He Did it for the Money

The reasonable points: Mahmud, the son of the slave-king Subuktigin, needed money to sustain his new-caught kingdom and so he went raiding wherever he sniffed money. Mahmud needed legitimisation as the big new player in Eastern Islam from the Caliph of Baghdad and so he exaggerated his conquests (or his chroniclers did). Later Muslim chroniclers added more masala to his exploits to establish him as the founder of Islam in India (which he patently was not).

Arabs, the seafarer-trader ancestors of non-Sunni Muslim communities in Gujarat like Bohra and Ismaili (like the Moplah of Kerala and the Marakayar of Tamil Nadu) need to be distinguished from invading Central Asian-Turks like Mahmud. The former became peaceful local settlers with strong business connections with the Jains, who even built mosques for them. They must not be monolithised into the general hate category of ‘Muslim invader’ (who, by the way, had Hindu mercenaries in his pay), which is what the British did, to divide and rule, a cue tragically picked by Hindu and Muslim nationalists in the early 20th century (K.M. Munshi is cited frequently), which led to Partition and never-ending Hindu-Muslim animosity. Good, so far, and what every sensible Indian wants to take forward to a positive plane.

Then, Thapar loses it, coming as she does from the ‘slave scholar’ generation. In trying “to suggest that the event of Mahmud’s raid on the temple of Somnatha did not create a dichotomy”, Thapar is unable to match the courage of Aligarh historian Prof. Mohammed Habib who in the 1920s was vilified by the Urdu press for saying squarely: “No honest historian should seek to hide, and no Musalman acquainted with his faith will try to justify, the wanton destruction of temples that followed in the wake of the Ghaznavid army… A people is not conciliated by being robbed of all that it holds most dear, nor will it love a faith that comes to it in the guise of plundering armies and leaves devastated fields and ruined cities… the policy of Mahmud secured the rejection of Islam without a hearing.”

Thapar even glosses over Alberuni’s famous report post-Somnath, despite citing his as “the most sober version”. Alberuni (his was the first foreigner’s account of India after Hsuien Tsang’s) wrote: “Mahmud ruined the prosperity of the country and performed there wonderful exploits by which the Hindus became like atoms scattered in all directions and like a tale of old in the mouths of the people. Their scattered remains cherish, of course, the most inveterate aversion towards all Muslims.”

Thapar’s contention is that only Brahmins and Rajputs were affected by Muslim invasions, whereas the ordinary people were drawn to Islam for its equality in brotherhood. But with the other breath she points out how Arab settlers in Gujarat picked up local customs, including caste. Similarly, after examining Sanskrit inscriptions — from four centuries later — she says there was evidence of prosperity, trade and travel. But nobody (to the lay reader’s knowledge) says that it was not back to business as usual, even while accommodating new political realities. Similarly, she wonders why the Prithviraj Raso (the bardic history of the last Hindu king of Delhi who fell to Mohammed Ghori’s second attack in 1194) does not mention Mahmud’s raid on Somnath. This leaves the lay reader profoundly uneasy: What exactly is Thapar trying to say, by such reasoning? That the Chahamana (Chauhan) bard in Delhi writing in praise of his immediate patron should have chronicled what befell a Chalukya in Gujarat years ago?

Yet another over-exertion by Thapar: she says the name ‘Hammir’ is “a Sanskritisation of the Arab title Amir… The currency of Hammira as a personal name among Rajputs suggests an admiration for the qualities associated with those referred to as Amirs”. But ‘hamm’ means ‘to move ahead’.

But Thapar’s most interesting speculation, citing the Ghaznavid panegyrics of Farukkhi and Gardizi is that the Mahmud’s 17 expeditions were a justifiable Islamic mission (to another country, against another’s house of worship), because he mistook the shivling of Somnath for the ‘lost’ idol of the Arab goddess ‘su-Manat’ whom the Prophet of Islam had decreed should be destroyed. In the end, what Thapar scores in saying, “Not everyone was destructive” and “Life went on anyhow”, she loses, in a typical-of-her-ilk denouement, where she argues, “He had BIG reasons” and, most peculiarly, “It wasn’t so bad really”.