Gupta and Medieval India

To conquer is not to subdue others, but to defeat the passions within.

Long before they built one of the world's most formidable maritime empires, the Cholas were recognized by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE as independent, friendly neighbors to his south.

Long before its grandest courts took shape, the foundations of the Gupta Empire were quietly laid in the ancient region of Magadha, where the monarch Sri Gupta issued silver coins stamped with his own portrait bust in…

An emperor's legacy is rarely preserved in both the clang of iron and the pluck of a string, yet Samudragupta commanded both with equal mastery.

To understand the height of India’s classical age, one must look to the reign of Chandragupta II, the emperor who steered the Gupta Empire to its absolute zenith between roughly 375 and 415 CE.

Northern India in the wake of the Gupta Empire’s sixth-century collapse was a fractured landscape of competing feudatory states, but out of this chaos emerged a ruler who would stitch the north back together.

In the autumn of 629 CE, a twenty-seven-year-old Buddhist monk named Xuanzang slipped away from the Tang capital of Chang'an, defying an imperial ban on foreign travel to embark on a seventeen-year journey across the…

To understand how the Chola dynasty transformed from a regional power into a colossus of the Indian Ocean, one must look to the late tenth century and the prince born Arul Mozhi Varman.