Before the White Europeans segregated and exterminated Indians and plundered India, the Hindus of India had to endure a different kind of segregation and enslavement by Muslim invaders between the 13th and 18th centuries. American historian and philosopher Will Durant (1885-1981) described this period as “probably the bloodiest in history.”
The Muslim rule in India did not emerge suddenly. Instead, it was a lengthy and intricate process that unfolded over several centuries. The Arab conquest of Sindh in 712 AD was a segment of the military campaigns in India’s north-western border regions under the Pious Caliphs and the Umayyads. The subsequent military expansion under the Ghaznavids and Ghaurids occurred in the backdrop of the ‘Abbāsid Caliphate’s central authority weakening due to the emergence of regional military leaders, which spurred further expansion into India. The culmination of this process was the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate, marking the establishment of Muslim rule in India.
The reason for Will Durant to call the Muslim invasion period in India the bloodiest can be found in a mountain range called the Hindu Kush, straddling the borders between Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India. Francis Joseph Steingass (1825-1903), a British linguist, interpreted the term and suffix “-kush” as referring to a killer, someone who kills, slays, murders, or oppresses, as exemplified by the term “azhdaha-kush” meaning dragon-slayer. Azhdaha, Azhdahak, Ezhdeha, or Azhdar is a dragon-like creature in Persian mythology. Steingass created a comprehensive Persian-to-English dictionary, now digitally hosted by The University of Chicago and available under the Digital Dictionaries of South Asia platform.
Steingass’s dictionary provides several examples of the usage of kush, such as ḵẖirs-kush (A bear-killer), sālār-kush (A slayer of army-leaders), and sitamkāra-kush (Who slays the oppressor). Thus, Hindu Kush is translated and interpreted as “Hindu Slayer.” The 14th-century explorer Ibn Battuta (1304-1369) asserted that the Hindu Kush Mountain range was the site where millions of Hindus were killed. These Hindus from India, who were enslaved, were being transported for sale in Afghanistan and further afield slave markets.
In recent times, “Right Wing Hindu Nationalism” has been blamed for creating the Hindu Kush “myth.” Alternative meanings have been suggested, such as Hindu Koh, meaning Mountain of Hindus. Koh is the Persian word for “mountain,” as in the name of the famous diamond Koh-i-Nûr, “mountain of light.” Other scholars have suggested that it could be a corruption of the Greek word for these mountains, Caucasus “Indicus” (corrupted as Hindu Kush), to distinguish these mountains from those that stood between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Encyclopaedia Britannica states that the Pashto language of Afghanistan calls the mountain “Hindu Koh,” which means “Mount India.” Pashto is an Iranian language close to Persian, and in both, Hindu Koh does indeed mean “Indian Mountain” or “Mount India.”
However, contrary to the “Hindu Nationalism creating Hindu Kush” myth, Ibn Battuta, a Muslim traveler from Morocco, confirms that this mountain range’s name is indeed Hindu Kush, not Hindu Koh. In the dual-language Arabic-French book “Voyages d’Ibn Battûta, texte arabe accompagné d’une introduction” by C. Defremery and Dr. B.R. Sanguinetti, initially published in 1854 and reprinted by Editions Anthropos, Paris, in 1968, there is an account by the Moroccan explorer on page 84. Ibn Battuta explains that one of the reasons for the journey across the Hindu Kush was the fear of snow. They had to cross a mountain known as Hindû Kûsh, which translates to “Hindu-killer.” This name was given because a large number of male and female Hindu slaves being transported from India would often lose their lives on this mountain due to the extreme cold and heavy snowfall.
According to “The Travels of Ibn Batuta,” translated to English from Arabic manuscripts by Reverend Samuel Lee, Professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge, published by Cambridge University Press in 1829, on pages 97-98, Ibn Battuta clearly states the following: “After this I proceeded to the city of Barwan, in the road to which is a high mountain, covered with snow and exceedingly cold; they call it the Hindu Kush, i.e. Hindu-slayer, because most of the slaves brought thither from India die on account of the intenseness of the cold.”
These two translations, one in French and the other in English, both by “Non-Right-Wing Hindu Nationalists,” put to rest the fallacious theory of Hindu Koh and Caucasus “Indicus” as Hindu Mountain since Ibn Battuta himself explains the meaning of this mountain as Hindu-slayer and confirms the slave trade of Hindu men and women of India by Muslim invaders.
Ibn Battuta documented the name Hindu Kush as pre-existing. He further attested that the name was a result of Muslims’ ill-treatment of Hindus, specifically, their large-scale enslavement and transportation to Central Asia. According to his records, the name does not pertain to a single incident of massacre but rather to the recurring event of Hindu slave caravans traversing the mountain range and losing a portion of their cargo to the cold.
The name Hindu Kush is unrelated to another recorded event, where a hundred thousand Hindus lost their lives in a single night at the hands of Timur (1336-1405). This took place in 1399 when Timur, anticipating a rebellion from his Hindu captives that could disrupt the battle he was preparing for the following days, instructed his men to eliminate all their Hindu slaves immediately. As a result, a hundred thousand Hindus were killed that very night.
Ibn Battuta, who lived several generations before Timur, refers to “Hindu Kush” as a term that was already widely used. In his interpretation, the term did not denote a single dramatic event of massacre or mass death due to frost. Instead, it referred to a repeated occurrence of enslaved Hindu people dying during transit. While the casualties might not have reached a hundred thousand in one night, the death toll over centuries of Hindu slave transports by Muslim invaders would likely have been significantly higher.
During the Arab invasion of Sindh, 20,000 Hindus were enslaved following the seizure of Brahmanabad – a fifth of them were kept for state purposes. At the same time, the rest were allocated among the soldiers. In a similar vein, during Mahmud of Ghazni’s incursion, enslaved Hindus were captured and transported to Ghazni, historically known as Ghaznain or Ghazna, in southeastern Afghanistan. In numerous instances, enslaved Hindu people constituted a significant part of the spoils taken from India.
During the Mongol incursions in the 13th and 14th centuries, records show that Hindus were enslaved in Central Asia. This is evident in Timur’s invasion of India, during which his troops seized 100,000 enslaved Hindus. Anticipating a revolt, Timur ordered the execution of these enslaved people just before his assault on Delhi. After the invasion, he orchestrated a mass enslavement of “several thousand artisans and professionals,” including stonecutters. These individuals were later employed in constructing his “grand” mosque in Samarkand.
The enslavement of Hindu artisans was a significant aspect of Muslim invasions. The subsequent founding of the Delhi and Deccan sultanates laid the groundwork for the slave trade as a domestic economy throughout the nation, leading to the emergence of slave markets across India. As famous Indo-Persian Sufi Scholar Amir Khusrau (1253-1325) noted, “The Turks, at their discretion, can seize, buy, or sell any Hindu.”
During the medieval period, enslaved Hindus were a highly sought-after commodity in the markets of Central Asia. The historian Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Utbi penned his work, Tarikh al-Yamini, as a chronicle of the initial Ghaznavid rulers, emphasizing Mahmud (998-1030). Mahmud was a Turkic sovereign of Ghazna, and his forebears had held positions as elite military enslaved people and leaders under the Samanid Amirs in Bukhara (819-1005).
Before Mahmud’s rule, Turkic forces positioned on the eastern frontier of the Samanids had already begun raiding Indian communities and temples. However, Mahmud formalized these raids as the Samanid regime faltered and eventually collapsed. Mahmud spearheaded seventeen expeditions against India, each time returning to his capital, Ghazna, with vast riches and countless enslaved Hindu men and women. This earned him the moniker “Hammer of the Infidels.”
During the rule of Tuglaq dynasty (1320-1413), it was observed that the slave markets in Delhi were saturated with an “overabundance” of enslaved people, which significantly reduced their prices. In the era of Shahjahan (1592-1666) and Aurangzeb (1618-1707), impoverished farmers and their families were taken away by tax collectors to be sold to generate revenue.
The Hindu slave trade in India had become so prevalent that some rulers even established prices to regulate the slave markets. For example, Sultan Khilji set the price for an attractive girl suitable for concubinage at 20-40 tankha (with ten tankhas equivalent to 1 gold coin) and the price of an enslaved man at 100 to 200 tankhas. Attractive boys were sold at 20-40 tankhas, while those deemed less suitable for labor were priced at 7-8 tankhas. Tankha, or Tanka was the standard circulation silver coin of the Sultanate of Delhi that ruled large parts of the Indian subcontinent for 320 years from 1206-1526.
As a side note, a New York Times article dated August 22, 1863, reported that slaves in the United States commanded a higher price in Kentucky, taking gold as the standard of value than in any other of the Southern United States. In Maryland, slaves fetched a price of $18 per head. Other reports suggest that for the period 1722–1775, the average price of slaves in South Carolina was $160 as compared to $152 in the Caribbean. Over the period 1785–1806, South Carolina prices averaged $216 as compared to $227 in the Caribbean.
Looking back at their twelfth campaign, the sixteenth-century document, Tarikh-i Alfi, indicates that the Ghaznavid armies enslaved approximately 750,000 Hindu individuals. In another account, al-Utbi notes that during the earlier Ghaznavid invasion of Peshawar and Waihand in 1001, Mahmud and his forces captured around 100,000 young Hindu people. The Tarikh-i Firishta, written much later than the actual event, reports that after the Ghaznavid seized Thanesar in 1014, his army brought about 200,000 Hindu captives and an immense amount of wealth to Ghazna, making the capital resemble an Indian city, with no soldier in the camp being without wealth or numerous enslaved Hindu people.
In 1219-20, Minhaj al-Din Juzjani (1193-1265) escaped from the invading Mongol armies in his homeland of Gur, central Afghanistan. He found sanctuary in Delhi, where he secured a position at the court of the Delhi Sultans. Here, he began to compile his comprehensive history of the Islamic world, the Tabaqat-i Nasiri, which he finished in 1260. Juzjani’s writings indicate that the inaugural ruler of the Shamsi slave dynasty, Qutb al-Din Aibak (1206-10), allegedly enslaved around 20,000 Hindu individuals in Gujarat and an additional 50,000 in Kalinjar.
In another source from the same period, comparable numbers are provided in Zia al-Din Barani’s Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi, a chronicle of the Delhi Sultanate spanning from the rule of the Shamsi leader Ghiyath al-Din Balban (1266-87) to the Tughluqid Firuz Shah (1351-88). Barani states that Sultan Khalji (1296-1316) had around 50,000 slave Hindu boys and employed an additional 70,000 as construction workers throughout his kingdom. Barani also estimates that Sultan Firuz Shah’s benefactor had approximately 180,000 enslaved Hindu people.
Considering the numbers cited in historical sources, it is evident that the act of Muslim invaders enslaving Hindu prisoners from India led to the transportation of hundreds of thousands of Hindus to slave markets located beyond the Hindu Kush. In addition, hundreds of thousands of other Hindus remained enslaved within their homelands by the Muslim dynasties ruling India for hundreds of years.