Mathura, Somnath and after

In 1018 Mahmūd reached Mathura, a very rich city with a magnificent temple. His own court historian, al-Utbi, wrote that no writer's pen or painter's brush could describe its beauty. Mahmūd destroyed it and took its treasure.

He went on to Kannauj, surprised one of the last Pratīhāra rulers, and looted and destroyed many temples. A few years later he marched to Gujarat and Somnath, then a busy seaport. Despite strong local resistance and heavy losses, he won after a few days of fighting, destroyed the Somanātha Śhiva temple and looted its great treasures.

In later centuries the Somnath temple was rebuilt and destroyed again several times. The present temple was built in 1950, paid for entirely by public donations, and opened the next year by Rajendra Prasad, then President of India.

Mahmūd died in Ghazni in 1030. Around then his nephew Sālār Masūd attacked the Ganga region. According to oral history and a 17th-century Muslim chronicle, at Bahraich the local ruler Suheldev resisted successfully, and Sālār Masūd was killed in battle.

Mahmūd's campaigns brought not only destruction and looting but the killing of tens of thousands of ordinary people and the capture of many prisoners, including children, who were sold as slaves in Central Asia. His biographers describe him as a powerful but cruel and ruthless general, who also killed Muslims of rival sects.

Why did he do it? Since Mahmūd never tried to stay in India beyond Punjab, historians have often said his main aim was plunder. Large temples did hold huge wealth, built up from devotees' offerings over centuries, so they were obvious targets.

But evidence from his own time also shows a religious aim: he wanted to spread his version of Islam. Al-Utbi wrote that wherever Mahmūd went he plundered, destroyed temples and built mosques in their place.

Al-Bīrūnī adds that Mahmūd had the Somnath image broken and part of it taken to Ghazni and laid at the door of the mosque, for people to wipe their feet on — an act meant to humiliate, not to earn money. So the evidence supports both motives. (Mahmūd also issued a coin at Lahore with Arabic on one side and Sanskrit on the other, calling him 'nṛipati', king.)