Invaders and Infidels (Book 1): From Sindh to Delhi: The 500-Year Journey of Islamic Invasions

by Sandeep Balakrishna

On the one side lay the Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam; on the other, the realms still to be converted, the Dar al-Harb, the House of War....

The Indian historical memory is familiar with

Muhammad ibn al-Qasim al-Thaqafi simply as Muhammad bin Qasim, the first alien Muslim invader of (undivided) India who located the key that opened the floodgates of nearly a millennium-long era of unparalleled barbarism, subjugation, religious bigotry and all-encompassing destruction that permanently altered Bharatavarsha. al-Hajjaj held Muhammad bin Qasim in such special esteem that he ‘considered him a suitable match for his sister Zaynab’6. But there was a deeper, twofold reason for selecting Muhammad bin Qasim for the mission.

[T]he Bolan Pass was protected by the brave Jats of Kikan or Kikanan. The long-drawn struggles of the Arabs with these powers … mark their steady but fruitless endeavours to enter India…. The hardy mountaineers of these regions, backed by the natural advantage of their hilly country, offered stubborn resistance to the conquerors of the world, and though often defeated, ever refused to yield. If there had been a history of India written without prejudices and predilections, the heroic deeds of these brave people, who stemmed the tide of Islam for two centuries, would certainly have received the recognition they so richly deserve [emphasis added].20

In the overall reckoning, it was a bleak show right from the first Caliph, Abu Bakr—father of Prophet Muhammad’s favourite wife, Aisha—all the way up to Caliph Ali. The first four pious Caliphs of Islam died without hearing the tidings of even a single victory over Sindh, let alone Al-Hind.

The year 712 marks one of those rare freak but pivotal coincidences in history. In the Western Hemisphere, the young Muslim general Tariq bin Ziyad leading an army of seven thousand troops had inflicted a crushing defeat on and killed the Visigoth chief Roderick and proceeded to conquer most of Spain and Portugal: both these Christian countries offered almost no resistance to the marauding onslaught of the invading Muslim armies. Meanwhile, in faraway Iraq, Muhammad bin Qasim had received blessings to embark on a similar mission to Sindh. It was the initiation of a campaign that unleashed a wanton trail of brutality, bloodshed and a kind of barbarism hitherto unprecedented in the history of Bharatavarsha whose cultural sensibilities couldn’t conceive in its wildest dreams that war could even be fought in this fashion.

The Buddhist priests [in Nerun] were already carrying on treasonable correspondence with Hajjaj, and now openly helped Muhammad with provisions. Muhammad then conquered many cities without any opposition and advanced to Siwistan32. Here, too, the Buddhist fifth-columnists welcomed the Arabs and entered into a pact with them against their own governor, who was defeated and fled.33

With her action, she had also inaugurated what later became a recurrent feature among Hindu women whose kingdom had been defeated by Muslim armies: Jauhar.

According to Hindu lore, Mulastana was founded by Rishi Kashyapa and was the capital of the Trigarta kingdom when the Great Kurukshetra War occurred.

At a more profound level, Mulastana was one of the most sacred pilgrimage centres for Hindus, on par with Kashi, Prayagraj, Mathura and Kanchipuram.

they had permanently settled in India and become rulers and

It was originally founded as a small market town and is perhaps one of the few antiquarian cities which had the misfortune of being kicked around like a football: from the Achaemenid king Cyrus II to Alexander to the Saffarids to the Ghaznavids to the Ghurids to the Mughals to Nadir Shah to the Durranis to the British and finally, to the Taliban.

Hindu kings had largely forgotten what K.M. Munshi calls the ‘Aryavarta Consciousness’ which ‘threw up values and institutions of great vigour and tenacity’3 and for centuries, had enabled them to easily ward off and drive away alien invasions from the time of Alexander, the Bactrian Greeks, the Kushanas, the Sakas and the Huns.

a determined army of infidels led by a mere boy, the (eventual) Gujarat Chalukya king, Mularaja II. His mother, Queen Nayakadevi15 pitched the boy in this battle against the reviled Turushkas, leading from the front. At Gadaraghatta16, the armies of the ‘Mahomedans were defeated with great slaughter’17 and Muhammad himself managed to escape after ‘suffer[ing] many hardships in their retreat to Ghazni’.18 It was a mortal blow to Muhammad’s confidence when he surveyed the battered ruins of his surviving army. For the next twelve years, he did not lead a single expedition against any Hindu ruler.

The peerless ancient centre of Sanatana Dharma, the home of every Sanatana sect, path and school, the repose of all the thirty-three crore deities in the Hindu pantheon, the Maha-Smashana (the Great Graveyard that liberates one from the endless cycle of birth and death) guarded by Mahadeva, the kotwal himself … was now left wholly defenceless. Kashi. Varanasi. Banares. The city that exuded the radiance of the highest, the deepest and the most profound yearnings of philosophy and spirituality. A radiance that was couched in the root of its very name: Kashi, from the Sanskrit root, kash, meaning light, effulgent. Now it was prey to the aforementioned ‘distribution of justice’, a pious act that involved the pitiless destruction of one thousand temples and the construction of an equal number of mosques on the same foundations using the debris of these razed temples. Varanasi’s very first and fiendish brush with the faith of peace and light permanently altered and marred its physical landscape. Needless to say, the collective wealth of all these temples added to Muhammad’s unquenchable thirst to plunder this infidel land.

The first stirrings of resentment against Imad-ud-din Rihan’s authority came, obviously, from the Turkic nobles in the sultan’s court. The fact that a lowly Indian Muslim71 like Rihan could even reach such a high office reveals another vital fact and outcome of the Turkic Muslim invasions of India and the subsequent establishment of the Delhi Sultanate. These invasions had created an entirely new class of Muslims in India—converted forcibly or at the point of a sword—whose number was rapidly growing and with it, their political ambitions. They were generally known as the neo-Muslims, a term of contempt. The coveted throne of the sultan or even life as a noble, officer or a high-ranking courtier fired their dreams. Their Turkish masters had themselves shown the way. All it took was to emulate them: in dress, manners, customs, speech. And methods. And tactics. Intrigues, plotting, conspiracy, back-stabbing, murder—whatever it took. Indeed, if the entire Muslim world was a universal brotherhood of Islam where all Muslims were equal, aspiration for the sultanate was a valid form of expressing and attaining the same brotherhood. However, the stranglehold of the foreign Turkic Muslims was absolute, ruthless and brutal. And they made no pretence of their open hostility to Indian Muslims. Even the notion of an Indian Muslim holding any position of authority in the administration was revolting and intolerable.