Chapter 7
Legacy & Modern Impact
How the wounds of Muhammad Ghori's conquests echo through eight centuries to the present day.
How the wounds of Muhammad Ghori's conquests echo through eight centuries to the present day.
History is not a series of isolated events — it is a chain of consequences. Muhammad Ghori's conquests did not just affect 12th-century India; they set in motion a chain of events that directly shaped the India of today.
Understanding this chain is not about living in the past. It is about understanding why India looks the way it looks today — its communal fault lines, its religious demography, its contested historical sites, its relationship with Buddhism, its long economic decline, and its extraordinary resilience in preserving a civilization under sustained assault.
Muhammad Ghori's conquests created the template for the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526 CE) — 320 years during which India was ruled by a succession of Turkish and Afghan dynasties that continued and amplified his policies. The Slave Dynasty, Khilji Dynasty, Tughlaq Dynasty, Sayyid Dynasty, and Lodi Dynasty all operated within the framework Ghori created:
Every subsequent Delhi Sultan built upon Ghori's foundation. The Mughals were the inheritors of this tradition, not inventors of it.
The partition of India in 1947 — creating the Muslim-majority nations of Pakistan and East Pakistan (Bangladesh) — was the culmination of 800 years of demographic and religious transformation that began with Ghori's invasions. The areas of heaviest Ghurid/Sultanate control and conversion (modern Punjab, Sindh, Bengal) are precisely those that became Pakistan and Bangladesh.
This is not to say the Partition was inevitable or that Muslims "caused" it — but the communal divide that British politicians manipulated for their divide-and-rule strategy was itself the product of 800 years of religious, cultural, and political differentiation that began with the Ghurid conquest.
The most counter-intuitive fact of India's religious landscape is that Buddhism — born in India, preached in India, patronized by great Indian emperors like Ashoka — is essentially absent from India. Buddhists constitute less than 1% of India's population today.
This is a direct consequence of Bakhtiyar Khilji's systematic destruction of Buddhist institutions. The burning of Nalanda, Vikramashila, and Odantapuri — and the massacre of their monks — broke the chain of transmission of Buddhist learning in India. Without teachers, the tradition died. Without living communities, there was no recovery.
India regained a small Buddhist presence only in the 20th century — through B.R. Ambedkar's mass Buddhist conversion movement (1956) as a political protest against caste discrimination, and through Tibetan refugees fleeing from China.
The direct consequence of Ghori's policy of building mosques on demolished temple sites is that India today has dozens of disputed religious sites where a mosque stands on the ruins of a demolished Hindu temple — and Muslim and Hindu communities make competing claims to the same sacred ground.
The most famous example is not from Ghori's era but follows the same pattern: the Babri Masjid / Ram Janmabhoomi dispute in Ayodhya, which led to the mosque's demolition in 1992 and centuries of violence. But the underlying phenomenon — the deliberate demolition of Hindu temples and construction of mosques on those sites — began with Ghori and was codified as state policy.
The Qutb Minar in Delhi — India's most-visited historical monument and a UNESCO World Heritage Site — is built directly on the ruins of 27 demolished Hindu and Jain temples. The columns you see in the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque still bear their original Hindu carvings: bells, chains, garlands, and the faces of Hindu deities.
Millions of Indians and international tourists visit this site every year, paying to see what is described as "medieval Indo-Islamic architecture" — without knowing that the decorative pillars they photograph were carved by Hindu artisans for Hindu temples, then dismantled and repurposed by a conquering army.
This is not ancient history. This is a living monument in the capital of India, maintained by the Archaeological Survey of India, that you can visit this weekend.
In 2010, India began the project of rebuilding Nalanda University — not as a tourist attraction or replica, but as a functioning international university. The new Nalanda University was inaugurated in 2014, on the outskirts of the ancient ruins. It now hosts students from across Asia, with a curriculum that includes Pali, Sanskrit, Buddhist studies, and international relations.
This reconstruction has profound symbolic importance: it is India consciously reclaiming a civilizational landmark that was violently destroyed by foreign invasion. The decision to rebuild acknowledges — implicitly — that something of enormous value was destroyed and must be rebuilt.
But we cannot rebuild the 9 million manuscripts. We cannot restore the knowledge traditions that were lost. The new Nalanda is a beginning, not a recovery. The full cost of Muhammad Ghori's 1193 campaign cannot be calculated — only acknowledged.
Visit New Nalanda University Website →