The Sultanate of Delhi, 711–1526 A.D. c10.2

c10.2

The history of the resistance offered by the Hindu States of north-western India against the mighty Arab and Turkish invaders from Central Asia and of the causes of their eventual fall has not yet been studied in correct perspective. No modern writer has made a scientific study to analyse on a comprehensive basis the causes of our final defeat and loss of independence at the hands of the Islamic races from the north-west. Owing to our eventual failure to stem the tide of Islamic invasions, it has been presumed that our political, social and military organisations must have been rotten to crumble at the touch of the virile invading forces. Modern European writers have sedulously built up the theory that as a race the Hindus were and are inferior in fighting qualities to the Central Asian Arabs, Turks and other Islamic peoples, and this in their opinion was the principal cause of the downfall of the Hindu States in medieval age. Lane-Poole, for example, remarks, “To the contrast of union and disunion, north and south, race and climate, was added the zeal of the Moslem and the greed of the robber.”¹ Vincent A. Smith, an equally acknowledged authority, writes that the invaders were superior fighters, as they came from the cold climate of the north, were eaters of meat and were inured to warfare.² This theory is based on an uncritical acceptance of the probably biased accounts of medieval Muslim writers, so prone to magnify the exploits of their compatriots and minimise those of their adversaries, and seems to give an undue consideration to the later debacle of the times of Mahmud of Ghazni and Muhammad of Ghur utterly ignoring the earlier three and a half centuries’ magnificent resistance offered by the Hindus of Sindh, Afghanistan and the Panjab. And a debacle, it must not be forgotten, was inevitable in the wake of demoralisation that set in as a result of three hundred and fifty years’ (636 A.D.–997 A.D.) warfare and confusion against a succession of ever-recurring fresh waves of invaders.