The kingdom of Ghazni, founded in 963, endured in Afghanistan for nearly two centuries, till 1157, when Saljuq Turks invaded the kingdom and drove its sultan, Khusrav Shah, out of Ghazni into Punjab. But in a few years, in 1173, the Saljuqs themselves were driven out of Ghazni by another invader, Sultan Ghiyas-ud-din Muhammad of Ghur, a mountain kingdom in northern Afghanistan. Ghiyas-ud-din then installed his brother, Shihab-ud-din Muhammad, generally known as Muhammad Ghuri, as the ruler of Ghazni.
Muhammad’s occupation of the throne of Ghazni evidently electrified him with memories of the epic exploits of Mahmud Ghazni, and inspired him to invade India. And, although his campaigns were nowhere near as spectacular as those of Mahmud, their results were far more enduring, for they led to the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate, which marked the decisive stage in the nearly one millennium-long history of the dominance of the subcontinent by foreign people that began with the Ghaznavid incursions into India in the last quarter of the tenth century and ended with the withdrawal of the British from India in the mid-twentieth century.
Muhammad’s first incursion into India, in 1175, was directed against Gujarat, which was the target of Mahmud Ghazni’s most celebrated campaign a century and half earlier. But this proved to be a perilous adventure for Muhammad, though the initial stages of the campaign went off smoothly for him. The sultan entered India through the Gomal Pass in the Sulaiman Range southeast of Ghazni and headed for the city of Multan, which he seized from its Ismaili ruler. He then advanced to the fortress of Uch, which he was able to occupy without a fight, as it was surrendered to him by its malcontent and treacherous queen after putting its ruler, her husband, to death, on Muhammad promising to marry her daughter. Muhammad then proceeded to Gujarat, trudging through the forbidding Great Indian Desert. Taking that route was a grave mistake, for the perils of the desert utterly exhausted his army by the time it reached Gujarat, so it was there easily routed with great slaughter by Mularaja, the Chalukya king of Gujarat, in a battle fought at the foot of Mt. Abu. Muhammad then prudently retreated to Ghazni with the ragged remnants of his army.
For his next Indian campaign, in 1179, Muhammad astutely took the northern route, through the Khyber Pass, and advanced into Punjab. This was essentially a pillaging raid, like Mahmud’s raids, and was followed by a few similar raids in the succeeding years. But gradually the nature and objective of his campaigns changed, from depredation to conquest. This change was particularly evident after his 1186 annexation of western Punjab from Khusrav Malik, the last Ghaznavid sultan there.
The occupation of western Punjab opened for Muhammad the gateway into the Indo-Gangetic Plane, the heartland of India. The region was politically fragmented at this time, and consisted of a number of kingdoms of varying sizes. Many of these kingdoms were ruled by Rajput rajas, the most prominent of whom were Prithviraja of Ajmer in Rajasthan and Jayachandra of Kanauj in Uttar Pradesh. Prithviraja’s kingdom extended from Rajasthan northward into eastern Punjab, and that made him the immediate neighbour and inevitable adversary of Muhammad, especially as the sultan’s raids extended deep into the northern districts of Prithviraja’s kingdom.
A military conflict between Prithviraja and Muhammad then became inevitable. And as Prithviraja prepared for war he was joined by a number of local Rajput chieftains, whose lands had been ravaged, and their women violated, by Turks.
Prithviraja then, accompanied by allied rajas, set out to confront Muhammad. He commanded, according to an evidently hyperbolic account, an incredibly large army of 200,000 cavalry, 3000 elephants, and a vast horde of infantry. The opposing forces met at Tarain, a hundred-odd kilometres north-west of Delhi, and in the ensuing battle Rajputs completely routed Turks. Muhammad himself was severely wounded in the battle by a javelin thrown at him by a Hindu chieftain, and he very nearly collapsed on the battlefield, but was saved by an alert and agile soldier, who sprang up behind the sultan on his horse, steadied him, and galloped away to safety with him.
THIS WAS IN 1191. Muhammad was honour-bound to avenge his defeat. So, after recuperating in Ghazni and replenishing his army, he once again, in the very next year, advanced into India to confront Prithviraja. And once again the opposing forces met at Tarain. The accounts of the composition of the rival armies and what happened in the battle are given variously in different sources. According to one account, Prithviraja led into this battle an even larger army than the one he had deployed in the first battle of Tarain—300,000 cavalry, 3000 elephants and countless foot soldiers! Further, he is said to have had with him 150 Hindu chieftains, who swore to defeat Turks or die in the battle.
More credible is the account of the deployment given in Hammira-mahakavya, an epic poem by the fourteenth century Jain writer Nayachandra Suri. According to Suri, Prithviraja, overconfident because of his previous easy victory over Muhammad, advanced against the sultan with a small body of soldiers, as his top generals and several divisions of his army were then engaged in campaigns elsewhere. His minister Somesvara saw the folly of the raja’s move and tried to dissuade him from advancing, but Prithviraja, apparently viewing the advice as impudent and inauspicious, cut off the ears of the minister in a rage and dismissed him. Somesvara then, clearly seeing the writing on the wall, defected to Turks.
Muhammad is said to have led into this battle a cavalry force of 52,000, which is quite probably an exaggerated figure. Some sources even give the strength of his cavalry as 120,000! But whatever the actual size of the two armies, the Rajput army certainly would have been very much larger than the Turkish army. So the only way Muhammad could win the battle against Prithviraja was by adopting some daringly ingenious tactics.
Muhammad was equal to the challenge. He divided his army into five divisions, and at dawn on the day of the battle sent four of the divisions, all mounted archers, to attack the Rajputs from all four sides. They were told to attack the enemy in waves and shower them with arrows, and then, every time the enemy advanced, quickly retreat by pretending flight. Muhammad’s objective was to harry, bewilder and disarray the Rajput army. And it worked. By late afternoon, when the Rajput army had become totally disordered, Muhammad charged into it with the fifth division of his cavalry that he had held in reserve, and routed it. Prithviraja then got down from his elephant, mounted a horse and attempted to flee from the battlefield, but was overtaken and captured.
There are two different versions of what subsequently happened to the raja. According to one account, Muhammad, along with the captive raja, proceeded from the battlefield to Ajmer, the Rajput capital. There he initially restored Prithviraja to his throne, as a tributary ruler, but later executed him, suspecting him of being treasonous, and enthroned his son. Other sources state that Prithviraja was caught and beheaded while attempting to flee from Tarain after the battle.
Muhammad’s next target was Delhi. But there was hardly any opposition to him there, and the city was surrendered to him by its governor after a token resistance. The sultan then appointed Qutb-ud-din Aibak, his trusted general, as his deputy in India, and retired to Ghazni. But he was back in India the very next year, to confront Jayachandra, who ruled over an extensive kingdom in the Gangetic Valley, with Kanauj as his capital. Jayachandra had stood morosely aloof when several other Rajput chiefs rallied to the support of Prithviraja in his battles against Muhammad, for there was intense political rivalry between Prithviraja and Jayachandra, as was natural and inevitable between neighbouring kings. And this antipathy was aggravated by bitter personal animosity between the two kings, because of Prithviraja’s ‘abduction’ of Jayachandra’s daughter Samyogita.
THE PRITHVIRAJA-SAMYOGITA romance is celebrated in Prithvirajaraso, an epic Sanskrit poem. This work as it exists now is of uncertain date and authorship, and has several different versions, but its core section is traditionally attributed to Chand Bardai, who is said to have been a court poet of Prithviraja. According to the epic, Samyogita was enamoured of the raja’s heroic persona, and had been in secret romantic correspondence with him for quite a while. Meanwhile Jayachandra arranged, as was required by royal custom, the swayamvara ceremony of the princess, for her to choose a groom from among the princes who had assembled in a hall in the palace on the invitation of the raja. Prithviraja was deliberately not invited to the ceremony, and Jayachandra compounded that slight by placing at the door of the swayamvara hall a mock statue of Prithviraja, depicting him as a doorkeeper.
As was customary, Samyogita then walked down the line of the seated princes with a flower garland in her hand, to choose a groom by garlanding him. But she passed them all one by one and went to the door of the hall and, as the astounded princes watched, garlanded Prithviraja’s statue. And in an instant she was seized by the raja, who was hiding nearby with a few cohorts—evidently by secret arrangement with the princess—and they sped off on horses to Ajmer, repulsing the pursuing soldiers of Jayachandra.
In general terms there is nothing improbable about the story, though many of its details are no doubt dreamed up by the poet. This incident is said to have happened between the first and second battle of Tarain. The rout of Prithviraja in the second battle of Tarain therefore delighted Jayachandra; according to folklore, he even celebrated the event by organising a festive illumination in his capital. But he was not fated to savour that euphoria for long, because Turks presently descended on Kanauj, and in a battle fought on the banks of Yamuna, the raja, an easy target on his grand elephant, was shot dead by a Ghuri archer, upon which the Rajput army predictably scattered. This was followed, as usual, by an orgy of carnage and rapine by Turks. Jayachandra was the last great Hindu monarch of North India, and the extinction of his dynasty was a major event in the history of medieval India.
Soon after defeating Jayachandra, Muhammad returned to Ghazni with the vast booty he had gathered. He would lead a few more campaigns into India, and collect more booty, but he does not seem to have had any intention to shift his capital to India and live there. His last Indian campaign was in 1206, to reinforce Aibak in his battle against Khokars, a fierce martial tribe of the upper Indus Valley. On the conclusion of that campaign, the sultan set out, as usual, to return to Ghazni, and on the way he camped on the banks of Indus to rest for a while. And there, in mid-March that year, he was assassinated.
It is not clear who the assassins were, or what their motive was. Possibly they were vengeful Ismailis of Sind—whose kingdom Muhammad had overrun in his very first Indian campaign—or, more likely, they were Khokars, a large number of whom Muhammad’s army had just recently slaughtered. Whoever the assassins were, they came in a small band of three or four daredevils, who swam across Indus and entered the royal camp through its unguarded riverfront. ‘On the king’s return from Lahore towards Ghazni . . . [he pitched his camp] on the bank of a pure stream in a garden filled with lilies, jasmines and other flowers,’ writes Hasan Nizami, an early thirteenth century chronicler. ‘There, while he was engaged in the evening prayer, some impious men . . . came running like the wind towards His Majesty . . . and on the spot killed [the guards, and then] . . . ran up towards the king and inflicted five or six desperate wounds upon the lord of the seven climes, and his spirit flew above the eight paradises and the battlements of the nine heavens, and joined those of the ten evangelists.’
MUHAMMAD HAD NO sons. That left the field wide open for his three chief nobles—Aibak in Delhi, Yildiz in Ghazni, and Qabacha in Multan—to grapple with each other for power, even though they were closely related to each other. On Muhammad’s death Aibak in Delhi promptly assumed sovereign power, but this was challenged by Yildiz, Aibak’s father-in-law, who, in possession of Ghazni, declared himself as the successor of Muhammad Ghuri and claimed suzerainty over all the late sultan’s territories. The third contestant for the throne was Qabacha, Aibak’s son-in-law, who declared himself to be an independent ruler in Multan, and sought to widen his territory by advancing on Lahore.
Of the two challengers whom Aibak confronted, Yildiz was the more serious one, so he decided to deal with him first, and promptly swept into Afghanistan with an army, and expelled him from Ghazni. But his triumph was short-lived, for Yildiz soon regained his power in Ghazni, and forced Aibak to retreat to India. And Yildiz, hovering at the frontier of India, would remain a threat to Aibak and his successors in Delhi for about a decade.
Aibak was originally a native of Turkistan, but was enslaved as a boy, and, after being sold and resold a couple of times, he was in his teenage taken to Ghazni by a slave trader, and there he was bought by Muhammad Ghuri. Aibak rose rapidly in the service of the sultan, because of his energy, efficiency, dedication, and nobility of character. The name Aibak means moon-face, indicating beauty, but physically Aibak was hardly personable. ‘He was not comely in appearance,’ states Siraj. But the richness of his talents more than compensated for his poor looks. Aibak, comments Siraj, ‘was a brave and liberal king. The almighty had bestowed on him such courage and generosity that in his time there was no king like him from the east to the west . . . He was possessed of every quality and virtue.’
In 1195 Aibak was appointed the viceroy of India by Muhammad, as a reward for his successful campaign against Gujarat, which he had undertaken to avenge the defeat that Muhammad had suffered there early in his career. Muhammad, writes medieval chronicler Sirhindi, ‘sent a canopy of state to Malik-Khutb-ud-din [Aibak] and conferred on him the title sultan.’ That honour presaged Aibak’s eventual accession to the throne of Delhi.
In every sense Aibak was the real founder of the Delhi Sultanate. Muhammad’s campaigns, rather like those of Mahmud, were primarily plundering raids, and he left it to Aibak to consolidate and extend the Ghuri conquests in India. And Aibak achieved that objective with consummate skill. Then, on the death of Muhammad, the Turkish territories in India under the governorship of Aibak became an independent kingdom, not just a province of the Ghuri empire. And presently, as Afghanistan was conquered by the Mongols, the connection of the Delhi Sultanate with Ghuri entirely ceased.
Aibak was tirelessly active all through his rule in Delhi, as governor and as sultan, conquering new territories and suppressing rebellions. These campaigns were essential for stabilising the Turkish rule in India, but they also served to keep the Turkish army active and in fine fettle, and to boost the morale of the soldiers with a constant feed of rich plunder.
It is difficult to see Aibak as a ruthless fanatic or as a savage invader, but these are the qualities that Muslim chroniclers laudatorily attribute to him, no doubt with considerable exaggeration. ‘His bounty was continuous and his slaughter was continuous,’ states Siraj. In Varanasi, according to Nizami, Aibak ‘destroyed nearly one thousand temples, and raised mosques on their foundations.’ And in his campaign against the Khokars, he was, according to Nizami, so ruthless in exterminating them that ‘there remained not one inhabitant [there] to light a fire.’
THE MILITARY CAMPAIGNS that Aibak personally led were confined to the central and western Indo-Gangetic Plain; he left the conquest of the eastern Gangetic Plain to the initiative and enterprise of his lieutenant, Bakhtiyar Khalji. Bakhtiyar, according to Siraj, ‘was a very smart, enterprising, bold, courageous, wise, and experienced man.’ But he, like Aibak, was not physically personable. His appearance, according to Siraj, was rather gorilla-like, his arms reaching down to his calves. But his lack of handsomeness was more than offset by his enormous physical power and energy. Taunted by envious nobles, he is said to have once even subdued an elephant in a single combat.
Aibak recognised Bakhtiyar’s potential and assigned to him the conquest of Bihar and Bengal, and in this he was phenomenally successful. But he was also phenomenally destructive—he was responsible for the destruction of the great Buddhist University of Nalanda in Bihar, though it has to be noted, as an extenuating circumstance, that he mistook the walled university to be a fort, and Buddhist monks to be Brahmins. As Siraj describes the scene, ‘Great plunder fell into the hands of the victors. Most of the inhabitants of the place were Brahmins with shaven heads. They were put to death. Large numbers of books were found there, and when Muhammadans saw them, they called for some persons to explain their contents, but all the men had been killed. It was then discovered that the whole fort and city was a university.’
After subduing Bihar the general advanced into Bengal, which had been under the rule of the Sena dynasty for several centuries. Bakhtiyar with characteristic impetuosity rode into Nadia, the then capital of Bengal, with an escort of just eighteen cavalrymen, leaving his army behind. Nobody challenged him and his men, for they were taken to be horse traders. They ‘did not molest any man, but went on peaceably and without ostentation . . . In this manner he (Bakhtiyar) reached the gate . . . [of the royal palace, and there] he drew his sword and commenced the attack,’ writes Siraj. ‘At this time the raja (Lakshmana-sena) was at his dinner, and gold and silver dishes filled with food were placed before him according to the usual custom. All of a sudden a cry was raised at the gate of his palace.’ Hearing the commotion and learning about the attack, ‘the raja fled barefooted by the rear door of the palace, and his whole treasure, and all his wives, maid servants, attendants, and women fell into the hands of the invader. Numerous elephants were taken, and such booty was obtained by the Muhammadans as is beyond all compute.’
Meanwhile Lakshmana-sena fled to east Bengal, a heavily forested region, and set up his rule there, but was not pursued there by Bakhtiyar. Lakshmanasena was an aged, scholarly king, a patron of poets, and a poet himself. Jayadeva, the renowned author of Gita-Govinda, is said to have adorned his court. Quite probably the raja was not martially inclined. Besides, there was an ancient and widely believed prophecy that Muslim rule would be established in Bengal at this time. Bakhtiyar therefore had little difficulty in subjugating most of Bengal.
Bakhtiyar’s sword now rested on the slopes of the Himalayas. Beyond the mountains lay the mysterious land of Tibet, which set Bakhtiyar dreaming. His thirst for adventure was insatiable, and it now led him to launch an invasion of Tibet. He set out on this campaign with a large force of 10,000 cavalry, but the operation turned out to be a total disaster, because of the extreme weather of Tibet as well as the virulence of the local tribesmen. Bakhtiyar gained nothing whatever from the campaign, but lost a good number of his soldiers in it, and himself barely managed to escape with his life.
This was a humiliation that Bakhtiyar could not bear. ‘He would thereafter never go out, because he felt ashamed to look on the wives and children of those who had perished [in that campaign],’ writes Siraj. ‘If ever he did ride out, all people, women and children, from their housetops and the streets, cried out cursing and abusing him.’ According to Siraj, Bakhtiyar’s mental distress led to the collapse of his health, and presently he ‘took to bed, and died.’ Other sources however state that he was put out of his misery by his fellow officer, Ali Mardan, who subsequently assumed the leadership of the Khalji clan of Bakhtiyar.
Bakhtiyar died in 1206. Four years later, in 1210, Aibak died in Lahore, in an accident while playing polo. ‘The sultan,’ writes Siraj, ‘fell from his horse in the field while he was playing chaugan, and the horse came down upon him, so that the pommel of the saddle entered his chest, and killed him.’
Aibak had ruled North India in all for fifteen years, eleven years as the deputy of Muhammad Ghuri, and the last four years as a sovereign, ‘during which he wore the crown, and had the khutba read and coin struck in his name,’ records Siraj. The Delhi Sultanate that he founded would endure for 320 years, from 1206 to 1526, till Babur conquered Delhi and established the Mughal Empire.
WHY DID THE Indian kingdoms, many of them ruled by Rajputs renowned for their martial valour, collapse so rapidly and abjectly? The reason that is commonly given for this is that Indian kings made no united stand against Turks. There could in fact be no such united stand by them, because, from the Indian point of view, there was no we/they divide between Indians and Turks. Turks were seen by Indians as just one element—though a new element—in the racial, linguistic, socio-cultural and political agglomeration of India. There was no sense of any unique Indianess among the people or the rulers anywhere in India at this time. Indians did not look like one people or speak like one people—the language of one regional group was entirely unintelligible to the other regional groups. And each of these regional groups was itself divided into several distinct socio-cultural groups based on caste and sect. India was a landmass, at best a civilisation, like Europe, but not a nation.
Because of all this, Turks were hardly ever seen by Indians as aliens. Several other races from outside the subcontinent had entered India over the centuries, and they were all absorbed into the local society over time, and Indians presumably did not see Turks as any different from these earlier invaders and migrants.
But of course Turks were different. Unlike the previous invaders and migrants, they could not be absorbed into Indian society, for there was an insurmountable barrier between them and the people of India. The problem was primarily religious. Polytheistic and poly-religious Indians had no problem in accommodating Turks and Islam in their society without in any way compromising their society and religion, but monotheistic Turks could not possibly accommodate Indians in their society without fundamentally altering the composition and ethos of their society and religion. The divide between the two civilisations was insurmountable.
The Turkish invader was of course seen by the threatened Indian rajas as an enemy. But not as an alien—for the rajas, Turks were not much different from their enemies within India. The local rajas in fact persisted in their self-destructive internecine wars even when the Turks were invading India. Indeed, in several instances Indian chieftains and royal commanders defected to Turks, or connived with them against their own rajas. And very many Hindu soldiers served in the Turkish army. There was no sense among Indian kingdoms that they were facing a common danger from Turks. Though there were a few instances of rajas banding together to oppose Turks, these were evidently the banding together of subordinate chieftains under their overlord, as indicated by the very large number of the confederate chieftains—fifty of them!—joining Jayapala in his first battle of Tarain against Muhammad Ghuri.
The absence of concerted military action by the rajas cannot however be considered as the decisive factor that led to their rout by Turks, for many of the Indian kingdoms were much larger in size, population and resources than Ghazni, and the rajas often fielded armies which were very much larger than the Turkish army.
But this numerical advantage of the Indian armies was more than negated by the decisive superiority of the Turkish army in weaponry, regimental discipline, innovative tactic, and group martial spirit. Indeed, the vast size of the Indian armies often proved to be a disadvantage, as their size was mostly made up of ill-trained and ill-disciplined hordes who could not act efficiently in concert. As individual soldiers, Rajputs, who constituted a large section of North Indian armies, were a match, or more than a match, to Turks in valour.
But the lack of regimental training and discipline nullified that advantage. On the whole Indians had very little chance of prevailing over Turks.
The main dependence of Turks was on their cavalry, which was far superior to the Indian cavalry in every respect, in men as well as in mounts. In contrast, the main dependence of Indian armies was on their elephant corps, but elephants, though forbidding in appearance, were no match for the storming, whirling charge of the Turkish cavalry. Elephants were in fact quite often a menace to their own side, for when wounded in battle or otherwise frightened they ran pell-mell, causing havoc in their own army.
Equally decisive was the Turkish ability to rapidly innovate their tactics to suit any emergent military situation, and execute lightning manoeuvres, while Indians were slaves of tradition, and they generally fought in the same manner regardless of the actual military situation.
Besides all this, Turks, as aggressors swooping down from the cool Afghan mountains, had irresistible kinetic energy, while Indians were mostly plains people leading a sedentary life in an enervating climate, and their posture, as defenders, was generally static. Psychologically too Indians were at a disadvantage, as they suffered from the victim syndrome, and were often sluggish in battle, unlike the spirited Turks. Moreover, the fatalistic value system of Indians inculcated in them a generally defeatist attitude. In some cases Indians were also demoralised by astrological predictions that the Turkish conquest of India was inevitable. In contrast, Turks were energised by religious fervour, confident in their faith that they were invincible as the soldiers of their god. Equally, they were motivated by the irresistible lure of plunder.
But is the story of the facile victory of Turks over Indians entirely true? Virtually the only sources of information of the Turkish conquest of India are Arabic and Persian chronicles. But these present only one side of the story. We do not have the Indian version of what happened and why. There is hardly any mention in the early medieval Indian texts about the momentous events that were then taking place. Apparently Indian chroniclers considered those events as not worth recording. And that in itself is significant, as a reflection of the general Indian disconnect with mundane reality.