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 Muizz-ud-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.
Part III
SLAVE SULTANS
Sultan Raziya was a great monarch. She was wise, just, and generous, a benefactor to her kingdom, a dispenser of justice, the protector of her subjects, and the leader of her armies. She was endowed with all the qualities befitting a king. But she was not of the right sex, and so in the estimation of men all her virtues were worthless.
—MINHAJ SIRAJ
{1}
Last Rajas, First Sultans
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 eleph
ants 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 Prithviraja-raso, 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.
The Age of Wrath: A History of the Delhi Sultanate Page 8