India

by John Keay

  Muhammad withdrew to Ghazni to convalesce and assemble more troops. The Ghorid forces included Afghans, Persians and Arabs, but the most numerous and effective contingents were of Turkic stock. Meanwhile those who had fled the field at Tarain were obliged to don their horses’ nosebags and tread the thoroughfares of Ghazni munching on grain. By mid-1192 Muhammad was back in the Panjab at the head of 120,000 horse and with an uncompromising ultimatum for the king of Ajmer: apostasise or fight. Prithviraj returned ‘a haughty answer’: he would not capitulate nor would he embrace Islam but, if Muhammad was having second thoughts, he was willing to consider a truce.

  Endearingly susceptible to the perquisites of power, Prithviraj is said to have been enjoying himself since his earlier victory. He was still in his mid-twenties and, returning now to the fortunate field of Tarain at the head of an army said to have comprised 300,000 horse, he was in an even better position to dispose of the Ghorid challenge. If Ferishta was right about his 150 royal vassals – and translator Briggs about their being ‘Rajpoot princes’ – he headed the most formidable rajput confederacy on record. Tod, despite his insistence on the rajputs’ chronic disunity, seems to agree: ‘Pirthi-raj’ was now ‘the ruler of Rajasthan’; and amongst those ‘Rajpoot princes’ who supposedly flocked to his standard was Tod’s particular hero, the Guhila ruler of distant Mewar (later capital Udaipur) in southern Rajasthan.

  From Ferishta’s much later and, it must be said, suspiciously detailed account there also comes evidence of trickery. Muhammad allegedly responded to Prithviraj’s suggestion of a truce with a letter couched in terms sufficiently ambiguous to give the Indians cause for celebration. ‘The letter produced the intended effect; for the enemy, conceiving that Muhammad was intimidated, spent the night in riot and revelry, while he was preparing to surprise them.’ When they awoke, late and in urgent need of ablutions, they found the Ghorid forces already entering their lines. The battle thus began amidst some confusion. Only Muhammad had a plan: like the great Mahmud he would launch wave after wave of mounted archers, but not try to force the Indian position, and in fact withdraw as the Indians’ elephant-phalanx advanced. Prithviraj, happy with this apparent success, duly advanced. But the buffeting assaults of the Turkish horse took their toll of the all-night revellers; sore rajput heads began to droop, and the scent of morning victory soured as the day wore on. By sunset Muhammad was ready to strike back.

  Thinking he had sufficiently worn out the enemy and deluded them with a hope of victory, he put himself at the head of twelve thousand of his best horse, whose riders were covered with steel armour, and making one desperate charge, carried death and destruction through the Hindu ranks. The disorder increased everywhere until at length the panic became general. The Muslims, as if they only now began to be in earnest, committed such havoc that this [Prithviraj’s] prodigious army, once shaken, like a great building tottered to its fall and was lost in its ruins.7

  Govinda-raja of Delhi, the hero of the first battle at Tarain, was slain; his body was recognised by its missing teeth. Slain too was the Guhila king Samatasimha, Tod’s ‘Ulysses of the Rajpoot host’. In all 100,000 are said to have been sent to their death. Prithviraj was taken prisoner and would soon join them.

  The 1192 rout of the rajputs at Tarain is arguably the most decisive battle in the history of India. Prithviraj had succeeded in uniting at least some of the rajput princes and in cordoning off the Islamised Panjab. The blood-and-plunder raids had been stopped. But this interdiction had served only to increase the pressure for a more decisive encounter. The Ghorids rose to the challenge because for them, as for their Indian contemporaries, plunder was a necessity.

  Prithviraj had upped the stakes, and he paid the price. When the Chahamana army succumbed, it became painfully clear that his earlier successes had only made his eventual failure all the more catastrophic. The ‘key to the Delhi gate’, indeed to the whole of arya-varta, now belonged to Muhammad of Ghor and his victorious Turks.

  Scenes of devastation, plunder, and massacre commenced, which lasted through the ages; during which nearly all that was sacred in religion or celebrated in art was destroyed by these ruthless and barbarous invaders.

  Colonel Tod could have been writing of the fall of the Roman empire. Fresh from the study of Edward Gibbon’s epic, he relished another apocalypse and saw the decline and fall of Hindu empire as a history which was there for the telling. Not beset by niggling scruples about impartiality, he conjured up the heroes of his choice in a language rich in the exaggeration typical of their bardic traditions. His verdict on the years that followed, like his estimate of the ‘Rajpoots’ themselves, would enjoy a long if controversial currency.

  The noble Rajpoot, with a spirit of constancy and enduring courage, seized every opportunity to turn upon his oppressor. By his perseverance and valour he wore out entire dynasties of foes, alternately yielding to his fate or restricting the circle of conquest. Every road in Rajast’han was moistened with torrents of blood of the spoiled and the spoiler. But all to no avail; fresh supplies were ever pouring in, and dynasty succeeded dynasty, heir to the same remorseless feeling which sanctified murder, legalised spoliation, and deified destruction. In these desperate conflicts entire tribes were swept away, whose names are the only memento of their former existence and celebrity. What nation on earth could have maintained the semblance of civilisation, the spirit or the customs of their forefathers, during so many centuries of overwhelming oppression, but one of such singular character as the Rajpoot?8

  THE SLAVE KINGS

  Within a year of the victory at Tarain, Muhammad of Ghor’s forces had taken Delhi, plus Meerut, Kol (Aligarh) and Baran (Bulandshahr), commanding the upper Ganga-Jamuna Doab. Ajmer was also under Ghorid control, and within another three years much of arya-varta shared its fate. Of the three great natural fortresses screening Rajasthan and the routes south, Ranthambhor had been won, Gwalior assailed and Narwar targeted. To the east, after another decisive battle, Kanauj, Asni and Varanasi on the Ganga had also been overrun; and in the south-west, following victory at Mount Abu over a western rajput combination, the Gujarati capital of Anhilwara (Patan) had been sacked. The thirteenth century opened with even more sensational conquests as Muslim forces pushed further east into Bihar, Bengal and Assam; others moved into the Chandela country south of the Ganga and captured, amongst many, the stronghold of Kalinjar. On paper the Ghorid empire in India already exceeded that of Harsha.

  Given, however, their predatory imperative, many of these conquests were temporary. Ajmer and Ranthambhor, for instance, changed hands several times; Gwalior and Kalinjar were lost shortly after they were won; Anhilwara was evacuated as soon as it was sacked. In some cases existing rulers were reinstated but then renounced their submission once the Turuskas had departed or further support had been recruited. In other instances, most notably in Bengal, the victorious Turuska generals would soon themselves renounce their allegiance to Delhi. It would be a characteristic of the Muslim advance that most major cities and forts were taken and then retaken, sometimes four or five times, before their fate was finally decided.

  Nor can many of these early successes be attributed to Muhammad of Ghor himself. Soon after the second battle of Tarain he returned to Ghazni and, although he paid subsequent visits to India, it was the more pressing affairs of central Asia which commanded his attention. There, at the instigation of the Baghdad caliph, the Ghorids had by 1201 won another empire. Like that of the Ghaznavids it reached west to the Caspian, and as before, the wide-open spaces of Khorasan were soon proving harder to hold than to win. Within a matter of months the Ghorids had been ejected by the Turkic rulers of Khwarasm, or Khiva (on the lower Oxus), who were themselves soon to be ejected by an even more formidable horde, alien and infidel to boot, under Ghenghiz Khan.

  Reeling from the heftiest of defeats in north-west Afghanistan, Muhammad found Ghor itself in danger and his lines of communication from Ghazni to Lahore under threat from a Panjabi hill-tribe know
n as the Ghakkars. By 1206 he had suppressed this revolt, but during a dark and sultry night a party of vengeful Ghakkars somehow penetrated his camp on the banks of the Jhelum and ‘sheathed their daggers in the King’s body’. ‘Thus fell Sultan Moyiz-ood-Deen Muhammad Ghori after a reign of thirty-two years,’ notes Ferishta.

  Rarely the work of Muhammad himself, his conquests in India had been principally achieved by his Turkish commanders, amongst whom the most successful was Qutb-ud-din Aybak (Aibak, Eibek). Aybak was also the most trusted and, since Muhammad had no sons, he looked to be his likeliest successor. Not without the bloody elimination of rivals which accompanied almost every succession of a Delhi sultan, Aybak eventually secured his position in India and would no doubt have made as great a sovereign as he had a viceroy. But in 1210, after just four years on the throne, he fell while playing polo, and his pony fell on top of him ‘so that the pommel of the saddle entered his chest and killed him’. He is remembered as the founder of what is sometimes called the ‘Slave Dynasty’ of Delhi, and as the creator of that city’s earliest surviving Islamic monuments, the so-called Qutb mosque and minar.

  Like the nearly contemporary slave, or Mameluke, rulers of Egypt, the ‘Slave Kings’ of Delhi were anything but servile. The term simply indicates that, as one-time captives, they had once been slaves. In fact they may even have found this station to their advantage. In a court awash with intrigue and opportunity, India’s Turkish conquistadors regarded a slave’s loyalty as more dependable than that of their own kin. Purchased, rapidly promoted, eventually freed, and still highly trusted, the erstwhile slave of a royal patron was ideally placed to act as either power-broker or pretender. Aybak would be succeeded, after a brief interlude of confusion, by Shams-ud-din Iltumish, another ex-slave of Turkic extraction. That no stigma attached to either of them is clear from Aybak’s recognition as sultan by his titular superior in Ghazni, and from Iltumish’s yet grander recognition by the caliph himself.

  Their elevated status is equally proclaimed by their monuments. The Qutb mosque in Delhi boasts a tower of victory which doubles as India’s, and perhaps Islam’s, most massive minar(et). Five balconied tiers tall, many of them fluted and the whole thing heavily tapered, it rears above the now outrageously-priced housing of south Delhi, its red sandstone reminding irreverent neighbours of a brick-built smokestack awaiting demolition. No doubt it made a braver showing until its topmost cupola was toppled by an earthquake in 1803. Down below, the mosque is properly that of Quwwattu’l Islam, the ‘Might of Islam’. Such triumphalism is well substantiated by its construction from the reassembled components – pillars, capitals, lintels – of what had previously been twenty-seven Hindu and Jain temples. Evidently the first sultans were more anxious to see their mosque open for worship than to gratify architectural purists. It stands, where the temples probably had, in what was Rai Pithaura, the Chahamana citadel named after Prithviraj. Renamed Lalkot, this ‘red fort’ area (not to be confused with the Shah Jahan’s ‘Red Fort’ in the Mughal city now known as Old Delhi) was also graced with a ‘white palace’ whence Iltumish and his successors reigned. The palace has gone, but the ruins of Iltumish’s tomb (Aybak was buried in Lahore) stand beside the Qutb mosque, the first in a long and sublime succession of Indo-Islamic mausolea. As if by way of a nod to the later glories of Humayun’s tomb and the Taj Mahal, white marble makes its Delhi debut in the interior of Iltumish’s resting place.

  At Varanasi, according to Ferishta, Muhammad of Ghor and Qutb-ud-din Aybak demolished the idols in a thousand temples and then rededicated these shrines ‘to the worship of the true God’. They also carted away treasure by the camel-load – fourteen hundred camel-loads according to one estimate. Then, as indeed now, most of the Varanasi temples may have been small and airless cells unsuited to the Muslim ideal of the whole community worshipping in unison. Temples were designed for a more intimate kind of communion and did not readily lend themselves to congregational assemblies. If piety and plunder necessitated the destruction of idols, temples may more commonly have been dismantled for their already dressed stones. At Ajmer, where Qutb-ud-din Aybak caused another great mosque to be built, the requisite height for the prayer chamber was obtained by sticking as many as three squat temple pillars on top of one another.

  The iconoclasm of the early sultans was not always so thorough. In the south-west, despite victory at Mount Abu and the destruction of nearby Anhilwara, the Muslim forces left untouched the magnificently decorated Jain temple of Adinatha at Dilwara on Mount Abu itself. Here white marble, and little else, has been fretted into a lacy membrane of intricate sculpture which, womb-like, lines the entire interior. The temple dates from 1032 and so belongs to that defiant period of construction immediately after Mahmud of Ghazni’s raids. It was commissioned by a minister of the Solanki rajput dynasty of Gujarat but is so unobtrusively sited and of such inconspicuous profile that it may simply have been overlooked by the invaders.

  Just how disastrous the Muslim conquest was for India’s heritage, how heavily Muslim rule bore on the Hindu population, and how determinedly it was resisted are contentious subjects. ‘An analysis of the military operations of the period reveals the fact that never once were the Turkish armies called upon to deal with a hostile population,’ insists an eminent Muslim historian; ‘we do not come across a single revolt of the Hindu masses as such.’9 Yet, following Tod’s lead, a no less eminent Hindu authority writes of ‘ceaseless resistance offered with relentless heroism’ as warriors, ‘boys in their teens’, ‘men with one foot in the grave’ and ‘women in thousands’ fought and died ‘to break the volume and momentum of the onrushing tide of invasion’.10 Curiously neither makes mention of what sounds like a devastating revolt in Awadh (or ‘Oudh’ in Uttar Pradesh) of C1220 during which, according to a contemporary, ‘120,000 Muslims received martyrdom at the hands and sword of the accursed Bartuh’.11 It is clear that ‘Bartuh’ was a Hindu but his identity is otherwise uncertain. As with other mysterious ‘heroes of the resistance’, like the Ghakkars of the Panjab or the Mhers and Mewatis of Rajasthan, it would seem that some of the most determined opposition came from tribal, or at least non-rajput, peoples, about whose existence the Hindu dynastic records, and Tod, are silent.

  Given that the Muslim conquest of India took several centuries, all generalisations must be suspect. The well-authenticated oppression of Muhammad bin Tughluq in the mid-fourteenth century cannot simply be presumed of his predecessors or his successors. Similarly a Hindu inscription of C1280 which lauds the security and bounty enjoyed under the rule of Sultan Balban should not be taken as a blanket endorsement of firm Islamic government. Not all temples were destroyed, although many were. The jizya tax on non-Muslims was not levied on brahmans until the reign of Feroz Shah Tughluq (1351–88),12 and may never have been very effectively collected. Idolatry was condemned yet Hindus were not prevented from practising their religion. And since the records often make no clear distinction between military and civilian casualties, it is hard to assess the extent of gratuitous violence.

  Many would argue that the sultans, like other Indian dynasts, were more interested in power and plunder than in religion. Muslim chroniclers chose to portray the occupation of northern India as a religious offensive and to paint its principals as religious heroes; ‘but such a view cannot stand the test of historical scrutiny’.13 The more informative chroniclers in fact say surprisingly little about Muslim – Hindu relations. They are much more revealing about the power struggles amongst the conquistadors themselves; indeed these feuds, together with the chaos induced by the Mongol invasions, look to have slowed the pace of conquest quite as much as any resurgence of Hindu resistance. According to one authority the entire history of the ruling Turkish elite ‘can be summed up in these words; they united to destroy their enemies and disunited to destroy themselves’.14

  During the twenty-six years of his reign Iltumish was almost continuously in the field, yet beyond raids into Malwa he brought little new territory
within the Muslim ambit and was as often engaged against fellow Muslims as against Indian ‘idolaters’. In the west, Sind and the Panjab were in constant turmoil as Ghenghiz Khan neared and then crossed the Indus in 1222. The turmoil was caused not just by the Mongols themselves but by the tide of armies, princes, scholars and artisans from all over Turkestan, Khorasan and Afghanistan whom the Mongol invaders rolled before them. Figures are not available but it seems probable that far more Muslims entered India as refugees from the Mongol invasions than as warriors in the Ghaznavid and Ghorid armies combined.

  East of Delhi Iltumish had to reconquer much of what is now Uttar Pradesh and then face Muslim rivals in Bihar and Bengal. These were the Khaljis or Khiljis, originally tribal neighbours of the Ghorids in central Afghanistan, who had followed Muhammad of Ghor to India. Muhammad Bakhtiyar, the founder of Khalji rule, had been denied lucrative office in both Ghazni and Delhi before eventually securing what was then a frontier fief (iqta) near Varanasi. Thence he organised freelance raids into Bihar, one of which was rewarded with the unexpectedly easy capture of what the Khaljis thought was a fortified city. Here the inhabitants, all of whom seemed to have shaven heads, were indeed put to death and great plunder was made. Amongst the spoils were whole libraries of books but, since all the people had been killed, no one could tell what the books were about. Further investigation, however, clarified the situation. According to Minhaju-s Siraj, a distinguished scholar who after being flushed out of Afghanistan by the Mongols spent two years with the Khaljis, ‘it was then discovered that the whole fort and city was a place of study’;15 it was in fact the famous Buddhist monastery-cum-university of Odantapuri.