The Foundation of Muslim Rule in India: A History of the Establishment and Progress of the Turkish Sultanate of Delhi, 1206–1290 A.D. c13.2

c13.2

The problem of North India's defence is considerably minimised by its natural boundaries. If we exclude the coast line in the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, it is only in the northwest that she is really vulnerable¹. From times immemorial, foreigners have entered through this northwestern passage leading into areas which afford convenient bases for an eventual conquest of the fertile plains. Owing to the peculiar configuration of mountain ranges in this region, an effective defence of this entrance is possible only by a complete military control of the area extending from Kabul, via Ghazni, to Kandahar, the so-called "scientific frontier" of India², controlling, as it does, the approaches to the fertile valleys of the Punjab rivers. For, the more southern entrances, through the Bolan and Las Bela regions, lead to the Indian desert. "India's second line of defence"³. The control of the Kabul-Ghazni-Kandahar line, flanked by the Hindu-kush, is thus not only essential from the point of view of military strategy, but in an age, when the alien conquerors of India were dependent for reinforcement on Central Asia, for political considerations also. Another aspect of this frontier problem, still a source of great difficulty to the present rulers of India, is the control of the ever-turbulent hill-tribes, inhabiting the wide mountainous belt of land extending from Kashmir to the seacoast, through which all the principal passages run. In the northern half of the Sind-Sagar Doab, round the chain of hills known as the Salt Range (Koh-i-Jud), lived, in the early middle ages, a number of warlike and lawless tribes,—the Khokars, Awans and Janjuhas¹,—whose political instability and periodic depredations on the Jhelum and Chinab valleys added to the enormity of the problem.