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

An accomplished scholar himself, Firuz was a liberal patron of the learned. And he had to his credit the setting up of several educational institutions. He was passionately fond of music, despite the fact that orthodox Muslims considered addiction to music to be a vice, though only a venial vice. Firuz was also an inventor. ‘Many wonderful things were invented by Sultan Firuz in the course of his reign,’ states Afif, ‘and among them the most wonderful was the tas-i-ghariyal ’ for marking time and indicating the hours of prayer. And he wrote his autobiography, as Mughal emperors Babur and Jahangir would later do.

One of the passions of Firuz was to build new towns and monumental structures. ‘Among the gifts which god bestowed upon me, his humble servant, was a desire to erect public buildings,’ he writes. ‘So I built many mosques and colleges and monasteries … [I also] dug canals, planted trees, and endowed [religious scholars] with lands.’ Confirms Afif: ‘Sultan Firuz excelled all his predecessors on the throne of Delhi in the erection of buildings; indeed no monarch of any country surpassed him [in this]. He built cities, forts, palaces, bunds, mosques, and tombs in great numbers … He also built monasteries, and inns for the accommodation of travellers. One hundred and twenty monasteries were built … The sultan also repaired the tombs of former kings.’

Firuz, according to Afif, ‘had a remarkable fondness for history.’ This turned him into a zealous conservationist, who took care to preserve the historical and cultural heritage of India. ‘I repaired and rebuilt the edifices and structures of former kings and ancient nobles, which had fallen into decay from the lapse of time, giving the restoration of these buildings priority over my own building works,’ states Firuz.

This conservationist zeal of the sultan was not confined to the monuments of the Sultanate, but extended to ancient Indian monuments as well. His most valuable contribution in this was the preservation of two Asoka pillars — one from Meerut in UP, and the other from a village near Khizrabad in Punjab — which were transported with great and respectful care from their original sites to Delhi, where they were set up in prominent sites. Firuz of course did not know what the pillars were or who had built them and when — no one knew that till the ancient Brahmi inscriptions on them were deciphered by a British philologist in the mid-nineteenth century. But apparently Firuz had a sense that they were of very ancient — they were in fact over one and a half millenniums old — and were of very great historical value.

‘These columns had stood in those places (their original locations) from the days of the Pandavas, but had never attracted the attention of any of the kings who sat upon the throne of Delhi, till Sultan Firuz noticed them, and, with great exertion brought them away,’ notes Afif. ‘When Firuz Shah first beheld these columns, he was filled with admiration, and resolved to remove them with great care as trophies to Delhi.’

Meticulous care was taken in excavating and transporting the pillars, and this is described in detail by Afif. [3] See Part IX, Chapter 2 The pillars evoked the admiration of Timur when he occupied Delhi in 1398. ‘During his stay of some days in Delhi, he inspected all the monuments of former kings, and among them these two obelisks,’ writes Afif. ‘He declared that in all the countries he had traversed he had never seen any monuments comparable to these.’

WE KNOW NOTHING about Firuz’s family life, but he had a number of sons, of whom his favourite was his eldest son, Fath Khan, who was born when the sultan was marching to Delhi after his accession in Sind. He was a talented prince, and when he died in 1374 it shattered the aged sultan, who was then in his late sixties, and he rapidly slid into mental and physical decline. For a while he even withdrew from his royal duties. Later he resumed work and carried on for over a decade. Towards the end of this period, in 1387, there was a virtual civil war fought in the streets of Delhi, between the supporters of Khan Jahan, the powerful minister who had become the de facto ruler of the empire during Firuz’s debility, and the supporters of Muhammad Shah, Firuz’s eldest surviving son and heir-apparent. In this, the prince prevailed. Firuz, now over eighty years old and rather senile, then appointed Muhammad Shah as his co-ruler, and conferred on him the royal title.

Unfortunately, the prince was a sybarite; he had no serious interest in governance, but devoted himself almost entirely to sensual pleasures. And this once again led to a civil strife, a popular uprising in Delhi, which forced Muhammad to flee from the city. Firuz then appointed Ghiyas-ud-din, son of Fath Khan, as the co-ruler of the empire. Firuz died soon after, in September 1388, aged 83 and, according to contemporary chronicler Sirhindi, ‘worn out with weakness.’

The reign of Firuz was the golden age of the Delhi Sultanate, especially in terms of the contentment of the people. ‘During the reign of Firuz Shah … all men, high and low, bond and free, lived happily and free from care … Things were plentiful and cheap, and the people were well to do … Nothing in the least degree unpleasant or disagreeable happened during his reign … The sultan being beneficent, all men, high and low, were devoted to him.’ states Afif. Confirms Sirhindi: ‘There has been no king in Delhi so just and merciful, so kind and religious, or such a builder [as Sultan Firuz]. His justice won for him the hearts of his subjects … It was in no way possible that during the reign of this sovereign any strong man could tyrannise the weak. God Almighty took this gentle, beneficent and just king to his everlasting rest, after a reign of thirty-seven years and nine months.’

As an orthodox Muslim ruler over an alien, pagan people, Firuz obligatorily discriminated against his Hindu subjects, and was often oppressive and sanguinary towards them. But even in these matters his policies and actions were moderate compared to those of most other Delhi sultans, and were on the whole more than compensated by his general regard for the welfare of all his subjects. If Muslims had good reason to rejoice in the reign of Firuz, so had Hindus. Concludes modern historian Wolseley Haig: ‘The reign of Firuz … [marks] the most brilliant epoch of Muslim rule in India before the reign of Akbar.’

‘The city of Delhi has been turned upside down,’ bemoans Afif about the conditions there following the death of Firuz. The subsequent story of the Tughluq dynasty is a dreary tale of assassinations, usurpations and rebellions; and of feckless, worthless sultans, and their overweening, faithless ministers, who treated their masters as puppets in their hands. During the twenty-four years between the death of Firuz Tughluq in 1388 and the overthrow of the Tughluq dynasty by Khizr Khan — the founder of the Sayyid dynasty — in 1412, as many as five sultans occupied the throne of Delhi. Of them, the longest reign was that of Nasir-ud-din Mahmud Shah, which lasted 18 years, while the shortest reign, that of Ala-ud-din Sikandar Shah, lasted just six weeks. The successors of Firuz are notable only for their utter insignificance.

During this period there were sometimes two rival kings in the Sultanate, ruling from different cities at the same time. And on a couple of occasions the imperial capital itself was divided between contending sultans, and civil war raged through the streets of the city. And once when a sultan returned to Delhi after a military campaign he had to suffer the humiliation of the city gates being shut against him by a rebel officer, who kept him waiting there for about three months. Sometimes the royal officers sent to suppress rebellions themselves turned rebels. And as power weakened at the centre, the empire began to disintegrate, and several of its provinces became independent kingdoms.