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Prologue continues....
After the death of Mahmud of Ghazni in AD 1030, it was the turn of another Afghan invader named Shahab-ud-Din Ghauri to attack India.
His army first reached Lahore and then moved down to Delhi. Though defeated the first time by the Delhi ruler Prithviraj Chauhan, he came back the next year and defeated Prithviraj and captured Delhi in 1192. Centuries rolled away, but invasions continued unabated.
There came a horde of invaders who established their empires and subjugated the people of India; Alauddin Khilji, Qutb-ud-Din Aibak, Iltutamish, and so on. Once Delhi was captured, the political power passed on to these conquerors. Delhi became a sultanate.
Taimur, a Turco-Mongol, conquered India in the fourteenth century and put an end to the sultanate. He was unimaginably cruel and he slaughtered people mercilessly. Nehru writes:
“He came to Delhi and went back. But all along his route he created a wilderness adorned with pyramids of skulls of those he had slain.
Delhi itself became a city of the dead.”5
The story of invasions continued and in 1526 Babur from Central Asia
captured Delhi and established one of the longest and most powerful
empires in India, the Mughal empire. Its suzerainty extended to most parts of India.
The word Mogul is said to have come to English from the Persian version of the word Mongols.
The founder of the Mughal empire, Zahir-ud-din Muhammed, popularly known as Babur, is said to be the descendant of Genghis Khan on his mother’s side and of Tamerlane on his father’s. Born in Ferghana in the present Uzbekistan, a Central Asian State, Babur had set his sights on India when he grew up into a warrior. He was a warrior of unmatched courage and with the spirit of adventure. His military campaign in India was a great success and led him to occupy the throne in Delhi.
To be continued...