Mahmud of Ghazna's Indian Campaigns

Across his long reign (388-421 AH / 998-1030 CE) Mahmud of Ghazna led repeated campaigns from his Afghan capital down into northern India, a series of expeditions that the later tradition counts at about seventeen. The Ghaznavids were a Sunni Turkic dynasty, risen from the Turkic slave-soldiers of the Samanids, who built an empire over Khurasan, Afghanistan, and the eastern Iranian world; Mahmud held his titles from the Abbasid caliph, who named him Yamin al-Dawla, and he presented himself as a champion of Sunni Islam. His Indian campaigns reached down the Punjab and into the Gangetic plain, striking the wealthy temple-cities of the subcontinent, the most famous being the raid on the great temple of Somnath around 416 AH (1025 CE), and bringing the Punjab under lasting Ghaznavid rule. The campaigns were proclaimed as jihad, and they were also expeditions for the immense wealth of the Indian sanctuaries and for empire; modern historians read them as both, and the Somnath raid in particular has carried heavy and contested meaning in later memory. The Ghaznavid court was a brilliant centre of Persian letters, and travelling in the orbit of these campaigns was the polymath al-Biruni, who learned Sanskrit and composed his Kitab al-Hind, a study of Indian religion, science, and society of unmatched care and curiosity, the intellectual counterpoint to the violence of the raids. This scene depicts not a battle or a sack but the army on the march through the upper Punjab: the green monsoon plains of the country of the five rivers, an intact temple-city with its tall shikhara spires rising in the distance, a column of Turkic and Khurasani cavalry with war elephants crossing the land, and a Hindu village along the route. The framing is sober, the army moving through a settled and populous country, the wealth and the danger of India ahead of it, the scholar's book the quiet shadow of the soldier's road.