The Age of Wrath: A History of the Delhi Sultanate (3 page)

From Delhi to Palam

Is the realm of Shah Alam.

There was some revival of the fortunes of the kingdom under Lodis, but their history ended abruptly in 1526, when Babur invaded India and established the Mughal Empire. But its last ruler, Ibrahim, had the distinction of being the only sultan of Delhi to die in battle, despite the innumerable battles they fought all through their over-three-century-long history.

The political history of the Delhi Sultanate was quite a roller-coaster ride. There were spectacular highs and lows in it, but hardly any progress. It is on the whole a sordid tale of treachery, rebellions, usurpations and fiendish reprisals. The sultans were particularly savage in dealing with their refractory or rebellious subjects, having them disembowelled or flayed alive, thrown alive into blazing fire, fed to wild animals, and thrown under elephants’ feet to be trampled to death. Such bestial punishments were meted out even to the rebellious members of the royal family.

‘Amputation of hands and feet, ears and noses, tearing out the eyes, pouring molten led into the throat, crushing the bones of the hand and feet with mallets, burning the body with fire, driving iron nails into the hands, feet, and bosom, cutting the sinews, sawing men asunder—these and many similar tortures were practised’ by sultans against criminals and rebels, notes Sultan Firuz Tughluq in his memoirs. Suspects were invariably tortured to extract confession from them, and tortured so savagely that they often confessed even to crimes they had not committed, preferring death to torture. ‘People consider death a lighter affliction than torture,’ notes Battuta, a fourteenth century Moorish traveller in India.

The punitive action of kings against rebels often involved mass slaughter, with no distinction made between the innocent and the guilty, for the objective of kings was more to terrorise people and keep them submissive, than merely to punish the guilty. Thus Balban once, in retaliation for the contumacy of some villagers, ordered his soldiers to burn down their villages and ‘slay every man there … The blood of the rioters ran in streams, heaps of the slain were
to be seen near every village and jungle, and the stench of the dead reached as far as Ganga,’ reports Barani.

Predictably, the conduct of the Sultanate army was most savage in enemy territory, and entailed the slaughter of thousands and thousands of people, both soldiers and common people. Thus, according to Mughal chronicler Ferishta, Bahmani sultan Ahmad Shah during his invasion of Vijayanagar ‘overran the open country, and wherever he went, he put to death men, women and children, without mercy … Wherever the number of the slain amounted to 20,000, he halted for three days, and made a festival in celebration of the bloody event.’

The ruthless suppression of adversaries and criminals was an essential survival requirement for rulers nearly everywhere in the medieval world. In India this was so with rajas as well as sultans, though Hindu kings, ruling over their own people, were not normally as virulent as Muslim rulers, conquerors ruling over an alien people.

THE TENDENCY OF Muslim rulers in India to be oppressive towards their Hindu subjects was heightened by the fact that most of their values and practices were diametrically opposite to those of Hindus. Muslim society, unlike the caste segmented Hindu society, was fundamentally egalitarian, and had no birth determined status divisions in it, so anyone could rise to any position, depending solely on his ability. Even a slave could rise to be a king, as indeed some of them did in the Delhi Sultanate.

This egalitarianism of Muslim society was particularly evident in the early history of the Delhi Sultanate, during which there was, till the reign of Balban, no great status difference even between the sultan and his nobles. The sultan was then more a leader than a ruler, a
primus inter pares
. Later however sultans generally claimed that the occupation of the throne endowed them with
farr
, divine effulgence, which distinguished them from all others. But whatever be their pretence, the real basis of royal authority, of sultans as well as of rajas, was their military might, their ability to coerce others to submit to their will. In principle the primary duty of kings was to protect their subjects and to provide for their welfare, but in practice their primary concern, often their sole concern, was to preserve and expand their power.

The throne however was no bed of roses. The sultan, for all his great power, led a perilous life, for the sword of an enemy or a rebel always hung over his head. But these perils were more than compensated by the incredible powers and privileges that he enjoyed, particularly his godlike power over the lives and fortunes of his subjects.

The primary concern of most medieval rulers, sultans as well as rajas, was to retain their seat on the throne. But some of them were also, commendably,
keen and knowledgeable patrons of art, literature and learning, and some were distinguished scholars and writers themselves. These cultural accomplishments however made virtually no difference in their performance as rulers; in that it was only their administrative and military capabilities that really mattered. Muhammad Tughluq was probably the most erudite of the Delhi sultans, but he was a pathetic failure as a ruler; on the other hand, Ala-ud-din Khalji was illiterate, but was the most successful of the Delhi sultans.

But even under capable rulers, the story of most medieval Indian kingdoms was marred by internal upheavals. The politics of the Delhi Sultanate during most of its history was, typically, a dizzying whirl of Byzantine conspiracies and counter-conspiracies, in which life was nightmarish for those in the inner circle of power. No one, including the sultan, was ever secure in his office, or even safe in his life. For instance, among the five descendants of Iltutmish who sat on the throne of Delhi, all except one were overthrown and killed.

The main reason for this ever-swirling political chaos was that there were no well-defined and generally accepted rules of royal succession. The throne belonged to whoever could seize it. Imprisoning or killing one’s rivals—even one’s father or brother—to gain or to secure the throne was not considered a crime, but as legitimate and normal political conduct. Kings were often murderers. In India, as Mughal emperor Babur would later remark in his memoirs, ‘there is … this peculiarity … that any person who kills the ruler and occupies the throne becomes the ruler himself. The amirs, viziers, soldiers and peasants submit to him at once and obey him.’

MEDIEVAL INDIAN STATES were all essentially military dictatorships, established and preserved through military action. The primary occupation of most of their kings was waging wars, to suppress rebellions, to defend or expand their kingdom, and to gather plunder. They were all warlords. They ruled over the kingdom, but rarely governed it. Civil administration, except revenue collection, had only a low priority for most kings. With very rare exceptions, providing good government and caring for the welfare of the people hardly ever concerned them.

Even the maintenance of law and order had only a low priority for most medieval Indian kings. Lawlessness was therefore widely prevalent in medieval India. There were countless robber bands in jungles all over India at this time, and whenever the political authority weakened they rampaged through the countryside, at times even through towns, pillaging and killing people. Protection against them was primarily the concern of the local people, seldom that of the king. And when the king acted against brigands, it was mainly to safeguard his revenue, hardly ever to protect the people. Indeed, kings
themselves at times acted like brigands, pillaging their own subjects, to collect the overdue taxes from them.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the medieval Indian kingdoms was the universality of corruption in them, from the highest to the lowest level. Taking bribes was not a secret, devious act in India at this time, but was done openly, and was widely accepted as the normal and natural state of affairs by everyone. Provincial governors and other high government officials, even the sultan himself, were not above seeking recompense for doing favours, the only difference being that in their case the offerings they received were treated as presents, not bribes. And just as subordinates gave bribes to their superiors to win favours from them, superiors often gave bribes to their subordinates to secure their loyalty, except that these offerings were also called presents, not bribes. Loyalty was invariably on sale in medieval India. Nearly everyone, at all levels of government and society, was perfidious.

Curiously, despite all the socio-political turbulences in medieval India, normal life seems to have been fairly comfortable for most people there, though only at the very basic level. India was blessed with rich natural resources, so the one essential survival requirement of the common people, food, was easily available for all at affordable prices in normal times. What is shocking about the medieval Indian society is the appalling disparity between the incredible opulence and wanton lifestyle of the ruling class and the dreary subsistence level existence of the common people. ‘Those in the country are very miserable, whilst the nobles are extremely opulent and delight in luxury,’ observes Athanasius Nikitin, a Russian traveller in India in the fifteenth century.

The worst horror that the common people in medieval India had to face in their normal life was the visitation of famine which ravaged the land periodically. Agricultural production at this time was almost wholly dependent on the monsoon, so when the rains failed, famine felled thousands and thousands of people in one sweep. And those who survived did so by eating whatever they could find, however filthy or rotten, even putrefied carrion, and by taking to cannibalism. ‘One day I went out of the city, and I saw three women … cutting into pieces and eating the skin of a horse which had been dead some months,’ reports Battuta. ‘Skins were cooked and sold in the markets. When bullocks were slaughtered, crowds rushed forward to catch the blood, and consumed it for their sustenance.’ Adds Barani: ‘Famine was very severe, and man was devouring man.’

THE SOCIO-CULTURAL AND political profile of India changed radically with the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate. Never before in its millenniums-long history had India faced a challenge as potent and irreconcilable as that of
Turco-Afghans, and never before had it failed to absorb invaders and migrants smoothly into its society and culture.

India at the time of the Turkish invasion had been in a dormant state for several centuries, remaining hermetically sealed within the subcontinent, with virtually no contact with the outside world. One would have expected that the Turkish invasion would awaken India from its slumber and stimulate it to transform itself to meet the Turkish challenge. But what happened was the opposite of this: instead of responding to the challenge of Islam, Hindu society curled up tighter into itself.

The aggressive presence of Turks in India made virtually no difference in the life and culture of most Indians. Nor did the contact with Hindus make any notable difference in the life and culture of most Muslims. Their civilisations were totally unlike each other in every respect to have any major influence on each other.

Hindus were treated as second class citizens in Muslim states, but as citizens nevertheless. They had their own rights. In any case, the discriminatory treatment that Hindus received at the hands of Muslim rulers would not have troubled them much, for most Indian communities were subject to worse discrimination in their own sharply stratified caste society. True, Hindus and Muslims did live separately and did not mix socially; but then so did the different Hindu castes live separately and did not mix socially. Even in the matter of jizya, not many Hindus would have felt it as a particularly discriminative tax, for Muslims too had to pay a community tax, zakat. Besides, jizya was usually imposed on individuals only in towns, while in villages, where most Hindus lived, it was assessed as a collective tax. Muslim rulers did slaughter a large number of Hindus, and demolish many of their temples and shrines, but Hindus seem to have taken all that fatalistically, as they normally did with nearly everything else in their lives.

There was hardly any display of resentment by Hindus against Turks. Nor were there any notable communal clashes during the many-centuries-long Muslim rule in India. This was largely because the establishment of Muslim rule in India made no notable difference in the lives of most Hindus, as most of them lived in villages, where there were scarcely any Muslims, and the lives of the people there were largely unaffected by the establishment of Muslim rule.

The only Hindu class that suffered any great material or social deprivation under Muslim rule was the ruling class, particularly the rajas, most of whom lost of their wealth and power. But several of the rajas saved some of their status and wealth by serving the sultans in subordinate positions. Similarly, most Hindu zamindars and chieftains served the sultans in various administrative capacities. And so did Brahmins, presumably in large numbers, and they were therefore rewarded by the sultans (except Firuz Tughluq) by exempting them,
as a community, from the payment of jizya. As for Hindu commoners, very many of them served in the army and the administration of the sultans. Hindus quite probably constituted the majority of government employees in Muslim states. In a sense it was Hindus who ran the government for the sultans.

HINDUISM, BEING A non-proselytizing religion, posed no threat to Islam. Rather, being a polymorphic religion, it was tolerant and accommodative towards Islam, as it was towards its own diverse castes and sects. But the tolerance of Hindu society was tolerance by segregation; it was in fact a form of intolerance. Every community was free to live in whichever way it liked, but none was allowed to intrude into the cultural or social space of other communities. This meant that Hindu society, despite its appearance of tolerance, was in fact a highly discriminatory, inequitable and intolerant society, which sharply and unalterably segregated people by religion, sect and caste, and treated each group differently.

However, Hindu caste segregation involved no overt oppression, as it was birth determined, and was not the result of any social action by any group. Nor did caste segregation lead to any notable social tension. Even though segregation was an oppressive practice, lower caste Hindus did not generally feel oppressed by it, but accepted the circumstances of their life fatalistically, as a natural and inevitable outcome of the transmigratory process, the conditions of their life being predestined by their acts in their previous lives. Besides, the pervasive fatalistic attitude of the Indians of the age made them passively accept the conditions of their life, whatever those conditions were, and not struggle against them, as they believed that those conditions were inexorably fated by their karma.