In the early second millennium, within only three years of each other, two armies marching from opposite directions raided north India. Neither would remain to govern or colonize conquered territory. Although both expeditions were successful in their own ways, they harboured different objectives, had different martial traditions and were informed by very different political systems. The two invasions also suggest why the opening of the second millennium marked a major transition in India’s long history.
The first of the two raids was led by a general acting on the authority of Rajendra I (r. 1014–44), maharaja of the Chola empire (848–1279) towards the extreme southern end of the Indian peninsula. In 1022 his army marched 1,600 kilometres north from the Cholas’ royal and ceremonial capital of Tanjavur, moving along India’s eastern coast. After subduing kings in Orissa, Chola warriors defeated rulers in the western and the south-central districts of the Ganges delta. Then, in a fiercely fought pitched battle, they defeated Mahipala, maharaja of the Pala empire (c.750–1161), at the time the dominant power in India’s easternmost region of Bengal. The southerners crowned their victory by carrying off a bronze image of the deity Śiva, which they seized from a royal temple that Mahipala had presumably patronized [see Fig. 1]. In the course of this long campaign, the invaders also took from the Kalinga raja of Orissa images of Bhairava, Bhairavi and Kali. These, together with precious gems looted from the Pala king, were taken down to the Chola capital as war booty.1
Major Indian dynasties, 975–1200
Before leaving the delta, however, Chola officers directed an operation unusual for military campaigns: they arranged for water from the Ganges River to be collected in pots and carried on the army’s long march back to Tanjavur. In the Godavari River delta, midway between Bengal and the Chola heartland, Rajendra, who had been consolidating Chola rule in coastal districts north of his capital, joined the victorious army. From there, the combined forces triumphantly returned to Tanjavur. The Cholas were at this time nearing the zenith of their might and glory; they would soon become the dominant power in the eastern Indian Ocean, their influence stretching across the Bay of Bengal to Sumatra. In their own estimation, they occupied the centre of the earthly and cosmic worlds.
In October 1025, not long after Rajendra Chola’s return from his conquests in Bengal, the son of a Turkish-speaking Central Asian slave marched out of Ghazni in eastern Afghanistan with 30,000 cavalry behind him. Heading south-east through the craggy ravines of the Sulaiman Mountains, he and his troops descended from the Afghan plateau into the low, lush Indus valley. Like his Chola contemporaries, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni (r. 997–1030) planned to attack a specific north Indian target – the wealthy temple of Somnath, an important pilgrimage site on the shores of the Arabian Sea on Gujarat’s southern coast. Built of stone a hundred years earlier and situated in a fortress that was surrounded by the sea on three sides, the temple of Somnath, like that of Mahipala in Bengal, was dedicated to the god Śiva. In December 1025, having crossed the Indus and marched across western India’s forbidding Thar Desert, Mahmud reached the site, successfully besieged the fortress and plundered the famous temple of its riches. He also ordered its Śiva image to be broken up and its pieces taken back to Ghazni, his capital, to be set in a floor and walked upon.2
This was not Mahmud’s first raid on north India. The sultan had already launched more than a dozen, beginning with an attack in 1001 on Peshawar, at the foot of the strategic Khyber Pass which connects the Afghan highlands with the Indus valley. Almost annually, similar offensives took place against prominent cities of the Punjab and the upper Ganges valley. In each of them, Mahmud’s men brought plundered wealth back through the mountain passes leading to Ghazni. What distinguished the Somnath raid from the others, however, was the way in which it captured the imagination of Persian chroniclers: those contemporary with the raid hailed Mahmud as an arch-iconoclast, piously responding to Islam’s prohibition against image-worship. Subsequent chroniclers even lionized him as the founder of Turkish rule and of Islamic sovereignty in South Asia, although in fact he was neither of these.
In striking contrast to Persian chronicles, which made so much of Mahmud’s raid on Somnath, Sanskrit inscriptions recorded by local Hindus made no mention of it at all. On the contrary, accounts dating to the months and years after the raid convey a sense of undisturbed business as usual for both the temple and the bustling seaport of Somnath, a major commercial entrepôt that imported war-horses from the Persian Gulf and exported locally produced textiles to markets around the Arabian Sea. Twelve years after the attack, a king from the Goa region recorded performing a pilgrimage to the temple, but he failed to mention Mahmud’s raid. Another inscription dated 1169 mentioned repairs made to the temple owing to normal deterioration, but again without mentioning Mahmud’s raid. In 1216 Somnath’s overlords fortified the temple to protect it not from attacks by invaders from beyond the Khyber Pass, but from those by Hindu rulers in neighbouring Malwa; apparently, such attacks were so frequent as to require precautionary measures.3 The silence of contemporary Hindu sources regarding Mahmud’s raid suggests that in Somnath itself it was either forgotten altogether or viewed as just another unfortunate attack by an outsider, and hence unremarkable.
In fact, the demonization of Mahmud and the portrayal of his raid on Somnath as an assault on Indian religion by Muslim invaders dates only from the early 1840s. In 1842 the British East India Company suffered the annihilation of an entire army of some 16,000 in the First Afghan War (1839–42). Seeking to regain face among their Hindu subjects after this humiliating defeat, the British contrived a bit of self-serving fiction, namely that Mahmud, after sacking the temple of Somnath, carried off a pair of the temple’s gates on his way back to Afghanistan. By ‘discovering’ these fictitious gates in Mahmud’s former capital of Ghazni, and by ‘restoring’ them to their rightful owners in India, British officials hoped to be admired for heroically rectifying what they construed as a heinous wrong that had caused centuries of distress among India’s Hindus. Though intended to win the latters’ gratitude while distracting all Indians from Britain’s catastrophic defeat just beyond the Khyber, this bit of colonial mischief has stoked Hindus’ ill-feeling toward Muslims ever since.4 From this point on, Mahmud’s 1025 sacking of Somnath acquired a distinct notoriety, especially in the early twentieth century when nationalist leaders drew on history to identify clear-cut heroes and villains for the purpose of mobilizing political mass movements. By contrast, Rajendra Chola’s raid on Bengal remained largely forgotten outside the Chola country.
On the surface, the military operations of Rajendra Chola and Mahmud of Ghazni would seem to have had much in common: both armies marched some 1,600 kilometres with a view to attacking and plundering specific north Indian sites; neither had any intent of occupation, annexation or permanent government; and both desecrated royal temples, carrying off plundered images to their respective capitals. But the differences between the two invasions are far more important than their similarities, since they highlight radically different political cultures in early-eleventh-century South Asia. The older of these two political cultures, the Chola, was informed by a body of Sanskrit texts that had circulated across India for many centuries before the rise of Chola power in south India. The other culture, informed by an analogous body of Persian texts, had come into being only two centuries before Mahmud’s day.