Delhi Sultanate

Name

Although conventionally named after its principal capital city, Delhi, the terminology applied to the Delhi Sultanate was often not fixed. It was called the "Empire of Delhi" (Persian: Mamalik-i-Delhi) by Minhaj-i Siraj Juzjani and Ziauddin Barani, while Ibn Battuta referred to the empire under Muhammad bin Tughlaq as "Hind and Sind". The Delhi Sultanate was also known as the "Empire of Hindustan" (Persian: Mamalik-i-Hindustan), a name that gained currency during this period.

History

Background

Like other agrarian societies in history, those in the Indian subcontinent have been attacked by nomadic tribes throughout its long history. The northwestern subcontinent was a frequent target of tribes raiding from Central Asia in the pre-Islamic era, and the Muslim intrusions and later Muslim invasions were not dissimilar to those of the earlier invasions during the 1st millennium.

The rise of the Delhi Sultanate in India was part of a wider trend affecting much of the Asian continent, including the whole of southern and western Asia: the influx of nomadic Turkic peoples from the Central Asian steppes that traces back to the 9th century when the Islamic Caliphate began fragmenting in the Middle East. Muslim rulers in rival states began enslaving non-Muslim nomadic Turks from the Central Asian steppes and raising many of them to become loyal army slaves called Mamluks. Soon, Turks were migrating to Muslim lands and becoming Islamicized. Many of the Turkic Mamluk slaves eventually rose to become rulers and conquered large parts of the Muslim world, establishing Mamluk Sultanates from Egypt to present-day Afghanistan, before turning their attention to the Indian subcontinent.

By 962 CE, Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms in South Asia faced a series of raids from Muslim armies from Central Asia. Among them was Mahmud of Ghazni, the son of a Turkic Mamluk military slave, who raided and plundered kingdoms in northern India from east of the Indus river to west of the Yamuna river seventeen times between 997 and 1030. Mahmud of Ghazni raided the treasuries but retreated each time, only extending Islamic rule into western Punjab.

The series of raids on northern and western Indian kingdoms by Muslim warlords continued after Mahmud of Ghazni. The raids did not establish or extend the permanent boundaries of the Islamic kingdoms. In contrast, the Ghurid Sultan Mu'izz ad-Din Muhammad Ghori (commonly known as Muhammad of Ghor) began a systematic war of expansion into northern India in 1173. He sought to carve out a principality for himself and expand the Islamic world. Muhammad of Ghor created a Sunni Islamic kingdom of his own extending east of the Indus River, and he thus laid the foundation for the Muslim kingdom called the Delhi Sultanate. Some historians chronicle the Delhi Sultanate from 1192 due to the presence and geographical claims of Muhammad of Ghor in South Asia by that time.

Muhammad of Ghor was assassinated in 1206 by Isma'ili Shia Muslims. After the assassination, one of Ghor's slaves (or Mamluks), the Turkic Qutb ud-Din Aibak, assumed power, becoming the first Sultan of Delhi.

Dynasties

Qutb ud-Din Aibak, a former slave of Mu'izz ad-Din Muhammad Ghori, was the first ruler of the Delhi Sultanate. Aibak was of Turkic Cuman-Kipchak origin, and due to his background, the dynasty he founded is known as the Mamluk dynasty. Aibak reigned as the Sultan of Delhi for four years, from 1206 to 1210. He was praised by the contemporary and later accounts for his generosity and was known with the sobriquet of Lakhbaksh (provider of lakhs).

After Aibak died, Aram Shah assumed power in 1210, but he was assassinated in 1211 by Aibak's son-in-law, Shams ud-Din Iltutmish. Iltutmish's power was precarious, and several Muslim amirs (nobles) challenged his authority as they had been supporters of Qutb al-Din Aibak. After a series of conquests and brutal executions of opposition, Iltutmish consolidated his power.

His rule was challenged several times, such as by Qubacha, and this led to a series of wars. Iltutmish conquered Multan and Bengal from contesting Muslim rulers, as well as Ranthambore and Sivalik from the Hindu rulers. He also attacked, defeated, and executed Taj al-Din Yildiz, who asserted his rights as heir to Mu'izz ad-Din Muhammad Ghori. Iltutmish's rule lasted until 1236. Following his death, the Delhi Sultanate saw a succession of weak rulers, rebellious Muslim nobility, assassinations, and short-lived tenures. Power shifted from Rukn ud-Din Firuz to Razia Sultana and others, until Ghiyas ud-Din Balban came to power and ruled from 1266 to 1287. Ghiyasuddin Balban destroyed the power of the Corps of Forty, a council of usually forty Turkic slaves who had played a role as kingmakers and had been independent of the sultan. He was succeeded by 17-year-old Muiz ud-Din Qaiqabad, who appointed Jalal ud-Din Firuz Khalji as the commander of the army. Khalji assassinated Qaiqabad and assumed power in the Khalji Revolution, thus ending the Mamluk dynasty and founding the Khalji dynasty.

Qutb ud-Din Aibak initiated the construction of the Qutb Minar but died before it was completed. It was later completed by his son-in-law, Iltutmish. The Quwwat-ul-Islam (Might of Islam) Mosque was built by Aibak, now a UNESCO world heritage site. The Qutub Minar Complex was expanded by Iltutmish, and later by Ala ud-Din Khalji in the early 14th century. During the Mamluk dynasty, many nobles from Afghanistan and Persia migrated and settled in India, as West Asia came under Mongol onslaught.

The Khalji dynasty was of Turko-Afghan heritage. They were originally Turkic, but due to their long presence in Afghanistan, they were treated by others as Afghan as they adopted Afghan habits and customs.

Government and politics

The historian Peter Jackson explains in The New Cambridge History of Islam: "The elite of the early Delhi sultanate comprised overwhelmingly first-generation immigrants from Iran and Central Asia: Persians, Turks, Ghūrīs, Khalaj from the hot regions (garmsīr) of modern Afghanistan".

Political system

Medieval scholars such as Abdul Malik Isami and Ziauddin Barani suggested that the prehistory of the Delhi Sultanate lay in the Ghaznavid state and that its ruler, Mahmud Ghaznavi, provided the foundation and inspiration integral to the making of the Delhi regime. The Mongol and Hindu monarchies were the great "Others" in these narratives and the Persianate and class-conscious, aristocratic virtues of the ideal state were creatively memorialised in the Ghaznavid state, now the templates for the Delhi Sultanate. Cast within a historical narrative, it allowed for a more self-reflective, linear rooting of the Sultanate in the great traditions of Muslim statecraft. Over time, successive Muslim dynasties created a "centralized structure in the Persian tradition whose task was to mobilize human and material resources for the ongoing armed struggle against both Mongol and Hindu monarchies". The monarch was not the Sultan of the Hindus or of, say, the people of Haryana, rather in the eyes of the Sultanate's chroniclers, the Muslims constituted what in more recent times would be termed a "Staatsvolk". For many Muslim observers, the ultimate justification for any ruler within the Islamic world was the protection and advancement of the faith. For the Sultans, as for their Ghaznavid and Ghurid predecessors, this entailed the suppression of heterodox Muslims, and Firuz Shah attached some importance to the fact that he had acted against the ashab-i had-u ibadat (deviators and latitudinarians). It also involved plundering and extorting tribute from independent Hindu principalities. Firuz Shah, who believed that India was changed into a Muslim nation, declared that "no zimmi living in a Musalman country might dare to act".

The Hindu kingdoms who submitted to Islamic rule qualified as "protected peoples" according to the wide spectrum of the educated Muslim community within the subcontinent. The balance of the evidence is that in the latter half of the fourteenth century, if not before, the jizyah was levied as a discriminatory tax on non-Muslims, although even then it is difficult to see how such a measure could have been enforced outside the principal centres of Muslim authority. The Delhi Sultanate also continued the governmental conventions of the previous Hindu polities, claiming paramountcy of some of its subjects rather than exclusive supreme control. Accordingly, it did not interfere with the autonomy and military of certain conquered Hindu rulers and freely included Hindu vassals and officials.

Economic policy and administration

The economic policy of the Delhi Sultanate was characterised by greater government involvement in the economy relative to the Classical Hindu dynasties, and increased penalties for private businesses that broke government regulations. Alauddin Khalji replaced the private markets with four centralized government-run markets, appointed a "market controller", and implemented strict price controls on all kinds of goods, "from caps to socks; from combs to pins; from vegetables to soups, from sweetmeats to chapatis" (according to Ziauddin Barani [c. 1357]). The price controls were inflexible even during droughts. Capitalist investors were completely banned from participating in the horse trade, animal and slave brokers were forbidden from collecting commissions, and private merchants were eliminated from all animal and slave markets. Bans were instituted against hoarding and regrating, granaries were nationalised and limits were placed on the amount of grain that could be used by cultivators for personal use.

Various licensing rules were imposed. Registration of merchants was required, and expensive goods such as certain fabrics were deemed "unnecessary" for the general public and required a permit from the state to be purchased. These licenses were issued to amirs, maliks, and other important persons in government. Agricultural taxes were raised to 50%.

Traders regarded the regulations as burdensome, and violations were severely punished, leading to further resentment among the traders. A network of spies was instituted to ensure the implementation of the system; even after price controls were lifted after Khalji's death, Barani claims that the fear of his spies remained and that people continued to avoid trading in expensive commodities.

Social policies

The sultanate enforced Islamic religious prohibitions on anthropomorphic representations in art.

Military

The army of the Delhi sultans initially consisted of nomadic Turkic Mamluk military slaves belonging to Muhammad of Ghor.

The nucleus of this South Asian sultanate military was the Turco-Afghani regular units named Wajih, which were composed of elite household cavalry archers who came from slave backgrounds. A major military contribution of the Delhi Sultanate was their successful campaigns repelling the Mongol Empire's invasions of India, which could have been devastating for the Indian subcontinent, like the Mongol invasions of China, Persia and Europe. Were it not for the Delhi Sultanate, the Mongol Empire may have been successful in invading India.

The strength of the armies changes according to time. Historians state the Delhi sultanate during the Khalji dynasty maintained 300 000 to 400 000 horse cavalry and 2500 to 3000 war elephant as a standing army. Its successor state, the Tughlaq dynasty further expanded into 500 000 horse cavalry in their force.

Economy

Some historians argue that the Delhi Sultanate was responsible for making India more multicultural and cosmopolitan. The establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in India has been compared to the expansion of the Mongol Empire and called "part of a larger trend occurring throughout much of Eurasia, in which nomadic people migrated from the steppes of Inner Asia and became politically dominant".

According to Angus Maddison, between the years 1000 and 1500, India's GDP, of which the sultanates represented a significant part, grew nearly 8% to $60.5 billion in 1500. Though the overall the percentage of the GDP share reduced from 33% to 22% According to Maddison's estimates, India's population grew from 85 million in 1200 to 101 million in 1500.

The Delhi Sultanate period coincided with more use of mechanical technology in the Indian subcontinent. India previously already had highly sophisticated agriculture, food crops, textiles, medicine, minerals, and metals. Water wheels also previously existed in India, as described by various Chinese monks and Arab travellers and writers in their books. During the Delhi Sultanate, various mechanical devices were introduced from the Islamic world to India, such as geared water-raising wheels and other machines with gears, pulleys, cams, and cranks. Later, Mughal emperor Babur provided a description on the use of water wheels in the Delhi Sultanate.

According to historians Arnold Pacey and Irfan Habib, the spinning wheel was introduced to India from Iran during the Delhi Sultanate. Smith and Cothren suggested that it was invented in India during the latter half of the first millennium, but Pacey and Habib said these early references to cotton spinning do not identify a wheel, but more likely refer to hand spinning. The earliest unambiguous reference to a spinning wheel in India is dated to 1350. The worm gear roller cotton gin was invented in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries; Habib states that the development may likely occurred in peninsular India, before becoming more widespread across India during the Mughal era. The incorporation of the crank handle in the cotton gin may have appeared sometime during the late Delhi Sultanate or the early Mughal Empire.

India and China have connections throughout thousands of years of history. Paper had already reached some parts of India as early as the 6th or 7th century, initially through Chinese travellers and the ancient silk road which India was very well connected with. Earlier some historians believed that paper failed to catch on as palmyra leaves and birch bark remained far more popular but this theory was discredited later on. On the other hand, the paper may have arrived in Bengal from a separate route, as 15th-century Chinese traveller Ma Huan remarked that Bengali paper was white and made from "bark of a tree" similar to the Chinese method of papermaking (as opposed to the Middle-Eastern method of using rags and waste material), suggesting a direct route from China for the arrival of paper in Bengal and paper was already very well established and widespread in that part of the subcontinent.

Factors

Demographics

According to one set of very uncertain estimates by modern historians, the total Indian population had largely been stagnant at 75 million during the Middle Kingdoms era from 1 CE to 1000 CE. During the medieval Delhi Sultanate era from 1000 to 1500, India as a whole experienced lasting population growth for the first time in a thousand years, with its population increasing nearly 50% to 110 million by 1500.

Culture

While the Indian subcontinent has had invaders from Central Asia since ancient times, what made the Muslim invasions different is that unlike the preceding invaders who assimilated into the prevalent social system, the successful Muslim conquerors retained their Islamic identity and created new legal and administrative systems that challenged and usually in many cases superseded the existing systems of social conduct and ethics, even influencing the non-Muslim rivals and common masses to a large extent, though the non-Muslim population was left to their laws and customs. They also introduced new cultural codes that in some ways were very different from the existing cultural codes. This led to the rise of a new Indian culture that was mixed in nature, different from ancient Indian culture. The overwhelming majority of Muslims in India were Indian natives converted to Islam. This factor also played an important role in the synthesis of cultures.

The Hindustani language (Hindavi) began to emerge in the Delhi Sultanate period, developed from the Middle Indo-Aryan apabhramsha vernaculars of North India. Amir Khusrau, who lived in the 13th century CE during the Delhi Sultanate period in North India, used a form of Hindustani, which was the lingua franca of the period, in his writings and referred to it as Hindavi.

The officers, the Sultans, Khans, Maliks and the soldiers wore the Islamic qabas dress in the style of Khwarezm, which were tucked in the middle of the body, while the turban and kullah were common headwear. The turbans were wrapped around the kullah (caps), and the feet were covered with red boots. The Wazirs and Katibs also dressed like the soldiers, except they did not use belts, and often let down a piece of cloth in front of them in the manner of the Sufis. The judges and the learned men wore ample gowns (farajiyat) and an Arabic garment (durra).

Architecture

The establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in 1206 under Qutb ud-Din Aibak introduced a large Islamic state to India, using Central Asian styles. The types and forms of large buildings required by Muslim elites, with mosques and tombs much the most common, were very different from those previously built in India. The exteriors of both were very often topped by large domes and made extensive use of arches. Both of these features were hardly used in Hindu temple architecture and other indigenous Indian styles. Both types of building essentially consist of a single large space under a high dome, and completely avoid the figurative sculpture so important to Hindu temple architecture.

The important Qutb Minar complex in Delhi was begun under Muhammad of Ghor, by 1199, and continued under Qutb ud-Din Aibak and later sultans. The Quwwat-ul-Islam Mosque, now a ruin, was the first structure. Like other early Islamic buildings, it re-used elements such as columns from destroyed Hindu and Jain temples, including one on the same site whose platform was reused. The style was Iranian, but the arches were still corbelled in the traditional Indian way.

Beside it is the extremely tall Qutb Minar, a minaret or victory tower, whose original four stages reach 73 meters (with a final stage added later). Its closest comparator is the 62-metre all-brick Minaret of Jam in Afghanistan, of c. 1190, a decade or so before the probable start of the Delhi tower. The surfaces of both are elaborately decorated with inscriptions and geometric patterns; in Delhi, the shaft is fluted with "superb stalactite bracketing under the balconies" at the top of each stage. In general, minarets were slow to be used in India, and are often detached from the main mosque where they exist.

The Tomb of Iltutmish was added by 1236; its dome, the squinches again corbelled, and is now missing, and the intricate carving has been described as having an "angular harshness", from carvers working in an unfamiliar tradition. Other elements were added to the complex over the next two centuries.

Another very early mosque, begun in the 1190s, is the Adhai Din Ka Jhonpra in Ajmer, Rajasthan, built for the same Delhi rulers, again with corbelled arches and domes. Here, Hindu temple columns (and possibly some new ones) are piled up in threes to achieve extra height. Both mosques had large detached screens with pointed corbelled arches added in front of them, probably under Iltutmish a couple of decades later. In these, the central arch is taller, in imitation of an iwan. At Ajmer, the smaller screen arches are tentatively cusped, for the first time in India.

Decline

Cities

While the sacking of cities was not uncommon in medieval warfare, the army of the Delhi Sultanate also often destroyed cities in its military expeditions. According to Jain chronicler Jinaprabha Suri, Nusrat Khan's conquests destroyed hundreds of towns including Ashapalli (modern-day Ahmedabad), Anhilvad (modern-day Patan), Vanthali and Surat in Gujarat. This account is corroborated by Ziauddin Barani.

Battles and massacres

Ghiyas ud din Balban wiped out the Rajputs of Mewar and Awadh, killing approximately 100,000 people.

Alauddin Khalji ordered the killing of 30,000 people at Chittor.

Alauddin Khalji ordered the killing Brahmins during his raid on Devagiri.

According to a hymn, Muhammad bin Tughlaq is said to have killed 12,000 Hindu ascetics during the sacking of Srirangam.

Firuz Shah Tughlaq killed 180,000 people during his invasion of Odisha.

Desecration

Historian Richard Eaton has tabulated a campaign of destruction of idols and temples by the Delhi Sultans, intermixed with certain years where the temples were protected from desecration. In his paper, he has listed 37 instances of Hindu temples being desecrated or destroyed in India during the Delhi Sultanate, from 1234 to 1518, for which reasonable evidences are available. He notes that this was not unusual in medieval India, as there were numerous recorded instances of temple desecration by Hindu and Buddhist kings against rival Indian kingdoms between 642 and 1520, involving conflict between devotees of different Hindu deities, as well as between Hindus, Buddhists and Jains at small scales. He also noted there were also many instances of Delhi sultans, who often had Hindu ministers, ordering the protection, maintenance and repairing of temples, according to both Muslim and Hindu sources. For example, a Sanskrit inscription notes that Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq repaired a Shiva and Parvati temple in Bidar after his Deccan conquest. There was often a pattern of Delhi sultans plundering or damaging temples during the conquest and then patronising or repairing temples after the conquest. This pattern came to an end with the Mughal Empire, where Akbar's chief minister Abu'l-Fazl criticised the excesses of earlier sultans such as Mahmud of Ghazni.

In the majority of cases, the demolished remains, rocks and broken statue pieces of temples destroyed by Delhi sultans were reused to build mosques and other buildings. For example, the Qutb complex in Delhi was built from stones from 27 demolished Hindu and Jain temples by some accounts. Similarly, the Muslim mosque in Khanapur, Maharashtra was built from the looted parts and demolished remains of Hindu temples.

The first historical record of a campaign of destruction of temples and defacement of faces or heads of Hindu idols lasted from 1193 to 1194 in Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh under the command of Ghuri. Under the Mamluks and Khaljis, the campaign of temple desecration expanded to Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra, and continued through the late 13th century. The campaign extended to Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu under Malik Kafur and Ulugh Khan in the 14th century, and by the Bahmanis in the 15th century. Orissa temples were destroyed in the 14th century under the Tughlaqs.

Beyond destruction and desecration, the sultans of the Delhi Sultanate in some cases had forbidden the reconstruction or repair of damaged Hindu, Jain and Buddhist temples. In certain cases, the Sultanate would grant a permit for repairs and construction of temples if the patron or religious community paid jizya (fee, tax). For example, a proposal by the Chinese to repair Himalayan Buddhist temples destroyed by the Sultanate army was refused, because such temple repairs were only allowed if the Chinese agreed to pay jizya tax to the treasury of the Sultanate. According to Eva De Clercq, an expert in the study of Jainism, the Delhi Sultans did not strictly prohibit construction of new temples in the sultanate, Islamic law notwithstanding. In his memoirs, Firoz Shah Tughlaq describes how he destroyed temples and built mosques instead and killed those who dared build new temples. Other historical records from wazirs, amirs and the court historians of various Sultans of the Delhi Sultanate describe the grandeur of idols and temples they witnessed in their campaigns and how these were destroyed and desecrated.