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Nihonjin1051
the so-called glory of the mughals is in fact shameful. they wasted all the stolen/taxed wealth on fancy ornaments/tombs and luxuries whilst the common man got steadily poorer. its not that turks/mongols were bad just because they were foreign invaders. if they had done something worthwhile, at a time when europe and even later america were laying the intellectual foundations for their dominance of today such as laying bricks for oxford/cambridge/harvard universities, rather than some grotesque looking taj mahal, which personally i find ugly, in the honor of one deceased wife/concubine out of the several they had, then maybe the common south asian would respect them more.
but nope, you cannot expect more of people who gloated about pyramids of skulls built from innocent men, women and children trying to defend their own honour. their shallowness and barbarity sealed their fate. contrast this with sher shah suri, a true Son of Subcontinent, who cared for the land and its people. in his incredibly short rule of less than a decade, he solidified pan-subcontinent trade by establishing GT road, introduced the rupee for the first time and laying the foundations of relatively modern monetary system before most of the world, and reforms in administration/bureacracy which put emphasis on meritocracy rather than nepotism.
thats why i hate when mughals are considered as the symbol of muslim rule in south asia, as they were much overrated and useless. the much less recognized or appreciated sher shah suri and tipu sultan -offered legendary resistance to brits, whose later congreve rockets were based on tipu's which slaughtered them in battle- were far superior in my opinion (and incidentally they were not foreigners to subcontinent. hmm.. get the hint?) compare the knowledge being discovered by south asians in 6-7th century, such as modern numerical system, algebraic theories and works on medicine/anatomy which arabs and persians used to come to learn and further transmit to the west. was anything comparable achieved/discovered after dehli sultanate? did mughals kill that scientific inquisitiveness or nurture it?
According to that, among their homelands was the hapta həndu (Sapta Sindhu).
i think that is description of geographical neighboring regions, not part of their original dominion or native homeland, although occasionally there were short-lived satraps/tributaries of early persian empires set up in punjab. historically this has been the native land of two types of people, the warrior/priestly/trader/farming clans of vedas and shudras/dalits/dasyus etc. that were descendants of harrapans. (its possible that australoids/veddoids inhabited it tens of thousands of years earlier when it was significantly more arid, but nothing concrete). ethnic punjabis who trace their ancestry only to punjab are a mixture of these two broad groups of people. but veritably, neither of these groups are/were iranic ethnically, linguistically or culturally. the theory of some tribes being descendants of scythians much later on (closer to 1st century BC), lacks credibility owing to genetic studies and the proof of a sedentary, farming culture far pre-dating invasions by those nomadic tribes to which their ancestory is attributed (particularly in case of pastoral/farming communities like jatts and gujjars, for rajputs one has to rely more on the genetic argument).
NB: sapta sindhu is the original sanksrit term for the seven rivers (i believe beas and ghaggar-hakra are the missing ones omitted from 'panch-nad'(Prakrit) or 'punj-ab'(punjabi) ) from which the avestan/old persian 'hapta hindu' derives, in fact the term hind or hindu came from a similar morph in pronunciation of 's' in sind/sindhu to hind/hindhu by the persians.
