The conquest of Persia had taken the Arabs as far north as the Oxus region where, in an attempt to hold back the Turks, they established frontier posts. These settlements assisted in the conversion of the Turks to Islam, although Arab power in the area declined. Conversion was initially a slow process, since the Turks had supported Buddhism and a variety of central Asian Shamanist religions. Their conversion to Islam, and to Sunni Islam in particular, coincided with their attempts to create powerful states, legitimized by the strength of Islam in west Asia. The history of politics and religion in central Asia seems to have moved between Islam as an ideology of power among the Turks, and opposition to them from others for that reason. Gradually, the Turks succeeded in making their control dominant in what were then the eastern areas of the Islamic world. Further support for Islam came from the conversion of the trading elites in the oasis towns along the western part of the Silk Route. Islam was now playing a role similar to that of Buddhism in earlier times, although Buddhism remained a substratum religion in some areas. In addition, a few Zoroastrian communities that were exiled from Iran settled in central Asia and the borders of China, their occupation undoubtedly being trade. The arrival of Jewish traders in central Asia was also recorded. They had been pre-eminent in the Mediterranean trade in the ninth century when they developed commercial connections with south India.
To begin with, a number of small kingdoms arose with rulers of Turkish origin. Among them was the kingdom ruled from Ghazni that acquired fame under Mahmud. A principality in Afghanistan, Ghazni became prominent in 977 when a Turkish nobleman annexed the trans-Indus region of the Shahiya kingdom, together with some territories adjoining central Asia. His son Mahmud decided to make Ghazni a formidable power in the politics of central Asia and in the Islamic world, especially in the world of eastern Islam. Mahmud’s ambition was to be proclaimed the champion of Islam and in this he succeeded. For him, India was the proverbially wealthy land that had always appeared rich and attractive from the barren mountains of the Hindu Kush. Raids on Hindu temples provided him with quantities of wealth and also claims to being an iconoclast. His success in these activities needs some investigation.
Pastoral societies have frequently been significant to Indian history as adjuncts to agrarian societies, and the interaction between the two has promoted historical change. In Afghanistan, as in central Asia, political ambitions and the lure of profits from various kinds of exchange encouraged pastoralists to turn to trade, as well as transforming pastoral societies into military forces. This was a regular pattern in the central Asian intervention in northern India, which was repeated with the coming of the Turks. Centuries of trade had generated greater familiarity between the two areas and some of the earlier cultural forms shared between them, such as those associated with Buddhism, were gradually set aside with the conversion of the Turks to Islam. Nevertheless, they were not unfamiliar people.
Arab visitors to India wrote of the Pratiharas with their massive armies and the Rashtrakutas as among the great monarchs of the world. Such descriptions might have been provocative to those across the north-western borders. The politics of Afghanistan were at this time more closely allied with those of central Asia than with India, and from Mahmud’s point of view incursions into India were essentially raids to gather wealth, but of little permanent significance. This made them different from the Arab campaigns that were more evidently a prelude to settlement in India, with participation in the local economy. Indian attitudes towards the Arabs and the Turks were somewhat different. The degree of hostility and accommodation were not identical. It would be worth examining the nature of the modifications that became necessary to various societies with settlements in their midst of people with different beliefs and customs, as well as the changes which the incoming migrants had to concede when they settled in various parts of India. The structures of each of these societies would have undergone some change, as they had also done with the migrants in earlier periods.
With the continuing trade between China and the Mediterranean, it was far more lucrative to hold political power in Khvarazm and Turkestan, as the Ghaznavids did for some years, than in northern India. The Ghaznavid kingdom therefore comprised parts of central Asia and Iran and was acknowledged as a power in eastern Islam. Mahmud turned with remarkable speed from raids in India to campaigns in central Asia. Apart from religious iconoclasm, the raids on Indian towns were largely for plunder aimed primarily at replenishing the Ghazni treasury.
These raids were almost an annual feature. In AD 1000 he defeated Jayapala, the Shahiya King. The following year he was campaigning in Seistan, south of Ghazni. The years 1004-6 saw repeated attacks on Multan, a town of strategic importance in the middle Indus Plain, with access to Sind. Multan was also a nodal point in the lucrative trade with the Persian Gulf and with western India. The renowned Sun temple maintained by the merchants was seen by Mahmud as a repository of wealth. For Mahmud, the mosque maintained by the wealthy Shia’h Muslims of the town was also a target for desecration, since, as an ardent Sunni Muslim, he regarded Shia’hs and Ismai’lis as heretics. Accounts of his destruction speak of the killing of 50,000 infidels and the same number of Muslim heretics, though the figures are formulaic and often repeated.
In 1008 Mahmud again attacked the Punjab and returned home with a vast amount of wealth. The following year he was involved in a conflict with the ruler of Ghur (the area between Ghazni and Herat in Afghanistan). Obviously his army was both mobile and effective, or these annual offensives in different areas would not have been successful. Careful planning of the campaigns led to the arrival of his armies in India during the harvest and well before the monsoon rains. This reduced the dependence on commissariat arrangements and enhanced the mobility of the army. Mahmud’s targets were the richest temples, the looting of which would provide him with ample booty as well as making him a champion iconoclast. The destruction of temples even by Hindu rulers was not unknown, but Mahmud’s was a regulated activity and inaugurated an increase in temple destruction compared to earlier times.
Temples built with royal grants, that were maintained through the income of estates and donations, served multiple functions as did religious monuments elsewhere, such as churches and mosques. The primary function of a temple was as a place for religious devotion, especially when built for a specific religious sect or deity. But frequently it performed other roles as well. It was a statement of the power of its patron, indicating the generosity of his patronage, and was intended to impress this on those who visited it. Conquest was therefore sometimes imprinted by the destruction of a temple. Thus when the Rashtrakuta King, Indra III, defeated the Pratiharas in the early tenth century, a Pratihara temple at Kalpa was torn up to establish the victory. On defeating the Chaulukyas, the Paramara King of Malwa, Subhatavarma, destroyed the temples that the Chaulukyas had built for the Jainas as well as the mosque for the Arabs. Both the Jainas and the Arabs were traders of some economic consequence, hence the royal patronage.
Temples controlled an income that included the revenue received from their lands and endowments, the wealth donated to them in gold and precious stones by wealthy donors, as well as the offerings of the many thousands of pilgrims. All this added up to a sizeable sum. Some temples invested in trade and the profits from this activity came to the temple treasury. Not surprisingly therefore they were targets for greedy kings. Kalhana writes of the kings of Kashmir of this period looting temples, and one among them, Harshadeva, even appointed a special officer to supervise this activity. Kalhana uses the epithet ‘Turushka’ for him! This would suggest that the destruction of temples by Hindu rulers was known and recorded, but such acts were viewed as more characteristic of the Turushkas. Mahmud’s attacks would have been resented but may not have been an unfamiliar experience. This is demonstrated in the history of the Somanatha temple, subsequent to the raid by Mahmud.
Mahmud’s greed for gold was insatiable, so his raids were directed to major temple towns such as Mathura, T
hanesar, Kanauj and finally Somanatha. The concentration of wealth at Somanatha was renowned, so it was inevitable that Mahmud would have attacked it. Added to the desire for wealth was the religious motivation, iconoclasm being a meritorious activity among some followers of Islam. Somanatha had a large income from the taxes paid by pilgrims who visited the temple, money that was sometimes forcibly appropriated by unscrupulous local rajas, according to local inscriptions. Attempts to prevent this were a major headache to the Chaulukya administration. Arab sources refer to temples making profits on commercial investments, and Somanatha adjoined the commercially active port of Veraval. The most profitable item in this trade was the import of horses that enriched both those who imported them and those who bought them for further distribution to the hinterland. An additional reason for Mahmud’s determination to attack Somanatha may have been to reduce the import of horses from Arab traders. This would have benefited the traders of Ghazni who imported horses into north-west India, a trade mentioned in inscriptional sources.
In 1026 Mahmud raided Somanatha, desecrated the temple and broke the idol. The event is described in Turko-Persian and Arab sources, some contemporary – the authors claiming to have accompanied Mahmud – and others of later times, the story being repeated continually in these histories up to the seventeenth century. The most accurate account appears to be that of Alberuni, who stated that the icon was a lingam, the temple was about a hundred years old and located within a fort on the edge of the sea, and that it was much venerated by sailors since Veraval had maritime connections with Zanzibar and China. But there is no unanimity about the idol in other accounts. The earlier descriptions of the event identify it with the idol of Manat, a pre-Islamic goddess of southern Arabia, whose shrine the prophet Mohammad had wanted destroyed and the idol broken; others write that it was a lingam; still others state that it was an anthropomorphic figure stuffed with jewels. Gradually a mythology was constructed around the temple and the idol, with alternative narratives. A thirteenth-century account from an Arab source gives yet another version, in which the temple and the icon are enveloped in further fantasy, presumably to make a greater impression on those who read the text:
Somnat – a celebrated city of India situated on the shore of the sea and washed by its waves. Among the wonders of that place was the temple in which was placed the idol called Somnat. 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 the Hindus, and whoever beheld it floating in the air was struck with amazement, whether he was a Musulman or an infidel. The 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. They believed that the souls of men used to meet there after separation from the body and that the idol used to incorporate them at its pleasure in other bodies in accordance with their doctrine of transmigration. The ebb and flow of the tide was considered to be the worship paid to the idol by the sea. Everything most precious was brought there as offerings, and the temple was endowed with more than ten thousand villages. There is a river (the Ganges) which is held sacred, between which and Somnat the distance is two hundred parasangs. They used to bring the water of this river to Somnat every day and wash the temple with it. A thousand brahmans were employed in worshipping the idol and attending on the visitors, and five hundred damsels sung and danced at the door – all these were maintained upon the endowments of the temple. The edifice was built upon fifty-six pillars of teak covered with lead. The shrine of the idol was dark but was lighted by jewelled chandeliers of great value. Near it was a chain of gold weighing two hundred maunds. When a portion (watch) of the night closed, this chain used to be shaken like bells to rouse a fresh lot of brahmans to perform worship. When the Sultan went to wage religious war against India, he made great efforts to capture and destroy Somnat, in the hope that the Hindus would become Muhammadans. He arrived there in the middle of… [December AD 1025). The Indians made a desperate resistance. They would go weeping and crying for help into the temple and then issue forth to battle and fight till all were killed. The number of slain exceeded 50,000. The king looked upon the idol with wonder and gave orders for the seizing of the spoil and the appropriation of the treasures. There were many idols of gold and silver and vessels set with jewels, all of which had been sent there by the greatest personages in India. The value of the things found in the temple and of the idols exceeded twenty thousand dinars. When the king asked his companions what they had to say about the marvel of the idol, and of its staying in the air without prop or support, several maintained that it was upheld by some hidden support. The king directed a person to go and feel all around and above and below it with a spear, which he did but met with no obstacle. One of the attendants then stated his opinion that the canopy was made of loadstone, and the idol of iron, and that the ingenious builder had skilfully contrived that the magnet should not exercise a greater force on any one side – hence the idol was suspended in the middle. Some coincided, others differed. Permission was obtained from the Sultan to remove some stones from the top of the canopy to settle the point. When two stones were removed from the summit the idol swerved on one side, when more were taken away it inclined still further, until at last it rested on the ground.
Al Kazwini, in H. M. Elliot and J. Dowson (eds), The History of India as Told by its owm Historians, vol. I., pp. 97 ff.
There is much fantasy in such accounts and they have to be seen in the historiographical context of the gradual change in the projection of Mahmud from an iconoclast and plunderer to the founder of Islamic rule in India – even if the latter is not quite what he was. The historiography of the raid on Somanatha has its own history. The popular view is that Mahmud’s raid on Somanatha was such a trauma for the Hindus that it became seminal to the Hindu-Muslim antagonism of recent times. Yet there is no reference in contemporary or near contemporary local sources of the raid on Somanatha, barring a passing mention in a Jaina text, nor is there any discussion of what might have been a reaction, let alone a trauma among Hindus. Jaina sources describe the renovation of the temple by Kumarapala, the Chaulukya King, and the reasons for its falling into disrepair were said to be a lack of maintenance by negligent local officers and the natural decay of age.
Two centuries after the raid, in the thirteenth century, a wealthy ship-owning merchant from Hormuz in Persia, trading at Somanatha, was given permission by the Somanatha town authorities to build a mosque in the vicinity of the now renovated temple and to buy land and property for the maintenance of the mosque. He was warmly welcomed and received assistance from the Chaulukya-Vaghela administration, the local elite of thakkuras and ranakas, and the Shaiva temple priests. The latter would have been important participants in the deal since the estates of the temple were part of the transaction, together with properties from nearby temples. It would seem that Mahmud’s raid on the Somanatha temple had not left a long-lasting impression and it was soon back to business as usual between temple priests, the local Vaghela administration and visiting Persian and Arab merchants. The silence about the raid in what would be called ‘Hindu’ texts remains unbroken, and has been commented upon by modern historians. It remains an enigma as some comment would normally be expected. Interestingly, the earliest claim that the raid resulted in something akin to a trauma for the Hindus was made not in India but in Britain, during a debate in the House of Commons in 1843, when members of the British parliament stated that Mahmud’s attack on Somanatha had created painful feelings and had been hurtful to the Hindus for nearly a thousand years. Subsequent to this, references began to be made to the Hindu trauma.
Mahmud’s iconoclasm earned him a title from the Caliph of Baghdad and recognition as a champion of Islam. Alberuni’s comment on Mahmud’s raids was that they caused economic devastation in the area, quite apart from the looting of temples. Nevertheless, judging by the evidence of the history of Somanatha and its vicinity s
ubsequent to the raid, there was an impressive bouncing back of the local authority and of the economy. Given the frequency of various campaigns, some degree of periodic destabilization was probably a familiar experience of these times.
Mahmud died in 1030 and this brought his raids to an end. He had used the loot from India to demonstrate his ability not only to establish power but also to indulge in cultural patronage, even if his activities involved acts of ruthlessness. A library was founded in central Asia with books of an impressive range, brought forcibly from other libraries in Persia, and a mosque was built at Ghazni incorporating the finest contemporary Islamic architecture. He recognized the strength of the Persian cultural tradition and wanted to nurture it at his court. The famous poet Firdausi, who wrote the Shahnama, an epic largely on the pre-Islamic heroes and kings of Persia, was invited to Ghazni but left because of Mahmud’s niggardliness. From his campaign in Khvarazm, Mahmud brought back with him a scholar by the name of Al Beruni/Alberuni, perhaps the finest intellect of central Asia, who was ordered to spend ten years in India. His observations on Indian conditions, systems of knowledge, social norms and religion, discussed in his book, the Tahqiq-i-Hind, are probably the most incisive made by any visitor to India.
The importance given by historians to political events alone sometimes hides the longer-lasting activities of societies in communication with each other. Indian mathematicians, astronomers and specialists in medicine had been in residence at the court of the Caliph at Baghdad, introducing Indian numerals and the notion of the decimal, among other discoveries, to Arab science, and from there the usage travelled to Europe. Indian medical knowledge and the recovery of Greek medicine by Arab scholars gave rise to new schools of medicine. The context in which this information was exchanged was the wider philosophical discourse in various parts of the world. Raids and campaigns were therefore not only paralleled by an exchange of goods, but also by the fertilization of ideas and the communication of knowledge from one culture to another. The philosopher Ibn Sina/Avicenna heard conversations in his family about Indian mathematics and philosophy in the early eleventh century, which stimulated his ideas in these areas. The power of the Caliphate and of orthodox Islam was challenged from time to time by the rise of dissident movements, and there was some familiarity with the intellectual discourse across continents. It has been plausibly argued that some strands of Sufi thought that arose in Persia at this time may reflect the proximity of Indian philosophical ideas.
The Penguin History of Early India Page 62