Somnath 1025–26: Raid, Return and the Jat Campaign

Nearly everything known about the raid comes from writers working inside the Ghaznavid world or shortly after it. The contemporary and near-contemporary testimony is Arabic and Persian. Al-Biruni, who spent years in India and is the author of the Kitab fi tahqiq ma li'l-hind — commonly cited as Tahqiq-e-Hind — is the closest thing the event has to an eye-witness among surviving named authors. Later Persian histories carry the narrative forward, and later still, European historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries translated and amplified it.

On the other side of the ledger there is a silence that is itself evidence. A. K. Majumdar's 1956 study of the Chaulukyas of Gujarat, quoted in Romila Thapar's work on the temple, puts it plainly: Hindu sources give no information about the raids of Sultan Mahmud, so what follows is based solely on the testimony of Muslim authors. Thapar's own point is not that the chronicles are false. It is that they were accepted as historically valid without much attention to their internal contradictions, largely because they happened to resemble what European historians of the period expected a history to look like.

The consequence is a lopsided record. The raid is extremely well documented for an eleventh-century event — far better than most battles of the period — and almost all of that documentation is celebratory, written for a court that had an interest in the size of the victory. Reading it responsibly means using the chronicles without treating their figures as measurements.

The army left Ghazni on 18 October 1025 according to the standard chronology drawn from Nazim's study of Mahmud. It rested at Multan, crossed the desert, took the fort of Ludrava near Jaisalmer, moved through the Jaisalmer country and Mallani, and reached Anhilwara — Patan — by the end of December. The siege of Somnath began on 6 January 1026 and the temple fell after three days.

So the year depends on which part of the campaign you are dating and which calendar you are using. Al-Biruni reports that Durlabha of Multan computed the year of the raid as Shaka 947, which Thapar renders as AD 1025–26 — the double-year form that most modern scholarship now uses. The year-by-year reading of the Persian chronicles places the attack itself in the winter of 1025–26. The recent academic literature on the temple's modern history, including Tommaso Bobbio's 2023 article in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, refers to the invasion of AD 1026.

The date 1024, which still appears in Indian publications and on this site's own temple page, belongs to a different conversion of the Hijri dating, and the variation across the literature is real: datings ranging from January 1025 to January 1026 are in print. It is not a conspiracy and it is not evidence of anything except the persistence of an older convention. This page uses 1025–26 and flags the alternatives where they matter.

Bhima I of the Chaulukya dynasty, whose capital was at Anhilwara, withdrew to the fort of Kanthkot in Kutch rather than meet the Ghaznavid army in the field. A defence was assembled further south: roughly twenty thousand warriors under local chiefs at Modhera were defeated, and the garrison at the port held out for three days.

The temple fell on 8 January 1026. The accounts describe the treasury taken and the lingam broken, and they describe the two together. That pairing is the reason the raid has never separated cleanly into a financial act or a religious one — the sources present it as both, and a reader who insists on one reading over the other is choosing, not discovering.

The plunder figure usually quoted is twenty million dinars. Numbers of that order in a medieval chronicle are not measurements. They are the writer's way of saying that a great deal was taken, and they should be read that way. The same applies to the army strengths that circulate alongside them.

The army stayed eighteen days. Before leaving, Mahmud is reported to have instructed Bhima's brother that the temple should be rebuilt — an instruction that, if it happened as reported, tells you something about how the raid was understood at the time: as an extraction from a subject territory, not as the annihilation of a place that could never be used again.

The march out of Gujarat is where this story usually gets compressed into a sentence, and it is the part that most needs the detail. The army did not simply go back the way it came. A force under a king the chronicles call "Param Dev" blocked the direct passage, which pushed the Ghaznavids through the Aravalli hills and the Rann of Kutch. From there the route ran by Kutch and Sindh — the so-called watery route — past Miyani, on to Kanthkot, and north to Mansura.

It was through the Sindh country and the Sindh Sagar doab that the harassment began in earnest. The chronicles describe repeated attacks on the marching column and its baggage. These were not pitched battles; they were the kind of pressure that a heavily loaded army moving through hostile ground is worst equipped to absorb, and the reported result is a very large attrition between the force that left Ghazni in October 1025 and the one that returned to it on 2 April 1026.

The figure attached to that return — that Mahmud arrived with only two thousand men — is the single most quoted number in this entire story and the single most unreliable. It appears in the gazetteer and school-text tradition as a fact. It is a chronicle figure, from a genre that routinely described returning armies as remnants, and it should be reported as reported rather than as counted. What it does establish, directionally, is not disputed: the return was expensive, and the Jat communities of the Sindh Sagar region were part of why.

Mahmud did not leave the matter there. In 1027 he mounted a further expedition — usually described as punitive — against Jat communities in the Salt Range and the Sindh Sagar doab for the attacks on his army during the previous year's return. The standard treatment is the campaign described in W. Haig's Cambridge History of India and the volume of the History and Culture of the Indian People devoted to the struggle for empire, both of which draw on the Persian sources; Muhammad Nazim's study of Mahmud gives the campaign the same reading.

The military form of the expedition is distinctive and is the part the sources agree on most clearly. Mahmud went to Multan and built a flotilla — the sources give fourteen hundred boats, fitted with iron spikes at the prow and along the gunwales and manned by armed crews. The Jats, who had moved their families and goods to an island in the river, put a fleet of reed boats on the water against it. Some sources give the Jat fleet as eight thousand boats; that figure is generally treated in the literature as inflated, and it is safer to report the smaller number and name the larger one as a variant.

The engagement itself is described as a Ghaznavid victory, and 1027 marks Mahmud's last military expedition into India. He returned to Ghazni around the middle of that year and died three years later, in 1030. The temple at Somnath was rebuilt under the Chaulukya rulers in the twelfth century, and the shrine the visitor sees today dates from 1951.

This is the section that most versions of the story skip, and it is the reason the page exists. The reported facts are specific and modest: a regional population harassed a withdrawing army; a punitive expedition was sent the following year; that expedition is reported to have succeeded. Everything beyond that — the defeat of Mahmud, the permanent blocking of his return, a named commander, a battlefield, a decisive turning point — is not in the sources.

Three limits are worth stating outright. No source consulted for this page names a Jat commander. No source consulted for this page reports a Ghaznavid defeat in the 1027 campaign. And no source consulted for this page says the Jats prevented Mahmud from returning — the expedition of 1027 is itself the proof that the route was open enough for an army to use it twice.

None of that diminishes what the harassment achieved. Harassment of a withdrawing army is a real military act with real effects, and the Ghaznavid response — a purpose-built river fleet, deployed the following year — is itself the clearest available measure of how serious the threat was taken to be. The point is not that the Jats did nothing. The point is that the difference between that and the claim usually made online is the whole distance between a chronicle and a myth.

Mahmud of Ghazni ruled from 998 to 1030 and campaigned into India repeatedly across a quarter of a century. The figure usually given for those campaigns is seventeen, and it is a real figure attached to a real body of military activity. What it does not describe is seventeen attacks on Somnath.

There was one raid on the temple, in 1025–26. The confusion enters from two directions. First, the count of the expeditions is not itself stable: the Somnath campaign is called Mahmud's fifteenth invasion in some accounts and the 1027 expedition against the Jats is called both his sixteenth and his seventeenth, depending on the source and on whether subsidiary raids are being counted separately. Second, the seventeenth-campaign figure travels through popular writing alongside the word Somnath often enough that the two become welded together.

The result is a multiplication error that the temple's own popular history tends to absorb. When a reader is told there were seventeen expeditions and then told about Somnath in the same breath, the natural inference is a repeated assault, and that inference then supports the further claim that the Jats had to intervene more than once. Neither follows from the record.

A parallel variation of this error claims that Mahmud looted Somnath 'twelve times' — or that Somnath was raided for an 11th or 12th time by Mahmud. This claim has no support in any primary chronicle or reliable scholarship. It stems from conflating three separate things: Mahmud's total Indian expedition tally (where Somnath is sometimes numbered as an 11th, 12th, or 15th expedition in older divergent lists), the traditional status of Somnath as the first of the twelve Jyotirlingas, and the multi-century sequence of subsequent destructions carried out by entirely different rulers (such as the Delhi Sultanate in 1299 and 1395, the Gujarat Sultanate under Mahmud Begada, and the Mughals under Aurangzeb). Mahmud himself attacked Somnath exactly once.

If a large military event happened at a wealthy and well-connected temple on a busy trading coast in 1026, one might expect something in stone to remember it. Nothing has been found.

Thapar draws attention to a specific case: a Kadamba inscription of 1038 CE, from a king of Goa, recording a pilgrimage that makes no mention of Mahmud's raid. Her broader observation is that neither Sanskrit nor Prakrit inscriptions refer to the raid at all. This is a narrow claim about what the epigraphic record contains, and it is worth holding next to the much broader claim that the raid is absent from Indian memory. It is not absent from Indian memory. It is absent from Indian inscriptions, which is a different and more limited statement.

The silence has two competing readings and neither of them can currently be settled. One is that the raid, while real, did not produce the kind of commemorative inscription that would survive — temple patrons after 1026 had reasons to describe rebuilding rather than defeat. The other is the harder reading associated with the Thapar line of argument: that the weight later placed on the event has much more to do with what the chronicles were made to carry from the nineteenth century onwards than with what happened at the site in 1026. Both readings are compatible with the physical evidence. Neither is proved by it.

During the first Anglo-Afghan war, in 1842, Lord Ellenborough instructed the British forces returning from Afghanistan to collect the gates said to hang at the tomb of Mahmud of Ghazni in Ghazni — gates which, the story went, had been taken from Somnath eight centuries earlier. He made the order public that November, in the document known as the Proclamation of the Gates.

General William Nott removed the gates from Ghazni in September 1842. A whole sepoy regiment, the 6th Jat Light Infantry, was detailed to carry them back to India, and the gates were paraded through the country on a ceremonial carriage as an intended restoration of a Hindu shrine by a Christian colonial power. The episode was debated in the House of Commons in 1843.

The gates were not sandalwood, as tradition held. They were deodar — a timber native to the region around Ghazni — and their carving was not Gujarati. On examination they were not accepted as authentic, and they were placed in the arsenal store-room of Agra Fort, where they remain. Neither Turko-Persian nor Indian sources mention any such gates having been taken from Somnath in 1026. Thapar's verdict is that if there were any gates at all, they might have been fort gates.

This is the moment at which the Somnath story acquires its modern shape. Bobbio's article traces it precisely: an episode from 1026 was turned, in 1842, into an instrument of colonial legitimacy, and the historiography that followed — James Mill's, Gibbon's before it — had already framed the penetration of Islam into India as a rising domination of which Somnath was the turning point. The myth was not invented in 1842. It was given a purpose.

The temple at Somnath today was completed in 1951. Its reconstruction is the second of the two moments Bobbio studies, and it is the one in which the raid became inseparable from the question of what kind of state independent India would be.

The reconstruction committee was led by Vallabhbhai Patel, with K. M. Munshi among its most forceful advocates, and it was opposed at the time by Jawaharlal Nehru, who feared that Somnath would become the symbol of a sectarian reading of the nation, particularly in the wake of partition. Gandhi's assassination that same period changed the political weather around the project but not its completion. The shrine was consecrated on 11 May 1951 by President Rajendra Prasad.

Read with the 1842 episode beside it, the pattern is unmistakable: two different polities, separated by a century, using the same eleventh-century raid to make a claim about themselves. That is what makes this story unusual. Very few medieval events in India have been reconstructed so thoroughly, and so repeatedly, by people who were not there.

Search for this subject in English today and three kinds of claim come back with predictable regularity: that Mahmud attacked seventeen times (or looted Somnath 11 or 12 times); that the Jats defeated him on the return; and that a named Indian king — Raja Bhoj and the folk hero Goga Ji both turn up — killed him or defeated him in single combat.

None of the three survives contact with the sources. The first is the multiplication error of Section 07. The second is the overreach of Section 06. The third has no basis in the chronicle record at all — Mahmud died at Ghazni in 1030, three years after the last Indian expedition, of causes unrelated to any Indian battlefield.

What those retellings are doing is not, mostly, lying. They are compressing. A raid on a beloved temple is a story people want to end in a victory, and a community that fought an invading army wants that fight remembered as decisive. Those are understandable impulses. They are also where the record stops.

The three discussion threads linked in the bibliography were checked during research and their URLs resolve, but their text is rendered by the browser after loading and could not be re-read by the research process. They are cited as examples of the discourse, not as evidence for any historical claim. A further two pages — a Quora thread on the "seventeen times" claim and a Jat community history page — returned HTTP 403 to automated access and so could not be verified at all; they are named here for completeness and are not relied on anywhere in this page.

Three labels are used consistently on this page and in the table above. Established means the claim is supported by more than one kind of evidence, or is accepted across the modern historiography without significant dissent. Reported means a named source says it and no independent confirmation exists — which is where most of the interesting detail of this story lives. Disputed means the claim circulates widely and is not found in the sources, or is contradicted by them.

Applying those labels changes very little about how the raid should be felt and changes a great deal about how it should be argued. A temple was attacked, a treasury was taken, a lingam was broken, and a community was enslaved or displaced on the return march. Those things are documented. So is the fact that the story built around them has been assembled, twice, by people with reasons to assemble it.

The temple is open to visitors every day, and the evening aarti at the seafront draws a large crowd. The site museum holds fragments recovered from the earlier phases during the excavations of the late 1940s. Reading the raid well and standing at the temple are not in tension; if anything, the second is clearer after the first.