Alexander was primarily looking to expand his territory when he went to India.
Check these sites for more information.
http://wso.williams.edu/~junterek/india.htm
http://www.sparknotes.com/biography/alexander/section11.rhtml
http://www.livius.org/aj-al/alexander/alexander_z2.html
Why did Alexander go to India? Was it for gold? Did he conquer any cities there or name any after himself?
Thank you.
2 answers
Alexander entered very little of what we now call India. He attacked the area around the Indus river in the west of what was India and is now Pakistan, the area of the present Pakistani provinces of Sind and the Punjab (Sind is all over the news today because ot the murder of the former prime minister of Pakistan). He wished to march to the Ganges River, but his troops refused to go that far into a hostile region so far from support and inhabited by strongly armed people. The last big battle of his life was fought against the Indian leader Porus who used elephants.
He was by then the "Great King" of the Persian empire, and this region was once part of the Persian Empire so he probably wanted to reclaim it. Moreover he considered himself ruler of all the world, and that western part of Asia was about the limits of the known world in that direction. He probably felt that he had to have it. The Greeks and Macedonians knew about the Indus valley, but not much about what lay further East. Probably if his fights against Indians and their elephants had not discouraged his army so badly in defeating Porus he would have gone much further into India.
He was by then the "Great King" of the Persian empire, and this region was once part of the Persian Empire so he probably wanted to reclaim it. Moreover he considered himself ruler of all the world, and that western part of Asia was about the limits of the known world in that direction. He probably felt that he had to have it. The Greeks and Macedonians knew about the Indus valley, but not much about what lay further East. Probably if his fights against Indians and their elephants had not discouraged his army so badly in defeating Porus he would have gone much further into India.