Source: TW
Mulla Abu al-Fazl, the courtier of tyrant Akbar, seems to give a more objective account of pR^ithivIrAja ChahamAna than his “coreligionists” or most vivAsa authors.
You believe the account of Prithviraj killing Ghuri?
To clarify, I don’t think any of the evidence supports that.
The history of pR^ithvirAja is shrouded in agenda-driven myth making. The Mohd. authors obviously wanted to illustrate the triumph of the army of Islam against the H & slant their narratives thus. The nirgrantha-s while acknowledging that chAhamAna rule was a golden age for them, are still ill-disposed toward the sanAtana-dharma that the kings followed. Hence, they tend to present the king in a negative light – i.e., blame his defeat on being slothful or given to excessive love for this woman.
The white indologists, given their expected biases, have gone with the Mohd. & vivAsa chroniclers, while trying to claim that H accounts were myth-making. They have tried to argue that
- pR^ithivirAja was not an important ruler;
- He probably never ruled over dilli; 3.He was as the jin-s claimed a bad/negligent ruler.
- The Mohds. on taking dilli really did not demolish the H/nirgrantha shrines as to destroy the kaffrs, but to advertise to their own coreligionsts that they were capable of erecting great minars & the like.
However, this goes against the H position that accorded a special place for 2 ChahamAna-s namely pR^ithivirAja & hammIra, the former explicitly as the last great king of dilli. This point has interested me for a while, because, despite their aspersions, even the jin-s devote several works to them. Why would they do that if there was no backdrop against which they were acting? We hold that this backdrop was none other than the H position that these ChahamAna-s were great rulers. The jin-s implicitly accepted it but used it for the rhetoric of pressing their religious rivalry with the H.
Against this background shaikh Abu al-Fazl opens the dilli account by accepting the H account that Muiz ad-din = Shahab ad-din made several incursions into Hindustan without any success. Then he departs from his correligionists accounts by citing that there 7 encounters between p’rAja & the Mohd. in which the latter was defeated; but the invader won the 8th. He accepts that p’rAja was the ruler of dilli. He says that p’rAja was taken prisoner & that M authors say that he was killed in the battle. That’s the reason why I think he was being more objective.
My own take based on the totality of evidence was that p’rAja was a notable ruler, who made some strategic mistakes that ultimately cost him his life & opened the door for the H nearly becoming extinct. However, the blame for the latter could not be placed solely on him. Many think it was a military failure & blame elephants & the like. I don’t think so - both p’rAja & the chAlukya defeated the Ghuri on 1 or more occassions.
To get a good measure of the Ghuri’s power we have to see his central Asian campaigns – he destroyed the Ghaznavids & he might have even defeated the Khwarazm Shah – a war in which his elephants are said to have been of great use in Central Asian chronicles. The para-Mongolic Khitans, though enemies of the Khwarazm Shah, realized that his fall will expose them to an even greater Islamic danger. Hence, the Khitan Khan sent an army to put down the Ghuri & they smashed Shahab army to smithereens. Thus, it took the strongest central Asian army to conclusively beat the Ghurids. Thus, the initial Indian performance is rather commendable.
So what went wrong? Hence, we say it was p’rAja’s strategic mistakes that compounded to a battle field defeat. The key issue was his tardiness in shoring up the Panjab frontier even when he knew that the Ghuri would come back given his prior incursions. In part this was probably beause, like other H rulers of the time, he was more concerned of his conflicts in inner India with his coethnics to be proactive about the sImAnta-pradesha.