After the Arab conquest of Sind, India had a respite from invasions for nearly three centuries, till the Ghaznavid invasion in the early eleventh century. In the meantime, by the second decade of the ninth century, the far-flung Arab empire had begun to crack up like a clay field in high summer, and several of its provinces became virtually independent kingdoms, even though Muslim rulers everywhere generally acknowledged the nominal overlordship of the Caliph.
One of the major kingdoms that emerged out of the splintered Arab empire was the Samanid kingdom of Central Asia, spread over Khurasan and Transoxiana, and had Bukhara as its capital. In time the Samanid kingdom too splintered into several independent states. In 963 Alptigin, a Turkic slave who had risen to high office under the Samanids and served them as their governor in Khurasan, rebelled against his king, seized the city of Ghazni in eastern Afghanistan, and established an independent kingdom there. Ghazni, states Mughal emperor Babur in his autobiography, was at that time ‘a very humble place’. But it had a grand historical destiny. And it would play a decisive role in the history of medieval India.
Alptigin died soon after founding the kingdom, and was succeeded by three rulers in quick succession: a son, a son-in-law, and a royal slave. The slave, Pirai—whom medieval chronicler Siraj describes as ‘a very depraved man’— was overthrown by the nobles of Ghazni in 977, and they raised Sabuktigin, a favourite slave and son-in-law of Alptigin, to the throne.
The nobles favoured Sabuktigin because he was a man of proven ability, and had also taken care to win their support. According to Khondamir, an early-sixteenth-century chronicler, ‘the chief men of Ghazni saw the signs of greatness and nobility, and the fires of felicity and prosperity on the forehead of Sabuktigin, who widely spread out the carpet of justice, and rooted out injury and oppression, and who, by conferring different favours on them, had made friends of the nobles, the soldiers, and the leading men of the state.’
Apart from having these laudable personal qualities, Sabuktigin also claimed royal pedigree—he traced his lineage to the last Persian monarch, whose descendants had, during the Arab invasion of Persia, fled to Turkistan, where they, having intermarried with the local people, eventually came to be considered as Turks. When Sabuktigin was around twelve years old, he was captured by a rival tribe, and was later taken to Bukhara by a slave trader. There he was bought by Alptigin, under whose favour he rapidly rose in rank, and in time achieved renown as a general.
Ghazni was a tiny kingdom at the time of Alptigin’s death, and was confined to just the city and its environs. Sabuktigin greatly expanded the kingdom, extending its frontiers up to the Amu Darya in the north, the Caspian Sea in the west, and eastward across the mountains up to the upper Indus Valley. According to Al-Biruni, Sabuktigin had chosen ‘the holy war as his calling,’ and this led him to launch several campaigns against King Jayapala of the Hindu Shahi dynasty of Punjab. There is however no evidence of any great religious zeal in the campaigns of the sultan. His invasion of Punjab was in any case inevitable, given his expansionist ambitions, and the normal hostile posture of kings against their immediate neighbours.
Jayapala ruled over an extensive kingdom stretching from western Punjab to eastern Afghanistan, but he, according to medieval Arab historian Al-Utbi, found ‘his land grow narrow under his feet’ because of Sabuktigin’s aggressions. Jayapala then, following the classic dictum that offence is the best form of defence, advanced against Sabuktigin with his army—‘he rose with his relations, generals and vassals, and hastened with his huge elephants to wreak his revenge upon Sabuktigin,’ states Al-Utbi.
THE ENSUING BATTLE went on for several days, but still remained inconclusive, and was not going too well for the Ghaznavids. What saved them was a miracle. There was, according to Al-Utbi, a ravine close to the Hindu camp, and in it a lake of absolute purity and miraculous properties. ‘If any filth was thrown into it, black clouds collected, whirlwinds arose, the summits of mountains became black, rain fell, and the neighbourhood was filled with cold blasts until red death supervened.’ Sabuktigin, baffled in the battlefield, decided to invoke the supernatural, and had some filth thrown into the lake. Suddenly, ‘the horrors of the day of resurrection rose up before wicked infidels, and fire fell from heaven on them.’ A fierce hailstorm accompanied by loud claps of thunder then swept through the valley, and ‘thick black vapours’ enveloped the Indian army, so they could not even ‘see the road by which they could flee.’1
Jayapala, faced with this strange adversity, then pleaded for peace. Sabuktigin was inclined to grant it, but his belligerent son Mahmud wanted total victory. Hearing of this, Jayapala warned Sabuktigin: ‘You have seen the impetuosity of Hindus and their indifference to death . . . If, therefore, you refuse to grant peace in the hope of obtaining plunder, tribute, elephants and prisoners, then there is no alternative for us but to mount the horse of stern determination, destroy our property, take out the eyes of our elephants, cast our children into fire, and rush on each other with sword and spear, so that all that will be left to you are stones and dirt, and dead bodies and scattered bones.’ Sabuktigin knew that this was not a hollow threat, so he granted peace to the raja on his promise of paying tribute and ceding some territories.
Jayapala reneged on that promise, and, according to Mughal chronicler Ferishta, organised a confederacy of several North Indian rajas against Sabuktigin. It was a matter of survival for him, as the very existence of his kingdom was being threatened by the rapidly expanding Ghaznavid sultanate. But the ensuing battle was once again won by Sabuktigin, despite the vast army that Jayapala deployed. This time his victory was due to the innovative battle tactic he adopted, after carefully reconnoitring the enemy deployment. Sabuktigin, according Al-Utbi, ‘ascended a lofty hill from which he could see the whole army of the infidels, which resembled scattered ants and locusts, and he felt like a wolf about to attack a flock of sheep.’ Returning to his camp, Sabuktigin divided his army into several contingents of 500 soldiers each and sent them in relays against the Indian army, to attack and retreat, attack and retreat, so that the Indian soldiers became utterly exhausted as the battle progressed while the bulk of the Turkish army remained fresh. At that stage Sabuktigin sent his entire army charging into battle in a fierce onslaught, and routed the Indian army, which ‘fled, leaving behind them their property, utensils, arms, provisions, elephants, and horses.’ Following the victory, Sabuktigin annexed the western part of the Hindu Shahi kingdom, up to Peshawar.
The crucial factor that led to Sabuktigin’s victory—apart from the ingenious battle tactic he used—was that the Indian cavalry, according to Ferishta, was far inferior to the Turkish cavalry using Central Asian bloodstock. Moreover, the Central Asian soldiers of the sultan were very much hardier than Indian soldiers. The ‘greatest pleasure [of the Ghaznavid cavalrymen] was to be in saddle, which they regarded as if it were a throne,’ claims Al-Utbi. The Ghaznavids also had a psychological advantage over the Indian soldiers, in that they were valorous unto death, in the absolute certainty that if they died fighting infidels they would straightaway go to heaven and enjoy eternal bliss there. Their weapons too were superior to those of Indians, in that they used the composite bow—made of two pieces of wood joined together with a metal band—which, as Sarkar describes it, was ‘the most dreaded weapon of antiquity’.
Sabuktigin was an exceptionally successful monarch, and in every field of government his achievements were substantial. ‘Amir Sabuktigin,’ states Siraj, ‘was a wise, just, brave and religious man, faithful to his agreements, truthful in his words and not avaricious for wealth. He was kind and just to his subjects.’ He was also a prudent and cautious monarch, and he, despite all his military successes, took care to acknowledge the overlordship of the Samanid rulers of Bukhara, and he aided them in their battles against rebels. For those services he was rewarded by the Samanid sultan with the governorship of the province of Khurasan. And Sabuktigin in turn conferred that governorship on Mahmud, his eldest son.
SABUKTIGIN DIED IN 997, after an eventful reign of twenty years, and was succeeded by his son Mahmud, after a brief war of succession. Mahmud was not Sabuktigin’s chosen successor—his preference was for Ismail, his younger son. But that choice was an expression of his sentiment, not of his judgement, for Ismail was a weakling compared to Mahmud. Mahmud seems to have been the son of a concubine of the sultan, and that also probably weighed against him in the eyes of Sabuktigin, even though in Islamic law all one’s children, whether born of a wedded wife or a mistress, are equally legitimate. In any case, the sword was the final arbiter of princely destinies, so a dead king’s will was no barrier to an ambitious prince in his pursuit of power.
Sabuktigin seems to have had a presentiment about Mahmud’s future greatness even at the very time of his birth. ‘A moment before his birth, Amir Sabuktigin saw in a dream that a tree had sprung from the fireplace in his house, and grew so high that it covered the whole world with its shadow,’ writes Siraj. ‘Waking up startled from his dream, he began to reflect upon the import of it. At that very moment a messenger came, bringing the tidings that the Almighty had given him a son. Sabuktigin was greatly delighted by the news, and he said, “I name the child Mahmud”. On the same night he was born, an idol temple in India, in the vicinity of Peshawar, on the banks of the Sind, collapsed,’ portending the iconoclastic zeal that Mahmud would come to have as sultan.
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 like 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 for 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.
Mahmud reached Somnath in January 1025. In medieval chronicles there are several different descriptions of Somnath, and of Mahmud’s exploits there. Of these, the most colourful account is in the thirteenth century Arabic chronicle by Kazwini. ‘Among the wonders of that place was the temple in which was placed the idol called Somnath,’ he writes. ‘This idol was in the middle of the temple without anything to support it from below, or to suspend it from above. It was held in the highest honour among Hindus, and whoever beheld it floating in the air was struck with amazement, whether he was a Muslim or an infidel. Hindus used to go on pilgrimage to it whenever there was an eclipse of the moon, and would then assemble there to the number of more than a hundred thousand . . . Everything that was most precious was brought there as offerings, and the temple was endowed with more than 10,000 villages.’ It was a fabulously rich temple, bursting with the treasures it had accumulated over many centuries. Water from the holy river Ganga, some 1200 kilometres away, was brought every day to Somnath to wash the temple. ‘A thousand Brahmins were employed there for worshipping the idol and for attending on pilgrims, and 500 damsels sang and danced at its door.’ There were 300 barbers there, for tonsuring pilgrims.
The people of Somnath were initially unperturbed by Mahmud’s invasion, for they firmly believed that it was their deity that had drawn Mahmud there so as to annihilate him for his sins of desecrating and destroying numerous temples elsewhere in India. So they assembled on the ramparts of the town to taunt and jeer at the Muslim army deployed just outside the town, even though their chieftain had prudently fled by sea to the safety of a nearby island. As it happened, the faith of the people was entirely misplaced. Somnatha, their god, let them down dismally.
The Turks responded to the jeers of the crowd with showers of arrows, and drove off the hecklers from the ramparts. They then climbed on to the ramparts by leaning ladders against them, and then, entering the town, engaged its defenders in fierce street-fights, slaughtering very many of them. This went on till dusk, when the Turks, having not yet fully eliminated the defenders, prudently withdrew from the town. But the next morning they resumed the attack. ‘Indians,’ writes Kazwini, ‘made a desperate resistance. They would go weeping and crying into the temple to seek [god’s] help, and then issue forth to battle and fight till all were killed. The number of the slain exceeded 50,000.’
Mahmud then exultantly entered the temple. According to Kazwini, ‘The edifice was built upon fifty-six pillars of teak. The shrine of the idol was dark, but was lighted by jewelled chandeliers of great value. In front of the entrance to the cella was a chain of gold weighing 200 mans.’ But the greatest marvel of it all was that the idol remained suspended in midair without any visible support. ‘The king looked upon the idol with wonder,’ and asked his officers about what the explanation of it could be, and one of them said that ‘the canopy was made of loadstone, and the idol of iron, and that the ingenious builder had skilfully contrived that the magnet would not exert a greater force on any one side. Hence the idol was suspended in the middle.’ That explanation indeed proved correct, for ‘when two stones were removed from the canopy, the idol swerved to one side, when more were taken away it inclined still further, until at last it rested on the ground.’
Other sources offer different descriptions of the temple and of what Mahmud did there. According to them, the main deity of the temple was Shiva, symbolised by a huge phallic idol made of hewn stone, which, embedded deep in the floor, stood over two metres high from the floor. And alongside it were several small gold and silver idols. The sight of the phallic idol enraged Mahmud, and he raised his mace to smash it. At that point some of his officers tried to dissuade him, saying that the temple priests were offering a fabulous ransom to save the idol. Mahmud scornfully rejected their plea, saying, ‘I desire that on the day of resurrection I should be summoned with the words, “Where is that Mahmud who broke the greatest of the heathen idols?” rather than by these: “Where is that Mahmud who sold the greatest of the heathen idols?”’
As it happened, smashing the idol proved to be of religious as well as material benefit to Mahmud, for when the idol was shattered it was found to have, in a cavity within it, gems worth over a hundred times the ransom offered for it. The temple was then razed to the ground. According to Siraj, Mahmud carried the Somnatha idol with him to Ghazni, where it was split ‘into four parts. One part he placed in the Friday Mosque in Ghazni, one he placed at the entrance of the royal palace, the third he sent to Mecca, and the fourth to Medina,’ for people to tread on them. As Kazwini states, the booty that fell to Mahmud at Somnath ‘exceeded twenty-thousandthousand [gold] dinars’—twenty million dinars—probably amounting to over six tons of gold.
Mahmud spent a fortnight at Somnath, then set out to return to Ghazni with his incalculable loot, cautiously taking a route different from the one by which he had arrived, which his enemies would have expected him to take. But his journey through Kutch and Sind, the route that he now took, proved to be perilous, as his guide, a devotee of the Somnath deity, led him into a waterless desert in Sind. Mahmud had the guide put to death, and marched on praying to god for relief. He finally managed to extricate himself from that desert trap, though many of his soldiers perished there. But that was not the end of his trials. Further along the route he was greatly harried by Jat tribesmen. Finally, after a great many ordeals, Mahmud reached Ghazni in the spring of 1026, and there received fresh laudatory titles from the Caliph, who confirmed him as the ruler of Khurasan, Hindustan, Sistan and Khvarazm. The following year Mahmud led another expedition into India, his last, to punish the Jats who had harassed him on his return from Somnath. The last three years of Mahmud’s life were spent in military engagements in Central Asia.
MAHMUD WAS QUITE ill in the last couple of years of his life. As in the accounts of many other facets of his life, medieval chroniclers differ about the nature of the illness that felled the indomitable sultan. ‘Opinions differ as to his disease: some say it was consumption, others a disease of the rectum, and others dysentery,’ notes Mir Khvand, a fifteenth-century Persian historian. According to Khondamir, the sultan ‘died of consumption or of disease of the liver . . .’
‘During the time of his illness he used to ride and walk about just as he did when in health, although physicians forbade him doing so,’ states Mir Khvand. ‘It is said that two days before his death he ordered all the bags of gold and silver coins which were in his treasury, and all the jewels, and all the valuables which he had collected . . . to be brought to his presence. They were accordingly all laid out in the courtyard of his palace, which, in the eyes of spectators, appeared like a garden full of flowers of red, yellow, violet, and other colours. He looked at them with sorrow, and wept very bitterly . . . [Afterwards] he reviewed all his personal slaves, his cattle, Arab horses, camels, etc., and after casting his eye upon them, and crying with great sorrow and regret, returned to his palace.’
The sight of all his treasures and acquisitions no doubt evoked in Mahmud memories of the great perils and triumphs of his life, of the power he once had over men and circumstances, and also the realization of the futility of it all, the tragedy of his life, the tragedy of all life, that every man dies alone, leaving behind everything he had cherished in life. Mahmud died weeping. And that redeems him. Partly.
Mahmud died in Ghazni in April 1030, aged 59, after a reign of 33 years. He died on a stormy, dark night of pelting rain, a night that perfectly matched the turbulence of his life. He was buried in the blue palace in Ghazni.
MAHMUD WAS A man of demoniac energy, and he was engaged in ceaseless wars during his entire reign, in which he slaughtered many thousands of people and ravaged vast tracts of land. His military campaigns extended over a vast area stretching east-west from the banks of the Ganga to the shores of the Caspian Sea, and north-south from the shores of the Aral Sea to Gujarat. Of this, his Indian campaigns constituted the dominant part, in which he, as Al-Biruni states, ‘utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed there wonderful exploits, by which the Hindus became like atoms and dust scattered in all directions.’
Mahmud’s nature, writes Al-Utbi, ‘was contrary to the disposition of men, which induce [them] to prefer a soft to a hard couch, and the splendour of the cheeks of pomegranate-bosomed girls to well-tempered sword blades.’ His was a singularly sanguinary career. But then, it was a sanguinary age, and the career of Mahmud differs from that of most other kings of the age only in the incessancy of his campaigns, not in the nature of his campaigns. And it has to be noted that while he was an absolute terror to his adversaries, he was, as modern historian K. M. Panikkar notes, ‘a just and wise monarch to his own subjects.’
The character of Mahmud was a complex mixture of several contradictory elements. ‘He was very bigoted in religion . . . [and] was exceedingly covetous in seizing the riches of wealthy people,’ states Mir Khvand. Confirms Khondamir: Mahmud was ‘excessively greedy in accumulating wealth . . . [and he had an insatiable] thirst for worldly glory.’ Adds Ferishta: Mahmud had ‘the sordid vice of avarice.’
Yet, despite such vices, and the despotic power that he exercised, Mahmud had no hesitation to bow before the lowliest of his subjects when they charged him of misdeeds or incompetence. According to Zinatu-l Majalis, a late sixteenth century compilation of historical anecdotes, once when an old woman—whose son was killed along a caravan route in Ghazni—publicly rebuked Mahmud for the poor security conditions in his kingdom, and warned him to ‘keep no more territory than . . . [he could] manage,’ he bowed to her in humility and humbly accepted her rebuke.
There was a poignant trace of melancholy in Mahmud. Once, while drinking wine, his thoughts turned to his father, and with tears welling up in his eyes he said to a courtier: ‘My father had established very good rules for the management of the country, and took great pains in enforcing them. I thought that . . . [after my father’s demise] I would enjoy the exercise of my power in peace and security . . . I also considered that . . . I should become a great king. But the truth was revealed to me when he died . . . for since his departure I have not had one day’s happiness. You think I drink this wine for pleasure, but this is a great mistake. I take it merely as a device to gain . . . [some] peace.’
For all his savagery, there are aspects of the character and life of Mahmud that draw our sympathy. Part of the making of his complex persona was his self-consciousness about his unprepossessing looks. According to Ferishta, Mahmud’s face was heavily pock-marked. ‘His features were very ugly,’ states Hamdullah Mustaufi, a fourteenth century chronicler. ‘One day, regarding his own face in a mirror, he became thoughtful and depressed. His vizier inquired as to the cause of his depression, to which he replied, “It is generally understood that the sight of kings adds vigour to the eye, but the form with which I am endowed is enough to strike the beholder blind.” The vizier then consoled him, saying, “Scarcely one man in a million looks on your face, but the qualities of your mind cast their influence on every one. Study, therefore, to maintain an unimpeachable character, so that you may be the beloved of all hearts.”’
Mahmud was particularly diffident in matters of love. According to Muhammad Ufi, an early-thirteenth-century Persian chronicler, Mahmud ‘had been long enamoured . . . [of a slave-girl]. He was sincerely attached to her, and was anxious to espouse her. But it occurred to him that he might by this act incur the reproaches of the neighbouring kings and princes and forfeit the respect and esteem of his servants. He entertained this apprehension for a long time.’ But one day he told a courtier about his predicament. ‘Will not the neighbouring kings call me a fool?’ he asked the courtier. ‘And will not you also, my servants and slaves, speak ill of me in respectable society? I ask your advice in this matter. Have you ever heard or read in any history of kings wedding the children of their slaves?’ The courtier then reassured Mahmud, saying, ‘Many cases similar to this have occurred. Several kings . . . [have] married their own slave girls.’ It was only then that Mahmud had the courage to marry the girl.
ONE OF THE most redeeming qualities of Mahmud was that he was a man of wide cultural interests. A good part of the enormous treasure that he plundered from India was used to turn Ghazni into an elegant city of great architecture and high culture, one of the grandest cities of the age. The sultan set up there a great library—with books in many languages—and a museum, and he built there a magnificent Jami Masjid, which became renowned as the Bride of Heaven, one of the finest expressions of Islamic architecture.
Mahmud was an ardent patron of learning, literature and the arts. He had ‘a great propensity to poetry,’ observes Ferishta. ‘No king ever had more learned men at his court, kept a finer army, or displayed more magnificence.’ According to Mustaufi, the sultan ‘was a friend to learned men and poets, on whom he bestowed munificent presents, insomuch that every year he expended upon them more than 400,000 dinars.’ He is said to have maintained some 400 poets at his court, to one of whom he once gifted 14,000 silver coins as a reward for composing a single ode that pleased him. Similarly, on three occasions he is said to have poured pearls into the mouth of another poet, for composing elegant extempore verses. And once, when the Chandella king Vidyadhara sent to him an adulatory poem, he conferred on the king the command of 15 fortresses in India. There is probably some exaggeration in these accounts of Mahmud’s bounty, but there is no doubt he was a man of keen cultural interests.
Among the many litterateurs in Mahmud’s court the most renowned were Firdausi (the author of the great Persian epic Shah-nama) and Al-Biruni (mathematician, philosopher, astronomer, historian and Sanskrit scholar). Firdausi would later fulminate against the sultan, and deride him as the niggardly son of a concubine, but that was an expression of the poet’s grudge against Mahmud, for having rewarded him, for Shah-nama, with silver coins instead of the gold coins he had expected. When Firdausi wrote the first 1000 verses of the epic, Mahmud had given him 1000 dinars (gold coins) as reward. His finished work had 60,000 verses, so he expected to be rewarded with 60,000 dinars, but got only 60,000 dirhams (silver coins). This greatly vexed Firdausi—perhaps not so much for not getting the reward he expected, as for not getting the recognition he desired—and he, according to Khondamir, peevishly gave away all the reward money in random gifts: 20,000 dirhams to a bath-keeper, 20,000 to a sherbet seller, and 20,000 to the officer who had brought him the money. He then composed about forty verses as a satire on the sultan, introduced them into Shah-nama, and then fled from Ghazni to Tus in Khurasan for safety. Some years later Mahmud is said to have regretted his niggardliness, and sent to Firdausi 60,000 dinars. But as the bearers of this reward entered Firdausi’s residence by one gate, his coffin was carried out by the other gate. ‘An only daughter was his heiress, to whom the emissaries of the sultan then offered . . . [the reward], but she, from the pride inherent in her disposition, refused the reward and said, “I have enough wealth to last me to the end of my days; I have no need for this money,”’ reports Khondamir.
MAHMUD’S DEATH WAS followed by a battle between two of his sons over the throne. The sultan had nominated his younger son Muhammad as his successor, preferring him over his eldest and ablest son Masud. But this choice—as in the case of Sabuktigin’s choice of Ismail over Mahmud to succeed him—was an expression of his sentiment, not of his judgement. Mahmud was well aware of this, and once told a noble who favoured Masud: ‘I know that Masud excels Muhammad in every respect, and after my death the kingdom will devolve upon him, but I take this trouble now on behalf of Muhammad, so that the poor fellow may enjoy some honour and gratification during my lifetime, for after my death it will not be so safe for him. May god have mercy on him.’ Mahmud seems to have disliked Masud, for ‘Masud, from his excessive haughtiness’ often spoke presumptuously and harshly to his father, notes Khondamir. According to Nizam-ul Mulk, an eleventh-century chronicler, ‘Sultan Mahmud was always on bad terms with his eldest son Masud.’
Mahmud had a poor opinion about his sons, and a bleak view of the future of his empire. ‘Masud is a proud fellow and thinks there is nobody better than himself,’ he once observed. ‘Muhammad is stout of heart, generous, and fearless, but if Masud indulges in pleasure, wine, and the like, Muhammad outdoes him. He has no control over himself, has no apprehension of Masud and is heedless of the important concerns of life . . . Masud . . . will devour him.’
That prognostication of Mahmud proved true. Masud was not at all perturbed by his father choosing Muhammad for the throne, for he knew that it was the sword, not parental choice, that would finally determine royal succession. So when a khan expressed to Masud his dismay over Mahmud’s choice of successor, the prince said, ‘Don’t grieve about it. The sword is a truer prophet than the pen.’ And indeed, in the battle between the two princes following the death of the sultan, Masud easily routed Muhammad, blinded and imprisoned him, and ascended the throne.
But Masud himself, for all his conceit, proved to be a disaster as sultan, who sometimes even cravenly chose flight over fight when confronted by enemies. The history of the Ghaznavid dynasty after the death of Mahmud is a sordid tale of endless internecine clashes between brothers, cousins, uncles and nephews, as well as recurrent rebellions by nobles and provincial governors, brutal assassinations, mass murders, mutinies and invasions. There was hardly ever any peaceful royal succession in Ghazni. Only six of the fifteen sultans of the post-Mahmud history of the kingdom died natural deaths while still on the throne; the rest were deposed or murdered. Many of the reigns were very short, a couple of the sultans occupying the throne for just a few weeks. Once a boy of three was raised to the throne in a palace intrigue; his reign lasted just one week.
Even more bizarre than these succession strifes were the rebellions by royal officers. In one such incident, an officer overthrew and put to death his king (along with eleven princes) and ascended the throne, but was himself overthrown and killed by the royal guards in about a month. On another occasion the guards of the royal treasury themselves plundered the treasures. And so it went on. Astonishingly, despite all this chaos, some of the Ghazni sultans had long and relatively peaceful reigns. Such was the case of Sultan Ibrahim of the second half of the eleventh century, who ruled for forty-two years, which was the longest reign in the entire history of the Ghaznavid kingdom; even his son and successor Masud had a fairly long reign, of seventeen years. But these were exceptional cases, just interludes of tranquillity in the swirling chaos in the sultanate following the death of Mahmud.
And as the kingdom slid into terminal and irreversible decline, its very existence was threatened by Seljuq Turks from the west, and by Ghuris from the north. The relationship between the rulers of Ghazni and Ghur was particularly vicious. Matters came to a head when two Ghuri princes were treacherously put to death by the sultan Bahram of Ghazni. That provoked Ala-ud-din Husain, the ruler of Ghur, to seek vengeance. In 1151 he stormed into Ghazni, and for a whole week his soldiers raged though the city, pillaging, slaughtering people, and burning buildings. ‘For seven nights and days he gave it (the city) to the flames,’ reports Siraj. ‘During these seven days the clouds of smoke so darkened the sky that day seemed to be night, and the flames so lighted the sky at night that night looked like day. Plunder, devastation, and slaughter were continuous on these seven days. Every man that was found was slain, and all the women and children were made prisoners. Under the orders of the conqueror, [the remains] of all the Mahmudi kings, with the exception of Mahmud, Masud and Ibrahim, were dragged out from their graves and burnt. All this time, Ala-ud-din sat in the palace of Ghazni occupied with drinking and debauchery.’
Later, when Ala-ud-din returned to Ghur, Bahram, who had, on being defeated by Ala-ud-din, fled to Punjab for refuge, returned to Ghazni. Then it was the turn of Saljuq Turks to menace the kingdom, and in 1157 they drove out Bahram’s successor Khusrav Shah from Afghanistan into Punjab. Lahore then became the last sanctuary of the Yamini dynasty. But even in Lahore their reign lasted only for about three decades, for in 1186 Ghuri prince Muizzud-din Muhammad invaded Punjab, seized Lahore, and imprisoned Khusrav Malik, the son and successor of Khusrav Shah. Six years later, in 1192, Khusrav Malik—who, according to Siraj, was ‘exceedingly gentle, liberal, and modest, but fond of pleasure’—was murdered in prison by the Ghuris, as he was a security risk.
‘The house of Mahmud had now come to its end; the sun of its glory had set, and the registrar of fate had written the mandate of its destruction,’ observes Siraj. The Ghazni kingdom had in all 22 sultans, including usurpers, in its 223 years long history from its founding in 963 to its final extinction in 1186. The average reign of the Ghaznavid kings was only about ten years, and some of them occupied the throne for only just a few days.