Chapter 1
The Official Narrative
What your textbooks say about Mahmud of Ghazni — and what they deliberately leave out.
What your textbooks say about Mahmud of Ghazni — and what they deliberately leave out.
Open any NCERT or state-board history textbook in India, and you will find Mahmud of Ghazni described in remarkably neutral — even positive — terms. He is typically presented as a "great military commander" who conducted "expeditions" to India, a "patron of scholars" like Al-Biruni and Firdausi, and a ruler who built the city of Ghazni into a magnificent cultural capital.
This is not entirely false. But it is catastrophically incomplete.
What textbooks omit is the documented reality: that Mahmud's 17 "expeditions" were systematic campaigns of plunder, temple destruction, mass enslavement, and religious persecution — and that the magnificent city of Ghazni was built entirely with wealth stolen from India.
The typical Indian school textbook presents Mahmud of Ghazni with the following framing:
Notice the language: his raids are called "expeditions" — a word that implies legitimate military activity. The destruction of Somnath is mentioned as "important" — without explaining what actually happened there. His patronage of scholars is highlighted while the mass enslavement of Indian populations goes unmentioned.
When Mahmud attacked the Somnath temple in 1025 CE, he didn't just "raid" it. According to Tarikh-i-Yamini by Al-Utbi and Tarikh-i-Ferishta, over 50,000 Hindu defenders were slaughtered defending the temple. Mahmud personally smashed the sacred Jyotirlinga with his mace. The temple's gates were carried off to Ghazni. The gold and jewels looted from Somnath alone were so vast that they had to be carried by hundreds of camels.
After every raid, Mahmud's armies captured thousands of Hindus and sold them as slaves in the markets of Central Asia. Al-Utbi records that after the raid on Thanesar alone, 200,000 captives were taken as slaves. The slave markets of Ghazni were so flooded with Indian slaves that prices dropped to a few dirhams per person. This is documented by multiple medieval chroniclers.
Mahmud's raids were not mere plundering expeditions — they were ideological campaigns of iconoclasm. He specifically targeted Hindu and Jain temples, smashing idols, demolishing sacred structures, and converting some sites into mosques. The temples at Mathura, Thanesar, Kannauj, Nagarkot, and many others were systematically destroyed. Al-Utbi, his court historian, recorded these destructions as pious achievements.
Your textbooks praise Mahmud for building Ghazni into a "great cultural centre." What they omit is that every brick of that magnificence was paid for with Indian blood and treasure. The scholars he "patronized" — including Firdausi and Al-Biruni — were funded by the wealth plundered from Indian temples. Al-Biruni himself, in his Kitab-ul-Hind, documented the devastation Mahmud wrought on India.
Al-Biruni, whom textbooks celebrate as Mahmud's "court scholar," actually wrote one of the most damning accounts of the devastation. In his Kitab-ul-Hind (c. 1030 CE), he wrote:
The systematic minimization of Mahmud of Ghazni's atrocities in Indian textbooks is not accidental — it is part of a broader pattern of historiographical bias documented by scholars like Arun Shourie in Eminent Historians and Sita Ram Goel in Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them.
This whitewashing operates through several mechanisms:
The whitewashing of Mahmud of Ghazni's atrocities is not just a historical curiosity — it has real consequences for how Indians understand their own civilization.
When textbooks present the destruction of Somnath as a mere "important expedition," they deny future generations the ability to understand why certain temple sites remain contested today, why certain cultural practices were nearly lost, and why the economic trajectory of India was fundamentally altered by centuries of systematic plunder.
Historical literacy is not about fostering resentment — it is about building informed citizens who understand the forces that shaped their civilization.
The chapters that follow present the documented facts — from primary sources written by Muslim historians themselves — so that you can judge for yourself what was lost.