The Ghaznavid Empire of India

Almost all of our information on the Ghaznavids comes from two contemporary chronicles (one in Persian and one in Arabic) and a divan (poetic anthology) from the early eleventh century. The Arabic text is the Tarikh-i Yamini written by Abu Nasr al-ʻUtbi, and the Persian chronicle is the Zayn al-Akhbar by Gardizi. Virtually, all subsequent Persian chroniclers drew on the later Persian translation of the Yamini. After the Mughal period, a few used Gardizi as well. In the nineteenth century, H. M. Elliot translated parts of the Persian translation of ʻUtbi into English, which popularised that particular version of events in modern scholarship. This uncritical overreliance on a single source has led to perhaps the greatest misunderstanding of medieval Indian history. I will argue that the version of the Ghaznavid campaigns in ʻUtbi was meant strictly for the court of the ‘Abbasid caliph in Baghdad where a sufficiently learned audience could actually be expected to understand the very difficult Arabic of the text. The Yamini did not simply embellish reality but was actually trying to create a narrative that was in contradiction to and even independent of reality. It was part of a campaign of misinformation to hide the fact that the Ghaznavids were creating an Indian empire both as a network of tributary kings and as an open trade zone ruled by a king of kings symbolised by the elephant.