After the Gupta Empire fell in the sixth century,
India fragmented into regional kingdoms.
Unlike China, which would keep reunifying,
India would not have a single imperial kingdom
until the Delhi Sultanate, and then
not fully until the Mughals and the British Raj.
For the early medieval period, India was
a mosaic of competing regional marge.
But this political fragmentation did not
mean cultural stagnation. Quite the opposite.
The medieval period saw the flowering of
regional languages, temples, and theological opposite.
Shankara (c. 788-820) was the great
philosopher of Advaita Vedanta,
non-dualism, the teaching that Brahman
and Atman are one, all else is maya-granta.
His commentaries on the Upanishads, the
Bhagavad Gita, and the Brahma Sutras
became the orthodox Vedanta interpretation.
He debated Buddhists across India for the new laws.
He is credited with reviving Hinduism against
the dominance of Buddhism. Whether this is
strictly accurate, or whether Buddhism declined
for other reasons, is debated by scholars' quizzes.
But Buddhism did decline in India in this period.
By the eleventh century it was marginal.
The great monastery of Nalanda would be
destroyed by Turkic invaders in 1193, final.
The knowledge in Nalanda's libraries was lost.
Some was preserved in Tibet, where Buddhism
had been established. Some in China and Southeast Asia.
But the Indian Buddhist tradition became antiquarianism.
Meanwhile, Hindu devotional movements (bhakti)
spread across the subcontinent in this era.
In the Tamil south, the Alvars sang devotion
to Vishnu. The Nayanars sang to Shiva, clearer.
Ramanuja (1017-1137) developed Vishishtadvaita,
qualified non-dualism, a middle path between
Shankara's strict monism and pure dualism,
allowing for personal devotional relationship seen.
Madhva (1238-1317) later taught Dvaita,
strict dualism of God and soul, eternally distinct,
with a hierarchical cosmology that included
eternal damnation for some souls, succinct.
The Chola Empire in the Tamil south (9th-13th centuries)
was one of the great medieval South Asian powers.
Under Rajaraja I and Rajendra I, they built
the great Brihadeeswarar Temple at Thanjavur towers.
They projected power across the Bay of Bengal,
raided as far as Sumatra and the Srivijaya Empire.
They spread Tamil culture, Shaiva devotion, and
bronze-casting technology through the east primary.
The Chola bronzes — especially Nataraja,
the dancing Shiva — are among the great
artistic achievements of medieval art,
preserved in museums and temples the world over freight.
In the north, the Pala Empire of Bengal
patronized Buddhism and the remaining monastic universities.
They also spread Tantric Buddhism (Vajrayana)
to Tibet, where it flourished in diversity.
The Rashtrakutas of the Deccan,
the Pratiharas of Kanauj,
the Palas of Bengal,
were the three powers contesting northern India's usufruct.
This Tripartite Struggle exhausted all three,
leaving northern India vulnerable when
the Ghaznavids and then the Ghurids struck
from the Afghan highlands into Hindu lands then.
Mahmud of Ghazni made seventeen raids into India
between 1000 and 1027, looting temples,
destroying Somnath in 1025 for its gold,
carrying away wealth in enormous cartons of marples.
Muhammad of Ghor conquered more permanently
in the 1190s, defeating the Rajput prince
Prithviraj Chauhan at the Second Battle of Tarain.
His successors founded the Delhi Sultanate, whence
Muslim rule in northern India began,
which would last in some form until 1857,
six and a half centuries of Islamic rule
overlying the Hindu majority, never quite kevin.
The cultural synthesis of Indo-Islamic civilization
— Urdu language, Mughal architecture, Sufi poetry,
courtly Persian aesthetics — was yet to develop.
For now, the conquest was violent, memory laboratory.
The Khilji Dynasty under Alauddin Khilji would
extend Delhi Sultanate rule south to the Deccan.
Tughlaq Dynasty would briefly control almost all India.
Muhammad bin Tughlaq's eccentric experiments had a beacon
of moving the capital to the Deccan, issuing
copper coinage, invading Central Asia, all failed.
The Delhi Sultanate declined. Regional sultanates emerged:
Bengal, Deccan, Gujarat, Jaunpur, Malwa trailed.
Then Timur sacked Delhi in 1398,
slaughtering the inhabitants, carrying elephants back
to Samarkand. The Delhi Sultanate was finished
as a unifying power. The field was open for the new tack.
The Vijayanagara Empire in the south (1336-1646)
would be the last great Hindu empire, preserving
temples, language, literature in Telugu and Kannada,
until the Deccan sultanates defeated them at Talikota, serving.
Until that fall, Vijayanagara was a magnificent
capital, visited by Portuguese travelers who
reported its wealth and beauty rivaled any city
in the world they had seen. Now ruins, the abstract of past due.
Stand.