6. Kanauj, now in the Farrukhābād district of the United Provinces, was sacked by Mahmūd of Ghaznī in January, A.D. 1019. The name of Mahmūd's capital may be spelled Ghaznih, Ghaznī, or Ghaznīn. (Raverty, in J.A.S.B., Part I, vol. lxi (1892), p. 156, note.)
7. 'Pān', the well-known Indian condiment (ante, chapter 29, note 10). 'Opera girls' is a rather whimsical rendering of the more usual phrase 'nāch (nautch) girls', or 'dancing girls'. The traditional numbers cited must not be accepted as historical facts. See V. A. Smith, 'The History of the City of Kanauj' (J.R.A.S., 1908, pp. 767-93).
8. This statement is too general. Benares, Allahabad (Prayāg), and many other important Hindoo cities, were never deserted, and continued to be populous through all vicissitudes. It is true that in most places the principal temples were desecrated or destroyed, and were frequently converted into mosques.
9. The statement is much exaggerated. The Hindoo Rājās who paid tribute to the Sultans of Delhi often maintained considerable courts in populous towns.
10. This proposition, which is not true of Southern India at all, applies only to secular buildings in Northern India. The temples of Khajurāho, Mount Abū, and numberless other places, equal in magnificence the architecture of the Muhammadans, or, indeed, that of any people in the world.
11. The anthor's remarks seem likely to convey wrong notions. Very few of the capitals of the Muhammadan viceroys and governors were new foundations. Nearly all of them were ancient Hindoo towns adopted as convenient official residences, and enlarged and beautified by the new rulers, much of the old beauties being at the same time destroyed. Fyzabad certainly was a new foundation of the Nawāb Wazīrs of Oudh, but it lies so close to the extremely ancient city of Ajodhya that it should rather be regarded as a Muhammadan extension of that city. Lucknow occupies the site of a Hindoo city of great antiquity.
12. It would be difficult to point out an example of a Muhammadan standing camp which was first converted into an open, and then into a fortified town.
13. This abstract of the history of the Deccan, or Southern India, is not quite accurate. The Emperor, or Sultan, Muhammad bin Tughlak, after A.D. 1325, reduced the Deccan to a certain extent to submission, but the country revolted in A.D. 1347, when Hasan Gango founded the Bāhmani dynasty of Gulbarga, afterwards known as that of Bīdar. At the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, the kingdom so founded broke up into five, not four, separate states, namely, Bījāpur, Ahmadnagar, Golconda, Berār, and Bīdar. The Berār state had a separate existence for about eighty-five years, and then became merged in the kingdom of Ahmadnagar.
[CHAPTER 64]
Murder of Mr. Fraser, and Execution of the Nawāb Shams-ud-dīn.