The Age of Wrath: A History of the Delhi Sultanate (62 page)

The murderers of Jalal-ud-din Khalji soon met with divine retribution, states Barani. Many of the chief conspirators died in a short time. ‘The hell-hound Salim, who struck the first blow, was a year or two afterwards eaten up by leprosy. Ikhtiyar-ud-din, who cut off the head, very soon went mad, and in his dying ravings cried out that Sultan Jalal-ud din stood over him with a naked sword, ready to cut off his head.’

Barani: When Ala-ud-din on his accession distributed vast sums as largess among the people, ‘they gave themselves up to gaiety and pleasure, and indulged in wine and all kinds of revelry. Within the city they erected several wondrous pavilions, where wine, sherbet, and betel were distributed gratis, and in almost every house an entertainment was held. The maliks, amirs, and all the other men of note and respectability invited one another to feasts; wine, music and mirth became the order of the day.’

Barani: In the first year of Ala-ud-din’s reign, because of this generous scattering of money, ‘folks of all classes, both high and low, lived in such ease and affluence, that I cannot recollect seeing any age or period of such perfect happiness and contentment.’

From where did Ala-ud-din get his reform ideas? Some of his administrative measures ‘were startlingly like that of
Arthasastra
,’ comments modern historian Kosambi, and he goes on to speculate that it is possible ‘that the sultan found someone to tell him of the Mauryan regulations.’

Once, on the way back to Delhi from Deccan, Muhammad Tughluq suffered from severe toothache and had to have a tooth extracted. He then erected, over the spot where the extracted tooth was buried, a domed tomb which later came to be called the Dome of the Tooth.

The earliest use of paper money anywhere in the world was in China around the close of the eighth century CE. In the beginning it was more like a bank draft than a currency note. It enabled merchants to deposit gold and silver money in one town, receive a certificate of the deposit, and cash it in some other town. Shortly thereafter the Chinese government used this mode of transaction to transfer the tax collected in the provinces to the imperial capital.

Marco Polo, medieval Venetian world traveller, noted the use of paper currency in China, and wrote about it: ‘All these pieces of paper are issued with as much solemnity and authority as if they were of pure gold or silver; and on every piece [of paper currency] a variety of officials … have to write their names, and to put their seals. And when all is duly prepared, the chief officer deputed by the Khan smears the Seal entrusted to him with vermilion, and impresses it on the paper … The money is then authentic. Anyone forging it would be punished with death.’

The use of paper money and its variants gradually spread westward from China, and eventually, after five centuries, it came into use in Persia. A few centuries later the practice finally spread to Europe, where paper currency was first issued in Sweden in the seventeenth century. Then, over the next century and half, the practice spread to the other parts of Europe as well as to America.

In India token currency—brass or copper coins marked as of the same value as silver coins—was first introduced by Muhammad Tughluq in the second quarter of the fourteenth century. But the reform failed utterly, like all his other innovations.

Muhammad Tughluq had two daughters in his early youth, but a surgery afterwards made him impotent. Consequently, according to Isami, a severely critical medieval chronicler, the sultan wished to see the whole world impotent like him. Perhaps the aberrations of his character had something to do with his sexual impotence.

Muhammad, according to Isami, was ‘full of deceit and fraud,’ and was ‘a first-class hypocrite … who, while he made a display of justice, exercised oppression.’

Robert Sewell, an early modern historian, on Muhammad Tughluq: ‘His whole life was spent on visionary schemes pursued by means equally irrational.’

The seventeenth-century English satirist Samuel Butler on Mahmud Begarha of Gujarat:

The King of Cambay’s daily food

Is asp and basilisk and toad.

According to the fifteenth-century Italian adventurer Varthema, the title ‘Zamorin’ of the raja of Kozhikode means ‘Lord of the Seas … The King of Calicut is a Pagan, and worships the devil.’