From Ghurids to Mughals, centuries of Indo-Muslim rule reshaped India
Main Muslim conquests across the subcontinent ran from the thirteenth through eighteenth centuries, after earlier Umayyad probes into the northwest. The Ghurid state became the Delhi Sultanate in 1206 under Qutb ud-Din Aibak; Mughals replaced it in 1526 until Marathas and British wars closed the era.
Khalji pushes under Alauddin carried sultanate power south in the fourteenth century. Akbar's Mughal enlargement stressed religious accommodation; Aurangzeb's death in 1707 opened rapid decline amid Rajput and Maratha wars and Nader Shah's blow. Marathas dominated roughly 1720–1818.
Plassey in 1757, Buxar in 1764, and the Anglo-Mysore, Anglo-Maratha, Sind, and Sikh wars halted further Muslim imperial expansion under rising Company and Crown power. The Indo-Muslim period thus ends less with a single battle than with layered British victories.
Contact began at sea. Around 636 or 637, during the Rashidun Caliphate, Uthman ibn Abi al-As, governor of Bahrain and Oman, sent naval raids toward Thane and Bharuch; al-Baladhuri does not call them successes, and they may have aimed at plunder or pirates rather than conquest. The Arabs called Kapisa-Gandhara, Zabulistan and Sindh the frontier of al-Hind. Arab forces beat Rutbil, king of Zabulistan, in 643 and a Sindhi army at Rasil in 644. Abdur Rahman b. Samurra besieged Kabul in 663, opening a long struggle in which the Kabul Shahi kings and their Zunbil kin kept the Khyber Pass closed. Campaigns in eastern Balochistan between 661 and 681 cost four Arab commanders their lives before Sinan b. Salma set up a permanent base in Makran by 673. In 697 al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, governor of Iraq since 694, took charge of Khurasan and Sistan and sponsored pushes into Makran and Sindh.
Source: Muslim conquests in the Indian subcontinent
