Arab and Turkish Invasions of India: Dates and Battles

Between the eighth and the twelfth centuries two waves of invasion came into India from the north west. The first was Arab, a single conquest of Sindh in 712 that stopped at the lower Indus. The second was Turkish, spread over two centuries, first the raids of Mahmud of Ghazni and then the campaigns of Muhammad Ghori, and it ended with a Turkish state at Delhi. Examiners treat the two waves as one chapter because the contrast is the lesson: the Arab conquest changed almost nothing politically, while the Turkish conquest changed the ruling order of northern India.

The Arab conquest of Sindh, 712

Arab interest in India began with sea raids on the Konkan coast, including an expedition towards Thane in the middle of the seventh century, but the conquest came later. The immediate cause was an attack by pirates of Debal on Arab ships carrying gifts from Sri Lanka. When Dahir, the Brahman ruler of Sindh, refused to pay for the loss, Hajjaj bin Yusuf, the governor of Iraq under the Umayyad Caliph Walid, sent his young commander Muhammad bin Qasim. In 712 Qasim took Debal, crossed the Indus and defeated and killed Dahir at the battle of Raor. Brahmanabad, Alor and then Multan fell in turn; the Arabs called Multan the city of gold because of the wealth of its temple. Qasim organised the province on Umayyad lines, kept the Hindus as protected subjects liable to the jizya, and left the village administration undisturbed. His career was short: the new Caliph Sulaiman recalled him and he died soon after. Arab rule never reached beyond Sindh and Multan, which is why historians describe the conquest as a triumph without results. Its real importance was cultural. Indian numerals, the works of Brahmagupta on astronomy, Indian medicine and the Panchatantra passed into Arabic, and the Chach Nama, the Persian version of an Arabic account, remains the chief source for the conquest.

Mahmud of Ghazni, 997 to 1030

Mahmud, the son of Sabuktigin of the Yamini house of Ghazni, is traditionally said to have led seventeen expeditions into India. His aim was plunder for his wars in Central Asia rather than empire in India, and temple towns were his targets. He defeated Jaipal, the Hindu Shahi ruler of Punjab, at Waihind in 1001, and Anandpal at the same place in 1008, after which the Hindu Shahi kingdom collapsed and Punjab passed to Ghazni. Nagarkot, Thanesar, Mathura and Kanauj were sacked in turn, and the richest raid of all was on the Somnath temple in Gujarat in 1025. Mahmud took the title Yamin ud Daulah from the Caliph and is counted the first ruler in India to use the title Sultan. He carried scholars with him: Alberuni, who wrote Tahqiq i Hind, better known as Kitab ul Hind, on Indian society and science, and at his court the poet Firdausi of the Shahnama and the historian Utbi of the Kitab ul Yamini. Mahmud died in 1030, leaving Punjab and Sindh under Ghazni but no Turkish state in the Indian interior.

Muhammad Ghori and the battles of Tarain

The Ghurids of Ghur in Afghanistan displaced the house of Ghazni, and Muizzuddin Muhammad bin Sam, known in Indian history as Muhammad Ghori, turned the raids into conquest. He took Multan in 1175 and Uch, was defeated by the Chalukya army of Gujarat at Kayadara near Mount Abu in 1178, and took Lahore in 1186, ending Ghaznavid rule in Punjab. In the first battle of Tarain in 1191 Prithviraj Chauhan III of Ajmer and Delhi defeated and wounded him. Ghori returned in 1192 with mounted archers and a feigned retreat, and in the second battle of Tarain he destroyed the Rajput army and captured Prithviraj. In 1194 he defeated Jaichand of the Gahadavala house of Kanauj at Chandawar on the Yamuna, which opened the Ganga valley. Ghori went back to Ghazni and left India to his slave officers: Qutbuddin Aibak held Delhi, and Bakhtiyar Khalji overran Bihar and Bengal, destroying the monasteries at Nalanda and defeating Lakshmanasena. Ghori was assassinated at Damyak in 1206, and Aibak then founded the dynasty that became the Delhi Sultanate.

Why the Rajputs lost

• No single authority: the Rajput kingdoms fought each other and made no common front against an invader who came again and again.
• Feudal armies raised by chiefs for a campaign, against a standing army of paid mounted archers under one command.
• Slow war elephants and heavy cavalry against fast horse archers who could retreat and strike again.
• No frontier policy: the passes of the north west were never fortified or watched, and the invader chose his season and route.
• A social order that left war to one caste, so defeat in one battle could end a kingdom.