explicitly "Mlechha lands" either.
And the point was not whether we had insularity against these regions but instead - whether the insularity against any region made us pay heavy price or not.
We had insularity on western frontier for sure. And we got mauled badly by devils rising out of west. That was my point.
We did not have insularity, it was forced on us by Muslims.