Muslim Slave System in Medieval India c10.18

c10.18

For example, in the early years of Muslim rule, Ikhtiyauddin Bakhtiyar Khalji sacked the Buddhist University centres in Bihar (1197-1202). There, according to the contemporary chronicler Minhaj Siraj, the greater number of the inhabitants of the place were Brahmans, and the whole of those Brahmans had their heads shaven (probably Buddhist monks mistaken for Brahmans) and they were all slain. There were a great number of books there; and the Musalmans summoned a number of Hindus that they might give them information respecting the import of these books; but the whole of the Hindus had been killed. All that the invader could learn was that the whole of the fortress was a college and in the Hindi tongue, they call a college (*madrasa*) Bihar.¹⁹ During this period there were a large number of centres of learning spread all over India.²⁰ So thorough was the massacre by the Khalji warrior in Bihar and later on by others in other places that those who could read ancient inscriptions became rare if not extinct. So that when Sultan Firoz Shah Tughlaq (fourteenth century) shifted two Ashokan pillars from Khizarabad and Meerut to Delhi and installed them there, he called some learned Brahmans to read the inscriptions engraved in Ashokan Brahmi/Pali on the pillars; they failed to read the script. Some of them tried to please the Sultan with cock and bull stories by saying that it was recorded in the inscriptions that no one would be able to remove the monoliths until the advent of Firoz.²¹