Delhi Sultanate

The slave kings

Drafted from Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (1999)formation

Qutb al-Din Aibak was a Turkic slave bought in Nishapur, sold on, and risen to command the Indian campaigns of Muhammad of Ghur. When Muhammad was murdered in 1206 without a son, Aibak took the Indian provinces and ruled them from Lahore and then Delhi as an independent sultan.

The pattern was two and a half centuries old by then. Alptigin was a Samanid slave-general who took Ghazna and founded the line that became the Ghurids' overlords; here a Ghurid slave does to the Ghurids exactly what a Samanid slave had done to the Samanids. The institution of military slavery was designed to give rulers soldiers with no local loyalties, and it worked so well that the soldiers repeatedly became the rulers.

Aibak's successor Iltutmish, also a slave and also Aibak's son-in-law, consolidated the sultanate, took an investiture diploma from the Abbasid caliph in 1229 — an act with no practical content and considerable value, since the caliph could not have withheld anything he wanted — and left a state rather than a conquest.

The whip with the bells

Drafted from Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Batuta (1829)expansion

Ibn Battuta travelled from Multan to Delhi in the 1330s and reports that the journey takes fifty days. He then reports that the sultan's despatches make it in five.

How

Two relay systems, running in parallel.

The horse couriers are stationed every four miles, mounted from the sultan's own cavalry. The foot couriers are closer: one every mile, in stations of three, so that every three miles there is an inhabited village and, outside it, three sentry-boxes where the runners sit with their loins girded, ready to move.

Each of them holds a whip about two cubits long with small bells fixed at the head of it. A courier leaving a city carries the despatches in one hand and shakes the whip continuously in the other, and as he approaches the next station the bells announce him, so that a fresh runner comes out and takes the packet without either of them stopping.

For this reason it is, Ibn Battuta concludes, that the Sultan receives his despatches in so short a time.

What that buys

Ten times the speed of a traveller, over a thousand kilometres, on foot.

A state that can do that can govern provinces it cannot see. It can hear about a revolt in Sind while the revolt is still small, order a response, and have the order arrive before the situation has changed beyond recognition. Everything the Delhi sultans did at distance — the Deccan campaigns, the transfers of governors, the suppression of the recurring rebellions of the far provinces — rests on it.

It is also, unusually for a medieval institution, described in a way that lets you check the arithmetic. Foot relays a mile apart, run flat out, will move a packet somewhere between five and eight miles an hour continuously through the day and night. Fifty days' travel in five is exactly what that produces.

The rest of the machine

The sultanate's expansion in the fourteenth century was the largest thing any Indian state had attempted since the Mauryas, and it was built on that kind of apparatus rather than on a larger army.

Ala al-Din Khalji, in the two decades either side of 1300, took Gujarat, broke the Rajput fortresses at Ranthambore and Chittor, and sent his armies as far as the far south — Madurai — while simultaneously holding the Punjab against repeated Mongol invasions.

He paid for it with a fiscal apparatus that was closer to a command economy than anything else in the medieval world: land revenue assessed at half the produce and taken in kind, the intermediary chiefs stripped of their exemptions, and prices of grain, cloth, horses and slaves fixed by decree in the Delhi markets with an inspectorate to enforce them.

The point of the price controls was military. If grain and horses cost a known fixed amount, a soldier can be paid a known fixed salary — which meant a large standing army maintained in cash rather than by land assignment, which meant troops who belonged to the sultan rather than to whoever held the district.

And the direction of the conquest

There is one thing about the southern campaigns worth stating plainly. They were not annexations.

The armies went south, took an enormous quantity of treasure, imposed tribute, and came home. Malik Kafur's expedition to Madurai in 1311 is the deepest, and it left no garrison and no administration.

Which is why the empire built on the courier relay had, within a generation of its greatest reach, produced independent sultanates in the Deccan and Bengal that the couriers could no longer reach.

The frontier that held

Drafted from Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (1999)peak

Every major Muslim state west of Delhi was destroyed by the Mongols. Khwarazm went in 1220-1231, Baghdad in 1258. Delhi did not.

Mongol forces raided the Punjab repeatedly from the 1220s and mounted serious invasions in the 1290s and early 1300s, several reaching Delhi itself. Ala al-Din Khalji beat them. The reasons were partly structural — the Indus was a real barrier, the Punjab was hard country to cross with large cavalry armies, and the Chagatai khanate that faced India was the poorest and most divided of the successor states — and partly that Ala al-Din built a large standing army and paid for it by fixing market prices in Delhi and taxing agrarian produce at punitive rates.

The consequence was that northern India became the refuge of the Persianate world. Scholars, administrators, poets and Sufi shaykhs from Khurasan and Transoxiana arrived as refugees across three generations, and the Persian literary and administrative culture that the Mongols had disrupted at its source continued at Delhi without a break.

The Persianate world's centre of gravity moved to India for two hundred years, and never entirely moved back. More Persian poetry was written in India than in Iran, and it was Indian courts that paid for it.

The judge who resigned

Drafted from Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Batuta (1829)contraction

Ibn Battuta was appointed qadi of Delhi by Muhammad bin Tughluq, held the post for some years, was ruined by debt, was rescued by the sultan, came within four days of being executed by him, and resigned to become a wandering ascetic. His account is the closest look anybody has at how the sultanate worked at the top.

The appointment

The exchange at the appointment is the whole system in six lines.

The sultan warned him the office would require the greatest attention. Ibn Battuta, who understood the warning perfectly, did not give a good answer: he pointed out that he was of the Maliki school, that the people of Delhi followed the Hanafi, and that he did not speak the language.

The sultan — who knew Arabic and was not pleased — replied that he had appointed two learned men as deputies who would advise him, and that it will be your business to sign the legal instruments.

A foreigner who could not read the local law or speak to the litigants was made chief judge of the capital, with the actual work delegated, because the point of the appointment was not the law. It was that a Moroccan scholar with no local kin, no faction and no property owed everything to the man who had appointed him.

The debt

Then the finances, which are equally instructive.

He was given twelve thousand dinars. Within a short time he was fifty-five thousand in debt, because attending on the sultan during his campaigns cost more than the office paid.

His solution was to compose a panegyric in Arabic and read it out. The sultan translated it himself, was wonderfully pleased — the Indians are fond of Arabic poetry — and paid the debt from his own treasury with the advice not to exceed his income in future.

A court where a senior officer's insolvency is normal, and where the remedy is a poem, is not badly run by accident. It is a system in which nobody's position is secure and everybody's continuation depends on the ruler's favour, refreshed personally and frequently.

The four days

The other side arrived when the sultan changed his mind about a shaykh he had previously trusted and visited — a holy man living in a cave outside the city.

He had the shaykh imprisoned and then interrogated his children about who had been visiting him. Ibn Battuta had.

He was put under guard. He spent four days reciting a Quranic formula — God is our support, and the most excellent patron — thirty-three thousand times, and was released.

the Sheikh, and all those who had visited him, except myself, were put to death.

He resigned the judgeship immediately, gave everything he owned to the faqirs, put on their tunic and attached himself to a shaykh for five months, during which he fasted five days continuously and then broke his fast on a little rice.

What this is a portrait of

Muhammad bin Tughluq is the most argued-about ruler in Indian medieval history, and Ibn Battuta is why. He is also the reason the arguments are possible: no other Indian sultan is described from the inside by somebody who held office under him.

The picture is not of a madman. It is of an extremely capable and extremely literate ruler with an enormous apparatus, an ambitious programme — the transfer of the administration to Daulatabad in the Deccan, the token currency, the Deccan and Khurasan campaigns — and no working restraint on the exercise of his own judgement.

Every one of those projects was defensible in principle. Daulatabad is better placed than Delhi to govern a southern empire. A fiduciary coinage had worked in China. What none of them survived was being ordered by one man, executed by officials who could be killed for advising against them, and reversed by the same man when they went wrong.

By the end of his reign Bengal and the Deccan were independent and the sultanate had lost most of what the previous fifty years had gained.

Timur, and what was left

Drafted from Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (1999)end

Timur crossed the Indus in 1398, took Delhi in December, and left in January. The sultanate never recovered, and it took another hundred and twenty-eight years to stop existing.

The sack

He came, on his own stated reasoning, because the sultans of Delhi had been too tolerant of their Hindu subjects — an argument advanced by a man who had spent his career sacking Muslim cities, and which is best read as what it was.

The city was taken and given over to three days of massacre and plunder. The craftsmen, in the usual Timurid practice, were carried off to Samarkand, where they built the great congregational mosque. The chroniclers give figures for the dead that cannot be relied on and describe towers of skulls, which Timur built elsewhere as well and which are not in doubt as a practice.

Then he went home. There was no attempt to hold anything.

What that did

Delhi was reported deserted for two months and depopulated for years. More importantly, the fiction that the sultanate was the paramount power of northern India had been publicly destroyed, and the provinces drew the conclusion.

Jaunpur, Malwa, Gujarat, Bengal and the Deccan all consolidated as independent sultanates in this period, each with its own court, its own architecture and its own literary patronage. Several of them were richer than what was left at Delhi.

The Sayyid dynasty that emerged in 1414 governed a territory a contemporary verse described as running from Delhi to Palam — about ten miles. That is a joke made at the time and it is roughly accurate.

The Lodis

The Afghans who took over in 1451 did better, and their difficulty is the more interesting one.

Bahlul Lodi and his successors were Afghans among Afghans, and the Afghan tribal convention was that a chief is first among equals. Bahlul ate with his nobles and sat with them. His grandson Ibrahim tried to govern as a sultan in the old Turkish manner — requiring the nobles to stand in his presence, disciplining them, executing some — and they went and found somebody else.

The somebody else was Babur, who had been raiding into the Punjab for years and had been invited by Ibrahim's own governor of Lahore and his own uncle.

At Panipat in April 1526 a smaller force with field artillery and a fortified centre destroyed an army several times its size. Ibrahim was killed on the field — the only sultan of Delhi to die in battle — and the sultanate ended.

Three hundred and twenty years

Five dynasties, thirty-odd sultans, and the arithmetic of how they left is worth setting down: assassinated, deposed, blinded, or dead of natural causes in roughly equal proportions, with a great many of the transitions decided by the slave officers, the Afghan amirs, or the sultan's own household.

That instability is usually treated as the sultanate's defining weakness, and it coexisted with something remarkable. This is the state that held the Mongols on the Indus when nothing else between the Pacific and the Mediterranean did. It governed most of the subcontinent for a generation. It ran a courier relay from Sind to Bengal.

A polity can have no working rule for replacing its ruler and still be the most effective administration of its age. The two facts sit side by side for three centuries and neither cancels the other.

The language nobody decreed

Drafted from Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (1999)afterlife

The Delhi Sultanate's largest and least intended legacy is a language that about half a billion people now speak.

Where Hindustani came from

The sultanate ran on Persian. The chancery was Persian, the poetry was Persian, the histories were Persian, and Persian remained the language of administration in northern India until the British abolished it in 1837 — which means the official language of the Indian state was Persian for six hundred years.

But an army, a court and a bazaar in Delhi contained Turkic soldiers, Persian secretaries, Afghan amirs and a local population speaking the Khari Boli dialect of the upper Doab, and what came out of that was not Persian. It was a language with an Indic grammar and an enormously enlarged vocabulary — Persian, Arabic and Turkish words carried in wholesale, on top of a Sanskritic base.

Nobody decreed it. It grew where the languages met, spread along the routes the sultanate's armies and administrators used, and reached the Deccan with the southern campaigns, where it acquired a literature earlier than it did in the north.

That language is Hindustani, and its two modern standardised forms are Hindi and Urdu — separated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by script and by which reservoir their formal vocabulary is drawn from, and mutually intelligible in ordinary speech to this day.

Amir Khusrau, at the court of five sultans between the 1280s and 1320s, wrote in Persian and also in the vernacular, and is the earliest poet anybody can name in it.

The buildings

The Qutb Minar was begun by Aibak in the 1190s and is still the tallest brick minaret in the world.

What is around it is more informative than the tower. The Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque beside it was built out of the columns of demolished temples, reused whole, with the figural sculpture defaced but the carving otherwise intact — so a congregational mosque of the first years of Muslim rule in India stands on recycled Hindu and Jain pillars that are visibly what they are.

Over the following three centuries that hybridity stopped being improvised. The Indo-Islamic architecture of the sultanate — corbelled arches learned from local masons, then true arches; Indian materials and Indian craftsmen working Persian plans; the Tughluq fortresses, the Lodi tombs — is the direct ancestor of what the Mughals built, and the Taj Mahal is at the end of an unbroken line that starts here.

The Sufis

The other transmission is religious and it did not travel through the state.

The Chishti order established itself in India in this period — Muin al-Din at Ajmer, Nizam al-Din Auliya at Delhi, whose shrine is still one of the busiest pilgrimage sites in India — and its practice was deliberately unofficial: shaykhs who refused court appointments and royal gifts, whose lodges fed anybody who came, and whose devotional music, qawwali, was open to non-Muslims.

Nizam al-Din outlived seven sultans and made a point of not visiting any of them. When Ghiyath al-Din Tughluq sent word that Delhi was not big enough for both of them and that the shaykh should leave before he returned from campaign, Nizam al-Din is said to have answered Dilli hanuz dur ast — Delhi is still far away — and the sultan died on the road.

The conversions that made the Indian subcontinent's Muslim population, which is now the largest in the world outside Indonesia, happened overwhelmingly through that channel rather than through the sultans, and mostly in the two regions furthest from Delhi's control: Bengal and the Punjab.

Which is the shape of the whole afterlife. The sultanate's deliberate projects — the campaigns, the price controls, the capital moved to Daulatabad and back — mostly failed. What lasted came out of the sides of it: a language nobody planned, a building style nobody theorised, and a religious movement that made a point of keeping away from the court.