Holocaust of Hindus During the Muslim Occupation of India

Hampi the capital of Vijaynagar the last Hindu kingdom of the South was ruthlessly pillaged for six months and was nearly reduced to rubble in the year 1565, when the allied Muslim Bahamani armies overran Vijaynagar after the battle of Talikota.

This page is dedicated to the memory of those men, women and children who were killed or were captured or converted by force to Islam over a period of eleven centuries in India and for fourteen centuries in other parts of the globe. These men, women and children cannot be recalled for standing witness to what was done to them by the swordsmen of Islam.

Hence we are going to rely on Muslim historians, in India and abroad, who have written hundreds of glowing accounts of the devastation caused by the progress of Islamic armies across the world (and in India). As our focus is India, we are going to look only at what happened in India during the Islamic invasion and the following struggle for independence from Islamic rule that was waged by the Hindus. A pronounced feature of these Muslim histories is a description - in smaller or greater detail but always with considerable pride - of how the Hindus were slaughtered en masse or converted by force, how hundreds of thousands of Hindu men and women and children were captured as booty and sold into slavery, how Hindu temples and monasteries were razed to the ground or burnt down, and how images of Hindu Gods and Goddesses were destroyed or desecrated.

most all medieval Muslim historians credit their heroes with desecration of Hindu idols and/or destruction of Hindu temples. The picture that emerges has the following components, depending upon whether the iconoclast was in a hurry on account of Hindu resistance or did his work at leisure after a decisive victory:

1. The idols were mutilated or smashed or burnt or melted down if they were made of precious metals;

2. Sculptures in relief on walls and pillars were disfigured or scraped away or torn down;

3. Idols of stone and inferior metals or their pieces were taken away, sometimes by cartloads, to be thrown down before the main mosque in

(a) the metropolis of the ruling Muslim sultan and

(b) The holy cities of Islam, particularly Mecca, Medina and Baghdad;

4. There were instances of idols being turned into lavatory seats or handed over to butchers to be used as weights while selling meat;

5. Brahmin priests and other holy men in and around the temple were molested or murdered;

6. Sacred vessels and scriptures used in worship were defiled and scattered or burnt:

7. Temples were damaged or despoiled or demolished or burnt down or converted into mosques with some structural alterations or entire mosques were raised on the same sites mostly with temple materials;

8. Cows were slaughtered on the temple sites so that Hindus could not use them again.