I’m going to be blunt: Invaders and Infidels delivers the hard, uncomfortable narrative it promises. From the first Muslim conquest of Sindh to the fall of the Delhi Sultanate and Babur’s invasion, Sandeep Balakrishna does not sugarcoat events. He names people, battles and places — Muhammad ibn Qasim, Mahmud of Ghazni, Muhammad Ghori, Qutb-ud-din Aibak, Iltutmish, Balban, Alauddin Khalji and finally Babur — and he tells the story as a long, grinding series of invasions and struggles that reshaped the subcontinent. This sweep — five hundred years of confrontation and change — is the spine of the book.
What the book covers — plain and wide
The book moves chronologically and keeps its focus: the early raids and Arab entry into Sindh, the rise of successive Turkic and Afghan warlords, the formation and consolidation of the Delhi Sultanate, and the final rupture with Babur’s coming. It includes the military campaigns, the political intrigues, the episodes of resistance and the cultural consequences of those centuries. Balakrishna is trying to show not just who fought whom, but how those fights altered institutions, society and the very shape of Indian civilisation.
Names and episodes — he calls them as he sees them
I liked that the book doesn’t avoid ugly details. It calls invasions by their names and connects them to concrete events and rulers. You will read about the Arab conquest of Sindh, the Ghaznavid raids, the Ghorid conquests that planted Turkic rule in north India, and the long Delhi Sultanate era with its cycles of conquest and consolidation. The book repeatedly returns to the same hard truth: these were not one-off raids but a chain of violent interventions that, over centuries, produced lasting change.
Tone and sources — readable, sourced, unapologetic
Balakrishna writes in a style that’s direct and energetic — not academic turgidness, not polemic fluff. He uses primary chronicles, inscriptions and earlier histories as his scaffolding and then writes a narrative that reads like history told clearly to a modern reader. He’s unapologetic in his framing: he intends to recover and emphasise the experience of the victims and the consequences for classical Indian polity and culture. That approach makes the book feel like a corrective for anyone who’s only seen the softer, textbook version of this era.
What struck me most — the scale of change
What stayed with me is the book’s argument that over three centuries of repeated incursions and conquest, Classical India was permanently altered. Balakrishna shows how institutions, temple economies, urban centres and cultural life were disrupted; he traces continuity of resistance as well as episodes of collaboration and accommodation, but the emphasis is on the long-term rupture. Reading it felt like watching a civilisation being pushed into a different shape over generations.
Who should read it and why I recommend it
If you want a clear, muscular account of how north India went from regional kingdoms to a long period of Sultanate rule and eventual Mughal overlordship, read this. If you want to understand the major players and feel the human consequences — the battles, the sieges, the betrayals and the brave stands — this book puts those stories in one place and tells them plainly. For me, it fills a gap between academic monographs and popular myths: it’s readable, sourced and unflinching.
Final
I’m all in for what Balakrishna sets out to do: tell the 500-year story without politeness, name the invaders, name the victims, and show how those centuries remade India. I finished it feeling informed, stirred and absolutely convinced by the picture he paints
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