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

In civil administration, the preponderant majority of the staff of the Delhi Sultanate, at all but the top one or two levels, were Hindus, particularly in the provinces. The sultans did not have the manpower from their own people to man the entire administration, or even to man all the crucial offices of their extensive Indian empire with its vast and diverse population. Nor did they have the local knowledge needed to run the local administration. They therefore necessarily had to depend heavily on Hindus to run the government.

At the district and village levels the administration in Muslim states was almost entirely manned by Hindus, and there the traditional indigenous administrative institutions and hereditary officers generally — except during the reign of Ala-ud-din Khalji — continued to function as they had done for centuries before the Muslim invasion. This was particularly true of village administration. Villages were virtually autonomous during the medieval period, as they had been for very many centuries. The government of the sultans did not normally intrude into village administration at all, except for revenue collection and for the maintenance of law and order. But even in these functions, Muslim officers and fief-holders generally played only a supervisory role, for villages policed themselves in normal times, and revenue collection was mostly managed by the traditional local functionaries.

In a very real sense, it was Hindus who ran the government in Muslim kingdoms. What Dubois said of India in the early nineteenth century — that ‘the rule of all the Hindu princes, and often that of the Mahomedans, was properly speaking, Brahminical rule, since all posts of confidence were held by Brahmins’—was substantially true of the early medieval period as well. The rule of the sultans was sustained — indeed, was made possible — by the service of Hindu officers and staff.

The majority of Hindu officers in the service of Muslim kings were in subordinate positions. There were however a few notable exceptions to this, of Hindu officers rising to the top echelons of government in Muslim states. For instance, in the early sixteenth century Hindus held several top positions in the Muslim kingdom of Malwa, and one of them, Basanta Rai, even rose to be the wazir. This dominance of the Hindus in the government led to a conflict between the Hindu and Muslim officers of the state, resulting in the murder of Basanta Rai. But presently another Hindu officer, Medini Rai, rose to dominance in the state, and he grew so powerful and overweening that the sultan himself was forced to flee from the state and take refuge in Gujarat. Similarly, the de facto ruler of Bengal in the early fifteenth century was a Hindu officer named Ganesa; his son, who became a Muslim, even ascended the throne of Bengal.

The appointment of Hindus to high official positions was fairly common in the Deccan sultanates at this time — Bahmani sultan Firuz Shah, for instance, appointed several Brahmins and other Hindus to crucial offices in his government. Generally speaking, the establishment of the Turko-Afghan rule made no significant difference in the lives and functions of most Hindu officials from what they had been before the Muslim invasion.

NOR DID THE life of the common folk in India change in any notable way consequent of the displacement of rajas by sultans. This was partly because the Sultanate did not have the administrative capacity or the manpower needed to intrude in any significant manner into rural India, where most Indians lived, and partly also because the rajas were nearly as exploitative of the common people as the sultans were. It was mainly the Hindu political elite who suffered loss — the loss of power and prestige and wealth — because of the Turko-Afghan invasion.

And what the Hindu political elite lost was gained by the Muslim political elite — the gain of power and prestige and wealth. The top Turko-Afghan officers of the Sultanate were paid fabulous salaries; in fact, what they received were not just salaries, but what amounted to be shares in the revenues of the empire. The wazir under Firuz Tughluq, for instance, received, ‘exclusive of the allowance for his retainers, friends and sons … a sum of thirteen lakh tankas — or, instead of it, sundry fiefs and districts,’ states Afif. Not surprisingly, when Malik Shahin Shahna, a senior officer of the Sultanate, died and his effects were examined by royal auditors, it was found that he had accumulated ‘a sum of fifty lakh of tankas in cash … besides horses, valuables, and jewels in abundance.’

The normal practice of most Delhi sultans was to assign to their officers, and sometimes even to the soldiers of their central army, lands in lieu of cash salaries, lands from which they could collect taxes. This reinforces the impression that the sultan was not merely paying salaries to his officers, but sharing the revenues of the empire with them. This practice also had a major advantage for kings, in that it considerably reduced the tax collection burden of their rudimentary administrative organisation.

Under this system, soldiers were usually assigned villages, while officers received districts, or even provinces, depending on their rank. The principal assignees in turn often sub-assigned parts of their territory to their subordinates, on terms similar to those on which they received their assignments from the sultan. In all these cases what was given to the assignees was only the revenue from the allotted land, not the land itself. The assignee had no hereditary ownership right over the land. Besides, the land assignments were transferable, and were usually reassigned every four years or so, so that the assignees did not get rooted in their jagirs and turn themselves into zamindars. The land revenue assignment system, termed iqta , therefore did not lead to feudalism.

The iqta system was a highly inefficient system of revenue administration, and it led to a great deal of corruption, as well as to the exploitation of peasants by the assignees. But it was the only workable system in most medieval Indian kingdoms, because of their poor administrative capability. Even Ala-ud-din, who sought strict administrative control over his empire, had to retain the iqta system in the provinces, even though he abolished it in his central army, whose soldiers and officers were paid in cash directly from the royal treasury. Muhammad Tughluq also sought to tightly control iqta assignments, but his successor Firuz reverted to the old practice of general iqta assignments. In Vijayanagar land assignments to Nayaks (chieftains) was the common practice; there were, according to Nuniz, over 200 such assignments in the kingdom.

THE REVENUE AND military departments were the most important departments of the Delhi Sultanate, as in any medieval state. These were interdependent departments — there could be no army without revenue, and quite often the army was needed to enforce revenue collection. And just as the sultans maintained a large army, so also they maintained a large finance department with numerous accountants, to keep track of the state’s income and expenditure. The accounts submitted by the officers of the fiefs were regularly audited by this department; similarly the accounts of the various royal establishments were also regularly audited.

There were four legitimate sources of revenue for the sultan, sanctioned by Sharia: tax on agricultural produce, poll tax on non-Muslims, income tax on Muslims, and war booty. Of these, the primary source of revenue of the Delhi Sultanate, as of all medieval Indian states, was agricultural tax. The sultans also received a good amount of income from the produce of the crown lands, the khalisa , which was remitted directly into the royal treasury. All the lands of the empire other than the crown lands were assigned to royal officers as iqta lands, from the revenue of which they were to take their salary, meet their administrative expenses, and maintain the military contingents assigned to them.