I'm no expert on Indian history but recently I've taken a minor interest. Can anyone give me some feedback on the story of Islamic penetration into India? I know many of the kingdoms or states founded in India were from Central Asian tribes who've converted to Islam. The Mughal Empire strikes out as a great example and was regarded by many scholars as one of the largest and richest empires of it's time. But at the same time, many historians particularly Hindu nationalists blast Islamic penetration into India as the bloodiest story of conquest in Human History, bloodier than WW2, the Holocaust, European Colonialism in America. It seems both stories tend to exaggerate just a tad bit so I'm just curious if there are any experts here who can give more knowledgeable feedback.

You should be asking an historian, instead of Asiafinest members. I hope this isn't how you do research!

Only thing you will get is personal interpretation of history.

I'm doing both actually, granted that academic sources are far more valid than non-experts on the internet, the latter at least gives me somewhat of a simplistic approach or gist of what I need. Sort of like a small push before going full speed.

Understood!


Hopefully fair and impartial posters like Tej and Jagger can answer. I'll just say it was worse than the The Nanjing Massacre that happened in China 10x worse.

Yikes if that's the case, then damn those evil Muslims lol! But seriously, I find that hard to believe. The Nanking Massacre was as low as human beings could be towards another. It's cruelty and ruthlessness was one of a kind, almost unmatched in history.

well mugals got itegrat4ed to indian society .... lots of mugals own resturants in delhi and are known as good cheffs....lol

LOL kinda like the Manchus with chinese society only the Manchus don't eat similar food The general consensus in China of the Manchus is of mixed feeling. For better of for worse the Manchus as a minority had the most impact in Chinese history. Is that how Indians feel about the Mughals? They too ruled as a minority over a much larger more populous empire.

Mughals were so rich because they raped the Indian Subcontinent of its riches (which is exactly what the British did after them). To add feul to the fire, Mughals treated Hindus as second class citizens in their own country. Hindus were taxed to hell and were given very little opportunity to make use of their own resources which were all abused by the Mughals + British.


You may be wondering why the great Indian kingdoms of the past fell to the paltry Mughals. The answer to that is simple: lack of unity.

Indians are notorious for in fighting amongst each other. Different Kingdoums would often wage war against each other over silly things. Sometimes cousins would feud against each other (such as in the movie Lagaan where the King's Counsin blockaded the kingdoms from visiting religious shrines) and by the 1500's, the subcontinent had gone from being a land of powerful kingdoms to a land of feuding families. Aside from the Rajputs (who were at their peak during this time) most other kindoms fell fairly easy to the Mughals when they came to India. Had the Mughals attacked 200+ years earlier, they would have been defeated by one or more of the Indian Kingdoms. Sadly, that was not the case.

The early Muslim invaders (mostly Afghans and Turks) were really no different to the earlier Indo-Parthian, Indo-Scythian, Indo-Greek and Kushan invaders in northwestern India. Much like the others, Muslim invaders were also assimilated. The Mughal Empire was founded by Babur, a Turko-Mongol-Persian descendant of Timur (and possibly Genghis Khan) from Uzbekistan. His descendants intermarried with local Rajputs, and so most of the Mughal rulers had mixed Mughal-Rajput descent. By the 17th century, the Mughal Empire had the largest economy in the world (according to economic historian Angus Maddison). The early Mughal rulers were regarded as tolerant rulers, which is evident from Babur's autobiography Baburnama (which included a will passed down to his descendants) and from writings by court historians on later rulers (especially Akbar the Great), but this later deteriorated by the time of Aurangzeb, whose systematic persecution against Hindus eventually led to the decline of the Mughal Empire. Some Hindu nationalists have claimed that most Muslim rulers were responsible for genocide (well a few of them were) although population estimates (from scholars such as Angus Maddison and Jean-Noel Biraben) do not show any decrease in the Indian population at the time.


The Nazi Holocaust and the Mongol invasions of China and Baghdad were similarly brutal.


Everyone is a minority in India (the largest Indian ethnic group makes up no more than 10% of the population), so the Mughals were basically minorities ruling over other minorities.


The British transferred India's wealth to the United Kingdom and other British territories. The Mughals didn't transfer any wealth, they kept India's wealth within India itself. At the time Babur invaded, North India was ruled by the Delhi Sultanate, who he defeated using a much smaller army equipped with firearms. It was these new weapons that helped his descendants expand the empire across most of Southern Asia, which is why the Mughal Empire is regarded as one of the earliest gunpowder empires (along with the Ottoman Empire).