Bharat, with all her riches and glory, attracted many from the west. Some came to learn from her, and others, to loot, plunder, rape, and tear her apart until she was left as nothing more than a mere shell of her former self. The infamous Mahmud of Ghazni committed the first of these lasting crimes against Hinduism. Muhammad of Ghor continued Mahmud’s legacy. India had seen invaders before, but she had embraced them as guests and they simply merged with her. With Mahmud of Ghazni came the first attack in which the concept of “atithi devo bhavah” (guest is God) could not stand up to the savagery of the invaders.
The First Invasion
Mahmud of Ghazni plundered India no less than seventeen times, each time leaving her broken and in need of rebuilding. Every year he would leave before monsoon season, only to return the next year. He looted, raided and destroyed temples and used the loot to build libraries, museums, and elaborate mosques in Ghazni. His most famous raid was on the Somnath temple in Gujarat; he plundered the temple and broke the sacred jyotirlinga. In his book Tarikh-i-Yamini, Mahmud of Ghazni’s secretary records that the Sultan “separated two more pieces of Somnath and sent them to Mecca and Medina (so) that they might place them on the main roads [so] that poor and great might walk over them.”
At the battle for the Somnath temple, he killed 50,000 warriors and took 20,000 men, women and children as slaves. With delight, his court writers recorded the looting, pillaging, forced conversions, slavery, violence, and rape. Mahmud of Ghazni’s secretary also records, “The blood of the infidels flowed so copiously that the stream was discolored, notwithstanding its purity, and people were unable to drink it…the infidels deserted the fort and tried to cross the foaming river…but many of them were slain, taken or drowned… Nearly fifty thousand men were killed.” The most incredible aspect of resilient Bharat is that the Somnath temple has withstood this battering, to be regarded as Gujarat’s most revered archeological monument today .
The Second Onslaught
After Mahmud’s death in 1030, Muhammad of Ghor invaded India in the later part of the 12th century. While Mahmud of Ghazni was content with looting once a year, Muhammad of Ghor wanted to conquer the land and establish a kingdom. His attack on India was bloodier and even more barbaric than his predecessor’s. In the 1935 book The Story of Civilisation: Our Oriental Heritage, Will Durant writes, “The Mohammedan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. The Islamic historians and scholars have recorded with great glee and pride the slaughters of Hindus, forced conversions, abduction of Hindu women and children to slave markets and the destruction of temples carried out by the warriors of Islam during 800 AD to 1700 AD. Millions of Hindus were converted to Islam by sword during this period.”
India’s Vulnerability
Sanjeev Sanyal writes in The Indian Renaissance: India’s Rise after a Thousand Years of Decline, that the “main factor that seems to have let down the Indians is […] growing technological naiveté after the 11th century.” He goes on to quote Al Beruni and Marco Polo and concludes that the reason behind India’s decline was primitive technology.
What Mr. Sanyal fails to realize here is that the Hindu civilization that inhabited India at the time never had a reason to prepare for the egregious violence that they faced at the hands of the invaders. They also refused to resort to the lowly practices of the invaders in order to defeat them, even though they had unparalleled technology. The Hindus fell victim to the attacks by these Muslim warriors because of a naïve world-view, not a lack of technology. They had always been protected geographically; they were self sufficient, and most importantly, they lived by dharma (the path of righteousness). In Bharat, the rules of war were prescribed and both sides wholeheartedly respected them. In Hindu India, battles were noble affairs, and war was fought with grace and dignity because without these qualities, it becomes purely animal savagery.
War Wisdom from Kautilya
Kautilya’s Arthashastra prescribes the rules for war by saying, “When a king at war with another finds that greedy, impoverished, and oppressed as are the subjects of his enemy, still they do not come to his side in consequence of the troubles of war, then he should, though of superior power, make peace with his enemy or remove the troubles of war as far as possible.” Even in war, Kautilya tells the kings to be considerate of the subjects of the enemy and make sure that they are not negatively impacted by the war.
When Mahmud and Muhammad arrived, the Hindus were unsuspecting. They did not know that the invaders would take the battle off the battlefield and into civilians’ homes. Many of the invasions happened at night. Many a soldier was killed when he was without arms. The war waged outside of the boundaries of the war fields, savaging homes, killing children and mistreating women. Hindus had no reason to suspect unfairness and savagery from their war opponents because they lived in a civilization that taught the rules of dharmayuddha (righteous war). They had never seen such brutality and utter disregard for dharma.
In other words, the wars with Muslim invaders were won with deceit, not bravery or war skills. Mahmud of Ghazni and Muhammad of Ghor had only one objective: to establish their rule on the land, loot the land and spread Islam by brute force. They went to every length to achieve this, without any consideration towards the subjects of the land or the laws of war and peace. Multiple incidents recorded in the accounts of their own court poets verify this.
Setting the Context Right
Mr. Sanyal also neglects the fact that the civilization was highly advanced and had the greatest gift of technology. According to Brenda Buchanan in her book Gunpowder, Explosives, and the State: A Technological History, the Sukraniti talks about the technology of making gunpowder. This technology was later used by the West in their wars. Indians had firearms and aviary warfare before the Moguls even set foot on the subcontinent. Moreover, the Muslims used Hindu metallurgy and other technologies to fight the Christians in the west. The defeat that befell the Hindus occurred not due to a lack of technology but due to a lack of barbaric and adharmic (unrighteous) principles.
These two invasions were just the beginning of an 1000 year long bloodbath that occurred in India. The genocide of the Hindus cost hundreds of millions of lives and was one of the most brutal conquests the world has ever seen.
Impact of the Invasions
Apart from the direct impact the invasions had – that of debilitating the country’s resources, mass murder and forced conversions to Islam – there was also a bigger, more deep rooted impact of these Muslim invasions on all those who survived. There was now a constant fear in the masses. A highly dharmic population, which lived, ate and slept practicing a lifestyle taught by the Vedas, was now in a rude shock and was forced to be constantly afraid of either death, pillage or their very religion being snatched from them. The common subjects could not explain the acts of their invaders according to any principles of the Vedas, and their own belief and faith in their dharma was under attack.
Further invasions and attacks on India only deepened this identity crisis. The riches which Mahmud of Ghazni and Muhammad of Ghor looted were not as precious as the true richness of the land, which was its spiritual strength. Despite the many attacks, Hindus did not lose faith in the precepts of the Vedas, but every attack made a bigger dent in the mindsets of people and forced them to question their own dharma. The fear instilled by the invaders had a far reaching effect in the history of India, one that Hindus are trying to erase till date, without much luck.
Sources
1. The Indian Renaissance: India’s Rise after a Thousand years of Decline by Sanjeev Sanyal
2. Tarik-i-Yamini by Abu Nasr Muhammad ibn Muhammad al Jabbaru-l ‘Utbi
3. Kautilya’s Arthashastra translated by R. Shamasastry (pg. 378)
4. Gunpowder, Explosives, and the State: A Technological History by Brenda J Buchanan
5. The Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage by Will Durant
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