Appearance
6.8 — Harsha to the Rajputs: Why the North Fragmented
Between the eighth and tenth centuries, three great powers fought each other repeatedly for control of one city.
Kannauj, on the Ganges in what is now Uttar Pradesh, was the symbolic capital of northern India — whoever held it claimed to be the paramount ruler of the north. The Gurjara-Pratiharas from Rajasthan, the Palas from Bengal, and the Rashtrakutas from the Deccan spent roughly two centuries taking it from each other, in what historians call the tripartite struggle.
None of them won permanently. All three exhausted themselves. And while they did it, nobody was paying attention to the northwest, where the passes had been the entry route for every invasion for a thousand years (Chapter 6.1).
This chapter is about how the north got into that condition, and it is the setup for the two chapters that follow.
Harsha, the last of the old order
Harshavardhana ruled from Kannauj from 606 to 647 CE and assembled the last substantial north Indian empire before the Delhi Sultanate, covering much of the Ganges plain and parts of the west.
He is well documented for two reasons. His court poet Banabhatta wrote the Harshacharita, and the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang spent years in his empire and left a detailed account (Chapter 5.7).
Xuanzang's report is valuable and mixed. He describes a competent, generous ruler who divided revenue into four parts — for government, for scholars, for officials and for religious gifts — held enormous assemblies every five years at Prayag where the treasury was given away, and personally toured his territory constantly. He also describes a country less prosperous and less secure than Faxian had found two centuries earlier (Chapter 6.6): more banditry, decaying cities, and Buddhist monasteries in decline in many regions while flourishing in others.
Harsha was stopped in the south by the Chalukya king Pulakeshin II, and Chapter 6.7's point about the Deccan holds — the north could not project power over the plateau.
And when he died without an heir in 647 CE, the empire dissolved immediately. There was no institution beneath the man.
Why the north fragmented, mechanically
Four processes, and they compound.
1. Land grants alienated the revenue base. Chapter 6.6 introduced this and it deserves the weight. Kings granted villages in perpetuity to brahmins, temples and officials, with the revenue and often with the administrative and judicial rights attached, recorded on copper plates that survive in large numbers.
Each grant permanently removed land from the state's tax base. Over centuries this accumulates: the king's direct revenue shrinks while the number of intermediaries with independent local power grows. A grantee who collects revenue, administers justice and maintains retainers on his land is functionally a small lord, and when the centre weakens he is already independent in everything but name.
Historians debate whether "Indian feudalism" is the right label for this, since it differs from the European arrangement in important ways — there is no vassalage contract, no fief in the European legal sense. What is not in dispute is the mechanism: revenue and authority devolved downward and did not come back.
2. Rank became hereditary and military service became a caste. Local chiefs, granted land for service, passed both the land and the obligation to their sons. The result was a large number of hereditary warrior lineages with their own forts, their own retainers, and their own honour codes — which is what the Rajput clans became.
3. Trade contracted, and with it urban revenue. The evidence is argued but several indicators point the same way: fewer coins, fewer new towns, and less long-distance commerce in the period after the Guptas. The rise of the Islamic caliphates redirected some Indian Ocean trade, and the decline of the Roman world had removed one of the biggest customers centuries earlier (Chapter 5.7). A state that taxes trade has cash; a state that taxes only land pays its servants in land, which returns us to point one.
4. Nobody was trying to hold the frontier. This is the crucial one. The competing powers of northern India were oriented inward, at each other and at Kannauj. The northwest was a remote province at best, and after the Hunas there was no sustained frontier policy of any kind.
The Rajputs
The Rajput clans emerge from around the seventh century — the Pratiharas, Chauhans, Paramaras, Chalukyas of Gujarat, Chandellas, Guhilas and others — as regional dynasties across Rajasthan, Gujarat, Malwa and Bundelkhand.
Where they came from is argued. Some claim descent from ancient kshatriya lineages; some historians argue for origins among local tribal and pastoral groups, or among Central Asian groups who entered with the Hunas and were absorbed; and there is a well-documented process of new ruling families acquiring kshatriya status through genealogies produced by court brahmins — a mechanism visible repeatedly in Indian history. The likely answer is all of these in different cases.
What matters is what the Rajput political order actually was.
A warrior aristocracy with an intensely developed honour culture. Personal valour, the refusal to yield, and death in battle as the highest end. The associated practices of jauhar — mass self-immolation by women of a besieged fort facing certain fall — and saka, the final suicidal charge by the men, are recorded at Chittor and elsewhere, and they are the extreme expression of that code.
Numerous, competitive and unable to combine. This is the political problem. Rajput polity was built on clan honour and lineage rivalry, and combining under a single commander meant accepting subordination, which was precisely what the code made difficult. Alliances against outside threats formed, fought, and dissolved.
And their military system was built around individual heavy cavalry and forts, which is a fair description of what a Rajput army was excellent at and what it was poor at. Chapter 6.15 does the military analysis properly.
They also built extraordinarily. The Khajuraho temples were built by the Chandellas between roughly 950 and 1050 CE; the Dilwara Jain temples at Mount Abu by the Solankis; the Sun Temple at Modhera by the same dynasty; and the great hill forts of Rajasthan — Chittorgarh, Kumbhalgarh, Ranthambore, Mehrangarh — are among the most formidable fortifications in the world.
What happened to Buddhism in India
Buddhism, which began in India and reshaped Asia, had largely disappeared from India by around 1200 CE. The reasons are several and none alone is sufficient.
Loss of royal patronage. Buddhist institutions were monastic and depended on endowments from kings and merchants. As dynasties shifted patronage to brahmanical temples — which offered a ruler ritual legitimation of a kind monasteries did not — the funding dried up. The Palas were the last major Buddhist royal patrons.
Absorption. Devotional Hinduism, particularly the bhakti movements, offered many of the same things — personal devotion, accessible practice, teachers from outside the priestly class. The Buddha was incorporated into Vaishnava tradition as an avatar of Vishnu, which is absorption in the most literal sense. Meanwhile Buddhist practice in India had itself become more ritual and devotional, narrowing the visible difference.
Concentration in monasteries. Buddhism in India had become heavily institutional, concentrated in a few enormous universities and monasteries — Nalanda, Vikramashila, Odantapuri — rather than spread across villages. This made it efficient and fragile.
And then the monasteries were destroyed. The Turkic campaigns of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries sacked Nalanda, Vikramashila and Odantapuri. A tradition concentrated in a few large institutions with a celibate specialist clergy does not survive the destruction of those institutions, whereas a household-based tradition with village priests does. This is the same fragility argument as Chapter 4.6, applied to a religion.
All four together explain it. Any one alone does not.
The state of the north around 1000 CE
Politically: a dozen or more substantial kingdoms, competing, with no paramount power and no shared frontier policy.
Militarily: armies built around heavy cavalry, elephants and fortresses, dependent on imported horses (Chapter 6.1), organised around clan honour rather than unified command.
Economically: rich, with enormous accumulated wealth in temples, which were both banks and stores of votive gold.
And strategically: wide open on the northwest.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, a Turkic dynasty had established itself at Ghazni, drawing on the horse-breeding regions of Central Asia and on the military traditions of the steppe, and was looking east at a fragmented, wealthy, poorly defended plain.
Where this shows up in your life
The mechanism in this chapter is more useful than the details. A political system in which authority and revenue devolve permanently downward, in which the units compete with each other for symbolic primacy, and in which nobody is responsible for the common frontier, is a system that will lose to a smaller unified force. That is a general result and Chapter 16.2 states it as such.
The Rajput hill forts are UNESCO World Heritage sites and are among India's most visited monuments, and the honour code that built them still shapes regional identity in Rajasthan.
And Buddhism's return to India is one of the twentieth century's more remarkable stories: Ambedkar's conversion in 1956, with several hundred thousand followers, deliberately chose the tradition that had rejected birth-based hierarchy 2,400 years earlier and had been driven out of the country. Chapter 6.24 covers it.
What the next page covers
From 1000 CE the raids began, and from 1206 there was a permanent Turkic-ruled sultanate at Delhi. Chapter 6.9 covers the invasions and the Delhi Sultanate — what Mahmud of Ghazni actually did and why, how Muhammad of Ghor's victory at the second battle of Tarain changed everything, what the Sultanate's administration was actually like, why it survived the Mongols when Baghdad did not, and the honest ledger of destruction and construction. It is a period about which almost everything said in public argument is either exaggerated or minimised, and this book will state what the sources support.