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How the Muslims Could Invade India

M.V. Kamath

My dear Gauri,

You might ask whether there was any resistance to the Muslim invasion of India and why nobody fought back? This would be a good question.

The Indians living at that time did not have a good spy system. The rulers had no proper intelligence service. They were blissfully unaware of what events were taking place beyond the Hindu Kush mountains. If they had known, for instance, that Mohammad of Ghazni was organising a force to invade India, the Indian rulers might, at the very least, have got ready to face that invasion. But nothing of that sort happened.

Now Mohammad Ghazni was not interested in ruling India. He had no understanding of Hinduism either. He was more interested in wholesale robbery. He was a super-dacoit, as one scholar has put it, and he was ''a bandit operating on a large scale"' If, in the process, he saw idolatry, he smashed the idols believing that he was doing great service to Islam.

After Mohammad Ghazni died, India had a respite for almost half a century and another generation grew up not realising that yet another aggrandiser, Mohammad of Ghori, was mobilising forces to invade India.

In Punjab and in the territories surrounding it, there were many rulers who were at loggerheads with each other. There was no unity among them. This has been the fate of India right up to the arrival of the British. Rulers of separate states would not unite against a common aggressor. So an invader could conquer India piecemeal. That was what Mohammad Ghori did.

Of course, he was not always successful. He lost to the Chalukhyas, for example, in Gujarat in A.D. 1178. In the first battle of Tarain (A.D. 1191) he lost to the Rajput ruler Prithviraj III. It was only in the second battle that Prithviraj was defeated, captured and killed.

At first, Ghori's invasions were not taken seriously. Even when a Muslim ruler established himself in Delhi, the Hindu rulers continued to fight amongst themselves rather than against the invader. This was because the Rajputs behaved on the maxim of "one clan, one state". The people living in such states lived in isolation from the ruling clan. The ruling clan could not command the unquestioned obedience or loyalty of the rest of the people. So when the invader came, there was not much resistance and the rulers collapsed like a house of cards.

Also, the Rajput rulers had not perfected the art of war against foreign tactics. They did not know how the Muslim invaders would fight. The counter-tactics had to be learnt slowly, painfully. The Rajputs were-and are-excellent fighters, but it was not enough, in war-fare, to merely be brave. One had also to know how to face the enemy, how to regroup, how to make the maximum use of new weaponry and so on. When the Mughals, for instance, brought in canons and gunpowder they were faced with bows and arrows-antiquated weapons. Faced with an enemy that also used bows and arrows, the Rajputs might have won. But they proved unequal to the new tools of war. And they lost.

The attitude of the early Muslim rulers towards Hindus was one of sheer tyranny. It was, for example, the desire of Aliauddin Khilji (A.D. 1296-1316) to reduce the Hindus to a state of abject poverty. The historian Al Baruni has noted:

Sultan Aliauddin demanded from learned men rules and regulations so that the Hindu should be ground down and property and possessions which are the causes of disaffection and rebellion should not remain in his house.

From your history hooks, Gauri, you will learn a great deal more than I can write in my letters about the Khiljis and the other sultanates that succeeded the Khiljis; for example, the Tughlaks. These years were filled with ceaseless wars, bloodshed, murder and atrocities of all kinds against the people. Towards the end of the reign of the Tughlaks came Timur who seemed to have an insatiable thirst for military glory and lust for conquests.

Timur was the ruler of Samarkhand in Central Asia and had led a number of raids against Persia, Afghanistan and Mesopotamia. His success in these raids emboldened him to invade India, a land of fabulous wealth. This he did in A.D. 1398 as the head of a large army.

Timur crossed the five Punjab rivers unopposed. Again, the rulers of that time would not unite. Timur marched towards Delhi and carried out the massacre of 100,000 Hindus he had brought as prisoners with him. The cruelty of Timur's soldiers was so great that in Delhi people fought back. This gave Timur a pretext for drastic action. He ordered a general and indiscriminate massacre. For days at a stretch, Timur's soldiers killed the local Hindu population. A Muslim chronicler later wrote:

High towers were built with the heads of the Hindus and their bodies became the food for ravenous beasts and birds.... Such of the inhabitants who escaped alive were made prisoners....

Timur himself wrote in his memoirs (Malfuzat-i-Timuri):

Spoil was so great that each man secured from fifty to hundred prisoners: men, women and children.... The other booty was immense in rubies, diamonds, garnets, pearls and other gems...excepting the quarter of the Sayyids, the Ulema and other Mussalmans, the whole city was sacked....

Historians are agreed Timur had caused northern India more suffering and misery than any other conqueror before his days.

Timur's invasion had practically destroyed the Tughlak rulers. They were succeeded by other dynasties such as those of the Sayyids and the Lodis, none of any consequence. In India, Islam had come to be hated as an abomination. Though Timur never stayed on in India, he left behind him a deep distrust of Muslims that was to last for centuries. It was long after Timur left and his bid to destroy what he called "idolatry" failed that the Hindus allowed themselves to get closer to the Muslims, and saints like Kabir, Nanak and Chaitanya tried to arrive at a synthesis between Hinduism and Islam.

Your loving

Ajja