Abraham Eraly - The Age of Wrath - A History of the Delhi Sultanate

There is a good amount of information about medieval India in the chronicles of the age by Muslim writers, far more than on any of the previous ages in Indian history, but these almost solely deal with political history, and there is hardly any information in them about the towns and villages of India, or about the way of life of the common people. Though there is some information on these matters in the accounts of contemporary European travellers in India, these are quite meagre, just some casual sketches of a few random places, communities and incidents.

The Indian city on which we have the most information in medieval chronicles is, predictably, Delhi. According to a widely held but unverifiable tradition, Delhi was originally Indraprastha, City of Indra, mentioned in Mahabharata as the capital of Pandavas. In historical times the city, termed Dilli or Dillika, is believed to have been founded in the mid-eighth century by Tomaras (a Rajput clan ruling Haryana) as their capital. The name first occurs in an inscription in the late twelfth century.

But Delhi was at this time just an obscure provincial city. It was only in the early thirteenth century, after it became the capital of the Delhi Sultanate, that it gained subcontinental prominence. It would thereafter, except for a few short interludes, remain the political hub of India, first as the capital of the Delhi Sultanate, then of the Mughal empire, then of the British-Indian empire, and finally of the Republic of India.

The city became the capital of the Delhi Sultanate when Aibak, the Turkish general in India, assumed sovereign power in Delhi in 1206, on the death of his overlord, Muhammad Ghuri. The location of the city was ideal for the Delhi sultans, for it was near the centre of their extensive kingdom, which stretched from Punjab to Bengal across the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Further, Delhi had the advantage of being quite distant from the vulnerable western frontier of the Sultanate menaced by the Mongols, and yet close enough to the frontier to defend it.

Delhi grew immensely in size and prominence under the sultans, and in time it became a much admired city in the medieval Muslim world. It was ‘the envy of the cities of the inhabited world,’ claims Barani, an early medieval chronicler. Battuta, a Moroccan traveller who was in Delhi during the reign of Muhammad Tughluq, is equally lavish in his praise of the city. ‘Delhi, the metropolis of India, is a vast and magnificent city, uniting beauty with strength,’ Battuta testifies. ‘It is surrounded by a wall that has no equal in the world, and is the largest city in India, nay, rather largest city in the entire Muslim Orient. The city of Delhi is now made up of four neighbouring and contiguous towns. One of them is Delhi proper, the old city built by the infidels … The second is called Siri … The third is called Tughluqabad … The fourth is called Jahan Panah (Refuge of the World), and is set apart for the residence of the reigning sultan, Muhammad.’ Like all the cities and major towns of the age in India, Delhi was a fort city, and it had, according to Battuta, twenty-eight gates.

Towards the close of the history of the Delhi Sultanate its capital was shifted from Delhi to Agra by Sikandar Lodi. But Agra was not a lucky city for Sikandar, for on 6 July 1505, soon after he shifted his residence there, a violent earthquake shattered the town, reducing most of it to rubble. ‘Even the very hills quaked, and lofty buildings crashed to the ground,’ writes Ni’matullah, an early seventeenth-century chronicler. ‘The living thought that the Day of Judgment had arrived; the dead, the day of resurrection.’ The quake was so intense that it was felt nearly all over India, and even in far away Persia.

Very little is known about the early history of Agra. According to Abdullah, a seventeenth century chronicler, Agra before the time of Sikandar Lodi was ‘a mere village, but one of old standing.’ There was an old fort there, which was used by the raja of Mathura as a state prison before the advent of the Turks. Agra was ravaged by Mahmud Ghazni during one of his raids into India, and he so utterly devastated it that ‘it became one of the most insignificant villages in the land,’ states Abdullah. ‘After this, it improved from the time of Sultan Sikandar [Lodi], and at length, in Akbar’s time, became the seat of government … and one of the chief cities of Hindustan.’

ANOTHER MUCH ADMIRED early medieval Indian city was Vijayanagar, founded in 1336 by Harihara. In the beginning it was just a small fortified settlement in the hill country along the southern bank of the Tungabhadra, but in time it grew into a very large city, which probably had a population of half a million or more. The ruins of the city today cover nearly thirty square kilometres. ‘The city of Vijayanagar is such that eye has not seen nor ear heard of any place resembling it upon the whole earth,’ writes Abdur Razzak, the mid-fifteenth century Persian envoy in Vijayanagar. ‘It is so built that it has seven fortified walls, one within the other. Beyond the circuit of the outer wall there is an esplanade extending for about fifty yards, in which stone slabs are fixed near one another to the height of a man … so that neither foot nor horse … can advance with facility near the outer wall … The fortress [which is within the seventh enclosure of the city] is in the form of a circle, situated on the summit of a hill … In that is the palace of the king … Between the first, second, and third walls, there are cultivated fields, gardens and houses. From the third to the seventh enclosure, shops and bazaars are closely crowded together … There are many rivulets and streams flowing through channels of cut stone, polished and even.’

Some eight decades after Razzak, in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, Portuguese traveller Domingos Paes visited the city and described it ‘as large as Rome, and very beautiful to the sight,’ having gardens and lakes in it. The city had, according to Paes, some 100,000 houses. Another Portuguese traveller, Duarte Barbosa, also visited Vijayanagar around this time. The king of Vijayanagar, he writes, has ‘very large and handsome palaces, with numerous courts … There are also in this city many other palaces of great lords … All the other houses of the place are covered with thatch. The streets and squares are very wide. They are constantly filled with innumerable crowd of all nations and creeds … There is an infinite trade in this city.’

About 600 kilometres to the north of Vijayanagar, in Maharashtra, is Daulatabad, a fort unlike any other in the world. Originally built by Yadavas around the turn of the twelfth century, the fort was captured by Ala-ud-din Khalji towards the close of the thirteenth century. In 1327 Muhammad Tughluq shifted his capital from Delhi to it for a while, partly because of his resentment towards the truculent people of Delhi, but mainly because of the surpassing strength of the Daulatabad fort, which stands on a conical hill some 200 metres high. Daulatabad, writes Battuta, is an ‘enormous city which rivals Delhi … in importance and in the spaciousness of its planning … [Its fortress] is on a rock situated in a plain; the rock has been excavated and a castle built on its summit.’

The most detailed medieval description of the fort is given by Abdul-Hamid Lahauri, the official chronicler of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. ‘This fortress … is on a mass of rock which raises its head towards heaven,’ he writes. The sides of the hill at the bottom were chiselled away all around to form a sheer vertical barrier of about fifty metres high from the ground. And the barrier in turn was scraped smooth and even so that, according to Lahauri, ‘not even an ant or a snake could crawl up the slippery surface.’ For additional defence, the barrier was girded at its base by a broad and deep moat—‘40 cubits broad and 30 cubits deep’—hewn into solid rock. Further, the citadel, which was at the top of the hill, was itself girded by three concentric defensive walls, with bastions on them.