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

A wide variety of ships from different nations were engaged in trade with India in medieval times. The largest of these were the Chinese junks, but the Chinese also plied medium and small ships in the Indian seas. Indian ships were smaller than the junks, but larger than the European ships, according to Nicolo Conti. But European ships, despite their relatively small size, had a decisive advantage over Asian ships, as they were more robustly built. While the Indian, Arab and Chinese ships were not strong enough to sail in the open seas in rough weather, European ships could do that. European ships also carried superior artillery. These were the key factors that enabled Europeans to eventually dominate the Asian seas.

Medieval sea transport was slow, averaging only around sixty kilometres a day, and was often further delayed on the way for various reasons — a delegation sent by a Chola king to China in the early eleventh century, for instance, took as many as three years to reach the Chinese capital. Not surprisingly, it took ships around fifteen days to reach Colombo from Kozhikode.

Sea travel was also hazardous, because of violent storms in the Indian Ocean, and also because the sea was infested with pirates at this time. These pirates belonged to different nations, but many of them operated from the west peninsular coast of India, no doubt with the connivance of the local rulers, who received a share of the booty. According to Marco Polo, these pirates were ‘the most arrant corsairs of the world.’ Because of the ever present menace of pirates in the Indian seas, merchantmen usually sailed in fleets, just as trade caravans in India travelled in large groups for protection against brigands. For the same reason, Chinese junks in the Indian seas usually carried a good number of soldiers in them. According to Battuta, a large Chinese ship carried a crew of 1,000, of whom 600 were sailors and 400 warriors: ‘archers, shield-bearers and crossbow archers … who shoot naphtha missiles.’

‘Seldom in the history of mankind has the spectacle been witnessed of two civilisations, so vast and so strongly developed, yet so radically dissimilar as the Muhammadan and Hindu, meeting and mingling together,’ observes John Marshall, distinguished early twentieth century British archaeologist-historian. ‘The very contrasts which existed between them, the wide divergences in their culture and their religions, make the history of their impact peculiarly instructive …’

Such civilisational confrontations have indeed been very rare in world history. But what is even more curious is that though Hindu and Muslim civilisations coexisted in India for very many centuries, there was hardly any creative interaction between them, no significant change in either, in response to the challenge by the other. The two coexisted, but did not interact. They were like water and oil in the same pot.

The entire early medieval period in India was culturally quite barren, in sharp contrast to the lush cultural efflorescence of the preceding classical period or the succeeding Mughal period. Except for the patronage of Indian culture by a few provincial sultans, the explorations into Indian heritage by a couple of Persian scholars and writers like al-Biruni and Amir Khusrav, the conservation of some ancient Indian monuments by a few sultans like Firuz Tughluq, and the construction of a few grand monuments like Qutb Minar, there was nothing notably positive in the cultural history of the Delhi Sultanate and its provincial offshoots.

Nor was there any notable creative response by Hindu civilisation to the challenge of Islam, except the superficial adoption of a few Persian cultural modes and lifestyle by some rajas. For many centuries, roughly from the sixth to the eleventh century, Indians had lived hermetically sealed within the subcontinent, with virtually no contact with the outside world. There were no major invasions or racial migrations into India during this period, unlike in the previous periods. The only exception to this was the Arab conquest of Sind in the early eighth century, but that was a peripheral event, more important in what it portended than in what it achieved. As for Indian kings, they had never-ever, in the entire long history of India, ventured outside the subcontinent for conquest.

Because of all this, Indians of the late classical period had hardly any knowledge of the outside world. And they in their ignorance viewed all foreign civilisations as contemptibly inferior to their own civilisation, and held that any contact with foreign people would be degrading.

THE CULTURAL INSULARITY and torpor of medieval India was appalling. ‘I can only compare their mathematical and astronomical literature, as far as I know it, to a mixture … of pearls and dung, or of costly crystals and common pebbles,’ comments al-Biruni, an exceptionally liberal-minded and perceptive early medieval Iranian intellectual, who was a keen student of Indian civilisation. ‘Both kinds of things are equal in their eyes, since they cannot raise themselves to the methods of a strictly scientific deduction.’ This lack of discrimination, the blind acceptance of whatever ancient knowledge had come down to them, often in a corrupt form, and disdaining even to look at the achievements of other civilisations, characterised the Indian cultural elite of the early medieval period. Equally, Indians were averse to share their knowledge with the people of other lands, scorning them as unworthy of such knowledge. And even among Indians themselves caste rules restricted the dissemination of particular fields of knowledge to particular castes.

‘Hindus believe that there is no country like theirs, no nation like theirs, no kings like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs,’ continues al-Biruni. ‘They are haughty, foolishly vain, self-conceited, and stolid. They are by nature niggardly in communicating that which they know, and they take the greatest possible care to withhold it from men of another caste among their own people, still much more, of course, from any foreigner. According to their belief … [no people] besides them have any knowledge or science whatsoever … [And if you tell them of the achievements of other civilisations] they will consider you to be both an ignoramus and a liar.’ All these were fatal flaws in the Indian civilisation of the early medieval period. With no challenge to stimulate creativity, Indian civilisation had over many centuries become comatose, while most of the rest of the world woke up from their medieval slumber and surged ahead.

According to al-Masudi, a tenth-century Arab scholar, ‘India was the portion of the earth in which order and wisdom prevailed in distant ages.’ True indeed. But the scene in medieval India was entirely different from that. India at this time had hardly any creative vitality in any field of culture. Not surprisingly, India’s primary response to the Turkish invasion and the challenge of Islam was to defensively curl up tighter into itself. In the Sanskrit literature of the age there is virtually no mention of the establishment of the Turkish rule in India, and no indication of any socio-cultural response by Indians to the challenge of Islam.

TURKS WERE ORIGINALLY a wild nomadic people of mixed racial and tribal origin, spread over a vast area in Central Asia. But gradually, from around the eighth century, they became Islamised in religion and Persianised in culture. And by the time they invaded India, they had become an urbane, sophisticated people, though some of their old feral nature still persisted in them. Several of their sultans, in Delhi as well as elsewhere in India, were ardent patrons of culture, and some — Firuz Tughluq, for instance — were themselves respected writers. According to Afif, a fourteenth-century chronicler, Firuz Tughluq spent a vast sum of money on allowances to scholars; further, according to Mughal chronicler Ferishta, the sultan encouraged scholars to fan out in his empire and spread learning. There were said to have been as many as a thousand educational institutions flourishing in Delhi during the Tughluq period.