Early Muhammadan Conquerors, 714-1526 A.D.

CHAPTER IX: EARLY MUHAMMADAN CONQUERORS, 714-1526 A.D.

Muhammadan Influence on Hinduism

Hinduism was for a time submerged, but never drowned, by the tide of Muhammadan conquest, which set steadily towards India about 1000 A.D. At the present day, the south of India remains almost entirely Hindu. By far the greater number of the Indian Feudatory Chiefs are still under Brahman influence. But in the north-west, where the first waves of invasion have always broken, about one-third of the population now profess Islam. The upper valley of the Ganges boasts a succession of Musalman capitals; and in the swamps of Lower Bengal, the bulk of the non-Aryan or aboriginal population have become converts to the Muhammadan religion. The Musalmans now make 62 millions of the total of 294 millions in India.

Early Muhammadan Dynasties, 714-1526 A.D.

The present chapter is devoted to the early Muhammadan conquerors in the north of India before the rise of the Mughal Empire. But it is convenient to give in this place a chronological list of all the Muhammadan dynasties, whose succession makes up so large a part of the history of medieval India.

Chronological Summary of Muhammadan Conquerors and Dynasties of India, 1001-1857

The Rise of Islam

While Buddhism was giving place to Hinduism in India, a new faith had arisen in Arabia. Muhammad, born in 570 A.D., created a conquering religion, and died in 632. Within a hundred years after his death, his followers had invaded the countries of Asia as far as the Hindu Kush. Here their progress was stayed; and Islam had to consolidate itself, during three more centuries, before it grew strong enough to grasp the rich prize of India. But almost from the first the Arabs had fixed eager eyes upon that wealthy empire, and several premature inroads foretold the coming storm.

Early Arab Invasions of Sind, 647 to 828 A.D.

About fifteen years after the death of the prophet, Usman sent a naval expedition to Thana and Broach on the Bombay coast (647?). Other raids towards Sind took place in 662 and 664, with no lasting results. In 711, however, the youthful Kasim advanced into Sind, to claim damages for an Arab ship which had been seized at an Indian port. After a brilliant campaign, he settled himself in the Indus valley; but the further advance of the Musalmans depended on the personal daring of their leader, and was arrested by his death in 714 A.D. The despairing valour of the Hindus struck the invaders with wonder. One Rajput garrison preferred utter extermination to submission. They raised a huge funeral pile, upon which the women and children first threw themselves. The men having bathed, took a solemn farewell of each other, and, throwing open the gates, rushed upon the weapons of the besiegers, and perished to a man. In 750, the Rajputs are said to have expelled the Muhammadan governor from Sind; but it was not till 828 A.D. that the Hindus regained possession of that province.

India on the Eve of the Muhammadan Conquest

The armies of Islam had carried the crescent throughout Asia west of the Hindu Kush, and through Africa and Southern Europe, to distant Spain and France, before they obtained a foothold in the Punjab. This long delay was due not only to the daring of the Indian tribes, such as the Sind Rajputs just mentioned, but to the military organization of the Hindu kingdoms. To the north of the Vindhyas, three separate groups of Hindu princes governed the great river-valleys. The Rajputs ruled in the north-west, throughout the Indus plains, and along the upper waters of the Jumna. The ancient Middle Land of Sanskrit times (Madhyadesa) in the valley of the Ganges, was divided among powerful Hindu kingdoms, under the over-lordship of Kanauj. The lower Gangotic valley, from Behar downwards, was still in part governed by Pal or Buddhist dynasties, whose names are found from Benares to jungle-buried hamlets deep in the Bengal Delta. The Vindhya ranges stretched their wall of forest and mountain between the northern and southern halves of India. Their eastern and central regions were peopled by fierce hill tribes. At their western extremity, towards the Bombay coast, lay the Hindu kingdom of Malwa, with its brilliant literary traditions of Vikramaditya, and a vast feudal array of fighting men. India to the south of the Vindhyas was occupied by a number of warlike princes, chiefly of non-Aryan descent, but loosely grouped under three great semi-Hindu or semi-Buddhistic over-lords represented by the Chera, Chola, and Pandya dynasties.

Hindu Power of Resistance

Each of these groups of kingdoms, alike in the north and in the south, had a certain power of coherence to oppose to a foreign invader; while the large number of the groups and units rendered conquest a very tedious process. For even when the over-lord or central authority was vanquished, the separate groups and units had to be defeated in detail; and each supplied a nucleus for subsequent revolt. We have seen how the brilliant attempt in 711, to found a lasting Muhammadan dynasty in Sind, failed. Three centuries later, the utmost efforts of a series of Musalman invaders from the north-west only succeeded in annexing a small portion of the frontier Punjab Provinces, between 977 and 1176 A.D. The Hindu power in Southern India was not completely broken till the battle of Talikot in 1565; and within a hundred years, in 1650, the great Hindu revival had commenced, which, under the form of the Maratha Confederacy, was destined to break up the Mughal Empire in India. That empire, even in the north of India, was only consolidated by Akbar’s policy of incorporating Hindu Chiefs and statesmen into his government (1556-1605). Up to Akbar’s time, and during the earlier years of his reign, a series of Hindu or Rajput wars had challenged the Muhammadan supremacy. In less than two centuries after his death, the Mughal successor of Akbar was a puppet and a prisoner in the hands of the Hindu Marathas at Delhi.

Muhammadan Conquests only Partial and Temporary

The popular notion that India fell an easy prey to the Musalmans is opposed to the historical facts. Muhammadan rule in India consists of a series of invasions and partial conquests, during eleven centuries, from Usman’s raid about 647 A.D. to Ahmad Shah’s tempest of devastation in 1761. They represent in Indian history the overflow of the tribes and peoples of Central Asia to the south-east; as the Huns, Turks, and various Tartar tribes disclose in early European annals the westward movements from the same great breeding-ground of nations. At no time was Islam triumphant throughout all India. Hindu dynasties always ruled over a large area. At the height of the Muhammadan power, the Hindu princes paid tribute, and sent agents to the imperial court. But even this modified supremacy of the Mughal Empire of Delhi did not last for one and a half centuries (1560-1707). Before the end of that brief period, the Hindus had again begun the work of reconquest. The Hindu chivalry of Rajputana was closing in upon Delhi from the south-east; the religious confederation of the Sikhs was growing into a military power on the north-west. The Marathas, who combined the fighting powers of the Hindu low-castes with the statesmanship of the Brahmans, had begun to subject the Muhammadan kingdoms in Southern India to tribute. So far as can now be estimated, the advance of the English power in the last century alone saved the Mughal Empire from reverting to the Hindus.

First Turki Invasions—Subuktigin, 977 A.D.

The first collision between Hinduism and Islam on the Punjab frontier was the act of the Hindus. In 977, Jaipal, the Hindu Chief of Lahore, annoyed by Afghan raids, led his troops through the mountains against the Muhammadan kingdom of Ghazni, in Afghanistan. Subuktigin, the Ghaznivide prince, after severe fighting, took advantage of a hurricane to cut off the retreat of the Hindus through the pass. He allowed them, however, to return to India, on the surrender of fifty elephants, and the promise of one million dirhams (about £25,000). Tradition relates how Jaipal, having regained his capital, was counselled by the Brahmans standing at his right hand not to disgrace himself by paying ransom to a barbarian; while his nobles and warrior Chiefs, standing at his left, implored him to keep faith. In the end, Subuktigin swept through the hills to enforce his ransom, defeated Jaipal, and stationed an Afghan officer with 10,000 horse to garrison Peshawar (977). Subuktigin was soon afterwards called away to fight in Central Asia, and his Indian raid left behind it only this Peshawar outpost. But henceforth the Afghans held both ends of the Khaibar pass.

Mahmud of Ghazni, 1001-1030

In 997, Subuktigin died, and was succeeded by his son, Mahmud of Ghazni, aged sixteen. This valiant monarch reigned for thirty-three years, and extended his father’s little Afghan kingdom into a great sovereignty stretching from Persia on the west, to far within the Punjab on the east. Having spent four years in consolidating his power in Afghanistan to the west of the Khaibar Pass, Mahmud led in 1001 A.D. the first of his seventeen invasions of India. Of these, thirteen were directed to the subjugation of the Western Punjab, one was an unsuccessful incursion into Kashmir, and the remaining three were short but furious raids against more distant cities,—Kanauj, Gwalior, and Somnath. Jaipal, the Hindu frontier Chief of Lahore, was again defeated. According to Hindu custom, a twice-conquered prince was deemed unworthy to reign; and Jaipal, mounting a funeral pile, solemnly made over his kingdom to his son, and burned himself in his regal robes. Another local Chief, rather than yield himself to the victor, fell upon his own sword. In the sixth expedition (1008 A.D.), the Hindu ladies melted their ornaments, while the poorer women spun cotton, to support their husbands in the war. In one great battle the fate of the invaders hung in the balance. Mahmud, alarmed by a coalition of the Indian kings as far as Oudh and Malwa, entrenched himself near Peshawar. A sortie which he made was driven back, and the wild Ghakkar tribe burst into the camp and slaughtered nearly 4000 Musalmans.

The Sack of Somnath, 1024

But each expedition ended by further strengthening the Muhammadan foothold in India. Mahmud carried away enormous booty from the Hindu temples, such as Thaneswar and Nagarkot; and his sixteenth and most famous expedition was directed against the temple of Somnath in Gujarat (1024 A.D.). After bloody repulses, he took the town. The Hindu garrison, at the end of their gallant defence, left 5000 of their warriors dead, and put out in boats to sea. The famous idol of Somnath was merely one of the twelve renowned lingas or phallic emblems of Siva-worship erected in various parts of India. But Mahmud, having taken the name of the ‘Idol-Smasher,’ the modern Persian historians gradually converted the plunder of Somnath into a legend of his pious zeal. Forgetting the contemporary accounts of the idol as a rude block of stone, Firishta tells how Mahmud, on entering the temple, was offered an enormous ransom by the priests if he would spare the image. But Mahmud cried out that he would rather be remembered as the breaker than the seller of idols, and clove the god open with his mace. Forthwith a vast treasure of jewels poured forth from its vitals, which explained the liberal offers of the priests, and rewarded the disinterested piety of the monarch. The growth of this fable can be clearly traced, but it is still repeated. Mahmud carried off the temple gates, with fragments of the phallic emblem of Siva-worship, to Ghazni, and on the way nearly perished with his army in the Indus desert. But the so-called ‘sandal-wood gates of Somnath,’ brought back as a trophy from Ghazni by Lord Ellenborough in 1842, and paraded through Northern India, were as clumsy a forgery as the story of the jewel-bellied idol himself. Mahmud died at Ghazni in 1030 A.D.

Results of Mahmud’s Invasions

As the result of seventeen invasions of India, and of twenty-five years’ fighting, Mahmud had reduced the western districts of the Punjab to the control of his Afghan kingdom of Ghazni, and left the remembrance of his raids throughout northern India as far as Kanauj on the east and Gujarat in the south. He never set up as a resident sovereign in India. His expeditions beyond the Punjab were the adventures of a religious knight-errant, with the plunder of a temple-city, or the demolition of an idol, as their object, rather than serious efforts at conquest. But as his father Subuktigin had left Peshawar as an outpost garrison of Ghazni, so Mahmud left the Punjab as an outlying Province of that Afghan kingdom.

Stories about Mahmud

The Muhammadan chroniclers tell many stories, not only of his valour and piety, but also of his thrift. One day a poor woman complained that her son had been killed by robbers in a distant desert of Irak. Mahmud said he was very sorry, but that it was difficult to prevent such accidents so far from the capital. The old woman rebuked him with the words, ‘Keep no more territory than you can rightly govern’; and the Sultan forthwith rewarded her, and sent troops to guard all caravans passing that way. Mahmud was an enlightened patron of poets, and his liberality drew the great Ferdousi to his court. The Sultan listened with delight to his Shah-namah, or Book of Kings, and promised him a dirham, meaning a golden one, for each verse on its completion. After thirty years of labour, the poet claimed his reward. But the Sultan, finding that the poem had run to 60,000 verses, offered him 60,000 silver dirhams, instead of dirhams of gold. Ferdousi retired in disgust from the court, and wrote a bitter satire, which to this day tells the story of the alleged base birth of the monarch. Mahmud forgave the satire, but remembered the great epic, and, repenting of his meanness, sent 100,000 golden dirhams to the poet. The bounty came too late; for, according to the legend, as the royal messengers bearing the bags of gold entered one gate of Ferdousi’s city, the poet’s corpse was being borne out by another.

House of Ghor, 1152-1186

During a century and a half the Punjab remained under Mahmud’s successors as an Afghan Musalman Province in India. There had long been a feud between the Afghan towns of Ghor and Ghazni. Mahmud subdued Ghor in 1010; but about 1051 the Ghor chief captured Ghazni and dragged its principal men to his own capital, where he cut their throats, and used their blood in making mortar for the fortifications. After various reprisals, Ghor finally triumphed over Ghazni in 1152; and Khusru, the last of Mahmud’s line, fled to Lahore, the capital of his outlying Indian territory. In 1186 this also was wrested from him; and the Ghor prince Shahab-ud-din, better known as Muhammad of Ghor, began the conquest of India on his own account. But each of the Hindu principalities fought hard, and some of them still survive, seven centuries after the torrent of Afghan invasion swept over their heads.

Hindu Resistance to Muhammad of Ghor, 1191

On his first expedition towards Delhi in 1191, Muhammad of Ghor was utterly defeated by the Hindus at Thaneswar in the Punjab, badly wounded, and barely escaped with his life; his scattered hosts were chased for forty miles. But he gathered together the wreck of his army at Lahore, and, aided by new hordes from Afghanistan, again marched into Hindustan in 1193. Family quarrels among the Rajputs prevented a united effort against him. The cities of Delhi and Kanauj stand forth as the centres of rival Hindu monarchies, each of which claimed the first place in Northern India. A Chauhan Rajput prince, ruling over Delhi and Ajmere, bore the proud name of Prithwi Raja or Suzerain. The Rahtor Rajput king of Kanauj, whose capital can still be traced across eight square miles of broken bricks and rubbish in Farukhabad District, celebrated a feast, in the spirit of the ancient Hindu Horse-Sacrifice (see pp. 68, 70), to proclaim himself the overlord. At such a feast all menial offices had to be filled by royal vassals; and the Delhi monarch was summoned as a gatekeeper, along with the other princes of Hindustan. During the ceremony, the daughter of the King of Kanauj was to make her swayam-vara, or ‘own-choice’ of a husband, as in the Sanskrit epics (see pp. 67, 69). The Delhi Raja loved the maiden, but he could not brook to stand at another man’s gate. As he did not arrive, the Kanauj king set up a mocking image of him at the door. When the princess entered the hall to make her choice, she looked calmly round the circle of kings, then, stepping proudly past them to the door, threw her bridal garland over the neck of the ill-shapen image. Forthwith, says the story, the Delhi monarch rushed in, sprang with the princess on his horse, and galloped off towards his northern capital. The outraged father led out his Kanauj army against the runaways, and, having, according to the legend, called in the Afghans to attack Delhi on the other side from the west, brought about the ruin of both the Hindu kingdoms of Delhi and Kanauj.

Distribution of Rajputs, 1193

The tale serves to record the disputes among the Rajput princes, which prevented a united resistance to Muhammad of Ghor. Muhammad found Delhi occupied by the Tomara clan, Ajmere by the Chauhans, and Kanauj by the Rahtors. These three Rajput States formed the natural breakwaters against invaders from the north-west. But their feuds are said to have left the King of Delhi and Ajmere, then united under one Chauhan overlord, only 64 survivors out of his 108 warrior Chiefs. In 1193, the Afghans again swept down on the Punjab. Prithwi Raja of Delhi and Ajmere was defeated and slain. His heroic queen burned herself on his funeral pile. Muhammad of Ghor, having occupied Delhi, pressed on to Ajmere; and in 1194 overthrew the rival Hindu monarch of Kanauj, whose body was identified on the field of battle by his false teeth. The brave Rahtor Rajputs of Kanauj, with others of the Rajput clans in Northern India, quitted their homes in large bodies rather than submit to the stranger. They migrated to the regions bordering on the desert of the Indus, and there founded the military kingdoms which bear their name, Rajputana, to this day. History takes her narrative of these events from the matter-of-fact statements of the Persian annalists. But the Hindu court-bard of Prithwi Raja left behind a patriotic version of the fall of his race. His ballad-chronicle, known as the Prithwiraj Rasau of Chand, is one of the earliest poems in Hindi. It depicts the Musalman invaders as beaten in all the battles except the last fatal one. Their leader is taken prisoner by the Hindus, and released for a heavy ransom. But the quarrels of the Chiefs ruined the Hindu cause.

Muhammadan Conquest of Bengal, 1203

Setting aside these patriotic songs, Benares and Gwalior mark the south-western limits of Muhammad of Ghor’s own advance. But his general, Bakhtiyar Khilji, conquered Behar in 1199, and Lower Bengal down to the delta in 1203. On the approach of the Musalmans, the Brahmans advised Lakshman Sen, the Hindu King of Bengal, to remove his capital from Nadiya to some more distant city. But the prince, a religious old man of eighty, could not make up his mind, until the Afghan general had seized his capital, and burst into the palace one day while His Majesty was at dinner. The monarch slipped out by a back door without having time to put on his shoes, and fled to Puri in Orissa, where he spent his remaining days in the service of the god Jagannath. Meanwhile the Sultan, Muhammad of Ghor, divided his time between campaigns in Afghanistan and Indian invasions. Ghor was his capital, and he had little time to consolidate his Indian conquests. Even in the Punjab, the tribes were defeated rather than subdued. In 1203, the Ghakkars issued from their mountains, took Lahore, and devastated the whole Province. In 1206, a party of the same clan swam the Indus, on the bank of which the Afghan camp was pitched, and stabbed the Sultan while asleep in his tent.

Muhammad of Ghor’s Work in India

Muhammad of Ghor was no religious knight-errant of Islam like Mahmud of Ghazni, but a practical conqueror. The objects of his distant expeditions were not temples but Provinces. Subuktigin had left Peshawar as an outpost of Ghazni (977 A.D.); and Mahmud had reduced the Western Punjab to an outlying Province of the same kingdom (1030 A.D.). That was the net result of the Turki invasions of India from Ghazni (977-1186). But Muhammad of Ghor left the whole north of India, from the delta of the Indus to the delta of the Ganges, under skilful Muhammadan generals, who on his death set up as kings on their own account (1206 A.D.).

Kutab-ud-din, 1206-1210

His Indian Viceroy, Kutab-ud-din, proclaimed himself sovereign of India at Delhi, and founded a line which lasted from 1206 to 1290. Kutab claimed the control over all the Muhammadan leaders and soldiers of fortune in India from Sind to Lower Bengal. His name is preserved at his capital by the Kutab Mosque, with its graceful colonnade of richly-sculptured Hindu pillars, and by the Kutab Minar, which raises its tapering shaft, encrusted with chapters from the Kuran, high above the ruins of old Hindu Delhi. Kutab-ud-din had started life as a Turki slave, and several of his successors rose by valour or intrigue from the same low condition to the throne. His dynasty is accordingly known as that of the Slave Kings. Under them India became for the first time the seat of resident Muhammadan sovereigns. Kutab-ud-din died in 1210.

The Slave Dynasty, 1206-1290

The Slave Dynasty found itself face to face with the three dangers which have beset the Muhammadan rule in India from the outset, and beneath which that rule eventually succumbed. First, rebellions by its own servants—Musalman generals, or viceroys of Provinces; second, revolts of the Hindus; third, fresh invasions, chiefly by Mughals, from Central Asia.

Altamsh, 1211-1236

Altamsh, the third and greatest Sultan of the Slave Dynasty, had to reduce the Muhammadan governors of Lower Bengal and Sind, both of whom set up as independent rulers; and he narrowly escaped destruction by a Mughal invasion from Central Asia. The Mughals under Changiz Khan pierced through the Indian passes in pursuit of an Afghan prince; but their progress was stayed by the Indus, and Delhi remained untouched. Before the death of Altamsh (1236 A.D.), the Hindus had ceased for a time to struggle openly; and the Muhammadan Viceroys of the Slave Dynasty of Delhi ruled all India north of the Vindhya range, including the Punjab, the North-Western Provinces, Oudh, Behar, Lower Bengal, Ajmere, Gwalior, Malwa, and Sind. The Khalif of Baghdad acknowledged India as a separate Muhammadan kingdom during the reign of Altamsh, and coins were struck in recognition of the new Empire of Delhi (1229 A.D.). Altamsh died in 1236.

The Empress Raziya, 1236-1239

His daughter Raziya was the only lady who ever occupied the Muhammadan throne of Delhi. Learned in the Kuran, industrious in public business, firm and energetic in every crisis, she bears in history the masculine name of the Sultan Raziya. But the favour which she showed to her master of the horse, an Abyssinian slave, offended her Afghan generals; and, after a troubled reign of three and a half years, she was deposed and put to death.

Mughal Irruptions and Rajput Revolts

Mughal irruptions from Central Asia and Hindu revolts within India soon began to undermine the Slave Dynasty. The Mughals are said to have burst through Tibet into North-Eastern Bengal in 1245; and during the next forty-three years they repeatedly marched down the Afghan passes into the Punjab (1245-1288). The wild Indian tribes, such as the Ghakkars and the hillmen of Mewat, ravaged the Muhammadan provinces in the Punjab almost up to the gates of Delhi. Rajput revolts foreshadowed that inextinguishable vitality of the Hindu military races, which was to harass, from first to last, the Muhammadan dynasties, and to outlive them. Under the Slave Kings, even the north of India was only half subdued to the Muhammadan sway. The Hindus rose again and again in Malwa, Rajputana, Bundelkhand, and along the Ganges and the Jumna, as far as Delhi itself.

Balban, 1265-1287

The last but one of the Slave line, Balban, had not only to fight the Mughals, the wild Indian tribes, and the Rajput clans—he was also compelled to battle with his own viceroys. Having in his youth entered into a compact for mutual support and advancement with forty of his Turki fellow-slaves in the palace, he had, when he came to the throne, to break the powerful confederacy thus formed. Some of his provincial governors he publicly scourged; others were beaten to death in his presence; and a general who failed to reduce the rebel Muhammadan Viceroy of Bengal was hanged. Balban himself moved down to the Gangetic delta, and crushed the Bengal revolt with merciless skill. His severity against Hindu rebels knew no bounds. He nearly exterminated the Rajputs of Mewat, south of Delhi, putting 100,000 of them to the sword. He then cut down the forests which formed their retreats, and opened up the country to tillage. The miseries caused by the Mughal hordes at that time in Central Asia drove a crowd of princes and poets from Afghanistan and other Muhammadan countries to seek shelter at the Indian court. Balban boasted that no fewer than fifteen once independent sovereigns had fed on his bounty, and he called the streets of Delhi by the names of their late kingdoms, such as Baghdad, Kharizm, and Ghor. He died in 1287 A.D. His successor was poisoned, and the Slave Dynasty ended in 1290.

House of Khilji, 1290-1320

In that year, Jalal-ud-din, a ruler of Khilji, succeeded to the Delhi throne, and founded a line which lasted for thirty years. The Khilji dynasty extended the Muhammadan power into Southern India. Ala-ud-din, the nephew of Jalal-ud-din, when governor of Karra near Allahabad, pierced through the Vindhya ranges with his cavalry, and plundered the Buddhist temple-city of Bhilsa, 300 miles off. After trying his powers against the rebellious Hindu princes of Bundelkhand and Malwa, Ala-ud-din formed the idea of a grand raid into the Deccan. With a band of only 8000 horse, he rode into the heart of Southern India. On the way he gave out that he was flying from his uncle Jalal-ud-din’s court, to seek service with the Hindu King of Rajamahendri. The generous Rajput princes abstained from attacking a refugee in his flight; and Ala-ud-din surprised the great city of Deogiri, the modern Daulatabad, at that time the capital of the Hindu kingdom of Maharashtra. Having suddenly galloped into its streets, he announced himself as only the advance guard of the whole imperial army, levied an immense booty, and carried it back 700 miles to the seat of his governorship on the banks of the Ganges. He then lured the Sultan Jalal-ud-din, his uncle, to Karra, in order to divide the spoil, and murdered the old man in the act of clasping his hand (1295 A.D.).

Reign of Ala-ud-din, 1296-1315

Ala-ud-din scattered his spoils in gifts or charity like a devout Musalman, and proclaimed himself Sultan. The twenty years of his reign established the Muhammadan sway in Southern India. He reconquered Gujarát from the Hindus in 1297; captured Rintimbur, after a difficult siege, from the Jaipur Rajputs in 1300; took the fort of Chitor, and partially subjected the Sesodia Rajputs (1303); and, having thus reduced the Hindus on the north of the Vindhyas, prepared for the conquest of Southern India or the Deccan. But before starting on this great expedition he had to meet five Mughal inroads from Central Asia. In 1293, he defeated a Mughal invasion under the walls of his capital, Delhi; in 1304-5, he encountered four others; sending all his prisoners to Delhi, where the Chiefs were trampled by elephants, and the common soldiery slaughtered in cold blood. He crushed with equal cruelty several rebellions which took place among his own family during the same period—first putting out the eyes of his insurgent nephews, and then beheading them (1299-1300).

His Conquest of Southern India

His affairs in Northern India being thus settled, he undertook the conquest of the south. In 1303, he had sent his eunuch slave, Malik Kafur, with an army, through Bengal, to attack Warangal, the capital of the south-eastern Hindu kingdom of Telingana. In 1306, Kafur marched victoriously through Malwa and Khandesh into the Maratha country, where he captured Deogiri, and persuaded the Hindu king Ram Deo to return with him to do homage at Delhi. Meanwhile the Sultan Ala-ud-din was conquering the Rajputs in Marwar. His slave general, Kafur, made expeditions through Maharashtra and the Karnátic, as far south as Adam’s Bridge, at the extremity of India, where he built a mosque.

Extent of the Muhammadan Power in India, 1306

The Muhammadan Sultan of India was no longer merely an Afghan King of Delhi. Three great waves of invasion from Central Asia had created a large Muhammadan population in Northern India. First came the Turkís, represented by the house of Ghazni; then the Afghans (commonly so called), represented by the house of Ghor; next the Mughals, having failed to conquer the Punjab, took service in great numbers with the Sultans of Delhi. Under the Slave Kings the Mughal mercenaries had become so powerful as to require to be massacred (1286). About 1292, three thousand Mughals, having been converted from their old Tartar rites to Islam, received a suburb of Delhi, still called Mughalpur, for their residence. Other Mughals followed. After various plots by them, Ala-ud-din slaughtered 15,000 of the settlers, and sold their families as slaves (1311 A.D.). The unlimited supply of soldiers which he could thus draw upon from the Turkí, Afghan, and Mughal settlers in Northern India and from countries beyond, enabled him to send armies farther south than any of his predecessors. But in his later years the Hindus revolted in Gujarát; the Rajputs reconquered Chitor; and many of the Muhammadan garrisons were driven out of the Deccan. On the capture of Chitor in 1303, the Rajput garrison had preferred death to submission. The peasantry still chant an early Hindi ballad, telling how the queen and thirteen thousand women threw themselves on a funeral pile, while the men rushed upon the swords of the besiegers. A remnant cut their way to the Aravalli hills; and the Rajput independence, although in abeyance during Ala-ud-din’s reign, was never crushed. Having imprisoned his sons, and given himself up to paroxysms of rage and intemperance, Ala-ud-din died in 1315, helped to the grave, it is said, by poison given by his favourite general, Kafur.

A Renegade Hindu Emperor, 1316-1320

During the four remaining years of the house of Khilji, the actual power passed to Khusrú Khan, a low-caste renegade Hindu, who imitated the military successes and vices of his patron, the General Kafur, and in the end murdered him. Khusrú became all in all to the new Emperor, the debauchee Mubárik; then slew him, and seized the throne. While outwardly professing Islam, Khusrú desecrated the Kuran by using it as a seat, and degraded the pulpits of the mosques into pedestals for Hindu idols. In 1320 he was slain by his revolted soldiery, and the Khilji dynasty disappeared.

House of Tughlak, 1320-1414

The leader of the rebellion was Ghiyás-ud-din Tughlak, who had started life as a Turkí slave, and risen to the frontier governorship of the Punjab. He founded the Tughlak dynasty, which lingered on for ninety-six years, although submerged for a time by the invasion of Timúr (Tamerlane) in 1398. Ghiyás-ud-din (1320-25 A.D.) removed the capital from Delhi to a spot about four miles farther east, and called it Tughlakabad.

Muhammad Tughlak, 1326-1351

His son and successor, Muhammad Tughlak, was an accomplished scholar, a skilful general, and a man of severe abstinence. But his ferocity of temper, perhaps inherited from the tribes of the steppes of Central Asia, rendered him merciless as a judge, and careless of human suffering. The least opposition drove him into outbursts of insane fury. He wasted the treasures accumulated by Ala-ud-din in buying off the Mughal hordes, who again and again swept through Afghanistan into the Punjab. On the other hand, in fits of ambition, he raised an army for the invasion of Persia, and is said to have sent out an expedition of 100,000 men against China. The force against Persia broke up for want of pay, and plundered his own dominions; the army against China perished almost to a man in the Himalayan passes. He planned great conquests into Southern India, and dragged the whole inhabitants of Delhi to Deogiri, to which he gave the name of Daulatabad, 800 miles off in the far south. Twice he allowed the miserable suppliants to return to Delhi; twice he compelled them on pain of death to quit it. One of these forced migrations took place amid the horrors of a famine; the citizens perished by thousands, and in the end the king had to give up the attempt. Having drained his treasury, he issued a forced currency of copper coins, by which he tried to make the king’s brass equal to other men’s silver. During the same century, the Mughal conqueror of China, Kublai Khan, had extended the use of paper notes, early devised by the Chinese; and Kai Khátú had introduced a bad imitation of them into Persia.

Tughlak’s forced currency quickly brought its own ruin. Foreign merchants refused the worthless brass tokens, trade came to a stand, and the king had to take payment of his taxes in his own depreciated coinage.

Revolt of the Provinces, 1338-1351

Meanwhile the Provinces began to throw off the Delhi yoke. Muhammad Tughlak had succeeded in 1324 to the greatest empire which had, up to that time, acknowledged a Muhammadan Sultan in India. But his bigoted zeal for Islam forbade him to confide in Hindu princes or Hindu officers; he dared not trust his own kinsmen; and he thus found himself compelled to fill every high post with foreign Muhammadan adventurers, who had no interest in the stability of his rule. The annals of the period present a long series of outbreaks, one part of the empire throwing off its allegiance as soon as another had been brought back to subjection. His own nephew rebelled in Malwa, and, being caught, was flayed alive (1338). The Punjab governor revolted (1339), was crushed, and put to death. The Musalman viceroys of Lower Bengal and of the Coromandel coast set up for themselves (about 1340), and could not be subdued. The Hindu kingdoms of Karnata and Telingana recovered their independence (1344), and expelled the Musalman garrisons. The Muhammadan governors in the Deccan also revolted; while the troops in Gujarát rose in mutiny. Muhammad Tughlak rushed with an army to the south to take vengeance on the traitors, but hardly had he put down their rising than he was called away by insurrections in Gujarát, Malwá, and Sind. He died in 1351, while chasing rebels in the lower valley of the Indus.

Muhammad Tughlak’s Revenue Exactions

Muhammad Tughlak was the first Musalman ruler of India who can be said to have had a regular revenue-system. He increased the land tax between the Ganges and the Jumna—in some Districts tenfold, in others twentyfold. The husbandmen fled before his tax-gatherers, leaving their villages to lapse into jungle, and formed themselves into robber clans. He cruelly punished all who trespassed on his game preserves; and he invented a kind of man-hunt without precedent in the annals of human wickedness. He surrounded a large tract with his army, and then gave orders that the circle should close towards the centre, and that all within it (mostly inoffensive peasants) should be slaughtered like wild beasts. This sort of hunt was more than once repeated; and on another occasion there was a general massacre of the inhabitants of the great city of Kanauj. Such horrors led in due time to famine; and the miseries of the country exceeded all powers of description.

Firuz Shah Tughlak, 1361-1388

His son, Firuz Tughlak, ruled mercifully, but had to recognize the independence of the Muhammadan kingdoms of Bengal and in the Deccan, and suffered much from bodily infirmities and court intrigues. He undertook many public works, such as dams across rivers for irrigation, tanks, caravan-sarais, mosques, colleges, hospitals, and bridges. But his greatest achievement was the old Jumna Canal. This Canal drew its waters from the Jumna near a point where it leaves the mountains, and connected that river with the Ghaggar and the Sutlej by irrigation channels. Part of it has been reconstructed by the British Government, and spreads a margin of fertility on either side at this day. But the dynasty of Tughlak soon sank amid Muhammadan mutinies and Hindu revolts; and under Mahmud, its last real king, India fell an easy prey to the great Mughal invasion of 1398.

Timúr (Tamerlane’s) Invasion, 1398

In that year, Timúr (Tamerlane) swept through the Afghan passes at the head of the united hordes of Tartary. He defeated the Tughlak King Mahmúd under the walls of Delhi, and entered the capital. During five days a massacre raged; ‘some streets were rendered impassable by heaps of dead’; while Timúr calmly looked on and held a feast in honour of his victory. On the last day of 1398, he resumed his march; first offering a ‘sincere and humble tribute of grateful praise’ to God, in Firuz Shah’s marble mosque on the banks of the Jumna. Timúr then crossed the Ganges, and proceeded to Hardwar, after a great massacre at Meerut. After skirting the foot of the Himalayas, he retired westwards into Central Asia (1399). Timúr left no traces of his power in India, save desolate cities. On his departure, Mahmud Tughlak crept back from his retreat in Gujarát, and nominally ruled till 1412.

The Sayyids and the Lodis

The Tughlak line finally ended in 1414. The Sayyid dynasty ruled from 1414 till 1450; and the Afghan house of Lodi from 1450 to 1526. But some of these Sultans reigned over only a few miles round Delhi; and during the whole period the Hindu princes and the local Muhammadan kings were practically independent throughout the greater part of India. The house of Lodi was crushed beneath the Mughal invasion of Babar in 1526.

Hindu Kingdoms of the South

Babar founded the Mughal Empire of India, whose last representative died a British State prisoner at Rangoon in 1862. Before entering on the story of that empire, I turn to the kingdoms, Hindu and Muhammadan, on the south of the Vindhya range. The three ancient kingdoms, Chera, Chola, and Pandya, occupied the Dravidian country of Southern India, peopled by Tamil-speaking races. Pandya, the largest of them, had its capital at Madura, and traces its foundation to the fourth century B.C. The Chola kingdom had its headquarters at Combaconum and Tanjore. Talkad, in Mysore, now buried by the sands of the Kaveri, was the capital of the Chera kingdom from 288 to 900 A.D. The 116th king of the Madura or Pandya dynasty was overthrown by the Muhammadan general Malik Kafur in 1304. But the Musalmans failed to establish their power in the extreme south, and a series of Hindu dynasties ruled from Madura over the old Pandya kingdom until the eighteenth century. No European kingdom can boast a continuous succession such as that of Pandya or Madura, traced back by the piety of genealogists for more than two thousand years. The Chera or Mysore and Travancore kingdom enumerates fifty kings, and the Chola or Tanjore sixty-six, besides minor offshoot dynasties.

Kingdom of Vijayanagar

But authentic history in Southern India begins with the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar or Narsingha, from 1118 to 1565 A.D. The capital can still be traced within the Madras District of Bellary, on the right bank of the Tungabhadra river—vast ruins of temples, fortifications, tanks, and bridges, haunted by hyaenas and snakes. For at least three centuries, Vijayanagar ruled over the southern part of the Indian peninsula. Its Hindu Rajas waged war and made peace on equal terms with the Muhammadan Sultans of the Deccan.

Muhammadan States in the Deccan

The Muhammadan kings of Southern India sprang out of the conquest of Ala-ud-din (1303-1306). After a period of confused fighting, the Bahmani kingdom of the Deccan emerged as the representative of Muhammadan rule in Southern India. Zafar Khan, an Afghan general during the reign of Muhammad Tughlak (1325-1351), defeated the Delhi troops, and set up as Musalman sovereign of the Deccan. Having in early youth been the slave of a Brahman, who had treated him kindly, and foretold his future greatness, he took the title of Bahmani, and transmitted it to his successors.

The Bahmani Dynasty

The rise of the Bahmani dynasty is usually assigned to the year 1347, and it lasted for 178 years, until 1525. Its capitals were successively at Gulbargah, Warangal, and Bidar, all in the modern Haidarabad territories; and it loosely corresponded with the Nizam’s dominions of the present day. At the height of their power, the Muhammadan Bahmani kings claimed sway over half the Deccan, from the Tungabhadra river in the south to Orissa in the north, and from Masulipatam on the east to Goa on the west. Their direct government was, however, much more confined. They derived support, in their early struggle against the Delhi throne, from the Hindu southern kingdoms of Vijayanagar and Warangal. But during the greater part of its career, the Bahmani dynasty represented the cause of Islam against Hinduism on the south of the Vindhyas. Its alliances and its wars alike led to a mingling of the Musalman and Hindu populations. For example, the King of Málwá invaded the Bahmani dominions with a mixed force of 12,000 Muhammadan Afghans and Hindu Rajputs. The Hindu Raja of Vijayanagar recruited his armies from Afghan Musalmans, whom he paid by assignments of land, and for whom he built a mosque. The Bahmani Muhammadan troops, on the other hand, were frequently led by converted Hindus. The Bahmani armies were themselves made up of two hostile sects of Musalmans. One sect consisted of Shias, chiefly Persians, Turks, or Tartars from Central Asia; the other, of native-born Musalmans of Southern India, together with Abyssinian mercenaries, professing the Sunní faith. The rivalry between these Musalman sects frequently imperilled the Bahmani throne. The dynasty reached its highest power under Ala-ud-din II about 1437, and was broken up by its discordant elements between 1489 and 1525.

Five Muhammadan States of the Deccan, 1489-1688

Out of its fragments, the five independent Muhammadan kingdoms in the Deccan were formed. These were—(1) The Adil Shahi dynasty, with its capital at Bijapur, founded in 1489 by a son of Amurath II, Sultan of the Ottoman Turks; annexed by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb in 1686-1688. (2) The Kutab Shahi dynasty, with its capital at Golconda, founded in 1512 by a Turkoman adventurer; also annexed by Aurangzeb in 1687-1688. (3) The Nizam Shahi dynasty, with its capital at Ahmadnagar, founded in 1490 by a Brahman renegade from the Vijayanagar Court; subverted by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan in 1636. (4) The Imad Shahi dynasty of Berar, with its capital at Ellichpur, founded in 1484 also by a Hindu from Vijayanagar; annexed to the Ahmadnagar kingdom (No. 3) in 1572. (5) The Barid Shahi dynasty, with its capital at Bidar, founded 1492-1498 by a Turkí or Georgian slave. The Bidar territories were small and ill-defined; and were independent till after 1609. Bidar fort was taken by Aurangzeb in 1657.

Fall of Hindu Kingdom of Vijayanagar

It is beyond my scope to trace the history of these local Muhammadan dynasties of Southern India. They preserved their independence until the firm establishment of the Mughal Empire in the north, under Akbar and his successors. For a time they had to struggle against the great Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar. In 1565 they combined against that power, and, aided by a rebellion within Vijayanagar itself, they overthrew it at Talikot in 1565. The battle of Talikot marks the final downfall of Vijayanagar as a great Hindu kingdom. But its local Hindu Chiefs or Nayaks kept hold of their respective fiefs, and the Muhammadan kings of the south were only able to annex a part of its dominions. From the Nayaks are descended the well-known Palegars (Polygars) of the Madras Presidency, and the Maharaja of Mysore. One of the blood-royal of Vijayanagar fled to Chandragiri, and founded a line which exercised a prerogative of its former sovereignty, by granting the site of Madras to the English in 1639. Another scion, claiming the same high descent, lingers to the present day near the ruins of Vijayanagar, and is known as the Raja of Anagundi, a feudatory of the Nizam of Haidarabad. The independence of the local Hindu Rajas in Southern India throughout the Muhammadan period is illustrated by the Manjarabad family, a line of petty Chiefs, which maintained its authority from 1397 to 1799.

Independence of the Provinces

Lower Bengal threw off the authority of Delhi in 1340. Its Muhammadan governor, Fakir-ud-din, set up as sovereign, with his capital at Gaur, and stamped coin in his own name. A succession of twenty kings ruled Bengal until 1538, when it was temporarily annexed to the Mughal Empire of Delhi by Humayun. Bengal was finally incorporated into that empire by Akbar in 1576. The great Province of Gujarát in Western India had in like manner grown into an independent Muhammadan kingdom, which lasted for two centuries, from 1371 till conquered by Akbar in 1573. Málwá, which had also risen to be an independent State under its Muhammadan governors, was annexed by the King of Gujarát in 1531. Even Jaunpur, including the territory of Benares, in the centre of the Gangetic valley, maintained its independence as a Musalman State for nearly a hundred years, from 1393 to 1478, during the disturbed rule of the Sayyids and the first Lodi at Delhi.

Weakness of the early Delhi Empire

The position of the early Muhammadan rulers of Delhi was a very difficult one. Successive Musalman hordes of Turks, Afghans, and Tartars swept down the passes, and wrested India from the preceding invaders of their own Muhammadan faith. The Delhi Empire was therefore beset by three perpetual dangers. First, new Muhammadan invasions from Central Asia; second, rebellious Muhammadan generals or Governors within India; third, the Hindu races whom the early Delhi kings neither conciliated nor crushed. It was reserved for Akbar the Great to remedy the inherent weakness of the position; and by incorporating the Hindus into his government, to put a curb alike on Muhammadan invaders from without, and on too powerful Muhammadan subjects within.

Materials for Reference

The Honourable Mountstuart Elphinstone’s History of India (Cowell’s Edition) is still the standard popular work for the whole Muhammadan period; Sir Henry Elliot’s eight volumes, entitled The History of India as told by its own Historians, i.e. the Arab and Persian travellers and chroniclers (Dowson’s edition), are the main original sources; also Edward Thomas’ Chronicles of the Pathán Kings of Delhi (especially from 1193 to 1554); Blochmann’s Ain-i-Akbari (Calcutta, 1873) and Gladwin’s older translation (1800); Stewart’s History of Bengal from the first Muhammadan Invasion to 1757 (Calcutta, 1847); and Briggs’ Firishta (subject to correction from Sir Henry Elliot’s eight volumes). The District Gazetteers or Statistical Surveys of Northern India contain a mine of still unexhausted historical materials, which have, so far as permitted by the space allowed, been condensed in Hunter’s Imperial Gazetteer of India (Second Edition) and his Indian Empire.