भारतीय इतिहास के ६ स्वर्णिम पृष्ठ (वीर सावरकर - विदेशी आक्रान्ताओं पर विजय गाथा)

began their onward march right up to Rameshwaram and for all these twelve hundred years or so from A.D. 711, to the time the British left India in 1947, the Hindus had been rotting in slavery. This assumption is as false as it is insulting to the Hindus. This is an unbearable perversion of facts. 659. Hereafter, at least a truth-loving writer of history should scrupulously avoid this falsehood, this perversion of facts from school or college textbooks as also from those of a greater worth and importance. These three hundred years 660. For during these three hundred years i.e., up to A.D. 1000 or so in the whole of India, right from Hindukush to Ceylon and to Burma in the east, the Hindu Sovereign states ruled proudly. At such an early date as that, the Hindu kings in the south such as the Cher, Chowl, Pandya, Rashtrakut and others, sometimes the one, at others the next, ruled the vast southern seas so powerfully as to call themselves Trisamudreshwar. To say that the whole of India sweated in slavery under the Muslims or some other rulers, ignoring its prosperous and independent sovereign status, is to belie history. From A.D. 1000 To A.D. 1030 661. All of a sudden, like a comet, rose Mahmud of Ghazni at this time. At his accession to the throne, he vowed to Muslimize the whole of India and as has been already described in paragraphs 365 to 375, carried on a series of depredations and arson, religious persecution and rapes, and pollution and conversion, throughout the vast tract from Multan in Punjab to Someshwar in Sourashtra. 662. But it is because, at such cataclysmal times, the Hindus showed exemplary valour and perserevence and forbearance in facing all these calamities, never losing self-respect or courage, that Hindu states could again raise their banners overthrowing the Muslim ascendancy hardly within twenty-five to thirty years of Mahmud Ghazni's death in A.D. 1030, with the sole exception perhaps of the northern part of Punjab beyond the Indus. This can surely be cited as the astonishing illustration of the tenacity of any nation for that matter. 663. Secondly, it must be remembered that during the thirty or forty years of the political havoc wrought by Mahmud of Ghazni in the north, the whole of South India had been displaying daring and adventure while enjoying independence, prosperity and the mastery of the three seas as nonchalantly as before.