The Age of Wrath: A History of the Delhi Sultanate

by Abraham Eraly

  Mahmud was in Khurasan at the time of his father’s death, and from there he wrote a conciliatory letter to Ismail suggesting that he should leave the crown to him (Mahmud) and accept the governorship of Balk and Khurasan, a substantial portion of the kingdom. Ismail rejected the offer. Mahmud then advanced on Ghazni with his army, routed Ismail in a battle, and imprisoned him for life, but generously provided him with all material comforts. Mahmud, aged twenty-seven, then ascended the throne.

  Mahmud’s accession to the throne was then legitimised by the Caliph by sending to him a robe of investiture and by conferring on him the title Yamin-ud-Daulah (Right-hand-of-the-empire), so his dynasty thereafter came to be known as the Yamini dynasty. Mahmud responded to the Caliphate honour by taking a solemn vow, at the formal ceremony of receiving the laurels, to undertake jihad, holy war, every year against the idolaters of India.

  MAHMUD COULD NOT keep his vow to the letter, because of his several military engagements in Central Asia, but he did lead more than twelve campaigns into India, perhaps as many as seventeen campaigns, during his thirty-two-year reign. The avowed objective of Mahmud’s Indian campaigns, according to Al-Utbi, was ‘to exalt the standard of religion, to widen the plain of right, to illuminate the words of truth, and to strengthen the power of justice.’ Mahmud, adds Ferishta, wanted to ‘root out the worship of idols from the face of all India.’

  Mahmud did indeed ‘convert as many as a thousand idol temples into mosques,’ according to Siraj. But the passion for plunder was an equally strong motive, or perhaps an even stronger motive, in Mahmud—he fought for god as well as for mammon, but quite probably more for mammon than for god. These were however interconnected motives, each reinforcing and energising the other.

  India was the ideal land for Mahmud to glut both his passions simultaneously, for Hindu temples were depositories of immense treasures, so sacking them earned him great religious merit as well as vast treasures. There was also an important morale boosting military advantage in demolishing temples and smashing their idols, for these were, in the eyes of Ghaznavid soldiers, convincing demonstrations of the invincible power of their god, and the utter powerlessness of Hindu gods. Sometimes the fragments of the smashed idols were sent to Ghazni for embedding them in thoroughfares there, for people to tread on and desecrate them.

  Muslim rulers were by convention required to offer three options to their infidel adversaries: become Muslims and be privileged citizens, or live as zimmis (protected non-Muslims: second class citizens), or be killed. But the invaders in the frenzy of battle almost never paused to offer their foes those choices. The religious fervour of Mahmud’s army expressed itself primarily in slaughter, plunder and destruction, but hardly ever in active pursuit of proselytisation. Even the small number of conversions that Mahmud made were done at the point of the sword—it was Islam or death for the vanquished. There was no serious attempt by him to propagandise Islam. Consequently, many of those who became Muslims to save their lives and properties, apostatised when the tide of Ghaznavid invasion receded. Mahmud’s campaigns had hardly any enduring religious effect in India.

  There was clearly a strong element of self-serving opportunism in Mahmud’s posture of religious fervour, for he had no hesitation in inducting a large number of Hindus into his army under their own commanders, or even in deploying them in battles against rival Muslim kingdoms in Central Asia. According to Al-Utbi an army he once deployed in Central Asia consisted of ‘Turks, Indians, Khaljis, Afghans and Ghaznavids.’ It is significant that Mahmud was as ruthless in his fight against Muslims of the ‘heretic’ Ismaili sect as he was in his fight against Hindus, and he had no qualms whatever about destroying the centuries-old Muslim kingdom of Multan, massacring a large number of Ismailis there, desecrating their mosques, and, as Al-Utbi reports, in levying from them ‘20,000,000 dirhams with which to alleviate their sins.’

  Religious fervour evidently subserved Mahmud’s temporal goals of amassing booty and expanding his power. As for his soldiers, the prospect of booty was undoubtedly their primary motive, though it was religious frenzy and bloodlust that galvanized them. Often, in a single raid into India, they obtained several times more wealth than they could have ever dreamed of acquiring in a whole lifetime of mundane toil. Apart from material treasures, the Turks also seized a large number of people in India—men, women and children—for serving them as slaves, or for selling them to slave traders back home.

  WARS EVERYWHERE IN the medieval world were savage. Mahmud’s Indian campaigns were particularly so. This savagery was often deliberately inflamed by Mahmud, as it served the dual purpose of rousing the ferocity of his soldiers, and of terrifying the enemy. These were the major factors that enabled Mahmud to be invariably victorious in his battles—and those victories in turn endowed him with an aura of invincibility, so that his adversaries often fled on his very approach, as before a tornado of fire. And this craven flight of adversaries in turn boosted the self-confidence of Mahmud and his soldiers, and they came to regard themselves as invincible. And indeed, they became invincible.

  Sometimes, when confronted with an overwhelming enemy force, Mahmud prostrated on the ground ardently praying for god’s help—and that, whether god intervened or not, did ignite the valour of his soldiers, so they won the ensuing battle. Mahmud however was not a reckless adventurer. His raids, for all their seeming impetuosity, were not random, impulsive acts, but were all very carefully planned, after meticulously gathering information about his adversaries by sending spies to scout them out. And he avoided needless risks. On one occasion, during his 1008 campaign against Shahi king Anandapala, son of Jayapala, he lay entrenched before the enemy for as many as forty days, unwilling to risk launching an attack against the vast enemy horde, but sought to provoke Anandapala to attack, which he unwisely did in the end, and was routed. It was this potent combination of caution, meticulous planning, and faith-driven battlefield ferocity that made Mahmud invincible.

  There is a good amount of information on Mahmud and his campaigns in medieval Arabic and Persian chronicles, which are generally reliable in recording the broad sweep of events in his life. But some of the details in the chronicles are suspect. The accounts of the havoc caused by Mahmud in India, and of the amount of booty he seized there, often seem exaggerated in the chronicles, evidently to glorify the heroism and religious fervour of the sultan. For instance, in one campaign he is said to have taken, apart from a vast amount of treasure, 380 elephants and 53,000 captives. And in another campaign he is reported to have captured 500 elephants! Similarly, the slaughter attributed to Mahmud is often preposterous—15,000 in one battle, 20,000 in another battle, and, most incredible of all, 50,000 in the temple town of Somnath—all that with sword and spear and arrows, in battles that usually lasted just a few hours!

  But even if we discount the exaggeration in these accounts, it cannot be denied that Mahmud’s raids were horrendous orgies of animal ferocity. Ghaznavids killed not only the enemy soldiers, but also common folks in countless numbers. Only women and children were usually—but not always—spared, but they, as well as numerous men, were seized as slaves, and were afterwards taken to Ghazni. There, reports Al-Utbi, ‘merchants from distant cities came to purchase the slaves, so that … [many lands in Central Asia] were filled with them, and the fair and the dark, the rich and the poor, were commingled in common slavery.’ There was a good demand for Indian slaves in Central Asia at this time, and they normally fetched a good price, though at one time the Afghan slave market was so overstocked with Indian slaves that their price plummeted, and a slave could be bought for as little as a couple of dirhams.

  Curiously, Mahmud, unlike most other invaders, had no hunger for land. Had he desired it, he could have easily annexed a good part of North India to his kingdom, but he did not have the patience for empire building. Except Punjab and Sind—the gateways to India, which he needed to keep open for his raids—Mahmud did not annex any territory in India. His Indian campaigns were lik
e bandit raids—he swept through the land rapidly, fought several quick battles, slaughtered enemy soldiers and people in multitudes, destroyed temples and smashed idols, enslaved thousands of people, seized immeasurable booty, and then sped back to Ghazni. He had no desire to settle in India, perhaps because of its torrid climate, which, as Khondamir puts it, ‘consumed the body as easily as flame melts a candle.’

  Mahmud was proud of the incredible amount of booty he seized in India, and once, on returning from a raid, he piled up the treasures he had collected on carpets in the courtyard of his palace, for people to admire it and extol him. And Ghazni, enriched by the vast treasures that Mahmud and his soldiers brought from India, became a fabulously rich city, where, as Wolseley Haig puts it, ‘mosques, colleges, caravanserais and hospices sprang up on every side.’

  MAHMUD’S IDEAL CAMPAIGN schedule was to arrive in India soon after the monsoon ended, and to return to Ghazni before the monsoon set in again and the rivers became unfordable. When the season of rain ended, the season of plunder began.

  Mahmud had five rainless and cool months, October to February, for his Indian campaigns. But the exigencies of war and the waywardness of weather often wrecked his plans. Nature itself was a vicious adversary that Mahmud had to contend with in India—torrential rivers, waterless deserts, deep ravines, jungles infested with ferocious animals and venomous reptiles. Once, his passage into India was blocked for a couple of months by a snowstorm that covered his route with heavy snowdrifts; another time he lost all his booty while crossing a flooded river. Sometimes vengeful native guides led him into forbidding marshes, as they did once, when he was returning from Kashmir; or led him into desert infernos, as they did once, when he was returning from Gujarat. Still he persisted relentlessly with his campaigns. And fortune invariably favoured him.

  The response of Indian kings to the Ghaznavid invasion was usually craven, if we are to believe the partisan testimony of Muslim chroniclers. According to these chroniclers, the rajas often fled from Mahmud’s path, even when they had under their command armies that were much larger than that of Mahmud. Often, on Mahmud’s approach, they sneaked out from their forts in the middle of the night, and hid in thick forests till Mahmud left the area. Such craven responses were at least in part due to the widely prevalent fatalistic attitude of Indians, which made them believe that victory and defeat were not in their hands, but as fate decreed. They were therefore defeated in their minds even as they entered the battlefield, and were more ready to flee than to fight. There are only very few recorded instances of Indian kings offering heroic resistance to Mahmud.

  Sometimes Indian kings purchased peace from Mahmud by surrendering to him their treasures as he approached their capital—and sometimes they passed on this burden to their helpless subjects, by levying on them a special tax called Turushka-danda. And sometimes, to prevent annihilation, the rajas embraced Islam, though they often apostatised later—thus Sukhapala, a grandson of King Jayapala of Punjab, became a Muslim and changed his name to Nawasa Shah, but he later reverted to Hinduism. To change religion was an act of no great import for Indians; in polytheistic India, Islam was often seen as just a constituent in the heterogeneous political, social, religious and sectarian make-up of India.

  THERE WAS AT this time no concept of India as a nation, and therefore no recognition of the invader as an alien. India was just a geographical region. For Indian kings, Ghazni was just another kingdom which, though militarily more dangerous and culturally more divergent than the kingdoms in the subcontinent, was nevertheless merely another element in their normal political milieu. Not surprisingly Indian kings continued to fight with each other even as Mahmud was storming through the land. And Hindu soldiers had no scruple at all to serve under the virulently anti-Hindu Mahmud, or, presumably, to be deployed by him even against Hindu rajas.

  Because of all this, it was only very rarely that Indian kings formed alliances to fight an invader. There are in fact only two recorded instances of rajas rallying together against the Ghaznavids, and both these were in support of the Hindu Shahi rajas of Punjab, Jayapala and his son Anandapala. According to Ferishta, in 1008, when Mahmud invaded Punjab, several Hindu rajas sent contingents in support of Anandapala. There was indeed something akin to a national response against this invasion. ‘The Hindu females on this occasion sold their jewels, and sent the proceeds from distant parts to their husbands, so that they, being supplied with all the necessaries of the march, might be earnest in the war,’ records Ferishta. ‘Those who were poor contributed from their earnings by spinning cotton, and other labour.’ But this concerted action, it should be noted, was not because Mahmud was an alien and a Muslim, but because he posed a threat to the power of all the local rajas and to the life and property of the common people.

  But even these allied forces, despite their vast numbers, were not able to defeat the Ghaznavids. None of the Indian kings ever, not even once, prevailed over Mahmud in the innumerable battles he fought in India. This universal rout of Indian kings by Mahmud was primarily because of the lack of regimental discipline in Indian armies, and by their inability to make tactical innovations. Indian military strategies and political attitudes were shackled to moribund traditions, not dynamically related to evolving historical realities. There was thus no way that Indian armies could succeed against the well-trained and well-disciplined Ghaznavid army, which was capable of rapid, coordinated manoeuvres and decisive tactical innovations.

  A much vaunted heroic act of Indian kings was to perform, when faced with certain defeat in battle, the fearsome rite of jauhar, ritual mass suicide, in which they killed their women and children, or consigned them into a mass funeral pyre, and then rushed out of their fort into the enemy lines to kill and be killed. The objective of Indian kings in executing jauhar was not to defeat the enemy but to get themselves killed—it was an entirely defeatist and futile act, even if viewed as an act of honour, to avoid the ignominy of defeat. There was nothing heroic or honourable about slaughtering helpless women and children, or in committing mass suicide.

  On all this, however, we have only the accounts of Muslim chroniclers, and these have to be taken with some scepticism, especially as their stories are often confusing and contradictory. We cannot be therefore certain that Mahmud was always victorious in his battles as the chroniclers claim. There are no references at all in Indian texts to Mahmud’s raids.

  MAHMUD’S FIRST INCURSION into India, probably in 1000 CE, seems to have been just a border raid, perhaps to test the field. His first major campaign was against his immediate eastern neighbour, the king Jayapala of Punjab, with whom Sabuktigin had earlier clashed. In September 1001 Mahmud, heading a 15,000-strong cavalry force, swooped down from the mountains and swept towards Peshawar. There he was confronted by Jayapala with an army of 12,000 cavalry, 30,000 infantry and 300 elephants. In the ensuing battle, which lasted just a few hours, Mahmud overwhelmed Jayapala by the sheer ferocity of his cavalry charge. Some 15,000 Indian soldiers were killed in the battle, and the raja, along with some princes, were captured by Mahmud. The raja and the princes were later released by Mahmud on payment of substantial ransoms. And on their release they were, according to Al-Utbi, sped on their way with contemptuous ‘smacks on their buttocks’ by the Turks.

  Returning to his kingdom, Jayapala, out of the humiliation of the repeated defeats he had suffered at the hands of the Ghaznavids, committed ritual suicide by mounting a funeral pyre. He was then succeeded by his son Anandapala, and under him also the conflict between the two kingdoms continued. Mahmud, we are told by Al-Utbi, ‘stretched upon him (Anandapala) the hand of slaughter, imprisonment, pillage, depopulation, and fire, and hunted him from ambush to ambush, over hill and dale, over soft and hard ground of his territory, and his followers either became a feast to rapacious wild beasts of the passes and plains, or fled away in distraction.’

  The conflict between the Ghaznavids and the Hindu Shahis went on intermittently for another two decades—altogether f
or some four decades, from the time of Sabuktigin—till around 1020, when Punjab was annexed by Mahmud. ‘The Hindu Shahi dynasty is now extinct, and of the whole house there is no longer the slightest remnant in existence,’ reports Al-Biruni. ‘We must say that, in all their grandeur, they never slackened in their ardent desire for doing that which is good and right, that they were men of noble sentiment and noble bearing.’

  Beyond Punjab, the campaigns of Mahmud took him deep into the Indo-Gangetic Plain, as far as Kanauj on the Ganga. On the way to Kanauj, Mahmud raided Mathura, an ancient sacred city of Hindus and the reputed birthplace of Krishna, a divine incarnation. The city had many splendid temples, and Mahmud, we are told by Al-Utbi, was awed by their grandeur, particularly by the main temple there. ‘If anyone should wish to construct a building equal to this, he would not be able to do it without expending a hundred thousand red dinars, and it would occupy two hundred years, even though the most experienced and able workmen were employed,’ he is reported to have remarked. But this admiration did not prevent Mahmud from ordering the demolition of the temple. ‘All the temples [in Mathura] should be burnt with naphtha and fire, and levelled to the ground,’ he ordered. The city was pillaged for twenty days by the Turks, till they glutted themselves with plunder.

  THE MOST CELEBRATED campaign of Mahmud was against the temple city of Somnath on the seashore in Gujarat, and it was also his last important Indian campaign. Mahmud set out from Ghazni on this campaign in October 1024, leading a huge army of 30,000 cavalry, and accompanied by a multitude of volunteers who joined him on the way, drawn by the lure of booty. He reached Multan in November and headed for Gujarat through the desert of Rajasthan, characteristically making meticulous preparations for the journey through the desert, loading several hundreds of camels with water and provisions, and requiring each soldier to carry with him fodder, water and food sufficient for several days.