Events

Raja Dahir killed; Sindh joins the Umayyad Caliphate.

Kannauj becomes the Pratihara capital; climax of the tripartite struggle.

Rajaraja Chola conquered the northern part of Sri Lanka, including the kingdom of Anuradhapura; his inscriptions also record a conquest of ‘islands of the sea’, which most historians identify with the Maldives.

Mahmud of Ghazni raided the subcontinent 17 times between 1000 and 1025, targeting wealthy temples; much of the wealth he carried away built up his capital at Ghazni.

Rajendra expanded his father’s conquest of northern Sri Lanka, which remained part of the Chola Empire for about half a century.

Rajendra Chola commemorated his northern victories with the title ‘Gangaikondachola’ — ‘the Chola who seized (or brought) Ganga’ — and built a temple at Gangaikondacholapuram to mark them.

Rajendra I raids Kadaram and the Srivijaya ports.

After about half a century of Chola rule in northern Sri Lanka, the Sri Lankan king Vijayabahu I drove the Cholas out after several battles; he married a princess from Kalinga.

The Ghurids, once vassals of the Ghaznavids, took Ghazni; their leader Muhammad, sultan of Ghur, soon brought parts of Punjab and Sindh under his rule.

Bakhtiyar Khilji, an army commander serving the Ghurids, campaigned in eastern India from the end of the 12th century and conquered Bihar and Bengal, then ruled by the Senas from Nadia. His expedition towards Tibet was routed in Kamarupa in 1205, and he was assassinated in 1206.

Alauddin Khalji’s slave-general Malik Kafur pushed the Sultanate southward, conquering several kingdoms; their plundered wealth paid for the Sultanate’s huge army. Warangal (Orugallu) was the capital of the Kakatiyas, who ruled much of present-day Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.

Pushing deep into the south, Malik Kafur attacked a number of Hindu centres such as Srirangam, Madurai, Chidambaram and possibly Rameswaram.

Warangal, the Kakatiya capital — where Queen Rudramadevi had ruled from 1262 to 1289 — fell to the Delhi Sultanate. Around 1330–1336 the Musunuri Nayakas, Telugu chieftains, rallied over 75 others into a confederacy and expelled Muhammad bin Tughlaq’s army from Warangal.

Afonso de Albuquerque takes Goa from Bijapur.

The last fifteen years of Akbar’s nearly fifty-year reign brought fresh military campaigns in Kashmir, Sindh, the Deccan and Afghanistan.

Aurangzeb invaded the Deccan and conquered the Bijapur (Adil Shahi) and Golconda (Qutb Shahi) Sultanates, ending the Adil Shahi dynasty (1489–1686), whose Gol Gumbaz at Bijapur is the tomb of Muhammad Adil Shah.

Aurangzeb invaded the Deccan and conquered the Bijapur (Adil Shahi) and Golconda (Qutb Shahi) Sultanates.