Britain carried gates from Mahmud of Ghazni's tomb to India in 1842 as the stolen gates of Somnath; they were Afghan cedar and are still in Agra Fort

Mahmud of Ghazni raided the Somnath temple in Gujarat about 800 years before the British reached Ghazni. A later belief held that he carried off its gates and set them on his tomb at Ghazni. In 1842, at the end of the First Anglo-Afghan War, Governor-General Lord Ellenborough ordered the army to bring them back. General William Nott removed the gates from the tomb in September 1842, and the 6th Jat Light Infantry carried them to India. Ellenborough's General Orders of 16 November 1842 announced their restoration to the temple. On 9 March 1843 Vernon Smith moved in the House of Commons that the conduct was "unwise, indecorous, and reprehensible." Macaulay said the gates were taken from a Muslim building to be given to a ruined temple, against the Company's orders. The motion lost, 242 to 157. The gates were deodar, a wood native to Ghazni, not sandalwood. Their carving is not Gujarati, and an Arabic inscription on them names Mahmud. Romila Thapar notes that neither Turko-Persian nor Indian sources mention gates taken from Somnath. The gates never reached Somnath. They were stored at Agra Fort, in a hall used to keep muskets, and they remain there.