The Age of Wrath: A History of the Delhi Sultanate (40 page)

In early Islamic society it was no disgrace or handicap for one to be a slave, for slaves could rise to any position—including that of the sultan—that they merited by their abilities. Though hardly anyone initially became a slave by choice, and most of them had been sold into slavery as children, or were captured and enslaved by marauders or conquerors, many slaves rose to high positions by their ability, dedication and hard work.

Many slaves no doubt led degrading lives, but being a slave was not in itself a disability or disgrace in early medieval Muslim society. There was no social or political prejudice against slaves as a class. Indeed, to be the favourite slave of a monarch or a high noble was a great advantage for a careerist, for that opened up major avenues for professional advancement for him, and several such slaves rose to be top officers in the Delhi Sultanate. Some nobles, even some sultans, honoured their favourite slaves by giving their daughters in marriage to them. Indeed, being a royal slave was a high honour and distinction, and three of them—Aibak, Iltutmish and Balban—succeeded their masters to the throne.

Another curious feature of the Delhi Sultanate was that the sultans generally preferred to appoint foreign migrants—Arabs, Turks and Persians—to top administrative and military posts in their government, reflecting their disdain for native Indians. And they usually treated foreign visitors with high regard. ‘It is a custom of the sultan of India … to honour strangers, to favour them, and to distinguish them in a manner quite peculiar, by appointing them to … [high government posts],’ records Battuta about what he observed in Delhi in the fourteenth century. ‘Most of his (sultan’s) courtiers, chamberlains, wazirs, magistrates, and brothers-in-law are foreigners.’ Battuta himself, a Moorish adventurer, was appointed by Muhammad Tughluq as a judge in Delhi on a
high salary of 12,000 dinars a year. And when he left to continue his travels, he was designated as the royal ambassador to China.

This partiality of the sultans for foreigners sometimes led to tension between foreign and native officials, and, in the case of Bahmani Sultanate, it even led to a few gory riots. However, despite the bias of the sultans in favour foreign migrants, paths for the advancement of talented natives remained open in Muslim kingdoms, and several Hindu converts to Islam rose to high positions in those states over time. The prominence gained by Raihan, a mid-thirteenth century Hindu convert to Islam, who became powerful enough in royal service even to overshadow Balban, the then topmost royal officer in the Delhi Sultanate, was indicative of the growing prominence of Indian Muslims in government. From the reign of Khaljis on the number and importance Indian Muslims in government increased considerably. This was partly because of the proven ability of the Indian Muslim officers, like Malik Kafur under Ala-ud-din Khalji, and partly because their appointment to high offices had become a practical necessity for the sultans from the thirteenth century on, because the interposition of Mongols between India and the Turko-Persian homelands drastically reduced the migration of foreign Muslims into India.

One of the most remarkable of the Indian Muslim officers of the Delhi Sultanate was Khan-i Jahan Maqbul, a Hindu convert from Telingana, who, though illiterate, rose to the highest position in the Sultanate by his sheer ability. He joined the service of the Sultanate during the reign of Muhammad Tughluq who, recognising his merit, raised him rapidly in official positions, and finally appointed him as the deputy wazir. ‘Although he had no knowledge of reading and writing, he was a man of great common sense, acumen and intelligence, and was an ornament of the court,’ reports Afif. Firuz Tughluq appointed Maqbul as his wazir, and left him as his deputy in Delhi whenever he set out on military campaigns.

Maqbul was in every respect a most extraordinary person—his physical prowess matched his mental prowess, and so did his sexual prowess. ‘He was,’ according to Afif, ‘much devoted to the pleasures of the harem, and sought eagerly for pretty handmaids. It is reported that he had 2000 women of Europe and China in his harem, where he spent much of his time notwithstanding his onerous official duties,’ and he fathered a great many children. And to cap it all, Maqbul lived in so grand a style that Firuz Tughluq was often heard jocularly remarking that Maqbul was indeed ‘the grand and magnificent king of Delhi.’

APART FROM THE Hindu converts to Islam, Hindus themselves also played vital roles in the affairs of the Delhi Sultanate. Right from the beginning of the Sultanate, in fact even from the time of Mahmud Ghazni, several Hindu chieftains served as captains in the armies of Muslim kings, and they sometimes
played crucial roles in the campaigns of sultans, leading their own contingents into battle. And a good number of the common soldiers in the armies of the sultans in India were Hindus.

In civil administration, the preponderant majority of the staff of the Delhi Sultanate, at all but the top one or two levels, were Hindus, particularly in the provinces. The sultans did not have the manpower from their own people to man the entire administration, or even to man all the crucial offices of their extensive Indian empire with its vast and diverse population. Nor did they have the local knowledge needed to run the local administration. They therefore necessarily had to depend heavily on Hindus to run the government.

At the district and village levels the administration in Muslim states was almost entirely manned by Hindus, and there the traditional indigenous administrative institutions and hereditary officers generally—except during the reign of Ala-ud-din Khalji—continued to function as they had done for centuries before the Muslim invasion. This was particularly true of village administration. Villages were virtually autonomous during the medieval period, as they had been for very many centuries. The government of the sultans did not normally intrude into village administration at all, except for revenue collection and for the maintenance of law and order. But even in these functions, Muslim officers and fief-holders generally played only a supervisory role, for villages policed themselves in normal times, and revenue collection was mostly managed by the traditional local functionaries.

In a very real sense, it was Hindus who ran the government in Muslim kingdoms. What Dubois said of India in the early nineteenth century—that ‘the rule of all the Hindu princes, and often that of the Mahomedans, was properly speaking, Brahminical rule, since all posts of confidence were held by Brahmins’—was substantially true of the early medieval period as well. The rule of the sultans was sustained—indeed, was made possible—by the service of Hindu officers and staff.

The majority of Hindu officers in the service of Muslim kings were in subordinate positions. There were however a few notable exceptions to this, of Hindu officers rising to the top echelons of government in Muslim states. For instance, in the early sixteenth century Hindus held several top positions in the Muslim kingdom of Malwa, and one of them, Basanta Rai, even rose to be the wazir. This dominance of the Hindus in the government led to a conflict between the Hindu and Muslim officers of the state, resulting in the murder of Basanta Rai. But presently another Hindu officer, Medini Rai, rose to dominance in the state, and he grew so powerful and overweening that the sultan himself was forced to flee from the state and take refuge in Gujarat. Similarly, the
de facto
ruler of Bengal in the early fifteenth century was a
Hindu officer named Ganesa; his son, who became a Muslim, even ascended the throne of Bengal.

The appointment of Hindus to high official positions was fairly common in the Deccan sultanates at this time—Bahmani sultan Firuz Shah, for instance, appointed several Brahmins and other Hindus to crucial offices in his government. Generally speaking, the establishment of the Turko-Afghan rule made no significant difference in the lives and functions of most Hindu officials from what they had been before the Muslim invasion.

NOR DID THE life of the common folk in India change in any notable way consequent of the displacement of rajas by sultans. This was partly because the Sultanate did not have the administrative capacity or the manpower needed to intrude in any significant manner into rural India, where most Indians lived, and partly also because the rajas were nearly as exploitative of the common people as the sultans were. It was mainly the Hindu political elite who suffered loss—the loss of power and prestige and wealth—because of the Turko-Afghan invasion.

And what the Hindu political elite lost was gained by the Muslim political elite—the gain of power and prestige and wealth. The top Turko-Afghan officers of the Sultanate were paid fabulous salaries; in fact, what they received were not just salaries, but what amounted to be shares in the revenues of the empire. The wazir under Firuz Tughluq, for instance, received, ‘exclusive of the allowance for his retainers, friends and sons … a sum of thirteen lakh tankas—or, instead of it, sundry fiefs and districts,’ states Afif. Not surprisingly, when Malik Shahin Shahna, a senior officer of the Sultanate, died and his effects were examined by royal auditors, it was found that he had accumulated ‘a sum of fifty lakh of tankas in cash … besides horses, valuables, and jewels in abundance.’

The normal practice of most Delhi sultans was to assign to their officers, and sometimes even to the soldiers of their central army, lands in lieu of cash salaries, lands from which they could collect taxes. This reinforces the impression that the sultan was not merely paying salaries to his officers, but sharing the revenues of the empire with them. This practice also had a major advantage for kings, in that it considerably reduced the tax collection burden of their rudimentary administrative organisation.

Under this system, soldiers were usually assigned villages, while officers received districts, or even provinces, depending on their rank. The principal assignees in turn often sub-assigned parts of their territory to their subordinates, on terms similar to those on which they received their assignments from the sultan. In all these cases what was given to the assignees was only the revenue from the allotted land, not the land itself. The assignee had no hereditary
ownership right over the land. Besides, the land assignments were transferable, and were usually reassigned every four years or so, so that the assignees did not get rooted in their jagirs and turn themselves into zamindars. The land revenue assignment system, termed
iqta
, therefore did not lead to feudalism.

The
iqta
system was a highly inefficient system of revenue administration, and it led to a great deal of corruption, as well as to the exploitation of peasants by the assignees. But it was the only workable system in most medieval Indian kingdoms, because of their poor administrative capability. Even Ala-ud-din, who sought strict administrative control over his empire, had to retain the
iqta
system in the provinces, even though he abolished it in his central army, whose soldiers and officers were paid in cash directly from the royal treasury. Muhammad Tughluq also sought to tightly control
iqta
assignments, but his successor Firuz reverted to the old practice of general
iqta
assignments. In Vijayanagar land assignments to Nayaks (chieftains) was the common practice; there were, according to Nuniz, over 200 such assignments in the kingdom.

THE REVENUE AND military departments were the most important departments of the Delhi Sultanate, as in any medieval state. These were interdependent departments—there could be no army without revenue, and quite often the army was needed to enforce revenue collection. And just as the sultans maintained a large army, so also they maintained a large finance department with numerous accountants, to keep track of the state’s income and expenditure. The accounts submitted by the officers of the fiefs were regularly audited by this department; similarly the accounts of the various royal establishments were also regularly audited.

There were four legitimate sources of revenue for the sultan, sanctioned by Sharia: tax on agricultural produce, poll tax on non-Muslims, income tax on Muslims, and war booty. Of these, the primary source of revenue of the Delhi Sultanate, as of all medieval Indian states, was agricultural tax. The sultans also received a good amount of income from the produce of the crown lands, the
khalisa
, which was remitted directly into the royal treasury. All the lands of the empire other than the crown lands were assigned to royal officers as
iqta
lands, from the revenue of which they were to take their salary, meet their administrative expenses, and maintain the military contingents assigned to them.

In addition to the four revenue sources sanctioned by Islam, most Muslim kingdoms also collected a variety of minor taxes, which varied from kingdom to kingdom, even from ruler to ruler. Many of these additional taxes were in violation of Islamic regulations, and were therefore abolished by Firuz Tughluq.

Hindu kingdoms also collected a wide variety of taxes in addition to agricultural tax; they indeed generally collected a far wider variety of taxes
than Muslim kingdoms, such as tax on forest produce, customs duties, octroi, police or military protection taxes, profession taxes (such as on barbers, goldsmiths, leather-workers, dhobis, etcetera), tax on workshops, social taxes (such as marriage tax), taxes on herdsmen, commercial taxes on merchants and artisans, and so on. In fact, virtually all productive activities in the kingdom, however trivial, were taxed—the government took a share of whatever money anyone made in any activity. Besides all these, rajas often charged special taxes to meet temple expenses.

The orthodox Muslim view of state revenue was that it belonged to the state, and was not the sultan’s personal income, and that it should to be used only to meet state expenses. Sultans were however permitted to spend a good part of the state revenue on themselves and their families, to maintain their exalted status, which was considered an essential requirement for maintaining the authority of the state. ‘Whatever is expended on your family could be increased a thousand fold, in order that the royal dignity might be thereby enhanced in the eyes of the people,’ a qazi once advised Ala-ud-din Khalji. ‘This enhancement of the royal dignity is politically essential and expedient.’ This in effect meant that the sultan could treat the kingdom as his private property, use the state revenue as his personal income, and spend it as he pleased.