According to historian Romila Thapar, Mahmud’s raids were primarily for ‘the wealth exceeding 20,000 (twenty thousand dinars) worth of jewels and gold’. But the shock and awe they produced were designed to intimidate the population. There are divergent versions. H. M. Elliot and J. Dowson’s The History of India records the event almost as a call for revenge: ‘When the Sultan...went to wage religious war against India, he made great efforts to capture and destroy Somnath in the hope that Hindus would become Mohammedan... The Indians made a desperate resistance. They would go weeping and crying
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