The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c20.242

v3.c20.242

The rhapsodies of Muslim historians in their accounts of the suppression of a rising or the capture of a fortress, of towns and villages burnt, of whole districts laid waste, of temples destroyed and idols overthrown, of hecatombs of 'misbelievers sent to hell,' or ‘dispatched to their own place,’ and of thousands of women and children enslaved might delude us into the belief that the early Muslim occupation of northern India was one prolonged holy war waged for the extirpation of idolatry and the propagation of Islam, had we not proof that this cannot have been the case. Mahmūd the Iconoclast maintained a large corps of Hindu horse; his son Mas‘ūd prohibited his Muslim officers from offending the religious susceptibilities of their Hindu comrades, employed the Hindu Tilak for the suppression of the rebellion of the Muslim Ahmad Niyāltigīn, approved of Tilak’s mutilation of Muslims, and made him the equal of his Muslim nobles; Mu‘izz-ud-dīn Muhammad allied himself with the Hindu raja of Jammū against the Muslim Khusrav Malik of Lahore, and employed Hindu legends on his coinage; all Muslim rulers in India, from Mahmūd downwards, accepted, when it suited them to do so, the allegiance of Hindu rulers and landholders, and confirmed them, as vassals, in the possession of their hereditary lands; and one of the pretexts for Tīmūr’s invasions of India at the end of the fourteenth century was the toleration of Hinduism. Neither the numbers nor the interest of the foreigners admitted of any other course. Their force consisted in garrisons scattered throughout the land among the indigenous agricultural population vastly superior in numbers to themselves and not unwarlike. On this population they relied not only for the means of support but also, to a great extent, for the subordinate machinery of government; for there can be no doubt that practically all minor posts connected with the assessment and collection of the land revenue and with accounts of public and state finance generally, were filled, as they were many generations later, by Hindus. Among those who met Balban at each stage on his triumphal return from the suppression of Tughril’s rebellion were *rāīs*, *chaudharīs* and *muqaddams*. The first two classes were certainly Hindu landholders and officials of some importance, and in the third we recognise a humbler class of Hindu revenue officials which in many parts of India retains its Arabic designation to this day. The Hindu husbandman is not curious in respect of high affairs of state, and cares little by whom he is governed so long as he is reasonably well treated. He is more attached to his patrimony than to any system of government, and while he is permitted to retain enough of the kindly fruits of the earth to satisfy his frugal needs, concerns himself little with the religion of his rulers; but oppression or such extortion as deprives him of the necessaries of life may convert him into a rebel or a robber, and there was at that time no lack of warlike leaders and communities of his own faith ready to welcome him in either character. Rebellion and overt disaffection were repressed with ruthless severity, and were doubtless made occasions of proselytism, but the sin was rebellion, not religious error, and there is no reason to believe that the position of the Hindu cultivator was worse under a Muslim than under a Hindu landlord. The disaffected were those of the upper and recently dominant class of large landholders and petty chieftains.