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

Such punishments, Muhammad believed, were right and proper — and essential. ‘These days many wicked and turbulent men are to be found,’ he one day told Barani, justifying the savage punishments he inflicted. ‘I visit them with chastisement upon the suspicion or presumption of their rebellious and treacherous deigns, and I punish the most trifling act of contumacy with death. This I will do until I die, or until people act honestly, and give up rebellion and contumacy.’ Muhammad was, for a medieval sultan, quite a learned man, but his learning, instead of making him humane, only calloused him. ‘The dogmas of philosophers, which are productive of the indifference and hardness of heart, had a powerful influence on him,’ comments Barani. ‘But the declarations of the holy books, and utterances of prophets, which inculcate benevolence and humility, and hold out the prospect of future punishment, were not deemed worthy of attention.’

In medieval chronicles there are several accounts of the savagery of Muhammad against his own subjects, slaughtering them indiscriminately, plundering and devastating their land. Thus on one occasion, following a rebellion, ‘the sultan led forth his army to ravage Hindustan,’ reports Barani. ‘He laid the country waste from Kanauj to Dalamu, and every person that fell into his hands he slew. Many of the inhabitants fled and took refuge in jungles, but the sultan had the jungles surrounded, and every individual that was captured was killed.’ Comments Sewell: Muhammad ‘exterminated whole tribes as if they were vermin.’

There was an element of revolting fiendishness in some of the punishments that Muhammad meted out. Thus when Baha-ud-din Gurshasp, his cousin, rose in revolt against him, not only was he flayed alive, but his flesh was cooked with rice and sent to his wife and children. In another case, when a pious and venerable Muslim described the sultan as a tyrant, and refused to retract the charge despite being chained and starved for a fortnight, the sultan, according to Battuta, ordered him to be forcibly fed human excrement. So the wardens stretched him on his back on the ground, ‘opened his mouth with pincers and dropped into it human refuse dissolved in water.’

‘The cruelties of this tyrant … surpass all belief,’ comments Nurul Haq, a Mughal chronicler. However, it should be noted that in brutality the difference between Muhammad and most other Delhi sultans was only that of degree, not of kind, though the difference in degree in this case was so extreme as to seem like difference in kind. Of the thirty-two sultans of Delhi, only a couple of them were free of such savagery. Brutality and the terror it evoked were, from the point of view of the sultans, essential for their survival as rulers in that brutal age, particularly in India, where they were a small group of alien invaders ruling over a vast and hostile subject people. But in the case of Muhammad he carried the brutality to such a senseless extreme that it turned out to be counterproductive: it undermined his power, instead of securing it.

Muhammad, concedes Ferishta, was a learned, cultured and talented prince, but adds that ‘despite all these admirable qualities he was wholly devoid of mercy or consideration for his people. The punishments he inflicted were not only rigid and cruel, but frequently unjust. So little did he hesitate to spill the blood of god’s creatures that when anything occurred which excited him to proceed to that horrid extremity, one might have supposed his object was to exterminate the human species altogether.’

Hanafi, a mid-sixteenth century chronicler, gives a graphic account of one of the sultan’s gruesome acts of tyranny. Muhammad, Hanafi writes, ‘one day … went on foot to the court of Kazi Kamal-ud-din, the chief justice, and told him that Shaikh-zada Jam had called him unjust; he demanded that he should be summoned and required to prove the injustice of which he accused him, and that if he could not prove it, he should be punished according to the injunction of the law. Shaikh-zada Jam, when he arrived, admitted that he had made the allegation. The sultan then enquired his reason [for doing that], to which he replied, “When a criminal is brought before you, it is entirely at your royal option to punish him justly or unjustly, but you go further than that, and give his wife and children to the executioners so that they may do what they like with them. In what religion is this practice lawful? If this is not injustice, what is it?” The sultan remained silent, but after he left the court he ordered the Shaikh-zada to be imprisoned in an iron cage.’ Later he had the Shaikh cut to pieces right in front of the kazi’s court. ‘There are many similar stories of the atrocities he committed. Tyranny took the place of justice.’

MUHAMMAD COMPENSATED HIS many frustrations by assuming a posture of extreme arrogance, of knowing and doing everything better than everyone else in the world. The more he failed, the more haughty he became. According to Barani, the sultan’s pride was so overweening that he could not bear to hear of anyone anywhere in the world as being better than him in any way. And he had, as the predictable corollary of his insane pride, a ferocious temper. But characteristically, as in everything else in him, Muhammad was a weird mixture of contrary qualities in temperament too — if he was grotesque in his wrathful arrogance, he was equally grotesque in his ostentatious displays of abject self-abasement.

The classic instance of this was the reception he accorded to the Caliph’s representative when he arrived in Delhi on royal invitation. As his troubles mounted, Muhammad conceived the chimerical notion that what would save him from his vicissitudes would be to secure pontifical recognition for his rule. ‘It occurred to his mind that no king or prince could exercise regal power without conformation by the Caliph of the race of Abbas,’ notes Barani. So he made diligent inquires, and, on learning from travellers that the true representative of the line of Abbas was the Caliph of Egypt, he sent envoys to Egypt to seek the Caliph’s formal recognition.

‘His flatteries of the Caliph were so fulsome that they cannot be reduced to writing,’ states Barani. And when the Caliph’s representative arrived in Delhi bringing Caliphal honours and a ceremonial robe for Muhammad, ‘the sultan, with all his nobles … went forth to meet … [him] with great ceremony, and he walked before him barefoot for the distance of some long bow-shots.’

On getting pontifical recognition, Muhammad considered himself to be the deputy of the Caliph in India, and he removed his own name from his coins, and substituted it with the name of the Caliph. And, predictably, he then went to absurd extremes in displaying his subservience to the caliph. ‘Without the Caliph’s command the sultan scarcely ventured to drink even a draught of water,’ wryly comments Barani.

Around this time there arrived in India one Ghiyas-ud-din Muhammad, a great-great grandson of the Abbasid Caliph al-Mustansir of Baghdad, and the sultan received him with grovelling servility. He sent the leading ecclesiastics and theologians of the court to receive the guest in western Haryana, and himself went a good distance from Delhi to meet him. After a ceremonious exchange of gifts, the sultan held Ghiyas-ud-din’s stirrup while he mounted his horse, and they rode together to Delhi with the royal umbrella held over the heads of them both. The sultan even persuaded the reluctant Ghiyas-ud-din to place his foot upon his neck!

Muhammad was generally gracious and generous — almost fawning — towards the foreigners who visited him. It was as if he sought to purchase their appreciation as he could not win it from his own people, and he hoped that the visitors would spread his renown around the world. Typically, Ghiyas-ud-din was granted surpassing privileges at the royal court, given opulent presents, provided with lavish residential facilities and assigned an extensive fief for his income. Battuta too received very generous treatment from the sultan. ‘When I approached the sultan, he took my hand and shook it,’ reports Battuta. ‘And, continuing to hold it, he addressed me most affably in Persian, saying, “Your arrival is blessed; be at ease, I shall be compassionate to you and grant you such favours that your fellow-countrymen will hear of it and come and join you.” Then he asked me where I came from and I answered him, and every time he said any encouraging word to me I kissed his hand, until I had kissed it seven times.’ Battuta was then given 6000 tankas in cash, and was assigned three villages as his fief, to which two more were later added, yielding him in all a substantial annual income of 12,000 tankas. Besides, he was given ten Hindu slaves to attend on him. He was even appointed as the kazi of Delhi, even though he did not know the local language — the office was, for Battuta, a sinecure, for he was given two local assistants to do his work, so he could enjoy the royal bounty with a clear conscience.