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

Apparently the size of the army and the quality of its mounts and equipments were not the decisive factors in the outcome of battles. What was decisive was the army’s spirit. And discipline. ‘The princes of the house of Bahmani maintained themselves by superior valour only, for in power, wealth and extent of country the rajas of Vijayanagar were greatly their superiors,’ observes Ferishta. Hindu armies — particularly their vast infantry contingents — were just mobs, with hardly any military training. The immense size of the Hindu armies was often more a disadvantage than an advantage.

Occasionally there were some efforts to tighten the discipline of the Hindu soldiers, and to rouse their martial spirit by instilling in them religious fervour, as in the Muslim armies. But these do not seem to have yielded any significant change in the fortunes of Hindu armies. Thus, according to Ferishta, Bukka I in his battle against Bahmani sultan Muhammad Shah ‘commanded the Brahmins to deliver every day to the troops discourses on the meritoriousness of slaughtering the Mohammedans, in order to excite [their zeal] … He ordered them to describe the butchery of cows, the insults to sacred images, and the destruction of temples [committed by Muslims].’ Despite this harangue by Brahmins, Bukka lost the battle.

This was the usual outcome of the battles between rajas and sultans. And the frequent defeats that rajas suffered at the hands of sultans dispirited and demoralised Hindu armies. They often engaged in battle expecting defeat, and they were therefore often more ready to flee than to fight. In contrast, the confidence of victory and the prospect of plunder galvanised the Muslim armies.

Yet another reason for the defeat of the Hindu armies was that they were not cohesive or well-disciplined forces. Even though the armies of the sultans were also not cohesive forces — their soldiers were racially diverse, and they had a good number of Hindus of different castes and sects in them — they were far more tightly organised and disciplined than the armies of the rajas. There was no integrating spirit at all in the Hindu armies, no unifying emotional bond between the soldiers and their raja. Besides the caste divisions of the Hindu society also divided the Hindu army. Soldiers of different castes would not even sit together for a meal. In personal valour Hindu soldiers were quite probably in no way inferior to Muslim soldiers, but Hindu soldiers were not trained to fight as integrated units, so they lacked group discipline, and were consequently weak as an army. Even in the case of the renowned martial valour of the Rajput soldier, what mattered to him was not so much the victory of the army as the demonstration of his personal heroism. His view, as al-Biruni puts it, was that ‘if he conquers, he obtains power and good fortune. If he perishes, he obtains paradise and bliss.’ The outcome of the battle therefore did not matter much to him.

THERE WAS NO spirit of unity at all among the people of any state in early medieval India, to bind together the king and the people and the army. This was how it was in Hindu as well as Muslim kingdoms. But the armies of the sultanates — their dominant Muslim soldiers anyway — were united in their religious fervour and in their aggressive spirit as conquerors ruling over an alien subject people. There was no such galvanising spirit in the armies of most Hindu kingdoms. Their soldiers were fighting for pay and plunder, not for their king or for any large cause. The soldiers belonged to their caste, not to their kingdom, especially as the kingdoms, unlike the castes, were ephemeral entities. What happened to their king — whether he won or lost the battle — made hardly any difference in the lives of the common people, for the state played only a peripheral role in their lives.

This absence of any emotional bond between Hindu soldiers and their raja was evident even in the battles that rajas waged against sultans. Turks were of course an alien people, and belonged to an alien religion, but even that made very little difference in the lives of the common people, to rouse their spirit against them. The common people, even the rajas, viewed Turks as just one of the many diverse people in the subcontinent, each belonging to a different race, tribe, religion, sect, or caste, and each speaking a different language. The absence of antagonism among Indians towards Turks was also because there was hardly any interaction between these two people, for Turks were almost entirely confined to urban centres, while the preponderant majority of Indians lived in villages into which the Turkish rule barely intruded. The Turkish invasion of India therefore did not make any notable difference in the lives of the common people of India, and it roused no strong feeling of antagonism among them against Turks. They were of course exploited by the Turkish rulers, but then they were exploited by the Hindu rulers as well.

There was no awareness among Indians, among people or kings, of the radically different and historic nature of the Turkish invasion — that the Turkish invasion, unlike all the previous invasions of India by foreigners, entailed the displacement of virtually the entire traditional political class of India, and, even more importantly, the superimposition of a foreign civilisation and religion over Indian civilisation and religion. This lack of awareness meant that there was no general, united opposition among rajas against sultans. Even when Turks were rolling up Hindu kingdoms one after the other, rajas and chieftains went on with their usual endless petty squabbles and fights among themselves, as if nothing whatever in their world had changed, while everything had in fact changed radically. Not surprisingly, there were many instances of senior Hindu officers betraying their rajas to sultans, as if they were merely shifting their allegiance from one local ruler to another local ruler. And it was common for Indians to serve Turks as informers and guides. And once the Delhi Sultanate was established, multitudes of Hindus would serve the sultans in various administrative and military capacities without any antipathy whatever.

The pervasive attitude of fatalism among Indians of all classes was yet another factor affecting the spirit of Indian armies — victory and defeat were not in their hands, they believed; whatever was destined to happen would happen. This inculcated a negativist, defeatist attitude in Indian soldiers. They lacked the confident aggressiveness essential for success in battle. The enervating climate of India also played a role in desiccating the martial spirit of Indians. In the case of the Delhi Sultanate, regular fresh arrivals of men from Central Asia reinvigorated its army periodically, even as earlier migrants slowly lost their vigour and spirit. Not surprisingly, the dwindling of fresh arrivals of foreigners in the later part of the Sultanate history greatly weakened the kingdom.

VICTORY IN A BATTLE in medieval India was immediately followed by the victorious soldiers frenziedly rampaging through the enemy camp and the enemy country, indiscriminately slaughtering enemy soldiers as well as the common people, even women and children, and pillaging whatever valuables they could find, to glut their bloodlust and their lust for plunder. And this was, for the common soldiers, among Hindus as well as Muslims, the real reward for risking their lives in battle. Says al-Biruni about Mahmud Ghazni’s Indian campaigns: ‘Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed there wonderful exploits, by which Hindus became like atoms and dust, and scattered in all directions.’ Similarly, when Vijayanagar once invaded Ahmadnagar, its soldiers, according to Ferishta, ‘committed the most outrageous devastations, burning and razing buildings, putting up their horses in mosques, and performing their idolatrous worship in holy places.’ In the frenzy of war, soldiers often did not even spare their coreligionists. Thus when Muhammad Tughluq once stormed into Devagiri to suppress a rebellion there, his soldiers plundered ‘the inhabitants of Devagiri, Hindus and Muslims, traders and soldiers’ without any discrimination, reports Barani.