Another myth about India of the seventh century is that it was a unified whole, a nation state, living in peace. In fact it was a divided country. The two major religions Hinduism and Buddhism were at loggerheads with Buddhism losing ground fast. The caste system, against which Buddhism came as a reaction, was well entrenched and unshaken. There was no sense of India as a nation state. The South was far removed from the North culturally and in the languages it spoke. To an outsider India must have looked like a fractured country with permanent civil strife, an easy target for ethnic Turks that ruled neighboring Afghanistan.
