Muslim conquests in the Indian subcontinent

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Muslim conquests in the Indian subcontinent unfolded across a thousand years, reshaping language, architecture, religion, and law across one of the most populous regions on earth. The first Arab naval raid on Indian soil happened around 636 AD, when Uthman ibn Abi al-As al-Thaqafi, the governor of Bahrain and Oman, dispatched his brother al-Hakam to strike the port of Thane, a small town near Mumbai. That raid was unauthorized. Caliph Umar had given no blessing for it. And yet it was the opening movement in a process that would run from the 7th century to the 18th, eventually producing the Mughal Empire, the Sikh Empire, the fragmentation of the subcontinent, and finally the British Raj.

  How did scattered Arab naval sorties become the foundations of an empire that stretched from Afghanistan to Tamil Nadu? What did Muslim rule actually look like on the ground, for ordinary people of different faiths? And how did it end, not in Islamic triumph, but in a patchwork of regional powers that the British would ultimately absorb? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. The Arab Frontier

  ›

  For roughly two centuries after al-Hakam's unauthorized raid, the Arab advance into the Indian subcontinent stalled repeatedly against a belt of mountain kingdoms that the Arabs called "The Frontier of Al Hind." The kingdoms of Kapisa-Gandhara, Zabulistan, and Sindh held the passes, and the Kabul Shahi kings and their Zunbil kinsmen blocked access to the Khyber and Gomal routes from 653 to 870 AD.

  The Arabs did win individual engagements. Suhail b. Abdi defeated a Sindhi army at the Battle of Rasil in 644, reaching the Indus River, only to be told by Caliph Umar ibn Al-Khattab that he could go no further. An expedition into Zabulistan in 663 AD ended in catastrophe when King Chach of Sindh trapped the Arab force in mountain passes and killed the commander Haris b. Marrah along with his entire army.

  The turning point came through Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf Al Thaqifi, appointed governor of Iraq in 694 AD and later given authority over Khurasan and Sistan as well. He had already seen what happened to overconfident commanders. In 698, a 20,000-strong army under Ubaidullah ibn Abu Bakra was surrounded by Zunbil and Turki Shah near Kabul and lost 15,000 men to thirst and hunger, earning the name "the Doomed Army." Hajjaj pressed on regardless. He equipped his nephew Muhammad bin Qasim with 6,000 Syrian cavalry, additional camel riders, and five catapults shipped by sea to the port of Debal. Muhammad departed from Shiraz in 710 AD, and the conquest of Sindh was finally, decisively underway.

• 3. Muhammad bin Qasim in Sindh

  ›

  Muhammad bin Qasim moved methodically up the Indus after taking Debal, subduing towns one at a time. Some, like Nerun and Sadusan, surrendered peacefully. Brahmanabad, Alor, and finally Multan fell with what the sources describe as light Muslim casualties. Arab forces marched as far north as the foothills of Kashmir along the Jhelum in 713 AD.

  The context that produced the campaign is recorded in the Chach Nama, a 13th-century manuscript claimed to be based on an earlier Arabic record. It was composed by Bakr Kufi and describes the casus belli as the raids of Meds pirates operating from Kutch, Debal, and Kathiawar, who had kidnapped Muslim women travelling from Sri Lanka to Arabia. Raja Dahir of Sindh had refused to hand over Arab rebels sheltering in his territory and declared himself unable to punish the pirates. Two earlier expeditions sent by Hajjaj were defeated before the force under Muhammad bin Qasim succeeded.

  Once in control, Muhammad bin Qasim's governance was more pragmatic than punishing. Historian Yohanan Friedmann notes that bin-Qasim reappointed every deposed Brahmin of Brahmanabad to their former positions, exempted them from the jizya, permitted traditional festivals, and granted protection to temples. At the same time, the Chach Nama records temple demolitions, mass executions of resisting Sindhi forces, and the enslavement of their dependents. Qasim chose the Hanafi school of Islamic law, which classified Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains under Muslim rule as dhimmis entitled to religious freedom in exchange for paying jizya. When Caliph Walid died in 715, Muhammad bin Qasim was removed from his post. Jai Singh, son of the defeated Dahir, retook Brahmanabad, and Arab rule was pushed back to the western shore of the Indus.

• 4. Mahmud of Ghazni and Seventeen Expeditions

  ›

  Mahmud of Ghazni launched seventeen expeditions into the Indian subcontinent in the early 11th century, a number that defines the period as much as any battle. He defeated Raja Jayapala of the Hindu Shahi Dynasty at the Battle of Peshawar in 1001, then made Peshawar the staging point for his forces in 1005. By 1027 he had captured parts of North India and received formal recognition from the Abbasid Caliph al-Qadir Billah.

  The scholar Al Biruni, writing in 1030, described the consequence of Mahmud's campaigns in striking terms: "Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed there wonderful exploits, by which the Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions." Al Biruni observed that Hindu learning had retreated from the conquered zones to places like Kashmir and Varanasi. The Ghaznavid campaigns began with an initially political goal, targeting the Ismaili Fatimids of Multan whose connections to the Fatimid Caliphate in North Africa made them enemies of the Abbasids. Once that was accomplished, Mahmud moved on to looting Indian temples and monasteries, reaching Varanasi, Mathura, Ujjain, Maheshwar, Jwalamukhi, Somnath, and Dwarka.

  Mahmud died in 1030 at age 59. His empire had stretched from Kurdistan to Samarkand and from the Caspian Sea to the Punjab, but only Punjab came under his permanent rule. Ghaznavid control of northwestern India lasted 175 years in total, from 1010 to 1187, and it was during this period that Lahore became first the second capital and then the only capital of the Ghaznavid Empire.

• 5. The Delhi Sultanate

  ›

  Muhammad of Ghor, also known as Mu'izz al-Din, was crowned in Ghazni in 1173 and conquered Lahore in 1186, ending the Ghaznavid Empire. At the First Battle of Tarain in 1191, Prithviraj III of Ajmer turned him back. The following year, Muhammad assembled 120,000 men and met Prithviraj's forces again at Tarain. This time he won. Prithviraj was executed, Muhammad advanced to Delhi, and within a year he controlled northwest Rajasthan and the northern Ganges-Yamuna Doab. Muhammad was assassinated on the 15th of March 1206 while offering evening prayers at Damik near Sohawa in the Punjab province of what is now Pakistan, killed by assassins from the Ismaili Muslim sect.

  His successors established the Delhi Sultanate, which would be ruled by five successive Turko-Afghan dynasties: the Mamluk, the Khalji, the Tughlaq, the Sayyid, and the Lodhi, spanning 1206 to 1526. The word "Mamluk" meant "slave" and referred to the Turkic slave soldiers who became rulers. Islam spread across most of the subcontinent under the Sultanate, and the period also produced what is now recognized as the earliest known Vaar in Punjabi poetry, a war ballad written at the Tughlaq court.

  Perhaps the most consequential service the Delhi Sultanate provided was one it never planned. In the 13th century, it temporarily shielded the subcontinent from the full force of Mongol invasion from Central Asia, even as Afghanistan and western Pakistan fell to the Mongols. The Sultanate also produced a lasting cultural fusion: the language of Urdu, a word meaning "horde" or "camp" in Turkic dialects, emerged from the mingling of Sanskritic Hindi with Persian, Turkish, and Arabic. The Tughlaqs deliberately transplanted the Muslim elite of Delhi, including nobles, Syeds, Sheikhs, and religious scholars, to their second capital at Daulatabad in the south, and these settlers, who were Urdu speakers, carried that language into the Deccan.

• 6. Timur's Sacking of Delhi

  ›

  Timur bin Taraghay Barlas, known in the West as Tamerlane or "Timur the lame," arrived at Delhi in 1398 having already conquered much of western and central Asia. He was informed of civil war within the Tughlaq dynasty and used as his official pretext the claim that the Muslim Sultanate was too tolerant toward its Hindu subjects. The real motive, as the sources make clear, was the wealth of Delhi.

  Before the battle, Timur executed more than 100,000 captives. The Sultan's army was defeated on the 17th of December 1398. On the 18th of December, according to the chronicle of Yazdi, Timur granted protection to the people of Delhi in exchange for payment of "mâl-e amâni," protection money. The collector began gathering it. Then, on the fourth day, Timur ordered that all the people of the city be enslaved. Groups of his soldiers entered Delhi and attacked its citizens. On the 29th of December, Timur's officers killed those gathered in the Congregation Mosque of Old Delhi.

  The chronicler Yahya recorded these events and inserted a prayer in Arabic for the victims. According to Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, 90 captured elephants were used solely to carry precious stones looted from Delhi back to Samarkand, where the stones helped fund construction of what historians believe is the Bibi-Khanym Mosque. The mosque was built too quickly and fell into disrepair within a few decades. Timur departed Delhi in approximately January 1399. The Sultanate revived briefly under the Lodi dynasty but was ultimately conquered by Zahiruddin Babur in 1526.

• 7. The Mughal Zenith and Collapse

  ›

  Babur was a descendant of both Genghis Khan and Timur. He defeated the last Lodhi Sultan at the First Battle of Panipat in 1526, a town north of Delhi, and died four years later in 1530. The empire his dynasty built became one of the largest centralized states in pre-modern history. Emperor Akbar, who reigned from 1556 to 1605, enlarged the empire to include a large portion of the subcontinent and abolished the jizya twice. He stressed religious tolerance and actively integrated non-Muslim subjects into the Mughal bureaucracy and military. He also established a new religion, Din E Elahi, which drew from multiple faiths.

  Aurangzeb, who reigned from 1658 to 1707, moved in a sharply different direction. He oversaw the full establishment of Islamic Sharia through the Fatawa al-Alamgir, a legal code, and his Deccan campaign produced one of the largest death tolls in South Asian history. An estimated 4.6 million people died during his reign, Muslim and Hindu alike. An estimated 2.5 million of his army died during the Mughal-Maratha Wars, approximately 100,000 annually over a quarter-century, while 2 million civilians died from drought, plague, and famine in war-torn lands.

  The Mughal decline came immediately after the empire's peak. Aurangzeb died in 1707 and his successors lacked competent governance. The Afsharid ruler Nader Shah's invasion in 1739 exposed the empire's weakness to the whole region. The Maratha Confederacy, which had emerged in 1674, replaced the Mughals as the dominant power of the subcontinent from 1720 to 1818. In early 1771, the Maratha general Mahadji recaptured Delhi and installed Shah Alam II as a puppet ruler on the Mughal throne. Ranjit Singh unified the Sikh commanders and made Lahore the capital of a new Sikh Empire in 1799. The Battle of Attock in 1813 saw the Sikh army rout the Afghan forces of Wazir Fateh Khan, who lost over 9,000 soldiers.

• 8. Legacy and Lasting Debate

  ›

  Richard M. Eaton lists 80 temples desecrated by Muslim conquerors across the entire period, while also noting that Hindu and Buddhist kings desecrated rival temples before the first Islamic sultanates were established in India. He further documents numerous instances of the Delhi Sultanate, which often employed Hindu ministers, ordering the protection, maintenance, and repair of temples. Historian K. S. Lal claimed that between 1000 and 1500 the Indian population decreased by 30 million, but explicitly stated his estimates were tentative. Economics historians Angus Maddison and Jean-Noel Biraben, as well as Colin Clark, John D. Durand, and Colin McEvedy, reached the opposite conclusion: India's population increased by tens of millions during that same five-century span.

  Among the most concrete legacies of the period is the spread of trade. Arab traders had settled in Indian ports from the 7th century, and the expansion of Islamic Sharia courts created a common commercial and legal system stretching from Morocco to Indonesia. Letters of credit issued in Egypt or Tunisia could be honored in India. Sher Shah Suri built the Grand Trunk Road between 1540 and 1544, connecting Chittagong to Kabul; parts of it remain in use. Sultan Abidin, who ruled from 1420 to 1470, sent Kashmiri artisans to Samarkand to learn book-binding and paper-making. Specific cities became known for particular crafts: Moradabad for brass ware, Mirzapur for carpets, Firozabad for glass wares, Srinagar for papier-mache, Benaras for jewellery and textiles.

  The scholarly dispute over the character and scale of religious persecution during these centuries remains active today, shaped in part by the politics of the 1947 partition of British India. Romila Thapar argues that the narrative of uninterrupted Hindu persecution is historically untenable and points to well-documented instances of Muslim rulers patronizing Hindu religious institutions. Historian Audrey Truschke highlights the Mughal emperors' sustained engagement with Sanskrit culture. What is not disputed is that the encounter between Islam and the existing cultures of the subcontinent produced new languages, new legal systems, new architectural forms, and cities that still stand, from the Taj Mahal to the Jama Masjid.