Muslim Slave System in Medieval India c7.6

c7.6

*Ghaznavid capture of Hindu slaves* If such were the gains of the mild Muhammad bin Qasim in enslaving *kaniz wa ghulam* in Sindh, the slaves captured by Mahmud of Ghazni, that ferocious and insatiable conqueror, of the century beginning with the year 1000 C.E. have of course to be counted in hundreds of thousands. Henry Elliot and John Dowson have sifted the available evidence from contemporary and later sources-from Utbis *Tarikh-i-Yamini*, Nizamuddin Ahmads *Tabqat-i-Akbari*, the *Tarikh-i-Alai* and the *Khulasat-ut-Tawarikh* to the researches of early European scholars. Mohammad Habib, Muhammad Nazim, Wolseley Haig and I myself have also studied these invasions in detail.⁹ All evidence points to the fact that during his seventeen invasions, Mahmud Ghaznavi enslaved a very large number of people in India. Although figures of captives for each and every campaign have not been provided by contemporary chroniclers, yet some known numbers and data about the slaves taken by Mahmud speak for themselves.