Free The Age of Wrath: A History of the Delhi Sultanate by Abraham Eraly

Only women and children were usually—but not always—spared, but they, as well as numerous men, were seized as slaves, and were afterwards taken to Ghazni. There, reports Al-Utbi, ‘merchants from distant cities came to purchase the slaves, so that … [many lands in Central Asia] were filled with them, and the fair and the dark, the rich and the poor, were commingled in common slavery.’ There was a good demand for Indian slaves in Central Asia at this time, and they normally fetched a good price, though at one time the Afghan slave market was so overstocked with Indian slaves that their price plummeted, and a slave could be bought for as little as a couple of dirhams.
    Curiously, Mahmud, unlike most other invaders, had no hunger for land. Had he desired it, he could have easily annexed a good part of North India to his kingdom, but he did not have the patience for empire building. Except Punjab and Sind—the gateways to India, which he needed to keep open for his raids—Mahmud did not annex any territory in India. His Indian campaigns were like bandit raids—he swept through the land rapidly, fought several quick battles, slaughtered enemy soldiers and people in multitudes, destroyed temples and smashed idols, enslaved thousands of people, seized immeasurable booty, and then sped back to Ghazni. He had no desire to settle in India, perhapsbecause of its torrid climate, which, as Khondamir puts it, ‘consumed the body as easily as flame melts a candle.’
    Mahmud was proud of the incredible amount of booty he seized in India, and once, on returning from a raid, he piled up the treasures he had collected on carpets in the courtyard of his palace, for people to admire it and extol him. And Ghazni, enriched by the vast treasures that Mahmud and his soldiers brought from India, became a fabulously rich city, where, as Wolseley Haig puts it, ‘mosques, colleges, caravanserais and hospices sprang up on every side.’
    MAHMUD’S IDEAL CAMPAIGN schedule was to arrive in India soon after the monsoon ended, and to return to Ghazni before the monsoon set in again and the rivers became unfordable. When the season of rain ended, the season of plunder began.
    Mahmud had five rainless and cool months, October to February, for his Indian campaigns. But the exigencies of war and the waywardness of weather often wrecked his plans. Nature itself was a vicious adversary that Mahmud had to contend with in India—torrential rivers, waterless deserts, deep ravines, jungles infested with ferocious animals and venomous reptiles. Once, his passage into India was blocked for a couple of months by a snowstorm that covered his route with heavy snowdrifts; another time he lost all his booty while crossing a flooded river. Sometimes vengeful native guides led him into forbidding marshes, as they did once, when he was returning from Kashmir; or led him into desert infernos, as they did once, when he was returning from Gujarat. Still he persisted relentlessly with his campaigns. And fortune invariably favoured him.
    The response of Indian kings to the Ghaznavid invasion was usually craven, if we are to believe the partisan testimony of Muslim chroniclers. According to these chroniclers, the rajas often fled from Mahmud’s path, even when they had under their command armies that were much larger than that of Mahmud. Often, on Mahmud’s approach, they sneaked out from their forts in the middle of the night, and hid in thick forests till Mahmud left the area. Such craven responses were at least in part due to the widely prevalent fatalistic attitude of Indians, which made them believe that victory and defeat were not in their hands, but as fate decreed. They were therefore defeated in their minds even as they entered the battlefield, and were more ready to flee than to fight. There are only very few recorded instances of Indian kings offering heroic resistance to Mahmud.
    Sometimes Indian kings purchased peace from Mahmud by surrendering to him