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

The history of early medieval India was like a roller-coaster ride — there were spectacular highs and lows in it, but hardly any progress. This was true of nearly all the kingdoms of the age, those of rajas as well as of sultans. It is on the whole a sordid tale of treachery, rebellions, usurpations, murders, fiendish punishments, and barbaric mass slaughter.

The dominant Indian kingdom of the age was the Delhi Sultanate. This was essentially an alien military dictatorship — it was established by conquest, and was preserved by ceaseless military campaigns throughout its over three-century-long history. Except in a few rare cases, mostly in the peninsula, the Turco-Afghans, unlike the Mughals who succeeded them as the dominant rulers of India, did not sink their roots into the Indian soil, but remained aliens throughout their history. Though theirs was not a foreign rule in the sense that their home base was outside India, theirs was essentially a rule by foreigners.

The Turco-Afghans were a miniscule community in India, ever struggling for survival in the vast and churning sea of native Indians and their subjugated but not pacified rajas. That vulnerability put the sultans in a state of perpetual insecurity, which in turn disposed them, for self-preservation, to be brutal oppressors of the natives.

The survival anxiety of the sultans was further intensified by the fact that the Turco-Afghans even among themselves lacked unity, and were riven into various factions. The Delhi Sultanate was ever seething with conspiracies and rebellions. The law that prevailed in it all through its history was the law of the jungle. Its provincial governors often assumed postures of rivalry with their sultan, and they tended to rebel and establish independent kingdoms whenever the central authority in Delhi weakened. And when one uprising was suppressed by the sultan, another uprising broke out elsewhere in the empire. And the rebel governors and chieftains chastised by the sultan often turned rebels again when the royal forces withdrew. Sometimes the officer sent to suppress a rebellion himself turned rebel. This went on and on.

In Delhi itself the sultan was ever under the threat of being overthrown or assassinated, and of having his throne usurped by one of his top nobles or close relatives, particularly by his brothers, as it did indeed happen on several occasions. Even the reign of the ruthlessly efficient Ala-ud-din Khalji was beset with rebellions; there were, as the fourteenth-century chronicler Barani notes, several successive insurrections at one stage during his reign; there was even an attempted assassination of the sultan by one of his nephews seeking to usurp the throne.

This roiling state of affairs went on all through the history of the Delhi Sultanate. There was hardly a year, perhaps even hardly a month, free of internal military clashes somewhere in the empire. Scarcely anyone had any enduring loyalty to anyone. Those who plotted to betray their sultan often had betrayers against them in their own group. And those who bowed before a sultan one day unhesitatingly bowed before his assassin the next day.

All this gave the Delhi Sultanate a disquieting appearance of transience. Yet, amazingly, the Sultanate endured for over three centuries. There were, however, as many as five dynasties in the history of the Delhi Sultanate — Slave, Khalji, Tughluq, Sayyid and Lodi — and within each of these dynasties too there were several internal upheavals and usurpations. The Delhi Sultanate had, in all, 33 sultans in its 320-year-long history, their reigns averaging less than ten years. In contrast, during the entire history of the Mughal Empire, which was of about the same length as the history of the Delhi Sultanate, there was only one ruling dynasty, and during the 181-year-long high period of its history, from the invasion of Babur to the death of Aurangzeb, it had just six emperors, and the average length of their reign was over thirty years, which was more than three times the length of the average reign of the Delhi sultans. There were hardly any enduring periods of internal peace during the history of the Sultanate, except perhaps for a while during the reigns of Ala-ud-din Khalji and Firuz Tughluq. Though there were some attempts to consolidate and systematise the administration of the empire by some sultans, these had no lasting results.

A CURIOUS ASPECT OF the history of the Delhi Sultanate was the opportunistic collaboration of rajas with sultans. The rajas, if they had acted in concert, could have probably obliterated the Sultanate. Fortunately for the Sultanate, there was no prospect of any such alliance among the rajas, as there was absolutely no national spirit in that age, no awareness of India as a distinct nation, or of Indians as a distinct people. The rajas were solely concerned with preserving or augmenting their personal power and fortune. And to gain that objective they were often willing to collaborate with the sultans against their own compatriots.

The attitudes of the Muslim political class were also equally opportunistic. Just as there were many instances of rajas allying with sultans against fellow Hindu rulers, there were also many instances of sultans allying with rajas or using Hindu military contingents, against fellow Muslim rulers. Even Mahmud Ghazni, despite his reputation as a ruthless exterminator of Hindu kingdoms, had a large Hindu contingent in his army, and so had his son Masud. Masud in fact treated his Hindu officers in every way as equals to his Muslim officers, and employed them in the same high offices in which he employed his Muslim officers. Indeed, he valued their services so highly that he sternly warned his Muslim officers against offending the religious sensibilities of their fellow Hindu officers in any way.

Similarly, a Muslim governor of Gujarat under the Delhi Sultanate at one time ‘encouraged the Hindu religion … and promoted … the worship of idols,’ in order to gain the support of Hindus for his planned rebellion against the Delhi sultan, states Ferishta, a late sixteenth century Mughal chronicler. And, in a similar development in Hindu polity, king Devaraya of Vijayanagar took care to place a copy Koran on a desk in front of his throne, so that his Muslim officers could perform obeisance before him, without violating their religious injunctions.

It was all a power game. And in that game religion invariably subserved the political and military goals of kings. So sultans often collaborated with rajas in their battles, even in their battles against Muslim kingdoms; conversely, rajas often collaborated with sultans in their battles, even in their battles against Hindu kingdoms. For nobles and common people too religion usually subserved their temporal interests. And just as Hindu soldiers and officers freely served under sultans, so also Muslim soldiers and officers freely served under rajas.

And there is at least one instance of a Hindu being the ruler of a Muslim kingdom. This was Ganesa, a zamindar in Bengal in the early fifteenth century, who, according to Ferishta, ‘attained great power and predominance during Shihab-ud-din’s reign, and became the de-facto master of the treasury and kingdom.’ And on the death (or assassination) of the sultan, Ganesa usurped the royal power and ruled Bengal for about seven years, though he probably did not physically occupy the throne. But on Ganesa’s death, his son, who had become a Muslim, ascended the throne and ruled the state for sixteen years; and he, though outwardly a Muslim, appointed Brahmins as his ministers, and even had a Brahmin as his court priest.