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what do you mean we never devised ways to win wars ? like indian empires like cholas and chalukyas or satavahanas and western kshatrapas fought each other till one of them just went extinct on the battlefield ?!Yes you do have a point. But I wouldn’t attribute something to just the lack of a particular tactic.
That’s a tactical view but from a strategic view it seems like we were contented and all these concepts came as in case of rajputs. We never devised ways to win wars even if for the good. It always boils down to who wants it more doesn’t it? Objectives drive your actions and not the other way around.
Result average Indian now is under confident and non-violent to the core and we lack the strength to deal with other races that bring this aggressiveness.
It doesnt boil down to who wants it more. it always boils down to who has more ability to project force. Without cavalry, the Indo-gangetic plains is un-holdable for any empire if they are being assailed from the Afghanistan region.
There is a reason why the vaunted Greeks, along with the persians, parthians and scythians were not able to crack the heartland of Indian civilization ( Ganges valley) and it took the Kushans 3 generations AFTER arriving in India to project power over Pataliputra, despite India not having any major empire/kingdom in the north at the time, while the Guptas got utterly whacked by the Hun invasions of the 480s period: Cavalry. Huns were the first true heavy cavalry force experienced by India and they weren't interested in fighting a major set-piece battle to defeat the Guptas and take over land ( like the Scythians, parthians, kushans, greeks etc did), they just came in as all cavalry force, utterly burned down a city/region and by the time the slow lumbering gupta army showed up, the huns fucked off to somewhere else 100km away, burnt it down and ran circles around the empire, completely crushing it in a matter of a decade.
ironically, by the time the Lodi dynasty were in power( late 1400s/early 1500s), India sees for the first time in history presence of indian-bred cavalry ( Marwari & Kathiawari horse- which carry a strong arabian horse genetic component, which makes sense since we have Abbasid era records of vast amount of horses imported by the Rashtrakutas from the Arabs during this period, while Gurjaras relied more on their links with Kabul-shahis to import Bactrian horses). And this period sees predictable decline of power of the central Asia based turkic sultanates in India, as Indians had caught up to horses by this point but unfortunately, the mughals came along with a new innovation: gun powder. Which now rendered both cavalry charges and elephant charges useless.