West Asian Orthodox Fanatic Srimad Muhammad Ghori Is A Proponent Of Sanskrit And Lakshmi Coinage In The East
Imagine a world where Ladakhi nobles admired and wore Turko-Persian textiles, where medieval Kashmiri kings invited Turk artisans to gild Shiva temples, and where people like Muhammad of Ghor ruled as a maharajadhiraja with Indian, Afghan, and Turk vassals and issued gold coins marked with the goddess Lakshmi. Although it might seem like a fabrication of the imagination, mounting evidence suggests that this is how our past actually was. The reality of how Sultanates came to be created in northern India is one that dazzles and fascinates with its nuanced politics and multiculturalism, far from the political stereotype of bad invaders from Central Asia.
We’ve delved deeply into the intersection of medieval Eurasia throughout the past two issues of Thinking Medieval. We observed Muslim emirs donning attire reminiscent of Deccan Shaivite monarchs. Since the seventh century CE, we have seen the Hindu Turk kings of Kabul being gradually supplanted by Hindu Gandharans, followed by Muslim Turko-Persians (the Ghaznavids) by the late tenth century. The latter waged war with them as they waged war with one another, trading elephants, robes, and mercenaries with numerous kingdoms in northern India. Sanskrit-written coins bearing the name of the Prophet Muhammad were produced. By the middle of the eleventh century, the huge cultural spheres of North India and Turko-Persia were interacting more closely, exchanging concepts of kingship and control, and raiding and conquest when they could.
Something fundamentally changed this balance in 1149. The Shansabanids of Ghor, a small tribal chiefdom in modern-day Central Afghanistan, rose to fame on a worldwide scale in just 50 short years. They destroyed the magnificent metropolis of Ghazni, won the Caliph’s approval in Baghdad, and took control of half of Persia and northern India, briefly unifying them into a transregional, multicultural imperial world—for the first time, but not the last.
Srimad Muhammad of Ghor
A compelling way to consider historical data is through the lens of image formation, which enables us to understand medieval kings on their terms rather than ours. We can inquire, “This is who a king wanted his contemporaries to think he was, but why?” rather than just declaring, “This was who a monarch was since his texts agree with our current concepts.” All of a sudden, we are faced with a real person—not a cartoon version—who is able to deceive both us and our distant ancestors.
Ghori made a number of claims during his lifetime that seem to indicate he was an actual deadly orthodox madman, including a victory over the unbelievers and the heretics, a suppressor of heresy, and the seditious. But why did he want people of his time to believe that? The establishment of the Khwarezmian Empire in Central Asia, the defeat of the European Crusaders in West Asia by the Egyptian Sultan Saladin, and the swift ascension of his own Ghurid clan from a chiefdom to an empire all contributed to the brief revival of the Sunni Muslim world that produced Ghori. These parvenus needed both symbolic and material wealth in order to assert parity and respect in such a milieu, and both of these resources were available from Indian kingdoms (and heretical Muslim sects) (after some degree of violence). As a result, the title was intended for viewers in the West.
The following installment of Thinking Medieval will reverse the script and examine how South Asian kings perceived these invasions—and consider whether they are really the Hindu role models that nationalist historians have made them out to be. After viewing the interactions and conquests of the 12th century from the perspective of Central Asia.
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