Class 7 Social Science Chapter 16: Turning Tides: 11th and 12th Centuries

Who held the north-west

Several kingdoms confronted one another across what is now Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, through the ninth century and the tenth.

A powerful dynasty ruled over both those regions, and over the country all the way to Punjab: the Hindu Shahis. Several other Indian rulers helped them, and between them they resisted invasion after attempted invasion.

Why that resistance mattered

Look at what the Shahis controlled. Through the Hindu Kush range there are only a few main passes, and the Khyber was theirs.

Many an invader has used that pass to enter the Subcontinent. It was also a major trade route for at least 2,500 years, joining Central Asia, and the lands past it, to the Subcontinent. Buddhist scholars and monks went along it.

The Ghaznavids

A Turkic power overran the Shahis in the end, and Jayapala was ruling them at the time. First, though, the Ghaznavids had a rival Muslim kingdom to defeat.

Ghazna was their capital, which the name itself tells you, and it is Ghazni in Afghanistan today.

Mahmud, and the road opened

In the first decade of the eleventh century their ruler Mahmud finished the conquest. Jayapala he defeated first. Then, in 1008, Anandapala, who was Jayapala's son, went down after a long battle, and several rulers from north India had come to his support.

Northern Punjab is where that battle was waged, and its outcome was that the Indus plains, and the country beyond them, now lay easily within Mahmud's reach.

What a man in his own camp wrote

Al-Biruni, a Persian scholar we meet again later, went with Mahmud on some of these campaigns.

The Hindu Shahiya dynasty was extinct, he wrote in his memoirs on India, and of the whole house not the slightest remnant was left. Yet for all their grandeur, he added, they had never slackened in their eager wish to do what was good and right, and he called them men of noble sentiment and noble bearing. Notice who is saying it.

Sultan

A title Mahmud assumed, and the word is worth keeping. Authority, or power, is what it means, and it is Arabic in origin.

In the Muslim world it came to mean a sovereign ruler, a king. Later sultans established kingdoms in India, their sultanates, and the dominant one was the Delhi Sultanate.

Seventeen campaigns

That is the count for India. After every one of them he would go back to Ghazni, and huge amounts of booty went back with him.

Resistance he met, and strongly: the Chandellas of central India were among those who gave it, and on a few occasions he came close to defeat. What proved decisive in the end was the rapid marching of his large army, and daring cavalry attacks with archers mounted on horseback.

Mathura, 1018

Enormous wealth is what he found in the city, and a magnificent temple overlooking it.

Al-Utbi, his own court historian, chronicled these campaigns. The beauty and the decoration of that temple, he wrote, were beyond the pens of every writer and the pencils of every painter. Mahmud destroyed it, and took its treasure.

Kannauj, and then Somnath

From Mathura he went on to Kannauj. One of the last Pratihara rulers was taken by surprise there, and many temples were looted and destroyed.

Gujarat was where another campaign took him a few years later, and Somnath in what is now Saurashtra, a bustling seaport then. The locals resisted strongly and his army took severe losses. After a few days of fighting he gained the upper hand. The Somanatha Shiva temple he destroyed, and treasures that were enormous he looted.

The temple that stands now

Rebuilt and destroyed again, several times over, is what happened to Somanatha in later centuries.

The temple standing today was built in 1950, and the President of India, Rajendra Prasad, inaugurated it the next year. Every rupee of the construction came from public donations, which is worth asking about.

1030, and a nephew

At Ghazni, in 1030, Mahmud died, aged fifty-eight.

Around that time an attack on the Gangetic region was launched by his nephew, Salar Masud. Bahraich, in what is now Uttar Pradesh, is where he got to. Oral history and a Muslim chronicle of the seventeenth century agree on what happened: the local ruler Suheldev resisted the attack successfully, and Salar Masud fell in the battle.

What the campaigns cost

Destruction and plunder were not the whole of it. Tens of thousands of Indian civilians were slaughtered. Numerous prisoners were taken, children among them, to be sold on the slave markets of Central Asia.

Powerful but cruel, and ruthless, is how his own biographers depict him. He was keen to slaughter or enslave those he called infidels, meaning Hindus or Buddhists or Jains, and keen too to kill those believers who belonged to rival sects within Islam.

Why a textbook says so

War, conquest and destruction have been recorded by history far more than it has recorded creativity, or good governance, or peace. Historians the world over have sometimes hesitated to draw attention to its darker periods.

The better approach is to face them and analyse them, so that we understand what made such things possible and can hope to help avoid their happening again. Two things hold together here: past events can be neither erased nor denied, and it would be wrong to hold anyone alive today responsible for them.

The question nobody has settled

Beyond Punjab, Mahmud made no attempt to establish a permanent base. So historians have debated what his motives were for campaigns as destructive as these.

Plunder is what they have often suggested as the chief reason why he destroyed temples. That holds up well: the larger temples often held immense wealth, built up from the offerings of devotees over centuries, so they were prime targets.

The other half of the answer

Spreading his own version of Islam into those parts of the world that were not Muslim is something he was also keen on, and contemporary evidence shows it.

Al-Utbi is blunt about it. Wherever Mahmud went, he writes, the country was plundered and sacked until nothing was left of it, buildings were dug up and burnt, and mosques were built where temples had been destroyed, so that the light of Islam would be visible.

Al-Biruni on the Somnath image

He had explained where the shivalinga worshipped at Somnath came from, and then he recorded what became of it.

Broken by order of Prince Mahmud, is his account: the upper part broken off, the remainder carried to his residence at Ghazni. Part of the image, he says, lay before the door of the mosque there, where people rubbed their feet on it to clean off dirt and wet.

A coin with two faces

One object sums the period up better than any sentence. Mahmud issued a coin from Lahore.

Arabic is on one side of it and Sanskrit on the other. Islam is praised, and so is Mahmud, who is called nripati on it, which is the Sanskrit word for king. A ruler who is a sultan on one face and a nripati on the other is telling you something about who he expected to use the coin.

Scenario:

A student is given two passages about the same man. In the first, a Persian scholar writes that the dynasty Mahmud destroyed was extinct. He adds that its rulers had never slackened in wanting to do what was good and right. In the second, Mahmud own court historian is proud of the plunder. Mosques were built where temples had been destroyed, he writes, to make the light of Islam visible. The student says the two passages contradict each other. One of them must be false, he concludes.

Analysis:

Two contemporary sources on one ruler, and a reader who thinks they cancel out.

Activity:

Find out what the Somanatha temple looked like before 1950.

Title:

A pass is a door

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

Invaders came in, Mahmud among them. Going out were trade to Central Asia and beyond, for at least 2,500 years, and Buddhist scholars and monks. The same gap in the same mountains did both jobs, which is why holding it mattered to rulers far away.

A coin of Mahmud from Lahore has Arabic on one face and Sanskrit on the other.

Al-Biruni praised the Hindu Shahis while riding with the man who ended them.

The Somanatha temple standing today was paid for by public donations.

Mathura 1018, Somnath 1026, Mahmud dead 1030.

Seventeen campaigns, and not one settlement.

Five scholars in one man

Abu Rayhan al-Biruni came from Khwarizm, which is in Uzbekistan today, and he was a Persian scholar.

Linguist, historian, geographer, astronomer, mathematician: one man was all of those together. He travelled widely and he wrote a great deal, in Persian and in Arabic both, and on nearly every branch of the knowledge his own time had.

What he did once he was here

Around 1017 he came into India, accompanying Mahmud of Ghazni on campaign.

Then he did something the campaign did not require of him at all. Sanskrit he learned. Indian texts he read. With Indian scholars he held conversations.

The survey that came out of it

Encyclopaedic is the word for what he wrote: a survey of Indian religion and philosophy, of literature, of geography, of the sciences.

Indian intellectual achievements he discussed as best he could, and often he set them beside the Greek and the Islamic traditions for comparison. That habit of comparing is why his book is still useful.

What he gathered up

Mathematics and astronomy were his own subjects, and here he worked as a collector.

Whatever he could gather from the works of Brahmagupta, of Varahamihira, of Aryabhata and of others besides, he compiled. Think about what that means for us: a scholar from Uzbekistan is part of the reason we can still read what Indian astronomers had worked out.

Yoga into Arabic

One more book of his is worth naming on its own.

Patanjali wrote the Yogasutras, a classic text on the advanced concepts and techniques of yoga. Al-Biruni translated it into Arabic.

What he said the campaigns cost

He did not look away from what his own side had done, either.

The prosperity of the country was utterly ruined by Mahmud, he wrote, and the Hindus were scattered in every direction, like so many atoms of dust. This, he says, is why the Indian sciences retired far away from the parts of the country that had been conquered, and fled to places his side could not yet reach.

Where knowledge went

Three of those places he names: Kashmir, Varanasi, and others of the same kind.

Read that sentence carefully, because it is a sentence about survival rather than about loss. The production and transmission of a little later, in north India, scientific knowledge did decline. In other regions it went on flourishing.

Bhaskaracharya

Here is the proof of that. Born probably in what is now Maharashtra, in 1114, was Bhaskara II, who is better known as Bhaskaracharya.

Among the greatest mathematicians and astronomers India has had, and not alone in his family either: several scholars and astronomers are counted in it.

Three books, in Sanskrit

Lilavati is the famous one, and it teaches basic mathematics through lively riddles and problems.

Bijaganita goes further, into more advanced algebra. Siddhantashiromani means Crown of Treatises on Mathematical Astronomy, and advanced astronomical calculations are its business.

Why students liked him

A gift for poetry is not what you expect of a mathematician, and he had one. He used it to make his writing enjoyable.

Examples fill his works. The explanations are clear. Demonstrations and proofs are given. For centuries afterwards, students made these their favourite texts, which is a thing very few textbooks manage.

A riddle from the Lilavati

Try this one, because it shows you his method better than any description.

Half a herd of elephants went into a cave, and a third of that half went with them. A sixth of the herd was drinking at a river, and a seventh of that sixth was drinking too. An eighth was sporting in a lotus pond, with a ninth of that eighth. Three female elephants were being led by the king of the elephants. How many were in the herd?

How far his work travelled

Commentaries on his works were written by many later scholars, which is one measure of standing.

Several were translated into Persian in the Mughal period, so his influence lasted long, in India and outside it. Some of his pioneering techniques took Europe a few centuries to rediscover.

A king who wrote an encyclopaedia

Scholarship was not only for scholars here. Someshvara III, a Chalukya ruler of the twelfth century, wrote the Manasollasa.

An encyclopaedia is what it is, and its range is startling: astronomy and architecture, music and medicine, cooking and games. In effect a full guide to governance, and to royal life, in effect, and it puts some emphasis on what a king owes his subjects.

Ramanujacharya

Two thinker-saints of the south belong here as well, and the first of them took on the biggest name in Indian philosophy.

Adi Shankaracharya's advaita vedanta was the dominant school of the time. Ramanujacharya, a philosopher-saint, challenged it.

What his school claims

Vishishtadvaita vedanta is the school he developed, and the claim is easier than the word.

Real is what the world is, on this view, and real is what individual souls are. Liberation comes by the path of bhakti, and by surrender to the divine. Set that beside advaita, where the many is maya, and you can see what the argument was about.

Basavanna

At Kalyani, which is Basavakalyana in Karnataka today, Basaveshvara held the post of royal minister. Then he left it, to become a social and religious reformer.

The Lingayat movement is what he founded. Caste distinctions it rejected, and ritualism with them. What it taught instead was personal devotion, and dedicated work.

Looking at a person, not a rank

The inner value of a person is what Basavanna looked at, rather than his or her social rank.

All men and all women have the same spiritual potential: that is what he promoted. His vachanas, which are short poems in Kannada, carry his spiritual and ethical vision strikingly, and his firm devotion to his Lord with it.

The pavilion of experience

One thing he built at Kalyani is worth knowing by name. Anubhava Mandapa means pavilion of experience.

Men and women could assemble there from every background there was, whether social or economic or religious or linguistic, saints and philosophers among them. All aspects of life could be discussed, moral values and religion included. Like Bhakti saints elsewhere, they made spirituality more personal and more reachable, and lowered some of the existing social barriers. Both left a deep mark on the culture and society of the south.

Scenario:

A visitor is shown the site of a pavilion at Kalyani. He is told that men and women of every social, economic, religious and linguistic background once assembled there. Saints and philosophers came too. Everything could be discussed, including moral values and religion. The visitor is impressed but puzzled. Such a place must have been built by a king, he says, since only a court could gather so many kinds of people. He adds that it must have been for scholars, because ordinary people would have nothing to discuss. His guide disagrees with both claims.

Analysis:

A pavilion of experience, and a reader who assumes it must have been royal and learned.

Activity:

Find out whether any vachanas have been translated into your own language.

Title:

Solve the elephant riddle

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

The parts and the four remaining elephants must add to the whole herd, which is what turns a story into an equation. That move is exactly what Bhaskaracharya was teaching, and it is why the Lilavati stayed a favourite with students for centuries.

A 1973 Soviet stamp honoured al-Biruni, since Uzbekistan was then Soviet.

The Manasollasa covers cooking and games as well as astronomy.

Basavanna short Kannada poems are called vachanas.

Lilavati basic, Bijaganita algebra, Siddhantashiromani stars.

Advaita says one; vishishtadvaita says one with difference.

A very different scene

The brunt of the Ghaznavid raids fell on north India. Hold that in mind, and then look east, in the same eleventh century.

Very different is what the scene there was. Nothing in this topic happens later than the raids; it happens at the same time, and somewhere else.

The Senas

After the Palas declined, one dynasty emerged as the power that dominated much of Bengal, and that was the Senas.

Nadiya was their capital, which is the Nadia district today, and it shares a border with Bangladesh.

Neighbours, friendly and not

Kamarupa, which is Assam, lay on one side of them. Kalinga, which is more or less Odisha, lay on another.

Their relations with both seem to have alternated: friendly for a while, then conflictual, then friendly again. That is worth noticing, because it is the ordinary condition of neighbours in this chapter.

What each dynasty supported

Buddhist institutions had been the Palas concern, and they patronised them.

Hindu literature and thought is what the Senas promoted instead, which is a change of direction rather than a change of scale.

Jayadeva

Poets were hosted at the Sena court, and one of them is famous still.

Jayadeva wrote the Gitagovindam. The story it tells is of Krishna and of Radha.

The Eastern Gangas

Follow the coast southward, into Kalinga, and you come to them.

Matrimonial alliances tied them to the Cholas, whom we meet in the next topic. They also clashed with the Cholas a few times, and with other neighbours besides. Both things were true at once.

From the Ganga to the Godavari

By the end of the twelfth century this dynasty had emerged as a power among the most stable in eastern India.

Some of their inscriptions make a large claim for the kingdom: that it extended from the Ganga as far as the Godavari. An inscription is evidence of what a dynasty wanted said about itself, which is not quite the same as a map.

Two temples they began

Here is the part you can still go and see.

At Puri the Jagannatha temple had its construction begun by this dynasty. In the middle of the thirteenth century came the other one: the grand Sun temple at Konark.

Two sets of Chalukyas

Now go further south, and keep two names apart. Kalyani, also called Kalyana, was the capital of the Western Chalukyas.

A major power in the Deccan is what they were, and at one point their rule extended north as far as the Narmada River. The Eastern Chalukyas are the other set.

Vengi, and the wars over it

Marriage alliances drew the Eastern Chalukyas gradually into the Chola sphere of influence.

Their capital was Vengi, and the region around it was fertile. That capital and that region became what the Cholas and the Western Chalukyas fought fierce wars over.

Who replaced the Western Chalukyas

The result was that the Western Chalukyas faded away.

Two other powers grew stronger in the same decades, the Kakatiyas and the Hoysalas, and in the end those two replaced them. Both are worth a card apiece.

The Kakatiyas

Through the twelfth century they cemented their authority over much of what is Telangana and Andhra Pradesh today.

Orugallu was their capital, and it is Warangal now. A fort they built there, and its stone toranas, which means gateways, are impressive still.

What the Kakatiyas left

Works in Sanskrit were composed by some of their kings.

Telugu literature had their patronage too. For their temple architecture the fine example is the Thousand Pillar temple, which stands at Hanamkonda.

How the Kakatiyas governed

This is the part of them worth remembering longest, because it is not about buildings at all.

Village self-governance was the base of the strong local administration they promoted. A revenue system they developed, and it was efficient. Irrigation infrastructure they developed as well, and agricultural prosperity rested on it.

The Hoysalas, and a name

Southern Karnataka is where they originated, and behind the name itself there is an interesting legend itself.

Sala, their founder, went to a Jain temple to worship, and found an ascetic meditating there. Then a tiger appeared. Strike, Sala, is what the ascetic said, and in the old Kannada language that is Poy, Sala.

What the legend says followed

Sala obeyed at once, and the ascetic's life was saved by it.

The ascetic blessed him with kingship in return. From that command the name Hoysala is said to come, and the legend is depicted in several temples, and mentioned in inscriptions.

Two capitals, and a break

In our period two cities became their capitals: Velapura, which is Belur today, and Dvarasamudra, which is Halebidu.

King Vishnuvardhana is who they broke away under, leaving Chalukya overlordship, and challenged the Cholas, and extended their sway gradually over most of what is Karnataka now.

What the Hoysalas are remembered for

Cultural and literary development in the Kannada language came under their rule.

Their most visible legacy, though, is a style of temple architecture that is theirs alone: stone pillars carved intricately, with sculptures and with panels. Particularly famous are the temples at Belur and at Halebidu, and three Hoysala temples in all are recognised by UNESCO as world heritage monuments.

Scenario:

Two letters are written in the same year of the eleventh century. One is from a town in the Gangetic plains. It describes a city emptied, a temple pulled down and an army that has moved on with its booty. The other is from a court in Bengal. It describes a poet reading a new work about Krishna and Radha, and a king who has been promoting Hindu literature and thought. A reader who sees both decides that one of them must be a forgery, since the same country cannot be doing both things at once.

Analysis:

Two accurate letters from one year, and a reader who thinks they cannot both be true.

Activity:

Find out which dynasty ruled your own region in these two centuries.

Title:

One year, four places

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

Senas, Eastern Gangas, Kakatiyas and Hoysalas. The circled pair is the Kakatiyas and the Hoysalas. What the four boxes show together is that this was not an empty century anywhere except where the raids actually fell.

Three Hoysala temples are UNESCO world heritage monuments.

The Nadia district of today shares a border with Bangladesh.

Some Kakatiya kings composed works in Sanskrit themselves.

Senas at Nadiya, Kakatiyas at Orugallu, Hoysalas at Belur.

Poy, Sala: strike, Sala.

Three capitals, one dynasty

Powerful and influential is how the chapter describes the Cholas, and their prominence rose in what is Tamil Nadu today.

Three cities served them as capitals: Kanchi, which is Kanchipuram now; Gangaikondacholapuram; and Tanjavur, which is Thanjavur.

Rajaraja, from 985

Some three decades is how long he ruled, beginning in that year.

Parts of what are now Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh he conquered. Northern Sri Lanka he conquered too, and the kingdom of Anuradhapura was in it.

Islands of the sea

One phrase in his own inscriptions is worth stopping on, because it is a puzzle rather than a statement.

A conquest of islands of the sea is what those inscriptions record. Which islands? Most historians identify them with the Maldives.

The temple he built

At Thanjavur he built the Brihadishvara temple, which is also called Rajarajeshvaram, after Rajaraja himself.

Architecture and engineering both: a masterpiece of each is what it is.

A monastery a foreign king paid for

Predominantly Shaivites is what the Cholas were, so this next thing is not what you would predict.

Nagapattinam was an important Chola port then, and a Buddhist vihara, meaning a monastery, was built there. Rajaraja facilitated it. The man who had it built was the ruler of the Shrivijaya Empire, from the far side of the Bay of Bengal, in what are parts of Malaysia and Indonesia today.

Rajendra I, and a title about a river

Nearly thirty years is how long Rajaraja's son ruled as well, and he expanded the empire further, into parts of present-day Odisha and Bengal.

Gangaikondachola is the title with which he commemorated those victories. The Chola who seized the Ganga, or who brought it, is what the title means, and it points two ways at once: at his campaigns in the north, and at the sacredness attached to the river.

Sri Lanka, won and then lost

The conquest of northern Sri Lanka his father had made he expanded.

For half a century or so the region was an integral part of the Chola Empire. Then Vijayabahu I, the Sri Lankan king, drove the Cholas out, and it took him several battles to do it.

Why there was a war at sea

Trade is the root of it, and trade with China in particular. Under the Cholas those relations thrived, which archaeological evidence and inscriptions both confirm, and A diplomatic mission to China was even sent by Rajendra.

But the Strait of Malacca carried one of those sea routes, a narrow strip of sea, with Malaysia on one side of it and Sumatra on the other. The Shrivijaya king controlled it, and competition with the Cholas came out of that.

A punitive expedition

His navy Rajendra sent, and the forces of Shrivijaya were defeated by it, and their capital was captured.

Then he stopped. Occupying the defeated empire is what he did not attempt. Punitive is the word for such an expedition, many Indian merchant guilds supported it, and its objectives seem to have been achieved.

Shrivijaya was not an enemy

Do not read that expedition as the normal state of things, because it was not.

Deep cultural relations ran between these two regions of Asia, and generally peaceful ones. Here is the proof: Donations to Nalanda were made by a Shrivijaya ruler, who also asked the Pala king for land so that one more monastery could be created there. Granted, was the answer, and a copper plate found at Nalanda records it.

The same point holds for the island the Cholas fought over.

Strong cultural links existed quite apart from the wars. Vijayabahu I, the king who drove the Cholas out, married a princess from Kalinga.

Public works at home

While all that was happening at sea, large public works were being undertaken at home.

Roads were among them, to make communications easier. For irrigation there were tanks, and wells, and canals. Artificial lakes were built as well.

What drained the treasury

Conflicts with neighbouring kingdoms were frequent, and they were extensive.

Among those neighbours were the rulers of Sri Lanka, and the Pandyas, and the Western Chalukyas. Draining the treasury is what those conflicts did, and the decline of the empire had that among its causes. By the thirteenth century the Chola empire had shrunk a great deal, and the Pandyas absorbed what was left.

The Paramaras

Turn north now, to Malwa, which is in Madhya Pradesh today.

Vassals of the Pratiharas and of the Rashtrakutas is what the Paramaras had been originally. In the second half of the tenth century they emerged as an independent power there, and Dhara, which is Dhar now, was their capital.

Bhoja of Malwa

Their most famous king began to rule in 1010, and almost half a century is how long he had.

Numerous campaigns he led, and his kingdom came to extend from parts of Rajasthan to the Konkan region on the west coast. He was also one of the Indian rulers who sent forces to help the Hindu Shahis against Mahmud of Ghazni. After he died in 1055 the Paramaras gradually declined, and conflicts with neighbouring powers were part of why.

The lake, and a city's name

Keep this Bhoja apart from King Bhoja of the Gurjara-Pratiharas, who lived in the ninth century.

Efficient governance and public works are what this one was known for. Bhojpur is a town he is credited with founding, and between Bhojpur and the city of Bhopal he constructed a vast lake, harnessing the waters of several rivers for it. Irrigation was one purpose and water management the other. Bhojpal means the dam, or the fort, of Bhoja, and the name Bhopal comes from it.

What is left of the lake

A small portion of it remains near Bhopal today, and Bhojtal is what that is called.

Further away you can still see remains of embankments, some earthen and some stone. A proverb in Hindi remembers how big the thing once was: ask for a lake and you mean Bhopal's, since all the rest are merely ponds.

A capital that drew scholars

Generous is the word for Bhoja as a patron. Scholars he supported, and Sanskrit literature he promoted.

Arts and sciences flourished under that patronage, so a renowned centre of learning is what his capital became, and scholars, poets and artists were drawn to it from across India. He also built the Bhojeshwar Temple, which was never completed and is an architectural marvel even so.

What Bhoja himself wrote

A noted scholar he was in his own right, and a prolific author, and the subjects he wrote on ranged widely.

Samarangana Sutradhara is the long one: a treatise on architecture, on town planning, on temple construction, on sculpture and on mechanical devices. On governance he wrote treatises too, and on Sanskrit poetics, with texts of medicine among others, and a commentary on Patanjali's Yogasutras. Wise and learned is the reputation he left, and it became legendary, and numerous stories and folk tales were inspired by it.

Scenario:

A class is told that a king sent a navy across the sea, defeated a foreign empire and captured its capital. They are then asked what happened next. Most of the class says the king must have ruled the place afterwards, since that is what winning means. One student says the two sides must have hated each other for generations, because nobody crosses an ocean to fight over nothing. A third says the war must have been about religion, since the two kingdoms followed different ones. All three are wrong, and the chapter says why.

Analysis:

A naval victory, and three confident guesses about what follows from it.

Activity:

Find the Strait of Malacca on a map and say why it still matters.

Title:

Build Bhoja lake

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

The rest is gone, and the earthen or stone embankments have remains that can still be seen, further away. Irrigation was one purpose and water management the other, which is why a king is remembered for a lake as much as for his campaigns.

A Shaivite Chola king helped a Buddhist monastery get built at his port.

A Hindi proverb says every lake but Bhopal is only a pond.

Rajendra sent a diplomatic mission all the way to China.

Rajaraja built the temple; Rajendra took the title.

Bhojpal to Bhopal: a king behind a city name.

After Mahmud

Attack came at the Ghaznavid Empire from several sides, in Afghanistan and beyond it, and the empire soon disintegrated.

Mahmud had been the first notable invader of the period we are looking at. He was not the last.

The chiefs of Ghur

West of Ghazni, in Afghanistan, lies a mountainous region called Ghur, which is Ghor today.

Vassals of the Ghaznavids is what its chiefs had been earlier. Now they seized the opportunity: control of Ghazni they took, and their own power they built up.

Stopped at the foot of a mountain

Muhammad was their leader, and sultan of Ghur, which is why he is called Muhammad Ghuri. Parts of Punjab and Sindh he soon brought under his rule.

Gujarat is where he failed. In 1178 Mularaja II, the Chaulukya king, defeated him there, and the foot of Mount Abu is where they fought.

A queen, or her son?

Another version of that battle exists. In it the victorious army was led on horseback by Queen Naikidevi, Mularaja's mother, with her son in her lap. A Jain scholar of Gujarat, Merutunga, put the event into a chronicle that is semi-historical. He wrote over a century later, though, so historians are divided over whether the credit belongs to the queen or to her son. On Muhammad's defeat there the sources do agree.

Two names that look alike

Keep these apart, because the chapter warns you to. Gujarat and parts of Rajasthan were ruled from the tenth century to the thirteenth by the Chaulukyas, who are also called the Solankis.

Anahilavada was their capital, and that is Patan today. They are sometimes called Chalukyas of Gujarat, which is the confusing part: the Chalukya dynasty of the Deccan is a different family altogether.

The Chahamanas

Also called Chauhans, this was a powerful Rajput dynasty, and it arose in Rajasthan and the regions next to it.

Other Indian dynasties they battled, and invaders such as Mahmud they often repelled. In the twelfth century their conquests built an empire: most of Rajasthan, with Delhi, Haryana and parts of Punjab and Uttar Pradesh. Ajayameru was the capital, now Ajmer.

Tarain, twice over

Prithviraja III is the king people today call Prithviraj Chauhan. Many battles he waged with neighbouring kings, those of Gujarat and Malwa among them.

Then in 1191, at Tarain, which is Taraori in Haryana now, he defeated Muhammad Ghuri.

Within a year Muhammad was back, and this time his army was larger.

Fierce fighting is what the Second Battle of Tarain saw. Prithviraja was defeated in it, and Muhammad executed him.

Land, not loot

Delhi was captured next. Here is the difference that matters in this whole chapter.

Mahmud had merely plundered and withdrawn. Territorial conquest is what Muhammad sought instead. He did return to Ghazni, but trusted military commanders were left behind him to consolidate what he had gained, and the most notable of them was his general Qutb-ud-din Aibak, who founded the Delhi Sultanate later on.

Dhillika to Delhi

Under the Chahamanas, Delhi was a flourishing city, and their inscriptions give us its older name.

Dhillika is what they called it. Dhilli is the shortened form that came next. Delhi is what it ultimately became.

Aibak, and his commander

Much resistance is what Aibak met in his north Indian campaigns, and he expanded Ghurid territory even so.

Bakhtiyar Khilji was his army commander. From the end of the twelfth century that commander campaigned in eastern India, and Bihar and Bengal were conquered.

What was destroyed on the way

Large Buddhist monasteries and universities lay on his route to Bengal, and Nalanda and Vikramashila were among them. He destroyed them.

Huge booty was collected, and large numbers of monks were slaughtered. Historians of Buddhism agree that losing its large centres of learning precipitated the religion's decline here, though other factors may have played a part.

A historian who did not understand what he saw

Some sixty years afterwards, Juzjani recorded the campaign in his Tabakat-i-Nasiri, and the passage is more revealing than he knew.

A fortress was captured and great booty acquired, he writes. Most of the inhabitants were Brahmans, he says, their heads all shaven, and all of them were slain. A great number of books was found. The whole of that fortress and city turned out to be a college, and bihar is what a college is called in their tongue. Shaven heads, books, and a word that is really vihara: he had destroyed a university and was describing a fort.

Nalanda's library

Three multi-storey buildings held it, and lakhs of manuscripts were in them.

Yijing and Xuanzang, the Chinese pilgrims, had both spent time there, studying manuscripts and choosing many to carry back to China. After the attack the library, it is said, went on burning for months. Tibetan scholars who were teaching and studying there fled home carrying what manuscripts they were able to.

The last class

Some three decades later a Tibetan monk called Dharmasvamin visited the site, and found it half ruined.

Yet a teacher of ninety was still at work there, Rahula Shribhadra, with about seventy students in his class. Perhaps that was Nalanda's last.

Stopped in Kamarupa

Around 1203 and 1204 Bakhtiyar pushed further east, into Bengal, and caught the Sena ruler unaware at Nadiya. Sena control over much of Bengal ended there.

Then, for reasons that are not too clear, an expedition into Tibet is what he decided to attempt. Kamarupa lay on his way, and in 1205 the local ruler's forces confronted him and inflicted severe losses. Food and fodder were destroyed by the local population, so it is said, which starved the invading army. With a handful of men Bakhtiyar escaped, and much weakened he got back to Bengal.

That year Muhammad Ghuri was killed.

Bakhtiyar Khilji was assassinated in the same year, apparently by men of his own. In north India their territory stayed under the control of Muhammad's generals.

What a kingdom had to pay for

So much warfare means every powerful king needed an army of some size, and an army costs.

Soldiers had to be employed and armed. Horses and elephants had to be kept, and camels too in the north, for provisions. So an efficient administration was needed, to collect taxes from traders and tributes from vassals. Muhammad Ghuri's system was the one real change: more centralised, granting officers temporary land assignments for revenue collection and military service.

Trade, and what lay under it

Growth went on in the trade with China and Southeast Asia despite the political disturbances. Coins and pottery from those regions turn up along India's west coast, which had seaports in numbers, and shipyards too.

Underneath all of it, though, the mainstay of the economy was agriculture, as it still is. Cotton came from western India and the Deccan, wheat from the north-west, ginger from Bengal, spices from Kerala, saffron from Kashmir, and rice and barley from Bengal and the Ganga plains.

Taking stock

Change and continuity both, as in every transitional period. The visible change was the Turkic campaigns, and foreign rule beginning in parts of the north, with plunder and destruction. Power equations were altered profoundly, and Islam spread here as a new creed.

Yet large parts of northern India, and the whole of the south, stayed outside the invaders' hold. Trade continued and the guilds adapted. At Khajuraho the Chandellas built dozens of temples in these two centuries, the Kandariya Mahadeva among them. In Cambodia the Khmer king Suryavarman II raised Angkor Wat, which is the largest monument any religion has. Conflict met with resilience, and learning whose power endures: that is the lesson the chapter draws.

Scenario:

A historian writing some sixty years after the event records a campaign in eastern India. A fortress was captured, he says, and great booty acquired. Most of the people in the place were Brahmans, he adds, and their heads were all shaven, and all of them were killed. A great number of books was found there. The whole fortress and city, he concludes, turned out to be a college, and in their own tongue they call a college bihar. A student reading this decides the historian has contradicted himself twice over.

Analysis:

A sixty-year-old chronicle whose own details undo its own description.

Activity:

Find out what the name of the state of Bihar comes from.

Title:

Raid or conquest?

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

Mahmud returned to Ghazni with booty, seventeen times, and left nobody. Ghuri also went back to Ghazni, but left trusted commanders, Qutb-ud-din Aibak among them. That one difference, leaving someone behind, is what turns a raid into the start of rule.

Angkor Wat, raised by Suryavarman II, is the largest monument any religion has.

Nalanda library, it is said, went on burning for months.

Camels carried provisions for armies in parts of north India.

Tarain 1191 he lost, 1192 he won.

Dhillika, Dhilli, Delhi.