The Ghaznavid Empire of India

The Sources and Modern Scholarship

Romila Thapar’s statement in 2004 was only partially accurate when she wrote, ‘the Turko-Persian chronicles have been hegemonic. They have been privileged as factual without adequate discussion of their historiographical intentions’. ¹⁹ In fact, a number of studies had already investigated the compositions of these texts, and certainly more works have appeared since that shed light on the historiographical intentions of the authors, their sources and their patrons. These, as we will see below, were not always in harmony. We should also note that the characterisation of this body of literature as ‘Turko-Persian’ is problematic. The language of these sources was Arabic or Persian, never Turkish. So, in fact Thapar is using the term as an ‘ethnic’ marker which brands them as alien and, thus, reifies colonial categories as deployed by Mill, Elliot and others.

Who were the main contemporary authors of the eleventh century? The most important were two court historians (Abu Nasr al-‘Utbi who wrote ca. 1020 and Abu Saʻid Gardizi who wrote ca. 1050) and a court poet named Farrukhi Sistani (writing continuously at least in the 1020s and the 1030s). Of secondary importance are the historian Abul-Fazl Bayhaqi (995–1077) and the poet laureate of Mahmud’s court Abul-Qasim Hasan ‘Unsuri (d. 1039/1040). The sections of Bayhaqi’s voluminous history that covered Mahmud’s reign have been lost. ‘Unsuri’s poetry has survived but in smaller portions than Farrukhi’s. His poems were not based on what he personally witnessed, unlike Farrukhi’s. Beyond these authors, the works of the epic poet Abul-Qasim Firdawsi (d. 1020) and the later chronicler Ibn al-Athir (d. 1232/3) are indirectly significant.

Theodore Nöldeke was the first scholar to observe in 1857 that ‘Utbi had never actually been to India, implying that his information for these sections was not as reliable. ²⁰ Elliot made similar points in 1871. ²¹ M. Nazim also noticed, in 1931, the lack of details regarding the India campaigns of Sultan Mahmud. ²² In more recent times, Meisami, Peacock and I have all argued that ‘Utbi had a problematic relationship with his royal patrons and in fact used the genre of dynastic history to shed light on the darker aspects of Ghaznavid rule. ²³ The sections on India, I have argued, were based on victory proclamations dispatched by the sultan and his courtiers, intended specifically for an audience in the distant caliphal court of Baghdad. ²⁴

A later text, Zayn al-Akhbar or ‘Adornment of Histories’, was written by Abu Sa‘id ‘Abdul-Hayy b. al-Zahhak b. Mahmud Gardizi. Gardizi wrote it in Persian circa 1050. He too composed a dynastic history of the Ghaznavids, but in a manner different from ‘Utbi. While ‘Utbi’s narrative covers only the end of the Samanids and the beginnings of the Ghaznavids, Gardizi’s book is a universal history that begins with the pre-Islamic kings of Iran and leads up to the period of the reign of Sebüktegin, Mahmud and their descendants until the mid-eleventh century. The Zayn al-Akhbar also contains several encyclopaedic sections dealing with the customs and manners of Indians, Turks, Romans, Muslims, Christians, Magians and Jews. Of the life of the author and his plans for writing, next to nothing is known. However, in a few short lines that he inserted before his section on the Ghaznavids, Gardizi stated that he had witnessed with his own eyes much of what he was about to relate regarding Mahmud and his successors. ²⁵

The scholars of the first half of the twentieth century made harsh and somewhat disparaging pronouncements on the author of the Zayn al-Akhbar. For Barthold, Gardizi’s main attraction lay in his use of a number of lost sources for the early Islamic history of Khurasan and Transoxiana. ²⁶ Nazim found this book to be ‘a brief and colourless chronicle of dry facts’, important as a contemporary source, but annoyingly devoid of ‘criticism or reflection’ on the little that he reported, ‘not even enough to break the monotony of the narrative’. ²⁷ Bosworth’s early position was similar to Barthold and Nazim’s. He compared Gardizi unfavourably with Bayhaqi and called his book, ‘a chronicle of bare events, without the analyses of motive and critical comments.’ He was, however, pleased with Gardizi’s attention to dates, his rather dispassionate attitude and the straightforward style of his prose. ²⁸

Gardizi fared a bit better with scholars of a more literary bent, particularly those Iranian or Afghan academicians who were interested in prose style. Bahar, in his foundational study of historical Persian prose, praised the Zayn al-Akhbar for its maturity and fluidity. ²⁹ Saʻid Nafisi was much more generous when he described it as ‘more important than any other historiographical work … both on account of its lofty, simple, and fluid Persian writing style, as well as for historical points that are in no other book’. ³⁰ The views of A. H. Habibi of Kabul University, who finally published a complete critical edition of the text in 1968, were similar: historically rich and useful details written in a pleasant and fluid Dari. ³¹

In recent years, Gardizi has been the object of renewed historiographic interest. Julie Scott Meisami in her 1999 Persian Historiography to the End of the Twelfth Century devotes 13 pages to Gardizi. Meisami believes that in Gardizi’s eyes, Sultan Mahmud stands on the pinnacle of the historical progression of rulers, from pre-Islamic kings of Iran up to the Islamic period and the ‘Abbasid Caliphate, as a warrior-king who suppresses heretics, spreads the true faith and maintains justice and order. ³² This feature, as well as the simple prose of the text, led Meisami to conclude that the book was intended to glorify the court in the eyes of an unsophisticated audience as well as to serve as a pedagogical tool for the young Ghaznavid prince, ‘Abd al-Rashid, who began to rule around 1048–49. ³³

Lastly, ‘Ali Parsa has studied the phenomenon of causation in the Zayn al-Akhbar. Through a comparison with several contemporary and near contemporary authors, Parsa concludes that Gardizi wrote his book in an ‘explanatory’ mode of didactic historiography and not a ‘moralistic’ one. ³⁴ In other words, Gardizi did not write that a ruler should or should not perform a certain act. Rather, the ruler acted in a certain way, and therefore the society reacted in a particular manner. ³⁵ The presence of numerous ‘causal structures’ in the Zayn al-Akhbar led Parsa to an interesting conclusion, one that stood in stark contrast to the statements of Nazim and Bosworth about half a century ago. ‘It seems’, wrote Parsa, ‘that there is an effort on [Gardizi’s] part to present events with explanation rather than merely presenting the facts’. ³⁶ One might note accordingly that if anyone can be accused of poverty of analysis, it is some of the modern readers of the Zayn al-Akhbar and not its author.

Finally, the third source for the study of Ghaznavid campaigns is the poet Farrukhi of Sistan. His version of events has the double advantage of personal familiarity and a greater license for using fabulous language and imagery. As is evident from several self-references in his poems, Farrukhi accompanied Mahmud on a number of expeditions. Furthermore, as a poet and an outsider to the intellectual milieu of Khurasan, Farrukhi showed no compunction in drawing on legendary, mythical and epic traditions of Iran and Afghanistan while writing about his patron Mahmud. This feature sets him apart from many of his contemporary chroniclers who often voiced disdain for what they considered to be mere fables.

For many years, studies of Farrukhi’s poetry were mostly limited to mentions in historical anthologies of Persian literature, and in a few articles. More recently, Meisami argued that Farrukhi’s relationship to his Ghaznavid masters was more complicated than that of a simple flatterer. His involvement in court intrigues, particularly after the death of Mahmud, seems to have gotten him into trouble with Mahmud’s son and successor Amir Mas‘ud. Moreover, even during the reign of Mahmud, Farrukhi might not have been totally enthusiastic about all of the sultan’s expeditions. ³⁷ Finally, Jocelyn Sharlet has shown how Farrukhi and other Persian and Arabic poets of his age created a professional identity by using rhetoric in the service of patrons, a relationship that I believe would also hold true for the new generation of court historians working under the Ghaznavids. ³⁸

In short, we can conclude that recent scholarship has certainly complicated the earlier, formulaic reading of Ghaznavid chroniclers and poets as ‘epics of conquest’ or even as straightforward panegyrics. The three authors discussed above evinced some hesitations towards their imperial patron. We also know that their information on India potentially derived from conflicting viewpoints: either they reported on what they themselves witnessed (which did not always accord with the sultan’s vision of himself) or they relied on official victory proclamation from the war front (which did not necessarily harmonise with their personal ethics and viewpoints). Finally, we now know that at least ʻUtbi’s writing was intended for an audience in Baghdad, and that raises the possibility of not simply exaggeration but even intentional misinformation.

Still, while the studies reviewed above have shed considerable light on the sources, they have mainly focused on the authors and not the feeder material that comprised their source of information. I will argue below that not only did they share their authorship with Sultan Mahmud and his letter-writers but they also included oral reports from other participants as well, most likely from the members of the Ghaznavid army. While we do not have the names of specific individuals, we can certainly parse them and distinguish them based on their content and message.

The Sources and Their Sources

Where did Ghaznavid authors derive their information as they composed their texts? Their sources included at least three distinct strands. These are as follows: (a) what the authors reproduced from official victory proclamations dispatched by the king, (b) what they reported from other participants, some of which may be independent oral ‘bardic’ tales; and (c) what they themselves witnessed. What this means is that our main authors, ʻUtbi, Gardizi and even Farrukhi, had to handle a very diverse and complicated sources material that was narrated for a variety of sometimes conflicting and contradictory reasons that were not always in harmony with the main intention of the authors of the chronicle/panegyric or their patrons. The presence of the discordant voices in the chronicles will consequently force us to further revisit structural features of the Ghazna Empire and its constituencies.

The most obviously propagandistic material in the early Ghaznavid texts were reproduced directly from victory proclamations of the king. As I have argued elsewhere, we can identify these passages especially in ʻUtbi who himself was not an eyewitness of the events. These reports form the basis of all of his descriptions of the India campaigns and can be easily identified due to their episodic nature. They usually follow a rough outline involving seven stages: setting out, crossing natural barriers, encountering monstrosities, waging battles, causing the enemy to commit suicide, capturing wondrous forts and returning home rich with plunder. ³⁹ We know that these stages were contained in Mahmud’s letters as the Baghdadi historian Sibṭ ibn al-Jawzi (d. 1256) quotes an earlier source saying specifically that letters would arrive at the caliph’s court from Mahmud of Ghazna describing a campaign exactly following the episodic manner outlined above. ⁴⁰

In such sections, we encounter the most graphic descriptions of violence. However, these passages do not prove that there was violence. Rather, the only securely demonstrable fact we can glean from them is that the Ghaznavid court wanted to appear to the Arabic-reading elite in Baghdad as a destructive champion of faith in South Asia. No doubt, the main purpose of this strategy was legitimacy, but of what kind? Scholars have long argued that as a dynasty founded by lowly slaves, the Ghaznavids could gain validation from the caliphal court that bestowed upon them titles and robes from Baghdad. In exchange, the ‘Abbasid caliphs could prop up the Sunni Ghaznavids against the Shiite dynasties that were dominating the western part of the Islamic world—namely, the Fatimids in Egypt and the Buyids in western Iran and Iraq itself.

However, as I have argued recently, ⁴¹ these passages must be read with even more care and scrutiny. When analysed in chronological order, we can see that the content of these passages grow more graphically violent over time, and they refer to attacks on temples usually in their later iterations. This was because Mahmud’s victory proclamations and their echoes in ʻUtbi and Farrukhi were not simply exaggerating for the sake of legitimation. Rather, they were intentionally distorting. To put it more specifically, these texts were intended to create the rhetorical opposite of particular policies of the Ghaznavids in South Asia.

As stated above, the incorporation of the elephant, both practically and symbolically, by the Ghaznavid state created a backlash in the Islamic world. Muslim authors began to compare the sultan with Abraha, the prideful Yemeni king who had tried to destroy the Kaʻba in Mecca. The comparison was especially stinging because it was believed by at least the tenth century that the name of Abraha’s elephant had actually been ‘Mahmud’. Ghaznavid victory proclamations were contesting this problem by creating a mirror-like counter-narrative: Mahmud was not Abraha on the elephant assaulting the House of God. Quite the contrary, he was like Prophet Muhammad cleansing idols out of pagan temples. The climax of this counter-narrative was reached in the accounts of the attack on the temple of Somnath which seemed to contain in its name the word ‘Manat’—one of the pagan idols of Mecca destroyed by the prophet. ⁴²

All this created an extremely complicated situation for Ghaznavid authors, as they had to base the core of their description of what had happened upon material that did not simply embellish reality but actually presented a narrative that was in contradiction to and, even at times, independent of the events it purported to describe. What made matters worse was that even though the victory proclamations were promoting the Islamic credentials of the Ghaznavid monarchs, their composers were in part constructing them out of plotlines and topoi found in non-Islamic heroic tales circulating at that time in eastern Iran and Afghanistan.

For instance, we find the seven-stage outline of Mahmud’s India campaigns replicated in the Persian epic of pre-Islamic kings the Shahnamah, specifically in the battles of Faridun the primordial dragon-slayer. ⁴³ Even the much less formulaic descriptions of Mahmud’s father Sebüktegin relied heavily on similar material. For instance, in the episode of the war between Sebüktegin and the Hindu Shahi king Jayapala, ʻUtbi writes that Ghaznavid ruler ended a stalemate by throwing filth into a lake of pure water which in reaction spewed out a massive hailstorm and frightened Jayapala into suing for peace. This strange story is connected to reports in the eleventh-century History of Sistan as well as in the ninth-century Zoroastrian text the Bundahishn that described the existence of similar lakes in the regions of Afghanistan. According to the Bundahishn, the water of these lakes would ‘accept anything a freeborn holy man may throw into it, [but] it will throw it out again if one be not holy’. Moreover, it claimed that ‘all hardness, brackishness, and impurity that are inclined to go from the Putik Sea into the ocean Frakhvakart are repelled by a mighty high wind, blowing from the Lake Sataves’. ⁴⁴ Clearly, even if the reports of Sebüktegin’s ‘jihad’ against Jayapala were meant to highlight his Islamic qualifications, the content of these reports were actually formed out of narrative material derived from ‘pagan’ and Zoroastrian lore. Ghaznavid authors were fully aware that such descriptions had a very tenuous connection with the actuality of events, and while they could not exclude them, they still sought alternative sources for their histories. ⁴⁵

The second sources of information about what happened in India were provided by other participants who remain unidentified. These included personal friends of the authors as well as other military men or courtiers. The chroniclers would appropriate these stories and incorporate them either in their entirety or in part. The latter was more common and involved inserting details from such tales into the basic skeletal structure provided by more ‘official’ letters. The following two excerpts from ‘Utbi’s description of the battle of Nara’in (1013 or 1014) exemplify this point. The first expresses a muffled criticism:

It so happened that upon [Mahmud’s] entrance into those regions, snow fell, such as had never been seen before, and the mountain passes were closed, and the hills and the valleys became level. The air frowned with such bitter cold that the feet of horses and camels were affected, to say nothing of the exposed parts and the extremities of men. The wide roads were covered, and the right wing of the army could not be distinguished from the left, nor the vanguard from the rear-guard. The situation grew dire to the point of an inclination for return until God should permit it some other time. Indeed, everything has a limit and an endpoint. ⁴⁶

Here, Mahmud’s decision to delay or cancel the journey in face of a severe snowstorm seems to have been a point of embarrassment. ‘Utbi switches to an impersonal construction so that he should not directly implicate Mahmud for a wavering resolve. He supports the decision by a fatalistic sentence which further removes censure from the sultan. On the other hand, why should he have included it? In other similar situations, as based on the sultan’s letters, hardship on the road functioned as a stage of trial that Mahmud had to overcome with the help of God. Here the sultan is shown to have been defeated by the challenge. Moreover, Mahmud had allowed many of his soldiers to suffer terribly from the cold. It is worth comparing this passage with one about Mahmud’s father, Sebüktegin, who had endured hardship in his Indian campaigns in very different ways. Sebüktegin’s recollections are as follows:

Sure enough, I fought them [the enemy] in some of their battles along with these comrades. We were too few in number, but they were too many. The exercise of war began to drag too long, to the point where we had fewer provisions than men. Soon [the men] were lacking in supplies and aid. There was nothing before us but swords that cut down, and nothing beyond us but deserts and wasteland. Then they began to cry out to me from what afflicted them, asking me if I knew of a strategy for persevering through that hardship. So, I told them that I had taken along a little porridge for my retainers and that would now be divided equally among us all, and that should amount to a sufficient quantity. May God grant release from suffering and open up these dire straits. Every day, I used to dish out with a ladle a small bowl of that stuff first to every one of them, and afterwards to myself. We made do with that much for the whole day and night. We were in that position, amidst a loathsome cure, cautious enduring, and coming to meet swords and arrows with uplifted faces and hearts, until God granted victory. ⁴⁷

In this account, Sebüktegin appears more steadfast in face of affliction. This stands in sharp contrast to Mahmud’s wavering resolve in a similar predicament. Also, the old amir shares his soldiers’ suffering while Mahmud does not. It is unlikely that royal letters would have criticised Mahmud, and we can only conclude that ‘Utbi incorporated and then modified narrative elements from other participants that served as evidence of the fallibility of the sultan—evidence which would have been useful to the critical attitude of the author of the Yamini towards his master.

A second excerpt from the same episode strengthens the suggestion that ‘Utbi drew on alternative tales about India—especially those that were centred not on the person of Mahmud but other heroes. It reads as follows:

The battle was renewed, the thrashing become furious, the oven grew hot, the subordinate and the superior became indistinguishable, and the encounter became ferocious. They seized each other by the collar, quarrelled like mountain quails, and struck everything between the head and the Achilles’ tendon. In the same way, the elephants were paralysed out of fear, shrieking aloud, their cloven hooves and trunks were shattered, a cloud of spears showered upon them, and while writhing about like hideous serpents, strikes came upon their eyeballs, collarbones, or throats.

Suddenly, the infidels saw the position of Abu ‘Abd Allah Muhammad b. Ibrahim al-Ta‘i—a position that he had won by his ability and lust for bloodshed. So, [the enemy] set out against him with those of his gang who were the roughest in violence and the greatest in arms. They gave him a sound thrashing on his head, and struck him both behind and in the front. However, he was like an obstinate stallion, unmoving and untiring of his honourable position, indefatigable before sword-strike, nobly generous with his soul for the victory of religion and obedience to God.

The sultan saw the pagans heaping upon him. He dispatched to his aid an elite group of men to pull him out. They delivered him to the sultan, all cut by sword-blows and dotted with spear-tips like letters of the alphabet. The sultan ordered him to be placed on an elephant out of regard for the pain of the injuries to his body parts. Thus, by the elephant he was brought to the level of a king, and he was distinguished from the most prominent members of the soldiery. ⁴⁸

The hero of this episode of the battle is clearly not the sultan, but his general al-Ta‘i, commander of the vanguard. Not only is the story centred upon him but he is even raised to an equal footing with Mahmud himself by being placed on an elephant. We may note that even if Mahmud plays a decisive role here, ʻUtbi does not interrupt the narrative with a sentence inserted to praise the sultan’s magnanimity. We can deduce that the story was reported to ʻUtbi by al-Taʻi himself or someone loyal to him. This would suggest that there were individuals composing alternative accounts that have not survived independently. These would have been originally oral reports, and we may call them ‘bardic’ material, that must have been circulating after the campaigns about the heroic action of other members of the Ghaznavid army but were generally not used by the main chroniclers and poets. Shahid Amin has analysed one such bardic tradition in the story of Salar Masʻud Ghazi, a legendary tale whose origins probably lay in the kind of anecdotes we see cited by ʻUtbi about al-Taʻi above. ⁴⁹ There were many other such accounts that were not used by the early eleventh-century authors. However, we find them in later texts such as the universal chronicles of Ibn al-Athir (d. 1233), Bar Hebraeus (d. 1286) and Shabankara’i (d. after 1342). ⁵⁰

Finally, the third source of information for our authors was their own experience. Incorporating this material also complicated matters, because the authors felt compelled to try to fit what they saw into the mould of what their patrons expected to hear. The ones closer to the court were under greater obligation to do this, but in either case, the discrepancy between personal experience and courtly expectations shows that the situation in India was different than what the letters to the caliph had claimed. Perhaps the most famous case is provided by Gardizi, but we find relevant passages in Farrukhi as well.

As I have written elsewhere, Gardizi hailed from the area of eastern Afghanistan, the heartland of the Ghaznavid kingdom. This area was already home to a multireligious population in the tenth and eleventh centuries including Muslims of various persuasions, Hindus, Zoroastrians and others. Gardizi wrote his history the Zayn al-Akhbar sometime after the actual events and was, therefore, at liberty to highlight his own memories over the expectations of the early Ghaznavid court. ⁵¹ It is perhaps little wonder that it is in Gardizi that we find the famous story of Nanda/Ganda (Vidyadhara). This episode describes the submission of the Raja to Sultan Mahmud, of his receiving a robe in exchange, and in his composing a praise poem in ‘Hindavi’ for Mahmud. ⁵² The story is significant because it diverges greatly from the presentation of Ghaznavid conquests in the victory proclamations intended for an audience in Baghdad. Instead, it shows Mahmud as a gentler figure, somewhat indecisive, at times overwhelmed by doubt or fear.

According to Gardizi, Mahmud sent ‘messengers to Ganda, counselling him and giving him promises in order to wake him up. He warned and admonished him saying, “Become a Muslim and be safe from all this warring, suffering, and harm”’. On the eve of the battle, when Mahmud had observed his enemy’s forces, ‘regret began to beset the corner of his heart’. When the day of battle arrived, the sultan had decided to reopen negotiations by sending a messenger again, but the latter had found Ganda’s camp abandoned. After a careful search, Mahmud’s forces collected what was left behind and went back to Ghazna. Afterwards when Ganda finally submitted and gifts were exchanged, Gardizi writes that Mahmud ‘took great pride in’ the poem that Ganda had written for him. ⁵³ The difference between Gardizi’s version of events and, say, ʻUtbi’s or Farrukhi’s, can be explained by the fact that Gardizi could construct a narrative from what he himself had witnessed or heard from close personal friends. On the other hand, the other two authors were nearer in time and place to Sultan Mahmud who, based on his victory proclamations, did not wish to appear to the ʻAbbasid caliph as a gentle, tentative and accommodating figure who preferred peace to war.

So far, I have argued that the official Ghaznavid version of events in India, as reported by Mahmud’s letters and quoted by ʻUtbi in his Yamini, were meant to conceal reality or even construct an image independent of events. Primarily, they were intended as a rhetorical construction and response to criticism of the Ghaznavids by Muslim authors. Moreover, I hope to have demonstrated sufficiently that the early eleventh-century authors incorporated material from non-official sources, and, as a result, produced narratives that nuanced and even contradicted the official version. This is the reason why they contain evidence for a very different Ghaznavid rule in India, as seen in the review of recent scholarship as well. The Ghaznavids commanded large contingents of non-Muslim soldiers in their military, they used elephants for military, logistical and symbolic reasons, and they exchanged gifts with subjugated Rajputs. But if those parts of the Perso-Arabic chronicles and panegyrics of the early eleventh century that portray the type of relationships I just listed are actually the more reliable sections, then it would follow that the Ghaznavid campaigns were not acts of transitory destruction but primarily attempts at long-term strategising and imperial formation. What was the nature of this imperial formation?

The Ghaznavid Empire of India

Bayhaqi refers to the Ghaznavid Empire as ‘the kingdom of Ghazna, Khurasan, and Hindustan’. In other words, Ghazna was the clasp that held the two wings of the empire together. In terms of its specific content, the Ghazna Empire in South Asia consisted of a network of ‘feudatory’ kings subjected to the emperor (king of kings) in Ghazna. After the initial flow of plunder, two major means of steady revenue lay at the disposal of the imperial centre: tribute and trade. We find both of these listed as preconditions of peace once the initial hostilities ceased in favour of Ghazna. Additionally, the lesser kings were obliged to provide soldiers and military service when needed. An ‘ideological’ framework was developed to create coherence among the hierarchy of kings. Below this political arrangement, a deeper and equally powerful set of social forces was at work. The Ghazna Empire was built on the efforts of major population groups including slaves, militarised peasants and merchants.

At the top of the imperial hierarchy stood the ruler in Ghazna. Still, because of their slave origins and therefore precarious standing in the Islamic world, the dynasty often did not assume outright imperial titles in Arabic. In the chronicles, individual rulers were generally styled with the simple title of amir. Otherwise, they were referred to with honorific titles bestowed on them by the caliph. Mahmud was famously known as Yamin al-Dawlah, ‘the right hand of the state’. Similarly, the titles employed in South Asia also appear rather subdued. In the famous bilingual Arabic–Sanskrit coins of Mahmud in the Punjab, the ruler refers to himself with the rather simple title of nṛpatī, or ‘king’. ⁵⁴

However, we should not be misled by simply following the evidence of one set of sources and ignoring all others. It is quite possible that the bilingual coins were intentionally making modest claims, reflecting Mahmud’s acknowledgement of caliphal superiority in areas of direct administration such as the Punjab. On the other hand, the most outspoken expression of imperial claims occurs in Ghaznavid court poetry which was not intended for the caliph’s ear. Indeed, we know that Mahmud could openly express his disdain for the caliph at his court, calling him ‘senile’ (khirif) on one occasion. ⁵⁵ It is safe to say that unlike in victory proclamations and on coins, the Persian court poetry was giving voice to the most important self-presentation of Mahmud for a subject audience—namely, as an imperial master or Shahanshah ‘king of kings’.

For example, Farrukhi refers to the ruler as ‘king of kings’ or ‘king of the world’ (shahryar-i jahan). ⁵⁶ He clarifies that this title was to be taken literally, signifying a hierarchy of kings with the Ghaznavids standing at the apex. He writes, for instance, that ‘any king who has girded his loins for kingship has girded his loins in [Mahmud’s] service … From east to west, [Mahmud] decides everywhere to overthrow some kings and to appoint other kings’. ⁵⁷ Elsewhere, the poet repeats this concept when he writes, ‘the court of the king [Mahmud] is where all the kings are. All the kings gain glory and pride from [Mahmud’s court]’; ⁵⁸ or again, ‘[Mahmud] is the king, and all the king are his soldiers. Kings are his soldiers and he is their commander’; ⁵⁹ or finally, ‘it is no wonder that kings rejoice in you, o king! Other kings are like stars and you are like the moon’. ⁶⁰ This last image of Mahmud, as a superior heavenly body (moon) above other heavenly bodies (stars) is significant and is repeated by other poets as well.

Perhaps the best example of this political expression occurs in a panegyric written by the poet Firdawsi in the preface to his epic poem the Shahnamah. This long poem is worth quoting extensively as it lays out quite clearly how the Ghaznavid Empire was conceptualised in Ghazna itself. It reads as follows:

There was a meadow there that was like embroidered silk. In the midst of it, there appeared an emerald throne. A king sat upon that throne, and he looked like the moon. On his head was a crown and not a headgear. His army was arranged in a row, stretched for two miles. On his left side stood seven hundred fierce elephants. A virtuous minister stood there before him, guiding the king in justice and religion.

I was bewildered by that king’s glory, by his ferocious elephants, and his by innumerable army. When I saw his royal face, I asked one of those famous warriors, ‘Is this the celestial sphere and the moon or the throne of kings? Are these stars beside it or soldiers?’ One of them answered, ‘This is the king of Rome and India, from Kannauj to the Indus River. Iran and Turan are his servants. They live by his will and word. He adorned the universe with justice, and afterwards placed the crown on his head. This is the ruler of the world, the Great King, who brings wolves and sheep to the water trough. Kings praise him from Kashmir to the Sea of China. When children are weaned from their mothers’ milk, the first word they utter in the cradle is ‘Mahmud’. You, who are a poet, should also praise him if you seek immortal fame from him. No one may turn his head away from obedience to him. No one may violate his pact with him’.

At a feast, he is like the sky of fulfilment. In battle, he is a sharp-clawed dragon. In body he is a fierce elephant, his soul is Gabriel, his hand is a cloud in April, his heart is the Nile River … Neither does he become arrogant from his crown and treasure, nor does he shirk fighting and hard work. All those whom he has raised up, be they free men or good-hearted slaves, they all love the King of Kings, and have braced themselves in obedience to him. Each of them has become king in a kingdom, their names are uttered in every pulpit. ⁶¹

Such lines from panegyric poems are often dismissed as exaggeration, but the poet actually provides some specific details here. While calling Mahmud the ruler of Rome is surely wishful thinking, the identification of the region from ‘Kannauj to Sind’ is significant. The thousand-mile distance between these locations certainly was much traversed by Ghaznavid armies, as is seen in sources from the period. What is particularly interesting is that Firdawsi refers to Mahmud as the king of this region, obviously suggesting that the country is a possession and not a mere theatre of war. Moreover, this territorial description is contrasted with the others, namely Iran and Turan which are described as the subjects/servants (bandah). This would imply a different arrangement had been made for Iran, Turan and Hind by Mahmud. This is followed by the image of Mahmud creating universal peace, by bringing together natural enemies (wolves and sheep) to drink from the same watering trough. More detail is provided next. We are told that there are kings ruling from Kashmir to the China Sea who praise him. This would mean that Mahmud, who was earlier called king from Kannauj to Sind, is not in a relationship of absolute mastery over people there (as he is in Iran and Turan). What does that make him? He is a ‘Great King’ as well as ‘King of Kings’.

This latter title is further elaborated upon in the concluding lines. We are told that

[a]ll those whom he has raised up, be they free men or good-hearted slaves, they all love the King of Kings, and have braced themselves in obedience to him. Each of them has become king in a kingdom, their names are uttered in every pulpit. ⁶²

This means that each man who is loyal to him is a king in a kingdom. Hence, Mahmud is very literally a Great King (above the smaller kings beneath him) or king over those little kings.

As the titles used by Firdawsi imply, this model of empire was understood to have derived from an early Sasanian exemplar. However, it also echoed very closely Sanskrit theories of empire as well. As Ronald Inden argued, during the period between the fall of the Chalukyas in 750 ce and the arrival of the Ghaznavids, ‘the discourse of both “normative” texts and of historical records represented kings as organised into a single hierarchy. This hierarchy had a paramount “king of kings”, overlord of the “entire earth” at the top, and countless little kings … at the bottom’. ⁶³ This system was expressed by a monarch’s ability to bring his neighbours under the hierarchy of kings, symbolised by his mastery of elephants and reinforced by his generosity. ⁶⁴ As we saw above Firdawsi also emphasised these last two features in his panegyric.

Now, if Mahmud presented himself as king of kings, then beneath him we should find lesser kings. And indeed, we do. Some of these we know by names: Rajyapala (960–1018) of Kannauj, Vidyadhara of Kalinjar and Anandapala (r. 1002–10) of Nandana. ⁶⁵ Later sources were even aware of the hierarchical nature among these monarchs. For example, Shabankara’i states that ‘Rajyapala was equal to sultans in India while Nanda [Vidyadhara] … equivalent to the caliph’. ⁶⁶ In other words, the Persian authors showed a good understanding of the ‘king of kings’ imperial model in South Asia. Finally, we also possess an intriguing passage in the anonymous geographical treatise the Hudud al-ʻAlam, that at the time of the establishment of the Ghaznavid state in the tenth century, Kabul and Kannauj were politically connected. The text reads, ‘the population [of Kabul] are Muslims and Hindus. An idol temple is there, and the Ray of Kannauj cannot complete his rule until he has made pilgrimage to that temple’. ⁶⁷

These rulers had all been defeated or subjugated somehow by the Ghaznavid army and then reinstated. Their relationship to the ‘emperor’ involved (a) providing a tribute, generally consisting of money, soldiers and elephants; (b) performing military service if needed; and (c) safeguarding the traffic of merchant convoys (qafilas) between Khurasan and India. Barry Flood has already shown how these men were incorporated ritually into the ‘body politic’ through bestowal of robes and the occasional exchange of a small piece of flesh.

A good example of this arrangement is provided by the ruler of Narayanpur who entered into tributary submission and trade alliances with Mahmud. According to ʻUtbi, when Mahmud invaded this kingdom in 1009/1010, the ruler, after witnessing the destructive power of his enemy, sent his kinsmen and liegemen to ask for peace. The details of this peace are quite crucial. The king had offered to pay to Mahmud a large sum of annual tribute (itawah maʻlumah) from the wealth and goods of his kingdom and to send annually from among his soldiers 2,000 men to serve Mahmud at his court. He also vowed that these terms would be adhered to by all those who succeeded him on the throne. Mahmud, we are told, accepted this offer as jizya and sent some of his own trusted agents to arrange the agreement. ‘And so’, writes ʻUtbi ‘the peace treaty [hidnah] was contracted and tribute began to pour in. Merchant caravans began travelling back and forth between Khurasan and the kingdoms of India with guarantees of peace’. ⁶⁸

The passage above is highly significant as it clearly shows that the display of force by Ghaznavid armies had a calculated and systematic goal. War did not simply lead to plunder, but tributary relationships would be established with North Indian rulers. This tributary relationship did not only extend to the collection of wealth and elephants. Rather, it involved feudatory associations with the subjugated monarchs that entailed military service and obligations to be performed by the loser. This new company from Narayanpur was specifically designated for service at court, which means that the Ghaznavid capital housed a large number of Indian soldiers at all times, apparently with fresh recruits being supplied every year. We have evidence of this type of relationship even earlier. According to Shabankara’i, when Mahmud was a prince during his father’s lifetime, he had a bodyguard of 500 Indian foot soldiers, and when he and Sebüktegin had a falling out, the guards fought the forces sent to arrest Mahmud in order to protect their prince. ⁶⁹

To return to the agreements signed with the ruler of Narayanpur, we may note that the process further includes a layer of legality as an actual peace treaty with specific terms was negotiated by delegates. Finally, we note that the newly acquired territory becomes part of a trade zone in which merchants could transact with guarantees of security. This passage in short describes the creation of an imperial zone involving political and economic relationships.

This pattern continued to the very end of Mahmud’s reign. For instance, in 1023, just two years before his final raid on Somnath, Mahmud had gone on another campaign to an unnamed fort in India. According to Ibn al-Athir, Ghaznavid success led to the inhabitants asking for amnesty [aman]. Mahmud accepted this in exchange for presents as well as for a tax [kharaj] from their king [malak]. ⁷⁰ We are told that among the presents was a bird that would shed tears if ever food was served in its presence that had been laced with poison. The tears would calcify, and these, when grated, would give a powder that would heal any wound. ⁷¹ Ibn al-Athir does not provide a source for this peculiar episode, which probably came from non-official sources, but it fits the pattern of imperial conquests after which the vanquished king is reinstated in his position in exchange for taxes (here significantly called kharaj not jizya) and presents. The curious anecdote about the bird again reinforces the extra elements of the relationship, beyond just brute force and exchange of wealth, and signifies the extra beneficence and care shown by the subject to his new lord.

These relationships fit neatly with the Ghaznavid vision of rule as expressed in other sources. According to Shabankara’i, on one occasion, Mahmud returned from a successful campaign and sent victory letters to all his kingdoms (mamalik) stating that ‘[a]ll of India is now my territory (milk). In all the towns I have either constructed mosques and minarets, or have established the jizya’. ⁷² He then dispatched a separate letter to the caliph, accompanied by presents including ‘five golden idols’. ⁷³ Mahmud was indeed very interested in territorial gain and imperial rule in South Asia. The imposition of jizya implies the treatment of non-Muslims here as ‘people of the book’. The imperial claims were made explicitly within the local contexts. However, a separate message was conveyed to the caliphal court where Mahmud needed to highlight a different image: that of the iconoclastic plunderer (expressed by rich presents and five golden statues).

How did Ghazna keep its imperial network together? From time to time, the emperor himself would lead his forces around the empire to assert his authority. In other words, each new campaign would also provide an opportunity for consolidation. This custom was designated as the means of ‘waking up’ the subject kings, ‘not allowing [them] sleep’ or ‘dropping major clout’ [ḥishmat-i buzurg uftad]. ⁷⁴ As Minoru Inaba has recently argued, based on an analysis of itinerary of the sultans in eastern Iran, the practice of constant travelling and campaigning was crucial for the Ghaznavids as a means of ‘state formation and the development of social structure’. ⁷⁵ These tours displayed the power of the monarch, allowed him to receive supplies directly, gave him the opportunity to hold court for redress by the subjects and provided occasions for royal hunts of lions atop elephants. ⁷⁶ All these activities helped sustain the Indian parts of the empire as well by exposing the king of kings to his subject kings.

The same practice continued into the reign of Sultan Masʻud (r. 1030–40) who considered India the heart of his empire and even more important than Khurasan. According to Ibn al-Athir, after quelling the rebellion of Ahmad Yinaltegin in India, Sultan Masʻud ‘spent a very long time in those countries [India] until they were secured and stabilised’. ⁷⁷ The sultan’s desire for creating security and stability only makes sense if he saw his Indian territories as an integral part of his empire. This also explains his inaction towards the Seljuks in Khurasan, as he thought the management of his Indian holdings were more important. It is not surprising that after his defeat at Dandaniqan to the Seljuqs, Masʻud headed for India to seek military assistance from the kings there, ‘confident in their oaths of obligation’ [thiqqatan bi ʻuhudihim]. ⁷⁸

In order to compensate for the emperor’s inability to be everywhere at all times, the Ghaznavids implemented a second system of rule in South Asia, involving a supreme military commander. This was a powerful but dangerous role, as most of the initial occupants fell from grace, either because of rebellion or general distrust. The first was a certain Sukhapala, also known as Nawasa Shah. ⁷⁹ He was a member of the Hindushahi dynasty and a convert to Islam who was appointed to oversee Ghaznavid conquests in 1006 ce. Raza calls him a ‘viceroy’, but I think it is worth looking closely at how he is described in the Yamini. ʻUtbi identifies him as ‘one of the princes of India’, where the term ‘princes’ [awlad al-muluk] is perhaps a literal translation of Rajput. ⁸⁰ According to ʻUtbi, Mahmud had gained mastery over him and had thereafter appointed him as his deputy [khilafatihi] in charge of the kingdoms that the Ghaznavids had conquered. ⁸¹ Nawasa’s job was specifically to protect and fortify the frontiers of newly conquered territories. This is not so much a viceroyalty but a similar situation to what we observe later on in Anatolia during the beylik period whereby military commanders, often after having been incorporated as subject lords by the Seljuks or the Mongols, were subsequently appointed as frontier-commanders (uç bey). ⁸² The Ghaznavids were doing this at least a century earlier. Moreover, the terminology used by ‘Utbi is significant. The title of ‘shah’ that accompanies Nawasa’s name predated his appointment by the Ghaznavids, but the fact that he was allowed to keep this royal designation would only make sense if his master, Mahmud, was seen as a master-king (padshah) or king of kings (shahanshah).

Sukhapala’s rebellion may have convinced Mahmud to rely instead on Turkish slave generals who had a reputation for simplicity and loyalty. ʻAbd Allah Qarategin was considered ineffective, but the general Eryaruq served this post dutifully and successfully. ⁸³ He was praised in later sources as an example of an imperial slave (ghulam) who was himself the master (hakim) of large kingdoms—in his case ‘twelve thousand leagues of territory in India’. ⁸⁴ He was dismissed by Masʻud and replaced by a more junior slave commander Ahmad Yinaltegin, who ultimately rebelled. At this point, however, the sultan did not have to personally chase down Ahmad and the task was given to the Indian general Tilak. Tilak occupied the newer post of ‘Commander of the Indians’ [salar-i Hinduan], presumably referring to a contingent staffed by the soldiers who were being sent annually to Ghazna by the subjugated kings of North India. This position seems to have been created specifically as a check against the Turkish slave armies of the Ghaznavids. A previous holder of the post, Sanudhrai, had used his troops during the succession struggles after Mahmud’s death in support of Sultan Masʻud and against the slave commander Ayyaz. ⁸⁵

Below these commanders and the subject kings were merchants and administrators who managed the collection of tribute and conducted trade. We have very little information on them, but we can gather from scattered evidence that they were present across India. The tax collectors were called ʻamils. ⁸⁶ There is not much direct information on how these men operated, but according to Bayhaqi, they held a dangerous position, and the holders were liable to be subjected to torture and mutilation if they were suspected of embezzlement. ⁸⁷ According to Sebüktegin’s testament, the ʻamils were to be audited after working for a couple of years. ⁸⁸ In Iran, these agents would give receipts (barat), ⁸⁹ and just as Ghaznavids issued bilingual Arabic–Sanskrit coinage, they may well have issued bilingual receipts in Persian and Sanskrit in India. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that Bayhaqi specifically refers to Tilak and Birbal as having started their careers as translators (mutarjim) and secretaries (dabirs). ⁹⁰

The ʻamils also handled the salaries of troops, which were paid in 20 instalments per annum. ⁹¹ It is difficult to know if the entire Ghaznavid administrative apparatus was deployed across India, but if so, these would include auditors (mustawfi), informants (mushrif), treasurers (khazin) and secretaries (dabir). ⁹² Under Mahmud, the collection of tribute would certainly have involved such individuals. Later on, when Masʻud sent his son Majdud to Lahore, he had him accompanied by an auditor and bookkeeper. ⁹³

Later authors claim that Mahmud took pride in bringing as much of India as possible under his control. According to Shabankara’i, Mahmud had gone to war against Nanda (Vidyadhara) because ‘he did not recognize any ruler greater than himself, and had stated, “All of India must be under my command”’. ⁹⁴ Moreover, he reportedly appointed garrison-commanders (kotwal) in 10 major forts and left ‘no place in India without a resident commander [shahnah] or a tax-collector [ʻamil]’. ⁹⁵

The administrators may have been assisted by merchants who began to travel between India and Khurasan as a result of Ghaznavid rule. The promotion of trade had been an important part of Ghaznavid policy from early on. Not only was Ghazna chosen by Alptegin, the founder of the state, for its commercial viability, but Sebüktegin and Mahmud too actively supported large merchant caravans. For example, the tenth-century Hudud al-ʻAlam mentions the presence of merchants (bazarganan) in Parwan (north of Kabul) as well as Bust and Ghazna and identifies all three as gateways to India. ⁹⁶ ʻUtbi says that when Sebüktegin and Mahmud took control of Nishapur in 994, they spread justice and as a result ‘the roads became safe, and caravan and convoys moved continuously’. ⁹⁷ As we saw, the guarantee of the free traffic of merchants was a requirement in some of the peace treaties between Mahmud and his sub-kings.

Later sources testify to this as well. According to Shabankara’i, Sebüktegin sent the captives from his war against Jaypal to Khurasan in order to sell them as slaves and use the profits to purchase goods from there. ⁹⁸ In the testament that he reportedly left for his son Mahmud, Sebüktegin had warned the prince to ‘keep the roads secure, because this is the most important task. Whatever money is stolen from merchants, know that the money is actually taken from your treasury’. ⁹⁹ When Mahmud rose to power years later, he made peace with the Ilek Khanids so that ‘the roads would become secure’. ¹⁰⁰ Apparently, the sultan had even guaranteed insurance for the merchants in his kingdom, vowing to pay from the treasury any loss due to theft. ¹⁰¹

Numismatic evidence also suggests that Ghaznavid rule stimulated pre-existing merchant networks in the region covered today by Khurasan, Afghanistan and the Punjab. As Waleed Ziad has shown, recent troves of coins have been found at the Kashmir Smast temple complex, minted in the Arabic scripts ‘either under the aegis of a Ghaznavid regional authority or by a temple authority subordinate to the Ghaznavids’. ¹⁰² The minting of Arabic coins by more obscure Hindu temples from this period is significant. Essentially, Ziad argues that while larger temples were plundered, smaller temples were allowed to maintain their economic activity involving the handling of ‘immovable and movable assets, patronage structures, labour, disparate social classes, … pilgrimage and commercial networks … landholdings, industrial installations, … gifts, and … banking and pawn brokerage’. ¹⁰³ One can imagine a large network of such institutions across the Ghaznavid realm participating in the economy of the new empire, their business stimulated by (and stimulating) the regular merchants convoys that were now criss-crossing the entire region thanks to the peace treaties made by Ghazna and its tributary kings.

Finally, in addition to administrators and merchants, a significant body of warriors were engaged in the construction and maintenance of the Ghazna Empire. There has been a fair amount of research done on the Ghaznavid military, but the phenomenon remains rather misunderstood. The forces under Mahmud and Masʻud were not national armies. Rather, they encompassed decentralised militias from all over Khurasan, Transoxiana, Afghanistan and India. These included soldiers sent by various subjugated local potentates, but also importantly, a whole gamut of armed peasants from the Oxus to the Indus and probably beyond. Essentially, the success of the Ghaznavids lay in their ability to direct the efforts of all these various groups of soldiers to their own advantage.

In order to understand this process, we must study the works of C. E. Bosworth, representing an earlier scholarship, and Jürgen Paul, reflecting the most current developments that are unfortunately less well known. Bosworth’s relevant contributions published first in the 1960 article ‘Ghaznevid Military Organisation’ and then in the chapter on the army in his 1963 monograph The Ghaznavids, provide the basic academic treatment of this topic. These studies dealt with the composition of the army, its weapons and equipment, its pay and, finally, its numbers. The findings in the category of composition and membership are pertinent to the present analysis. Bosworth argued that the core of the Ghaznavid army was made up of slaves (ghulams), some of whom comprised the elite corps of palace ghulams. ¹⁰⁴ To this core was added a larger body of soldiers from many nationalities, ¹⁰⁵ either as mercenaries ¹⁰⁶ or as volunteers (ghazis). ¹⁰⁷ This was obviously a diverse group.

Most of the ghulams were Central Asians. For example, he writes that after Mahmud’s capture of Samarqand in 1026, the defeated ruler ‘Ali Tegin gave a tribute of a thousand slaves to the sultan. ¹⁰⁸ These might have been captured slaves from Turkistan. Another source of Mahmud’s ghulams, Bosworth continues, were those he had inherited from his father Sebüktegin. ¹⁰⁹ However, Bosworth himself admits that the inherited soldiery would certainly have included men who had been attracted to the old amir in response to his hospitality in Ghazna. ¹¹⁰ Therefore, they must have originated, at least in part, if not entirely, from the local populace of southern and eastern Afghanistan or even India, and not just the Central Asian steppes. Finally, Bosworth cites Bayhaqi in declaring, right at the beginning, that ‘the slaves comprised Turks, Indians, and some Tajiks, probably Khurasanis’. ¹¹¹ In short, the core of the Ghaznavid army that invaded India was not made up of warlike aliens from the north but people who had familiarity and even connection with South Asia.

One might object that Bosworth’s focus on the Ghaznavid army proper actually falls short of a full understanding of the military activity of Mahmud in India. This activity was not limited to the actions of a single unified force (the army) serving a single unified ruling institution (the state) as in the modern world. Rather the military machine that operated in Mahmud’s service was made up of an assembly of many private forces under the command of princes and amirs with varying degrees of independence. War, in this context, was not merely an act of aggression for loot. It was also a political move by which the sultan could unify his powers and test the loyalty of potentially rebellious subjects. ¹¹²

Jürgen Paul’s relevant chapters in his 1996 Herrscher, Gemeinwesen, Vermittler: Ostiran und Transoxanien in vormongolischer Zeit help us further identify the various sources of manpower that would have participated in Mahmud’s campaigns. Essentially, Paul shows that there existed numerous armed bodies all across Khurasan and Transoxania in this period. These encompassed armed guards of a few hundred horsemen that accompanied caravans as well as larger troops inside towns, involving local inhabitants, that participated in the defence of the city. ¹¹³ Pastoralist people also fought and could be hired for the protection of the nearest town. ¹¹⁴ These men could be mobilised en masse by ruling dynasties, under the immediate command of local notables. ¹¹⁵ However, the primary leadership came from a stratum that was not directly part of the ruling elite but generally included local notables who served as intermediaries for the state. The loyalty of the soldiers was not towards the monarch, dynasty or the state but to their immediate command structure. ¹¹⁶

Moreover, throughout the tenth century, such men, further supplemented by villagers, had developed the tradition of volunteering as ghazis, eventually being subordinated under the king’s army. ¹¹⁷ The presence of small peasant armies seems to have been connected to economic problems at the end of the Samanid period, where state officials had begun exploiting peasants in an unprecedented way, leading them to abandon their farms and form themselves into robber bands. ¹¹⁸ Then, in the Ghaznavid period, we find a huge volunteer force being organised under state-appointed salar-i ghaziyan. ¹¹⁹ In effect, we can surmise that Ghaznavid military activity owed its momentum to the decline of agrarian economy in Khurasan which created an underpaid soldiery and a desperate and overtaxed peasantry. Mahmud’s initial success lay in his ability to channel these destitute and well-armed masses on successful raids. Subsequently, the same policies were extended to South Asian peasant population immediately after their subjugation. We find the Jats of Punjab and the Khokhars of Kashmir supporting the Ghaznavids military starting in the reign of Sultan Masʻud. ¹²⁰

One of the best examples from the early eleventh century that reflects a number of the various trends discussed above is the rebellion of the Turkic general and ‘commander of India’ Ahmad Yinaltegin and his defeat by Tilak, ‘commander of the Indians’. There are a number of somewhat varying accounts of what happened, as is to be expected from the historiographical patterns I have discussed earlier in this article. The chroniclers all report that Masʻud had been in India until 1033 when the news of the troubles with the Seljuks in Central Asia reached him. Mas‘ud left Yinaltegin as his ‘deputy’ [na’ib] and headed for Khurasan. ¹²¹ In his absence, the general ‘rebelled’, meaning that he went on unauthorised raids, kept the plunder for himself and attracted a large following. ¹²² Masʻud sent an army, but Ahmad Yinaltegin defeated it soundly. Then he sent a second force, this time led by Tilak at the head of a huge force of Indian soldiers. ¹²³

According to Ibn al-Athir, who provides the most detailed account, upon Tilak’s arrival, ‘the kings of India refused [Ahmad’s] entry into their kingdoms and shut off his escape routes’. ¹²⁴ Ahmad was forced to fight against Tilak and was beaten. He fled to Multan and from there to Bhatia, demanding help from the king of Bhatia so that he might cross the Indus and escape deep into India. The king of Bhatia, knowing himself unable to resist the Turkish general, resorted to a ruse. He had his boatmen transport Yinaltegin’s army to a large island on the river, convincing them that they had reached the eastern shore. Thus stranded, Ahmad’s army suffered loss due to flooding and lack of food. Having been weakened in this way, they were finally finished off by a swift assault under Tilak’s command. ¹²⁵ Bayhaqi adds that the final attack on Ahmad and his eventual murder was accomplished by the Jats of Punjab who had been offered financial reward for their assistance. ¹²⁶

There is much to unpack in this anecdote, but the basic outline fits neatly into the pattern of the Ghaznavid tributary empire in India: the Ghaznavid army was a true imperial army, made up of soldiers from all over the empire and commanded by Turkish and Indian top generals. Each contingency served away from their home (the Turks in India and the Indians in Khurasan). It is only as a last resort that Tilak is sent to deal with Yinaltegin in the Punjab. The Indian empire is held by a string of tributary kings, all expected to show loyalty to the sultan, not by fighting against the rebel army (against which they are individually weaker) but by assisting the sultan’s purpose through acts of passive resistance. Crucially, the Ghaznavid forces could successfully draw on the militarised peasant population in order to increase their chance of success. The loyalty of the latter is not to the sultan or the empire. Rather it is to Tilak who pays them directly and serves as the intermediary between them and the state.

We have long known about the role of Central Asian slaves in the creation of the Ghaznavid Empire. The dynasty and its core military included men of obscure origin, alien to the top lineages that comprised the elite of the ‘Abbasid and Samanid states. We now see that other individuals outside of the aristocratic order of the tenth century were very much responsible for the creation of the new state. The most important of them were armed peasants from Khurasan to the Punjab as well as merchants from the same area. There were also low-level priests and workers from small temple complexes participating and benefiting from the new system. Finally, the need for new intermediaries provided further opportunities, again often from those from the lower ranks of society. Tilak himself had been a barber’s son, but rose to one of the most prominent positions in the empire.

Empire and Knowledge

From our discussion, it emerges that the Ghaznavid imperial project in South Asia was anything but a set of fleeting forays for plunder. Ultimately, it was formed on the incorporation of social networks, from kings to small temples to merchants and to militarised peasants in eastern Iran and North India. The control and maintenance of this system required not just administrative and military management but also knowledge. Surely, the accumulation of knowledge only makes sense in the context of deep interest in and commitment to South Asia as an integral part of the empire. The most thorough-going and famous example of intellectual engagement with India is found in al-Biruni’s Kitab al-Hind (or Indica)—a massive compendium of information derived ultimately from Sanskrit literature consulted by the author either directly or through the mediation of translators.

Al-Biruni’s works may appear as an unusual historical example at first. However, I would suggest that the systematic exposition of the religions and cultures of North India by al-Biruni merely represents the most thorough and scholarly example of what in fact was a very widespread familiarity in the Ghaznavid Empire. This is nowhere clearer than in the transformation of the reports from the initial entry of the Ghaznavid army into India, when one gets a sense of initial confusion and fear, to an increasing familiarity and understanding as time went on. This new added veneer of information can be attributed not just to continued exposure but also probably to the presence of South Asian soldiers and allies who would have joined the main Ghaznavid force once in the interior of Hindustan.

Upon their initial entrance into India, the Ghaznavid soldiers saw a land where the normal order of nature had turned topsy-turvy. This could involve the disruption of natural phenomena, or the presence of a strange ecosystem: ‘The warriors galloped on lean long horses, and before them rode the guides, leading them into the depths of that country where the sun does not dawn nor do the stars rise or fall’; ¹²⁷ ‘In that desert there was a day’s journey full of things so weird that if I mention them no one will believe me. A day dawned from behind a mountain, as dark as the night, so that human vision was completely useless in it. During the last prayers, I could not see my own fingers’; ¹²⁸ ‘The plants were like saws, such were the thorns on them. These thorns enter the buttocks of horses as iron pegs go through leaves (…). Who has ever seen thorns that look like this and do such things?’ ¹²⁹ As the tone of some of these lines indicates, this weird landscape intimidated the soldiers.

Later on, when the Ghaznavids pushed beyond the pale of their conquered territories, similar scenes were reported from the campaigns. During a siege in eastern India that began on 4 January 1034, the Ghaznavid army saw

an old witch come out of the fort. She spoke for a long time in the Indian language. Then she took a broom, moistened it with water, and sprinkled the drops in the direction of the Muslim army. [The sultan] fell ill, and woke up not being able to lift his head. A great weakness afflicted his strength. ¹³⁰

However, in this strange environment, the leader was expected to drive ahead and refuse to be daunted: ‘[Mahmud] urged the horses forward for two months through rivers deep and broad, into forests within which even herds of deer lose their way, and over steppes wherein sparrows become perplexed’; ¹³¹ ‘[The sultan] passed the army over ten or twelve rivers on horses that trample deserts and traverse mountains’. ¹³² Thus, in his heedlessness for the altered state of nature, Mahmud sets the example for the others.

Mahmud’s religiosity made a significant contribution to his nonchalance towards unnatural barriers. It seems that the bizarre visions and reports on the road appeared to some members of the Ghaznavid army as warnings from the other world. However, Mahmud, who himself believed in omens, would simply refuse to put credence in a sign that appeared to be dissuading him, and he would dismiss it. The following lines from Farrukhi illustrate this point. Just after mentioning the ominous dark day in which he could not even see his own fingers, the poet added,

This is surely something strange and a sign. What is stranger is that they said to the king, ‘There are two-headed serpents along this path. You have a great army, but this is a long road full of thorns, serpents, floods, and fissures. At night when a man sleeps, the serpent shows up and sucks the sleeper’s breath till sunrise. When the sun rises and heat reaches the sleeper, he will not awake from his slumber till Judgement Day’. But the lord of the world paid no heed to this talk. He drove his army forward with the help of God.

Mahmud’s selective acceptance of signs is clearly illustrated in another episode where opening his Quran and noticing the identical shape in the Arabic script between the un-dotted version of the word futuh ‘victories’ and the un-dotted version of the name of the Indian city qannauj ‘Kannauj’, the sultan ‘derived a favourable omen’ and embarked on his new campaign.

Beside his selective interpretation of omens, the king had a second function that would only make sense if the Ghaznavids understood what they had encountered on the campaign. This is because the incursions beyond the Indus exposed the court to a system of knowledge that was different from the Islamic one, which defied it and served as a challenge to it. The Ghaznavids dealt with this challenge in various ways, but in the process, they betrayed their knowledge and familiarity. One short-term way to deal with this problem was to incorporate forcefully ‘Indian knowledge’ into the Muslim universal epistemology, deforming it in the process and relegating it to a subservient position in that system. Farrukhi’s poem on the conquest of Somnath provides an example of this first strategy. ¹³³

It is clear that Farrukhi had learned some actual truths about the religious beliefs in Somnath. He knew, for example, of the sacredness of the cow or the rites of ablution in the Ganges River. He also knew that the highest men in the religio-social hierarchy were called Brahmins. He even purported to give the history of the deity in the temple, albeit in a distorted way. But if this peculiar account were true and accurate, it would certainly defy Farrukhi’s own understanding of the history of the universe and its creation by the God of the monotheists. Therefore, he dismissed it as a fiction made by men who fooled the over-credulous people. He was upset with them for endangering their souls by listening to such words. Instead, Farrukhi opted for a false etymology to incorporate the deity of Somnath into his version of religious history—one that punned on the name of the statute of the pagan Arabian god Manat which he identified with Somnath. It was obvious that he could not simply invent this story because there was too much knowledge of the original information among Ghaznavid courtiers.

We find other such information scattered throughout the sources. According to Shabankara’i, the Ghaznavid army had been told in Kannauj that ‘the Ganges River originates in heaven’. ¹³⁴ In Kalinjar, they found pools ‘on which it was carved in the Indian script that these pools have been built by such-and-such deva’. ¹³⁵ In Somnath, there was a brook ‘of heaven’s water, and oddly, when they brought cripples there and washed them, they would be healed, as if God Most High had endowed the water with this quality’. ¹³⁶ Again in Somnath temple ‘five to six thousand women resided in that temple, and they were called temple prostitutes. Whatever money they earned through this unemployment [bikari] and wrongdoing [fisad] they donated to the temple, saying that the money is licit’. ¹³⁷ As the phrasing in these passages shows, all this information had been obtained through observation, communication and translation.

Ibn al-Athir too incorporated information from uncited sources that evinced some knowledge about South Asia religion and culture. He wrote that ‘the river known as the Ganges is holy water for them, and they consider it to be flowing from heaven. [They believe] that if someone drowns himself in it, he will be cleansed of all sins’. ¹³⁸ He expanded on these themes in his descripting of Somnath:

they go on pilgrimage [hajj] to it every night of a lunar eclipse. More than a hundred thousand people gather there. The Indians believe that when the spirit leaves the body, it gathers there based on the doctrine of reincarnation, and [the idol of Somnath] installs it [the spirit] inside whomever it choses. ¹³⁹

Here the original source of the Iraqi historian showed an understanding of the concept of reincarnation and equated Hindu practice with Islamic pilgrimage, all the while supporting his information with details clearly gathered through observation and dialogue. This was in spite of the fact that the phenomenon was completely outside the Islamic frame of reference.

Another way of dealing with such challenges, besides their distortion or inclusion, was their outright and emphatic dismissal. It was in these cases that Mahmud had to fulfil the role of the re-affirmer of the shaken monotheistic system. The following passage from ‘Utbi amply demonstrates this point:

Now, in a huge idol-house, a carved piece of stone was found whose inscription indicated that it had been built forty thousand years ago. The sultan was amazed at the ignorance of this people, for everyone who believes in the illustrious law and the truth that has been sent down from heaven agrees that indeed the age of world is seven thousand years, and indeed we are now in its final millennium. Even now, all the evidence confirms that the Signs of the Hour are at hand. This is witnessed by the perceptions of the eye and the discernments of the heart. Nevertheless, the sultan asked the most prominent of the ‘ulema [learned jurists] for a ruling regarding this matter. They all concurred in rejecting that carved stone, and also declared the testimony of any other rock like it to be spurious.

The first impression here is one of shock and amazement with the scale of things; the idol-house is described as ‘huge’, the date on the rock was ‘forty thousand years ago’ and the sultan was ‘amazed’. The immediate reaction to this shock is one of regrouping and a counterattack, falling back on the certainties of one’s own culture. If things do not correspond to the Muslim’s understanding of the world, then the fault was assigned to the ‘ignorance’ of the other not in any defect in one’s own epistemology. In his defence, Mahmud brings out the arsenal of absolute incontestable certainty: ‘law’ and ‘truth’. The adjectives used for these two categories—‘illustrious’ (gharra’, literally ‘like lightning’) and ‘sent from heaven/sky’ (munazzal min al-sama’) suggest reaching for light and elevation. After appealing to heavenly knowledge and common sense for refuting the date of the stone, Mahmud takes recourse to the legal institutions to in order to eliminate the whole thing once and for all. He asks for a legal decision or fatwa (istafta), from the greatest of the learned jurists. They in effect put the stone on trial, and not only ‘concurred in rejecting’ (ajma‘a ‘ala inkar) that stone but went on to dismiss the whole category as spurious in a pre-emptive measure. None of this would have been necessary if the Ghaznavids were merely there to plunder and depart.

Other sets of information carry a sense of admiration or useful information regarding the military or revenue potential of various forts. Farrukhi’s poem on the attack of Somnath is a good example of this. Regarding the soldiers at the fort of Lodurva, he writes,

Its walls and fortification were strong, and the men on the walls were like ferocious male lions. Formidable soldiers they were who had fought together, troops who had one another’s backs. They took measured steps in accordance with their dignity but moved rapidly when it came time to attack. They had fought battles and gained the upper hand.

He describes the fort of Nahalwara as follows:

The pride of King Bhima in all of India. A huge city, it contained colossal palaces whose parapets almost touched Orion. It yielded good revenue, had a fertile soil, and was plentiful with water. Its gardens, farms, and orchards were blessed with incredible fecundity. Two hundred raging elephants were stationed there, along with ten thousand horsemen, and ninety thousand reckless foot-soldiers.

On Dewalwara he says, ‘[c]oconut-palms and betel-nut-trees crowded its orchards, bearing fruit many times in a year. Sturdy walls enclosed it roundabout, behind which there had gathered a whole host of idol-worshippers’. ¹⁴⁰

We can see that much military, administrative and agrarian detail was being collected by the Ghaznavid imperial apparatus. We only have evidence of this from what the poet Farrukhi chose to provide in his quasi-epic panegyric, but it can be safely assumed that the administrators and tax collectors were also amassing this type of information as well. The evidence of other chroniclers also confirms this. For instance, regarding Kalinjar, Shabankara’i writes, ‘[i]t was a fortified city below which were five thousand villages. Each village was the size of several towns, all very prosperous’. ¹⁴¹ Regarding the temple of Somnath, Ibn Athir states, ‘its endowment [mawquf  ] included more than ten thousand villages’. ¹⁴² In sum, early Ghaznavid texts evince cultural, religious, military and economic knowledge of South Asia. However, such information has been mostly hidden from modern scholarship in part thanks to the chiefly martial rhetoric of the Perso-Arabic authors of our sources.

Conclusion

I hope to have shown that the early eleventh century should be understood not as a period of mindless invasion but a thorough socio-economic and political realignment in the history of Central Asia and North India. As such, we need to have a hypothesis that explains this realignment in terms of world economic history. Mere appeals to broad financial motives are not enough. In part, we need to understand what happened against the backdrop of the change in the patterns of trade both along the overland routes of Inner Asia as well as in the Indian Ocean. We know that the traffic of goods via overland routes connecting China to the Eastern Mediterranean through Central Asia and Iran had significantly contracted by the early ninth century. Instead, world trade had shifted southwards into the Indian Ocean. ¹⁴³

In Central Asia, the new situation caused the collapse of ‘Steppe Empires’ that had been formed in part based on controlling and protecting the trade routes, while in agrarian Transoxiana, the Samanid state replaced the Sogdian merchant state. For over two centuries, the Samanids combined revenue from the agrarian resources of the Oxus and Jaxartes, justified their rule in Islamic terms as protectors of the frontier against incursions from the steppe (probably intensified by the collapse of the trade economy) and supplemented their income by enslaving and selling their neighbours to the north and east throughout the Islamic world as military labourers. As the years went by, the Samanid state began exploiting rich silver mines in their domains in order to begin a new trade with states north of the Caspian Sea, along the Volga River, and ultimately to the Baltic coast where silver dirhams were exchanged for animal products and humans chattel. This pattern continued until the end of the tenth century, when the silver mines were exhausted and the northern trade also collapsed. ¹⁴⁴ This in turn created a chain reaction that led to cash-deprived soldiers either overexploiting their peasants or seeking new sources for raiding on the outskirts of the Samanid domains. Finally, though we have no clear evidence for this yet, one can assume that the merchant networks profiting from this trade must have also been eager for alternative trade opportunities. It was against this backdrop that the Samanid state collapsed and the Ghaznavids rose in its place further to the east, closer to the Indian Ocean.

Ghazna was already an important trade centre, resembling on a smaller scale other sites across North India such as Thanesar, Kannauj, Varanasi and Veraval (the port of Somnath in Gujarat). The difference was that the North Indian towns could more easily conduct commerce in and out of the Indian Ocean ports, an advantage denied to Ghazna. By the end of the tenth century, these patterns had created a commercial sector, with some merchants rising in social prominence and even temples expanding their economic activity. However, the political situation in the same period was marked by a great deal of instability and warring among competing states, none of which could dominate the other, and the resultant alienation of more and more resources from the peasantry. Unsurprisingly, the agrarian economy that underpinned this order was in ‘recession’ in the post-Gupta period. The rise of the Ghaznavid Empire makes sense in this context. ¹⁴⁵ There would have been an incentive in both Khurasan and North India to form a single political unit bringing the various warring states under control, extracting the wealth of the Indian Ocean inland, allowing merchants to travel back and forth, repossessing treasures from large temples but allowing smaller ones to partially fill the economic vacuum, mobilising exploited peasants and forcefully removing the surplus population that the shrinking agrarian economy could not support.

The Ghaznavids led this realignment because of the close relationship between their elites, on the one hand, and merchants, on the other. If the state represents the interest of property, then what better ruling class to advance the cause of merchant elites than those who were themselves former property of merchants? As the story of Alptegin and Sebüktegin reminds us, Turkish slave commanders began their careers as objects of the slave trade and were subsequently dependent on the very same networks for the source of their power—the constant influx of new slave soldiers. The repeated references to the Ghaznavids facilitating the movement of commercial networks bear witness to their close interactions with this sector. The establishment of the Ghaznavid imperial system in South Asia greatly benefited merchants who engaged in the traffic of moveable goods, monetised commerce and made a profit by converting the plunder of soldiers into the means of exchange in goods and people. The state did not directly administer the appropriation of agrarian surplus, which was left in the hands of local kings and magnates.

A fairly consistent ‘ideological’ apparatus (involving knowledge, bilingual administration and coinage and the use of elephants as symbols of imperial sovereignty) was concocted to give coherence to this new imperial system. At the same time, an alternative campaign of ‘propaganda’ was undertaken for the caliphal court in order to conceal the problematic aspects of this venture. The scholarship of the last 200 years worked from the wrong end of this movement, the campaign of misinformation preserved in mainly Arabic sources, and, therefore, derived the opposite impression of the actual nature of the Ghaznavid Empire in South Asia.