Section

Ancient & Medieval India

From the Indus cities to the Mughals and Marathas: empires, rulers, scholars and the ideas that left India for the world.

India's Ports Ministry Describes Lothal's Brick Basin as the World's Oldest Known Dock, and a National Maritime Heritage Complex Is Being Built Beside the ASI Excavation of the Harappan Town

The seals and bead workshops make Lothal look like a trading town, a Ministry of Ports museum is rising beside it, and a 2024 study of the old river channels is read as supporting the dock reading. The dock-or-tank question has been discussed for over sixty years.

India Gave the World the Word 'Sugar.' Now It Consumes More of It Than Any Other Country.

In the 640s a Tang emperor sent envoys to Magadha for sugar-making craftsmen, and the Chinese annals say the result beat the Indian original. India now consumes more sugar than any other country, and the biggest change since the 1990s is that white sugar has replaced gur.

Europe Went Looking for India's Pepper and Cinnamon. It Found America by Mistake.

In 1492 Columbus carried samples of cinnamon and pepper across the Atlantic and showed them to everyone he met. Six years later the Portuguese reached the coast where the pepper actually grew, and the king's officials laughed at their presents.

She Was Supposed to Burn on Her Husband's Pyre. She Ruled Malwa for Twenty-Eight Years Instead.

Her husband died in battle in 1754. Custom said she should follow him onto the fire. She went on to run a kingdom for twenty-eight years, and the merchants who crossed it kept the receipts.

In 1838 Emily Eden Called Ranjit Singh's Army Review 'a Sad Blow to Our Vanities.' Eleven Years Later the British Annexed the Punjab From a Ten-Year-Old

A visiting officer wrote in 1838 that the instant Ranjit Singh died, Britain should walk in. The ten-year-old Maharaja who lost the throne in 1849 initialled his surrender in English letters.

Rajendra Chola's Army Marched to the Ganges and His Fleet Caught the King of Kadaram in 1025. The Navy and the Land Survey Behind Him Were His Father's.

In about 1006 witnesses walked an elephant round a Tamil village to fix its boundary for a Buddhist monastery that a Sumatran king had built. Nineteen years later Chola ships captured a king of the same line.

Peshwa Baji Rao I Led a Maratha Army to the Gates of Delhi in 1737 and Won Malwa by Treaty in 1738, While His Brother Chimaji Appa Took Vasai in 1739

He had no heavy guns and rarely offered a set battle. He cut water and grain from larger armies instead. Marathi papers, Persian chronicles and English company records show how that worked, and how much of the unbeaten record they support.

Charaka's 120-Chapter Medical Textbook Set Out How Ancient India Trained Physicians, Examined Patients and Discussed Epidemics

A forest debate over how many tastes exist, a teacher's charge to new students and a list of what affects whole populations during an epidemic all sit in one Sanskrit textbook. Here is what it says, whose work it is and where the dates differ.

Prithviraj Chauhan won the first battle of Tarain in 1191 and held Ajmer and Delhi for about fifteen years, according to the oldest Persian and Sanskrit records

A king of Ajmer and Delhi, a victory over Muhammad of Ghor in 1191 and a rematch a year later. The chroniclers of the time give one account, and an epic written centuries afterwards gives a bigger one.

The East India Company Gave Away Free Potato Seed and Cash Rewards in 1797. As Late as 1938, Doctors in Pune Were Still Trying to Talk Indians Into Eating Tomatoes.

A footnote says the potato may have been served at a Mughal banquet in 1617, or the dish may have been sweet potato. By 1797 the Company was giving away seed and rewards, and in 1893 a government botanist counted potatoes on one-tenth of one percent of the area.

Akbar's Court Wrote Down Thirty Recipes in 1598. Half Call for Pepper. None Calls for Chilli, Tomato or Potato.

Pepper is named in half the recipes Abu'l Fazl recorded for Akbar's kitchen, and chilli appears in none. The cookbooks before it, from a twelfth-century Chalukya king to a Jain author in 1508, name pepper, ginger and asafoetida and no chilli.

In 499 CE, Aryabhata Fitted Digit-by-Digit Roots, Series Sums, a 24-Entry Sine Table and an Equation-Solving Method Into About 120 Verses

A 23-year-old in Kusumapura wrote the rules for roots, series, sines and whole-number equations in verses short enough to memorise. This is what the book holds, who explained it for twelve centuries, and where the sources differ.

The Mughal Historian Khafi Khan Called Shivaji a Reprobate, Then Wrote That His Troops Were Ordered to Spare Mosques, the Quran and Women

Persian chroniclers, English factors and Marathi bakhars give different accounts of Pratapgad, Agra and his last day. Here is who says what, from Torna in 1646 to the deathbed at Raigad in 1680.

Kanishka's Kushan Empire Reached From Bukhara to Patna, His Gold Coins Carried the Buddha, and the Peshawar Stupa Identified as His Measured 286 Feet Across

A Bactrian inscription says Kanishka inaugurated year one, and a fourth-century Sanskrit astronomy text lets scholars turn that year into 127 CE. Around it sit gold coins, a bronze casket of relics and a council that a Chinese pilgrim placed in Kashmir.

Sir John Marshall Dug Taxila From 1913 to 1934 and Found Three Cities but No Lecture Hall, While the Jatakas Have a Prince Arriving With a Teacher's Fee of 1,000 Pieces

In one Jataka a king of Benares sends his sixteen-year-old son to Taxila with a purse for the teacher. Altekar and Britannica's entry on the site both say no college in the modern sense stood there to receive him.

India Cracked Zinc Four Centuries Before Bristol Did

Every other metal you can melt and pour. Zinc turns to gas and burns away, which is why the world went without it. The furnaces at Zawar in Rajasthan solved that centuries before Europe knew there was a problem.

The India We're Taught to Forget: When Hindus and Muslims Shared the Same Saints

Long before anyone drew a line through the subcontinent, Hindus and Muslims prayed at the same shrines, sang each other's songs, and built a shared culture that belonged to neither alone. It was real.

India Ate Off American Ships in 1966. Now It's the World's Biggest Rice Exporter

In 1966 India needed 11 million tonnes of imported grain just to get through the year. In 2024-25 it grew 357 million tonnes of its own. Here is how that happened, and what it cost.

One Cliff Was Forgotten for a Thousand Years. On Another, They Carved a Temple Downward Out of a Single Rock

Ajanta's painted Buddhist caves sat empty in a forest for a thousand years until a tiger hunt walked into one in 1819. Sixty miles away at Ellora, masons carved an entire temple downward out of a single rock.

The Taj Mahal: A Love Story, and Everything the Postcard Leaves Out

The most photographed building on earth is also one of the least understood. A widowed emperor, a team of master architects, twenty thousand labourers, a huge bill, and a builder who died a prisoner within sight of his own creation.

The Temple That Is Really a Giant Stone Chariot for the Sun

They gave the sun god a chariot the size of a cathedral: 24 carved wheels, seven straining horses, a sanctuary once 70 metres tall, all in stone at the edge of the sea. The tower fell and nobody quite agrees why. Yet the wheels still tell the time.

The Rajputs: Sons of Kings Who Mostly Made Themselves

Their name means son of a king, and their legend is fire and honour and doomed last stands. The real history is stranger. Most of these sons of kings were not born to the title. They made themselves into it.

They Called It India's Golden Age. Golden for Whom?

It gave the world an astronomer who set out place value, a poet called Kalidasa, and an iron pillar that still won't rust. It also hardened caste and narrowed the lives of women and the low-born. The achievements are real. The tidy label is the problem.

One Hill Fort, a Few Hundred Men, and the Empire That Outlived the Mughals

He was the son of a soldier-for-hire, boxed in by two of the mightiest empires of the age. Yet Shivaji invented a way of fighting, and an idea of self-rule, so durable it broke the Mughal century.

Rani Abbakka of Ullal Refused Portugal's Tribute in 1555 and Faced Its Fleet Again in 1618, and a Five-Ship Coast Guard Class Now Carries Her Name

The Portuguese called her the Queen of Olala and wrote about her for more than sixty years. Records, an eyewitness and Tulu tradition agree on the outline and differ on dates, on how many queens there were and on how she died.

Razia Sultan Ruled Delhi From 1236 to 1240, Led Her Own Army Into the Punjab and Struck Coins in Her Own Name

A rebel coalition outside the walls, a march into the Punjab, coins in her own name: the documents behind the only woman who reigned in Delhi in her own right.

Calculus Has Two Fathers in the Textbooks. It Had a Grandfather in Kerala

250 years before Newton or Leibniz was born, mathematicians on India's southwest coast had already found some of calculus's most important results. The real story is more honest than 'India got there first.'

The Indian City That Had Flushing Toilets 4,500 Years Before Your Apartment Did

Grid streets, covered sewers, and private bathrooms in 2500 BCE, and an empire that seems to have run without kings. Inside the Indus Valley's quiet genius.

Badauni Fired Into the Rajput Ranks at Haldighati in 1576 and Called It a Mughal Victory. In 2017 a Rajasthan Textbook Said Pratap Won.

Both Persian accounts of Haldighati say the Mughals held the field. Both also say Maharana Pratap got away, and one says Akbar was angry about it. The argument over who won starts from those pages.

Sambhaji Was Dragged by the Hair From a Hole in His Minister's House in February 1689 and Executed Five Weeks Later. The War Went On for Eighteen More Years.

A hole in a garden house, a jester's cap and a sentence signed off by Aurangzeb's divines. Every detailed account of Sambhaji's last weeks was written on the Mughal side, and they do not agree with each other.

Ashoka Put the Kalinga Toll in Stone, 150,000 Deported and 100,000 Killed, and for Centuries No One Could Read It Until a Calcutta Mint Official Did in 1837

A sultan hauled an Ashokan pillar to Delhi on a carriage with 42 wheels, and the Brahmans invited to read it could not make out the lines cut on it. About five centuries later a mint official in Calcutta started from the short inscriptions at Sanchi.

Rani Durgavati Ruled Garha-Katanga for About 15 Years, Won the First Day's Fight Against Asaf Khan at Narrai in 1564, and Now Gives Her Name to a University, a Tiger Reserve and a Planned Rs 100 Crore Memorial

Two Mughal chroniclers, a 1909 government gazetteer and a state university page tell how she held the Narmada valley and fought at Narrai. They agree on the year and on her wounds, and give different places, weapons and parents.

Abbas Sarwani Counted 1,700 Rest Houses on Sher Shah Suri's Roads, and the Silver Rupee He Struck Outlasted His Five-Year Reign

A well and a brick mosque at every stop, two horses for the mail, and a village headman who could be executed if a murderer was not found. One chronicle, written about 34 years after the Afghan ruler's death, is the main witness to how his state worked.

The First Nose Job Was Performed in India 2,500 Years Ago. Europe Called It a Discovery

Two British surgeons in Pune thought they were witnessing a medical marvel in 1793. The operation they wrote home about, rebuilding a nose from a flap of forehead skin, had been standard practice in India for two thousand years.

In 628 CE, Brahmagupta Wrote Down Rules for Zero and Negative Numbers, a Quadratic Solution and an Area Formula for Four-Sided Figures

A treatise from Bhillamala, now Bhinmal in Rajasthan, set out what a debt taken from zero leaves and what two negatives multiply to. This is what its chapters say and how its astronomy reached Baghdad within about 150 years.

Panini Fitted the Grammar of Sanskrit Into About 4,000 Rules That Build Words Step by Step, and Linguists and Computer Scientists Study the System as a Machine

A grammarian from the north-west wrote Sanskrit as a rule system that runs step by step. This is what the text contains, how computer scientists have used it, exactly what Cambridge announced in 2022 and what specialists replied.

Ahilyabai Holkar Built the Present Kashi Vishwanath Temple in 1780, Added a New Shrine at Somnath in 1783 and Raised Indore From a Village to a City, and India Marked Her 300th Birth Anniversary on 31 May 2025

Government gazetteers, a Somnath history by K. M. Munshi and Sir John Malcolm's memoir each name her on a different temple. Here is what each page says she built, and where the accounts differ.

Abu'l Fazl Put Akbar's Assessed Revenue at 3.6 Billion Dams and Wrote Down the Ranks, Rates and Rules That Raised and Spent It

A commander of 5,000 could draw Rs 30,000 a month and a commander of 10 Rs 100, and a muster could be faked with borrowed horses. Akbar's court historian and a hostile contemporary both wrote down how the machine ran.

In 499 CE, a 23-Year-Old Said the Earth Spins

He was 23. He said the stars only look like they move: it's the Earth that turns. He was right, a thousand years early, and his own tradition spent centuries explaining him away.

Bhaskara II Completed the Siddhanta Shiromani in 1150, and Its Algebra Solved the Equation Fermat Set as a Challenge to Europe in 1657

Verse problems about bees, elephants and geese carry arithmetic, algebra and a number-theory method that European mathematicians worked out centuries later. This is what his books contain, how they travelled, and which parts are tradition.

The Legendary Blades of Damascus Were Forged From Indian Steel. Then the Furnaces Went Cold

For two thousand years, South India made the finest steel on Earth: the metal behind the blades that baffled European scientists. Michael Faraday tried to copy it and failed. Then the knowledge quietly died.

Pulakeshin II Ruled the Deccan for More Than 30 Years, Turned Back Harsha at the Narmada, and Had a Court Poet Record His Conquests on a Temple Wall at Aihole

A poem on a temple wall at Aihole, a Chinese monk's travel notes and a Pallava pillar dated 642 are the main witnesses to a king who reached the Kaveri and met Harsha at the Narmada.

Seleucus Gave Chandragupta the Lands Along the Indus for 500 Elephants. Four Greek and Roman Writers Recorded the Deal, and It Took Until 1793 to Say Who the King Was

A Greek ambassador described the wooden wall around Pataliputra, and in 1876 workmen digging a tank in Patna struck rows of old timber. The textbook of statecraft credited to Chandragupta's minister has no such check, and Olivelle and McClish both date the text we have to centuries after his reign.

Krishnadevaraya Beat the Sultan of Bijapur at Raichur in May 1520, and the Portuguese Chronicler Who Told It Put the Date Two Years Late

Paes stood near the king while buffaloes were beheaded for the festival. Nuniz dated the battle of Raichur to 1522. Paes's own festival dates, worked through by Sewell, move it back to May 1520.

A 6-Tonne Iron Pillar Has Stood in the Delhi Weather for 1,600 Years. It Still Hasn't Rusted Away

A seven-metre iron pillar forged around 400 CE still stands in the Delhi weather with barely a trace of rust on it. Metallurgists eventually traced the reason to phosphorus, an impurity every modern steel mill works hard to strip out.

Kautilya's Arthashastra Reached Print in 1909 From a Single Manuscript Handed to a Mysore Librarian, and Scholars Still Date Its 15 Books Anywhere From the Fourth Century BCE to the Third Century CE

The text sets a trader's profit at five per cent on local goods, pays a spy 1,000 panas against a minister's 48,000, and says when a king should fight in the open and when from ambush. Who wrote it is still argued.

Nalanda Housed Thousands of Monks on Endowed Village Revenue, and a Tibetan Pilgrim Found Classes Still Running There in 1235

A coin dug up under a monastery floor, a Persian chronicle about a fortress called Bihar and a Tibetan monk's biography are the main evidence for when Nalanda began and how it ended.

Dholavira Held Its Rain in at Least 16 Reservoirs Cut Into Rock, and in 2021 Became India's 40th World Heritage Site

Joshi's survey team found the mounds in the late 1960s. Bisht's team then spent 13 field seasons uncovering walls, gates, wells and a chain of stone-lined tanks, plus a board of ten large signs that no one can read.

Kalidasa's Shakuntala Reached English in 1789 and German in 1791, and Goethe Answered It With a Four-Line Poem

A play with a lost ring in a fish, a love lyric addressed to a monsoon cloud, and two poems on gods and kings: the Sanskrit works of Kalidasa, and how one of them travelled from Calcutta to Weimar in two years.

Aurangzeb Held the Mughal Throne From 1658 to 1707, Took the Empire to Its Greatest Size and Spent the Last 25 Years of His Life Fighting in the Deccan

A will that counts four rupees and two annas from sewn caps, an empire of 21 provinces, and 170,000 troops on the Deccan rolls. The sources on Aurangzeb are detailed, and the historians who read them often part ways on motive.

On 14 January 1761 the Marathas Marched Out of a Starving Camp at Panipat, and Historians Still Disagree on How Many Died

A cash convoy lost in the dark, chiefs surrounding their commander's tent to say they had not eaten for two days, and one day of fighting from morning to mid-afternoon. The sources agree on the date and disagree on the size of the armies, the number of dead and who was to blame.

India Gave the World Zero. The World Filed It Under 'Arabic Numerals'

Every time you write a number, you're using an Indian invention: a positional decimal system and a symbol for nothing that rewired human thought. So why do we call the digits by the wrong name?

Harsha Held Northern India for 41 Years, and Much of What We Know About Him Comes From a Court Poet and a Chinese Monk He Patronised

The fullest accounts of Harsha come from a poet he rewarded and a monk he hosted. A rival's inscription and Chinese embassy records give a different view.

The Allahabad Pillar Names 9 Northern Kings and 12 Southern Kings in Samudragupta's Campaigns, and His Gold Coins Show Him Playing the Veena

One pillar inside the Allahabad Fort, one minister's poem and a run of gold coins carry almost everything known about a Gupta king, from a southern march to a horse sacrifice. Here is who is speaking in each source.

The One Rajput King Who Wouldn't Marry His Daughter to the Emperor

By the 1570s the smart move was to submit to Akbar and keep your throne. Almost every Rajput prince took the deal. One man in the hills of Mewar spent twenty-five years refusing it.

One Eye, One Kingdom: The Lion of Punjab Who Stopped the British at the River

He lost an eye to smallpox before he could walk and never learned to read. Then he united the warring Sikh misls, built a European-trained army, and became the last Indian power to hold the British at bay.

The Poet Who Ruled an Empire: Krishnadevaraya and the Golden Age of Vijayanagara

A warrior who lost no war, a king whose capital foreign visitors compared to Rome, and a conqueror who wrote one of the great poems in Telugu. Then, a generation after his death, his shining city was left to the jackals.

The Emperor Who Turned the Bay of Bengal Into a Chola Lake

A thousand years ago, while the usual story fixes on the north, a south Indian king was projecting navies across the Bay of Bengal and raising a granite tower that still hasn't fallen. Meet Rajaraja Chola.

The Emperor Who Won a War, Counted the Dead, and Renounced Conquest

He ruled the largest empire the subcontinent had ever seen. Then one war sickened him so deeply he renounced conquest at the height of his power, and left the evidence carved in stone.