The descendents of Timur (known in the west as Tamarlane decended from Genghis Khan) were Chaghatay Turks. They invaded India from Afghanistan and established an empire in northern and central India known later as the Mughals. Mughal is a corruption of the Persia word for Mongol. Driven out of Kabul (capital of Afghanistan) by the Uzbek Turks, the founder of the Mughal dynasty, Babur, captured an area that, by 1530, reached from the Oxus River (the northern border of Afghanistan) to Bihar state in the east and the Deccan Plateau of central India in the south. His grandson, Akbar the Great was a contemporary and an equal of Elizabeth I of England, Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire and Suleyman the Magnificent. He extended the territory to the rest of northern India and the balance of the Deccan. He instituted reforms of the bureaucracy, instituted a policy of religious toleration, intermarried with Hindu princesses and repealed the poll tax on non-Muslims. He ran open seminars on all sorts of religions and was a great patron of the arts. The last Indian monarch to achieve his level of political, economic and cultural dominance was Ashoka (in the third century BC).
Akbar's son, grandson and great-grandson were effective rulers in their own right and stabilized the Mughal Empire over a long period of time (until 1707). However, the grandson Awrangzeb was a narrow religiously fanatic ruler who persecuted the Hindus, destroying their temples and reimposing the poll tax. This alienated provincial rulers and much of the middle classes. Ultimately this led to the militant reformism of the Sikh movement and the rise of Hindu nationalism in western India. These are still features of the Indian political landscape to this day. Awrangzeb and his descendents had to contend with repeated uprising by the Rajput rulers, the Sikhs and a confederation of Deccan states called the Maratha. This ongoing civil war fatally weakened the Mughal Empire. By the mid-eighteenth century, the Afghans succeeded in detaching themselves from the empire under Ahmad Shah Durrani. The British defeated Bengali forces at Plassey in 1757 and the French won influence if not control over the southeatern coast. By the early nineteenth century, the British East India company completed replaced Mughal dominance. By 1858, the Mughal line came to an inglorious end as a local principality.
Many religious innovations sprang up between 1500 and 1650 that persist as threads in a complex array of different religious beliefs and practices across India. On the majority Hindu side, there was an upsurge of bhakti devotionalism that stressed total devotion to Lord Krishna. Among the Muslims, Chishtiya Sufi order had won many adherents and established many retreat centers. Their enthusiastic forms of worship and Indian habits of playing down the externalities of religion infuriated the ulama (religious judges or scholars) and Akbar the Great found him intervening in the disputes. To keep control over the raging arguments, Akbar made himself supreme spiritual ruler and decreed religious toleration. After he died, various religious leaders crusaded against tolerant treatment of the Hindus and of the Sufi adherents. This formed the background to the racking disputes and civil war under Awrangzeb that destroyed the Mughal Empire and opened India to conquest by England.
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