Introductory - Global Sikh Studies

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able to usurp political power practically throughout northern India. 3
The same phenomenon repeated itself, more or less, when the
Muslim invaders conquered the country. We are not alluding here to
battles lost against them, because even the best of wel-prepared nations
have suffered defeats. What is painful is that, sometimes, a handful
of foreigners overran vast tracts of the land without encountering any
sizable resistance. Shihab-ud-din Gauri won the second battle of
Tarain in 1192 and within fourteen years, his General, Bakhtiyar Khiliji,
had reached the bank of the Brahmputra. Nadiya was occupied with
an advance party of no more than eighteen horsemen 4 , and this opened
the way for the establishment of Muslim rule in Bengal. Sharma writes:
‘In the history of the fateful forty-five years (1295-1340) traced by us
so far, the one distressfully disappointing feature has been the absence,
in Maharashtra, of the will to resist… The people of Maharashtra
were conquered, oppressed and humiliated, but they meakly submitted
like dum driven cattle’. 5 What is even more painful is that, once the
back of the military power of the ruling castes was broken, there was
practically no organized notable attempt on the initiative of the local
people to overthrow the foreign power. This is the spectacle till we
come to the rise of the Marathas under Shivaji and that of the Sikhs.
Genghis Khan wa more ruthless than Mahmood Ghaznavi, and he
out-generalled the powers of three empires. 6 But, after the flight of
Mohammad Shah of Kharsen, the population of the Muslim countries,
like that of China, rose against him. 7 Nothing of the kind happened
in India.
Mahmood Ghaznavi destroyed all the important Hindu temples
in Northern India, from Mathura to Somnath. “In the early
Muhammadan period it is not too much to say that every great mosque
was erected from the materials of ruined shrines of the older faith of
the Hindu or Jain’. 8 Mahmood believed that it behoved him ‘to root
out the worship of idols from the face of all India.’ Most of the Muslim
rulers and the Ulemas sincerely believed to be their Shariatic duty,
either to bring, even by force, the non-Muslims into the Islamic fold, or
to reduce them to second-rate citizens. Such was the religious bigotry of
those times. But, in the caste society, there was hardly any significant