India is about 2000 miles from Constantinople, and all the territory east of Byzantine dominions was in the firm control of hostile Muslim states, so overland to India would have been a tough one for the Vikings.
The Vikings were fluent river as well as ocean seamen, and some of them got into the Caspian Sea via the eastern European river system. However, there are no rivers to India from west of modern Pakistan, and a Viking party would still have had a overland trek of well over 500 miles from any point on the Caspian. IMO they are unlikely to have succeeded in getting to India if they tried.
I wasn’t thinking of a group just heading east on a whim or raiding cruise or something, trying to bring their boats and heavy possessions with them. As I said, that seems crazy.
But – and again I really know very little here – from what I gather Scandanavians were often recruited as mercenary bodyguards for the Byzantive Empire. I could imagine that if there was some kind of contact among the Silk Road between an Indian King and the Byzantines, the Indian might decide to send someone to Constantinople to hire some of the Northerners that have made a name for themselves as bodyguards there (as they’d be free from local and regional politics, therefore better guards). Traders regularly traveled the Silk Road; why wouldn’t a small group of hired mercenaries head down it to get to a bodyguarding gig?
Not saying it did happen, just that it seems at least distantly plausible, in the right period (though maybe we wouldn’t really call the Northerners from that time period ‘Vikings’).
If I am not getting my dates mixed up - right about the time of the Vikings, there were the Zoroastrians who travelled from Persia (Iran) to India and settled there.
So if the Zoroastrians could do it why couldn’t the Vikings ? I am not claiming that they did - all I am saying is that there were populations west of the Indus river, in the time of the Vikings, who managed to make it to India - sometimes in large numbers.
Zoroastrianism was IIRC the religion of the various pre-Islamic Persian Empires. Per Wiki it was first taken to India beginning perhaps 1000 years before the Viking Age (generally dated apprx 750-1000AD) through the invasion by 10s or even 100s of thousands of armed men in aggregate. It died almost completely out under Islam, from which many Persian Zoroastrians fled to India as refugees.
As for the Vikings, they elsewhere operated always as fighting men (no refugee status for them!), and always as far as I know with ships and a waterway nearby. It would have taken a large army to have a good chance of getting from the Caspian Sea to India in one piece. IMO a mere raiding party with no nautical opportunities would almost surely not have gotten through 100 miles of wild country defended by states more powerful than for example 1066 England.
IIRC the Muslims were putting heavy pressure on the Indians by the time the Viking Age began ~750AD. They eventually conquered the northern 1/2 - 2/3 of the subcontinent, and probably had all of it cut off from contacts westward well before.
