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

The story of these warring splinter kingdoms, many of them quite small and transient, is dreary. In most cases what we know of their history is a bare list of their kings, the rebellions they faced, and the battles they fought. And even the veracity of these incidents is in many cases uncertain, as their accounts vary from chronicler to chronicler, depending on their partisan affiliation. No worthwhile story can be told of them. The process of the fragmentation of the Sultanate, and the perpetual clashes between these fragments that went on during this period, are, as historical trends, very significant, but the details of the history of the numerous individual kingdoms are of little significance. The pattern of events is important, but not the details of individual events.

THE MOST NOTABLE of the numerous successor kingdoms of the Delhi Sultanate were Sind, Multan, Rajput principalities, Gujarat, Malwa, Khandesh, Jaunpur, Kashmir, Bengal, Orissa, Telingana, Bahmani, and Vijayanagar. Some of the kings of these states were legendary characters, of varied and rich talents, and they deserve to be noticed. One of these notable kings was Rana Kumbha, the mid-fifteenth century ruler of the Rajput kingdom of Mewar. He was a celebrated playwright, an eminent literary critic who wrote an acclaimed commentary on Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda , and was a knowledgeable patron of musicians and architects. Unfortunately, he later went insane and was assassinated by his son.

Equally notable was Sultan Mahmud Begarha of Gujarat, though for entirely different reasons. A late contemporary of Rana Kumbha, Begarha’s very appearance was bizarre. He was a gigantic man, with a beard that reached down to his waist, and a moustache that was so long that it had to be pulled up over both sides of his face and tied into a coiffure. Also, he had a gargantuan appetite, to match his size. And, most curious of all, he took a swig of poison with his meals, which turned his breath, sweat, spittle, semen, urine and faeces deadly poisonous. Not surprisingly, Begarha’s sexual appetite matched his size, and he is said to have kept several thousand women in his harem — he needed so many of them, for every woman he slept with died soon after the coitus, poisoned by his deadly ejaculation. [5] More on Begarha in Part VII, Chapter 1

Among the provinces of the Delhi Sultanate, the one that occupied the most unique position was Bengal, which pulsed to a rhythm somewhat different from that of the other regions of the empire. Bengal had always enjoyed a fair amount of autonomy, because of its ethnic and cultural distinctiveness, and its great distance from Delhi. And it invariably broke free from the Sultanate at the first sign of political debility in Delhi. The region also went through some very peculiar political convulsions during the medieval period. And it has the distinction of being the only medieval Muslim state ever to be ruled by a Hindu. According to Ferishta, the de facto ruler of Bengal in the early fifteenth century was a Hindu zamindar named Ganesa.

Ganesa exercised regal powers for about seven years, but apparently without assuming the royal title. But his son, who became a Muslim, did ascend the throne, and the dynasty remained in power for nearly a quarter century, but was eventually ousted by a member of the resurgent old dynasty. After this, in the late fifteenth century, Bengal was ruled by Ethiopians for a few years, and then by an Arab.

As in Bengal, the politics of Kashmir too did not quite conform to the Indo-Gangetic Plain pattern. Buddhism had been the dominant religion of Kashmir for many centuries, but it virtually disappeared from there in early medieval times. The state however came under a Buddhist king briefly in the early fourteenth century, when Rinchana, an invader from western Tibet, established his rule there. Rinchana was however a Buddhist only nominally, and was quite savage in his conduct — once, while suppressing a rebellion, he not only impaled the rebels but ‘ripped open with sword the wombs of the wives of his enemies’ and tore out the foetuses in them. But at the other end of the political spectrum, Kashmir in the fifteenth century had the distinction of having had one of the most liberal and tolerant Muslim rulers of medieval India, Zaynul Abidin, who rebuilt some of the Hindu temples demolished by his predecessor, prohibited cow slaughter, permitted sati, allowed the Hindus who had been forcibly converted to Islam to revert to their ancestral faith, and encouraged Brahmins to occupy high official positions.

OF ALL THE many independent kingdoms that emerged out of the fragmented Delhi Sultanate, the most important were two peninsular kingdoms, Bahmani and Vijayanagar, both founded at around the same time: Vijayanagar in 1336 and Bahmani a decade later, in 1347. The histories of these two kingdoms, like that of most other Indian kingdoms of this age, are marked by periodic internal turmoils, internecine conflicts, and endless wars with their neighbours. But unlike the histories of most other kingdoms of the age, which are bare lists of events, there is a good amount of detailed information about these two states and their rulers, in the accounts of Muslim chroniclers, as well as of foreign travellers who visited the region at this time, so their stories can be told in some detail.

Of these two kingdoms, the Bahmani Sultanate endured as a unified state for only about a century and a half, till 1490, and then gradually broke up into five independent kingdoms. However, titular Bahmani sultans continued to occupy their throne till 1527, so that the Sultanate may be said to have endured nominally for 180 years. Vijayanagar endured longer as a unified state, for 229 years, till 1565, when the armies of a league of Deccani sultans in a joint campaign routed the Vijayanagar army in a decisive battle and reduced the kingdom to the status of a minor state. Eventually, even this truncated kingdom fragmented into a number of independent principalities. However, the last reigning dynasty of Vijayanagar survived till the mid-seventeenth century, ruling over Chandragiri, a small realm in South India, so the history of Vijayanagar may be said to have lasted in all for 300-odd years. In the end nearly all the peninsular kingdoms, of rajas as well as of sultans, were obliterated during the tidal sweep of the Mughal empire into the peninsula in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The primary activity of the Bahmani and Vijayanagar kings, as well as of the kings of their successor states, was to wage war against each other, and this went on all through their history. These were singularly savage wars, involving the slaughter of very many thousands of people, soldiers as well as civilians. According to Ferishta, during the reign of the mid-fourteenth century Bahmani sultan Muhammad Shah ‘nearly 500,000 unbelievers fell by the swords of the warriors of Islam, by which the population of the Carnatic was so reduced that it did not recover for several ages.’

Curiously, these wars were fought not to exterminate the enemy, but to gather plunder and to collect tribute — and, most importantly, to vaingloriously demonstrate the military prowess of kings. It was a game, but a savage game. Some districts of the enemy territory were sometimes annexed by the victor, but there was hardly ever any annexation of the whole enemy kingdom. For instance, the only major territory that changed hands back and forth, again and again, during the numerous wars between Vijayanagar and Bahmani kingdoms was the fertile and mineral rich Raichur Doab between Krishna and Tungabhadra rivers. And, although the warring peninsular kings usually belonged to rival religions, Hinduism and Islam, this divergence was hardly ever a decisive factor in their relationships, though a religious colouration was sometimes given to their wars, to rouse the zeal of the soldiers, and to justify the brutal reprisals that the adversaries inflicted on each other. Indeed, Hindu and Muslim rulers at times allied with each other to wage wars against the states ruled by kings of their own religion.