Nalanda: 9 Million Books Burnt in 1193 by Bakhtiyar Khilji
Nalanda
University! The very utterance of this name will transport you to
India’s ancient terrain of knowledge. This ancient center of higher
learning, located in Bihar, is India’s second oldest university after
Takshila. Spread over an area of 14 hectares, it was a principal seat of
learning from fifth century CE till (the Turkish invasion of) 1193,
attracting students from as far as Tibet, China, Greece, and Persia.
Nalanda
was ransacked and destroyed by Turkish Muslim invaders under Bakhtiyar
Khilji, a Turkish chieftain, in 1193 AD. The great library of Nalanda
University was so vast that it is reported to have housed more than 9
million books which burned for three months after the invaders set fire
to it. They ransacked and destroyed the monasteries and drove the monks
from the site.
Bakhtiyar Khilji was in the service of a commander in Awadh. The Persian historian, Minhaj-i-Siraj in his book Tabaqat-i Nasiri,
recorded his deeds a few decades later. Khilji was assigned two
villages on the border of Bihar which had become a political no-man’s
land. Sensing an opportunity, he began a series of successful plundering
raids into Bihar. He was recognized and rewarded for his efforts by his
superiors. Emboldened, Khilji decided to attack a fort in Bihar and was
able to successfully capture it, looting it of a great booty.
Barbarian
Khilji in a painting from Hutchinson’s ‘Story of the Nations’. It
depicts Khilji trying to make sense of a manuscript. Source: Wikipedia
Minhaj-i-Siraj
wrote of this attack: “Muhammad-i-Bakht-yar, by the force of his
intrepidity, threw himself into the postern of the gateway of the place,
and they captured the fortress, and acquired great booty. The greater
number of the inhabitants of that place were Brahmans, and the whole of
those Brahmans had their heads shaven; and they were all slain. There
were a great number of books there; and, when all these books came under
the observation of the Musalmans, they summoned a number of Hindus that
they might give them information respecting the import of those books;
but the whole of the Hindus had been killed. On becoming acquainted
[with the contents of those books], it was found that the whole of that
fortress and city was a college, and in the Hindui tongue, they call a
college Bihar.”
Minhaj-i-Siraj also wrote in his book Tabaquat-I-Nasiri about
thousands of monks being burned alive and thousands beheaded as Khilji
tried his best to uproot Buddhism and plant Islam by the sword. The
burning of the library continued for several months and ‘smoke from the
burning manuscripts hung for days like a dark pall over the low hills.’
Nalanda University before excavations. Source: Wiki Commons
According
to another historical source, Rahul Sri Bhadra, a Buddhist scholar of
Ayurveda treated Bakhtiyar Khilji for an illness which was deemed
incurable by his court Haqims. Disturbed by the fact that an Indian
scholar and teacher knew more than the Haqims of his own court, Khilji
decided to destroy the roots of all knowledge and Ayurveda in this
country. So he set fire to the Great Library of Nalanda and burned down 9
million manuscripts!
The
last throne-holder of Nalanda, Shakyashribhadra, fled to Tibet in 1204
CE at the invitation of the Tibetan translator Tropu Lotsawa (Khro-phu
Lo-tsa-ba Byams-pa dpal). In Tibet he started an ordination lineage of
the Mulasarvastivadin lineage to complement the two existing ones.
When
the Tibetan translator Chag Lotsawa (Chag Lo-tsa-ba, 1197–1264) visited
the site in 1235, he found it damaged and looted, with a 90-year-old
teacher, Rahula Shribhadra, instructing a class of about 70 students.
During Chag Lotsawa’s time, there was an incursion by Turkish soldiers
that caused the remaining students to flee. Despite all this, “remnants
of the debilitated Buddhist community continued to struggle on under
scare resources until c. 1400 CE when Chagalaraja was reportedly the
last king to have patronized Nalanda.”
Ahir
considers the destruction of the temples, monasteries, centers of
learning at Nalanda and northern India to be responsible for the demise
of ancient Indian scientific thought in mathematics, astronomy, alchemy,
and anatomy.
Visit Indian History Real Truth Facebook group to view related posts. This article is part of ‘JEWELS OF BHARATAM SERIES [TM]‘ by the author.
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