The Arab and Turkish Invasions

In 712, Muhammad bin Qasim, the teenage general of the Umayyad governor Hajjaj, conquered Sind and Multan from Raja Dahir. The Arab conquest stopped at the Indus — Sind remained 'the frontier of al-Hind' — but it peacefully planted the first Muslim communities in the subcontinent and transmitted Indian mathematics, astronomy and medicine to Baghdad.

From 1000 to 1027, Mahmud of Ghazni led seventeen raids into India — not to rule it, but to fill his treasury and smash the temples that were also banks. His raid on Somnath (1025), where he broke the great lingam, became the emblem of iconoclasm, immortalised and contested in memory ever since. The Chahamana and Chandela armies that met him fought bravely but separately.

Mahmud's court glittered with the spoils: Firdausi (retrospectively) and the scholar Alberuni, whose Kitab-ul-Hind remains the most penetrating foreign study of Indian science, philosophy and society before the modern era. The Punjab was annexed to Ghazni; the raids exposed how militarily fragile the Rajput honour-system had become against fast cavalry and mounted archery.

Muhammad of Ghor, aiming not at plunder but at empire, was defeated at Kasahrada (1178) by the Chalukyas of Gujarat, then beaten at the First Battle of Tarain (1191) by the Chauhan king Prithviraj III. At the Second Battle of Tarain (1192) Ghori returned with a mounted force of archers, attacked at dawn, and crushed the Rajput confederacy — a defeat that handed Delhi and the Gangetic plain to the Turks.

His lieutenants completed the conquest within a decade: Qutbuddin Aibak took Delhi; Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji overran Bihar and Bengal with a few hundred horsemen, destroying the monastery of Nalanda; and Jaichandra of Kannauj fell at Chandawar (1194). When Ghori died in 1206, his ex-slave Aibak founded the Delhi Sultanate — a continuous Muslim rule at Delhi that lasted, through five dynasties, until 1526.