For most of this period, the conquerors were too hostile toward each other to permit any one to control the entire region or to extinguish the power of Hindu dynasties in the south. Then, in the sixteenth century, the most skillful of these invaders from the northwest, the Mughals, succeeded in uniting most of the subcontinent under a single rule. The Mughal Empire embodied India’s diverse influences: Muslim in faith, Turkic and Mongol in ethnicity, Persian in elite culture, the Mughals ruled over a Hindu majority fragmented by regional identities.
