Abraham Eraly - The Age of Wrath - A History of the Delhi Sultanate

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.