The Age of Wrath: A History of the Delhi Sultanate (8 page)

The people of Somnath were initially unperturbed by Mahmud’s invasion, for they firmly believed that it was their deity that had drawn Mahmud there so as to annihilate him for his sins of desecrating and destroying numerous temples elsewhere in India. So they assembled on the ramparts of the town to taunt and jeer at the Muslim army deployed just outside the town, even though their chieftain had prudently fled by sea to the safety of a nearby island. As it happened, the faith of the people was entirely misplaced. Somnatha, their god, let them down dismally.

The Turks responded to the jeers of the crowd with showers of arrows, and drove off the hecklers from the ramparts. They then climbed on to the ramparts by leaning ladders against them, and then, entering the town, engaged its defenders in fierce street-fights, slaughtering very many of them. This went on till dusk, when the Turks, having not yet fully eliminated the defenders, prudently withdrew from the town. But the next morning they resumed the attack. ‘Indians,’ writes Kazwini, ‘made a desperate resistance. They would go weeping and crying into the temple to seek [god’s] help, and then issue forth to battle and fight till all were killed. The number of the slain exceeded 50,000.’

Mahmud then exultantly entered the temple. According to Kazwini, ‘The edifice was built upon fifty-six pillars of teak. The shrine of the idol was dark, but was lighted by jewelled chandeliers of great value. In front of the entrance to the cella was a chain of gold weighing 200 mans.’ But the greatest marvel of it all was that the idol remained suspended in midair without any visible support. ‘The king looked upon the idol with wonder,’ and asked his officers about what the explanation of it could be, and one of them said that ‘the canopy was made of loadstone, and the idol of iron, and that the ingenious builder had skilfully contrived that the magnet would not exert a greater force on any one side. Hence the idol was suspended in the middle.’ That explanation indeed proved correct, for ‘when two stones were removed from the canopy, the idol swerved to one side, when more were taken away it inclined still further, until at last it rested on the ground.’

Other sources offer different descriptions of the temple and of what Mahmud did there. According to them, the main deity of the temple was Shiva, symbolised by a huge phallic idol made of hewn stone, which, embedded deep in the floor, stood over two metres high from the floor. And alongside it were several small gold and silver idols. The sight of the phallic idol enraged Mahmud, and he raised his mace to smash it. At that point some of his officers
tried to dissuade him, saying that the temple priests were offering a fabulous ransom to save the idol. Mahmud scornfully rejected their plea, saying, ‘I desire that on the day of resurrection I should be summoned with the words, “Where is that Mahmud who broke the greatest of the heathen idols?” rather than by these: “Where is that Mahmud who sold the greatest of the heathen idols?”’

As it happened, smashing the idol proved to be of religious as well as material benefit to Mahmud, for when the idol was shattered it was found to have, in a cavity within it, gems worth over a hundred times the ransom offered for it. The temple was then razed to the ground. According to Siraj, Mahmud carried the Somnatha idol with him to Ghazni, where it was split ‘into four parts. One part he placed in the Friday Mosque in Ghazni, one he placed at the entrance of the royal palace, the third he sent to Mecca, and the fourth to Medina,’ for people to tread on them. As Kazwini states, the booty that fell to Mahmud at Somnath ‘exceeded twenty-thousand-thousand [gold] dinars’—twenty million dinars—probably amounting to over six tons of gold.

Mahmud spent a fortnight at Somnath, then set out to return to Ghazni with his incalculable loot, cautiously taking a route different from the one by which he had arrived, which his enemies would have expected him to take. But his journey through Kutch and Sind, the route that he now took, proved to be perilous, as his guide, a devotee of the Somnath deity, led him into a waterless desert in Sind. Mahmud had the guide put to death, and marched on praying to god for relief. He finally managed to extricate himself from that desert trap, though many of his soldiers perished there. But that was not the end of his trials. Further along the route he was greatly harried by Jat tribesmen. Finally, after a great many ordeals, Mahmud reached Ghazni in the spring of 1026, and there received fresh laudatory titles from the Caliph, who confirmed him as the ruler of Khurasan, Hindustan, Sistan and Khvarazm. The following year Mahmud led another expedition into India, his last, to punish the Jats who had harassed him on his return from Somnath. The last three years of Mahmud’s life were spent in military engagements in Central Asia.

MAHMUD WAS QUITE ill in the last couple of years of his life. As in the accounts of many other facets of his life, medieval chroniclers differ about the nature of the illness that felled the indomitable sultan. ‘Opinions differ as to his disease: some say it was consumption, others a disease of the rectum, and others dysentery,’ notes Mir Khvand, a fifteenth-century Persian historian. According to Khondamir, the sultan ‘died of consumption or of disease of the liver …’

‘During the time of his illness he used to ride and walk about just as he did when in health, although physicians forbade him doing so,’ states Mir
Khvand. ‘It is said that two days before his death he ordered all the bags of gold and silver coins which were in his treasury, and all the jewels, and all the valuables which he had collected … to be brought to his presence. They were accordingly all laid out in the courtyard of his palace, which, in the eyes of spectators, appeared like a garden full of flowers of red, yellow, violet, and other colours. He looked at them with sorrow, and wept very bitterly … [Afterwards] he reviewed all his personal slaves, his cattle, Arab horses, camels, etc., and after casting his eye upon them, and crying with great sorrow and regret, returned to his palace.’

The sight of all his treasures and acquisitions no doubt evoked in Mahmud memories of the great perils and triumphs of his life, of the power he once had over men and circumstances, and also the realization of the futility of it all, the tragedy of his life, the tragedy of all life, that every man dies alone, leaving behind everything he had cherished in life. Mahmud died weeping. And that redeems him. Partly.

Mahmud died in Ghazni in April 1030, aged 59, after a reign of 33 years. He died on a stormy, dark night of pelting rain, a night that perfectly matched the turbulence of his life. He was buried in the blue palace in Ghazni.

MAHMUD WAS A man of demoniac energy, and he was engaged in ceaseless wars during his entire reign, in which he slaughtered many thousands of people and ravaged vast tracts of land. His military campaigns extended over a vast area stretching east-west from the banks of the Ganga to the shores of the Caspian Sea, and north-south from the shores of the Aral Sea to Gujarat. Of this, his Indian campaigns constituted the dominant part, in which he, as Al-Biruni states, ‘utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed there wonderful exploits, by which the Hindus became like atoms and dust scattered in all directions.’

Mahmud’s nature, writes Al-Utbi, ‘was contrary to the disposition of men, which induce [them] to prefer a soft to a hard couch, and the splendour of the cheeks of pomegranate-bosomed girls to well-tempered sword blades.’ His was a singularly sanguinary career. But then, it was a sanguinary age, and the career of Mahmud differs from that of most other kings of the age only in the incessancy of his campaigns, not in the nature of his campaigns. And it has to be noted that while he was an absolute terror to his adversaries, he was, as modern historian K. M. Panikkar notes, ‘a just and wise monarch to his own subjects.’

The character of Mahmud was a complex mixture of several contradictory elements. ‘He was very bigoted in religion … [and] was exceedingly covetous in seizing the riches of wealthy people,’ states Mir Khvand. Confirms Khondamir: Mahmud was ‘excessively greedy in accumulating wealth … [and he had an
insatiable] thirst for worldly glory.’ Adds Ferishta: Mahmud had ‘the sordid vice of avarice.’

Yet, despite such vices, and the despotic power that he exercised, Mahmud had no hesitation to bow before the lowliest of his subjects when they charged him of misdeeds or incompetence. According to
Zinatu-l Majalis
, a late sixteenth century compilation of historical anecdotes, once when an old woman—whose son was killed along a caravan route in Ghazni—publicly rebuked Mahmud for the poor security conditions in his kingdom, and warned him to ‘keep no more territory than … [he could] manage,’ he bowed to her in humility and humbly accepted her rebuke.

There was a poignant trace of melancholy in Mahmud. Once, while drinking wine, his thoughts turned to his father, and with tears welling up in his eyes he said to a courtier: ‘My father had established very good rules for the management of the country, and took great pains in enforcing them. I thought that … [after my father’s demise] I would enjoy the exercise of my power in peace and security … I also considered that … I should become a great king. But the truth was revealed to me when he died … for since his departure I have not had one day’s happiness. You think I drink this wine for pleasure, but this is a great mistake. I take it merely as a device to gain … [some] peace.’

For all his savagery, there are aspects of the character and life of Mahmud that draw our sympathy. Part of the making of his complex persona was his self-consciousness about his unprepossessing looks. According to Ferishta, Mahmud’s face was heavily pock-marked. ‘His features were very ugly,’ states Hamdullah Mustaufi, a fourteenth century chronicler. ‘One day, regarding his own face in a mirror, he became thoughtful and depressed. His vizier inquired as to the cause of his depression, to which he replied, “It is generally understood that the sight of kings adds vigour to the eye, but the form with which I am endowed is enough to strike the beholder blind.” The vizier then consoled him, saying, “Scarcely one man in a million looks on your face, but the qualities of your mind cast their influence on every one. Study, therefore, to maintain an unimpeachable character, so that you may be the beloved of all hearts.”’

Mahmud was particularly diffident in matters of love. According to Muhammad Ufi, an early-thirteenth-century Persian chronicler, Mahmud ‘had been long enamoured … [of a slave-girl]. He was sincerely attached to her, and was anxious to espouse her. But it occurred to him that he might by this act incur the reproaches of the neighbouring kings and princes and forfeit the respect and esteem of his servants. He entertained this apprehension for a long time.’ But one day he told a courtier about his predicament. ‘Will not the neighbouring kings call me a fool?’ he asked the courtier. ‘And will not you also, my servants and slaves, speak ill of me in respectable society? I ask your advice in this matter. Have you ever heard or read in any history of kings
wedding the children of their slaves?’ The courtier then reassured Mahmud, saying, ‘Many cases similar to this have occurred. Several kings … [have] married their own slave girls.’ It was only then that Mahmud had the courage to marry the girl.

ONE OF THE most redeeming qualities of Mahmud was that he was a man of wide cultural interests. A good part of the enormous treasure that he plundered from India was used to turn Ghazni into an elegant city of great architecture and high culture, one of the grandest cities of the age. The sultan set up there a great library—with books in many languages—and a museum, and he built there a magnificent Jami Masjid, which became renowned as the Bride of Heaven, one of the finest expressions of Islamic architecture.

Mahmud was an ardent patron of learning, literature and the arts. He had ‘a great propensity to poetry,’ observes Ferishta. ‘No king ever had more learned men at his court, kept a finer army, or displayed more magnificence.’ According to Mustaufi, the sultan ‘was a friend to learned men and poets, on whom he bestowed munificent presents, insomuch that every year he expended upon them more than 400,000 dinars.’ He is said to have maintained some 400 poets at his court, to one of whom he once gifted 14,000 silver coins as a reward for composing a single ode that pleased him. Similarly, on three occasions he is said to have poured pearls into the mouth of another poet, for composing elegant extempore verses. And once, when the Chandella king Vidyadhara sent to him an adulatory poem, he conferred on the king the command of 15 fortresses in India. There is probably some exaggeration in these accounts of Mahmud’s bounty, but there is no doubt he was a man of keen cultural interests.

Among the many litterateurs in Mahmud’s court the most renowned were Firdausi (the author of the great Persian epic
Shah-nama
) and Al-Biruni (mathematician, philosopher, astronomer, historian and Sanskrit scholar). Firdausi would later fulminate against the sultan, and deride him as the niggardly son of a concubine, but that was an expression of the poet’s grudge against Mahmud, for having rewarded him, for
Shah-nama
, with silver coins instead of the gold coins he had expected. When Firdausi wrote the first 1000 verses of the epic, Mahmud had given him 1000 dinars (gold coins) as reward. His finished work had 60,000 verses, so he expected to be rewarded with 60,000 dinars, but got only 60,000 dirhams (silver coins). This greatly vexed Firdausi—perhaps not so much for not getting the reward he expected, as for not getting the recognition he desired—and he, according to Khondamir, peevishly gave away all the reward money in random gifts: 20,000 dirhams to a bath-keeper, 20,000 to a sherbet seller, and 20,000 to the officer who had brought him the money. He then composed about forty verses as a satire on the sultan, introduced them into
Shah-nama
, and then fled from Ghazni to
Tus in Khurasan for safety. Some years later Mahmud is said to have regretted his niggardliness, and sent to Firdausi 60,000 dinars. But as the bearers of this reward entered Firdausi’s residence by one gate, his coffin was carried out by the other gate. ‘An only daughter was his heiress, to whom the emissaries of the sultan then offered … [the reward], but she, from the pride inherent in her disposition, refused the reward and said, “I have enough wealth to last me to the end of my days; I have no need for this money,”’ reports Khondamir.