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

Battuta describes the incident quite differently. According to him it was the sultan who ordered the reception hall to be built, and it was built on wooden pillars and beams by Jauna in the course of three days. Jauna, according to Battuta, had designed it ingeniously so that ‘it would crash when elephants touched it at a certain spot … The sultan stopped at this building and feasted the people. After they dispersed, the prince asked the sultan for permission to parade the elephants before him.’ During the parade, when the elephants passed along a particular place, the building, as Jauna had planned, collapsed on the sultan, killing him. Though Jauna then ordered pickaxes and shovels ‘to be brought to dig and look for his father, he made signs to them not to hurry, and the tools were not brought till after sunset. Then they began to dig … Some assert that Tughluq was taken out dead; others, on the contrary, maintain that he was alive, and that an end was made of him.’

The mechanical ingenuity attributed to Jauna by Battuta in constructing the collapsible building, though not impossible, seems improbable, and so does his story of the prince making signs (obviously in front of many others) to the rescuers to delay their work. The hastily built structure was probably not quite stable. Ferishta mentions that there was a suspicion of conspiracy behind the accident, but he discredits it, and adds, ‘God only knows the truth.’ Assassinations of kings by their close relatives were all too common in the Delhi Sultanate, so it was natural to suspect conspiracy in every accident. But lack of a compelling motive — Jauna was after all the heir-apparent, and his father was a very old man — and the complicated and chancy device used for causing the sultan’s death, as also Battuta’s marked prejudice against the prince, which is evident in much of what he says about him, make the conspiracy theory implausible.

Ghiyas-ud-din Tughluq died in early 1325, in the fifth year of his reign. He had built for himself an elegant mausoleum at Tughluqabad, and he was buried there on the very night of his death, in conformity with the Islamic custom of burying the deceased soon after their death. Three days later Jauna ascended the throne, and took the title Muhammad Tughluq. He remained at Tughluqabad for forty days, in extended mourning. ‘When the accursed prince finished his father’s burial he made a display of sorrow while at heart he was happy,’ comments Isami, a contemporary chronicler virulently hostile to Muhammad.

After the period of mourning, Muhammad set out for Delhi in a ceremonial procession. The city was elaborately decorated for the occasion, and Muhammad, basking in the acclamation of the crowds lining the streets, proceeded to the palace of the early sultans of Delhi, and took up his residence there. He then, according to Isami, made a hypocritical declaration: ‘The late emperor’s policy was to administer justice … I shall do the same. The old and the aged in the realm are unto me like my father; the youth are like my brothers; … the children in the empire are like my own children … I wish prosperity, peace and long life for all, high and low … I shall rule with justice and enforce it to such an extent that I may fittingly be called the Just Emperor.’

Thus began, with festivities and in great optimism, the most turbulent reign in the over three centuries long history of the Delhi Sultanate. There is a good amount of information on Muhammad in contemporary chronicles. There is even an account of his reign by a foreign traveller, Ibn Battuta, a Moorish explorer, who spent about a decade in India in the mid-fourteenth century, most of it in Delhi, at the court of Muhammad. But these chroniclers were often as confused as modern scholars are about what to make of the motives and actions of Muhammad. There is even some confusion about the chronology of the reign.

The chief chronicler of Muhammad’s reign was Zia-ud-din Barani, who had excellent high level political contacts in the Sultanate, as he belonged to a family of prominent royal officers from the time of his grandfather, and was himself a favourite courtier of Muhammad for some fourteen years, though he never held any official post. Being a courtier had its advantages and disadvantages for Barani as a chronicler — it enabled him to witness at close range many of the events that he wrote about, but he had to be also very careful about what he wrote, for fear of rousing the sultan’s wrath. ‘We were traitors who were prepared to call black white,’ he frankly admits. ‘Avarice and the desire for worldly wealth led us into hypocrisy, and as we stood before the king and witnessed punishments forbidden by the law, fear of our fleeting lives and equally fleeting wealth deterred us from speaking the truth before him.’

But Barani was free of those fears and anxieties when he wrote his chronicle, for it was some years after Muhammad’s death and towards the end of his own life — when he was no longer a courtier, and had little to hope for or to fear from the Tughluqs — that he wrote it. He was therefore brutally candid about the sultan’s misdeeds, though he was also equally appreciative of his good deeds. Battuta is even more candid about Muhammad, for he had nothing at all to fear from the Tughluqs, as he wrote his book in Morocco after returning home from his travels.

The picture of Muhammad that emerges from these and other medieval chronicles is of a psychotic Jekyll-and-Hyde personality, a bizarre blend of antithetical qualities, of good and evil, overweening arrogance and abject humility, murderous savagery and touching compassion. ‘This king is of all men the fondest of making gifts and of shedding blood,’ comments Battuta. ‘His gate is never without some poor man enriched, or some … man executed, and stories are current among the people about his generosity and courage, and about his cruelty and violence … For all that, he is of all men the most humble and the readiest to show equity and justice … Justice, compassion for the needy, and extraordinary generosity’ characterised his conduct. In the colourful words of Sewell, an early modern historian, Muhammad was ‘a saint with the heart of a devil, or a fiend with the soul of a saint.’

Muhammad was a compulsive innovator. But he — unlike Ala-ud-din, the other great reformer sultan of early medieval India — lacked the pragmatism, patience and perseverance needed to execute his schemes successfully, even though several of the schemes he dreamed up were, in themselves, quite sound. All his grand dreams therefore turned into dreadful nightmares, for himself as well as for his subjects. Muhammad however did not see the failure of his schemes as his failure in their execution, but blamed it on the intractability and lack of vision of his subjects. And this turned him vindictive towards the people, treating them not as his subjects, whom he had the duty to protect and nurture, but as his enemies whom he had to chastise. ‘I punish the people because they have all at once become my enemies and opponents,’ he once told Barani. ‘I have dispensed great wealth among them, but they have not become friendly and loyal. Their temper is well known to me, and I see that they are disaffected and inimical to me.’

MUHAMMAD’S FRUSTRATIONS TURNED him into a sadistic, bloodthirsty tyrant. ‘The sultan was far too ready to shed blood,’ reports Battuta. ‘He punished small faults and great, without respect of persons, whether men of learning, piety or high station. Every day hundreds of people, chained, pinioned, and fettered, are brought to his hall, and those who are for execution are executed, those for torture are tortured, and those for beating are beaten.’ Confirms Barani: ‘Not a day or week passed without the spilling of much … blood … Streams of gore flowed [daily] before the entrance of his palace.’ The corpses of those executed were usually flung down at the gate of the royal palace, as a warning to the public to be obedient to the sultan. These executions were carried out on all days, except on Fridays, which was a day of respite for prisoners.