India is a land of enormous diversity. Cross-cultural influences are everywhere in evidence, in the food people eat, the clothes they wear, and in the places they worship. This was ever the case, and at no time more so than in the India that existed from c. 1200 to 1750, before European intervention. In this thoughtfully revised and updated second edition, readers are taken on a richly illustrated journey across the political, economic, religious, and cultural landscapes of India – from the Ghurid conquest and the Delhi Sultanate, through the rise and fall of the southern kingdom of Vijayanagara and their successors, to the peripheries of empire, to the great court of the Mughals. This was a time of conquest and consolidation, when Muslims and Hindus came together to create a literary, material, and visual culture which was uniquely their own and which still resonates today.
