Conclusion
In the late sixteenth century, almost two centuries after the end of Firuz Shah Tughluq's rule, the Akbarid chancery undertook the task of contextualizing their sovereign's reign in the long history of Muslims in India.
A number of texts did this in very creative ways, but Nizam al-Din's Tabaqat-i Akbari (The Pasts of the Akbarid Dispensation) stood out for its dramatic departure from a chronological regnal history to a history of India organized as a sum of its territories. Nizam al- Din organized his Tabaqat into nine sections, with the first a recounting of the rulers of Delhi until the accession of Akbar, and the remaining eight providing a serial account of the various provinces—the kingdoms of the Deccan, Gujarat, Malwa, Bengal, Jaunpur, Kashmir, Sindh, and Multan—from the time they sundered their relations with Delhi to their annexation and unification again under the great Mughal sovereign Akbar. The Tabaqat foregrounded the histories of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal dynasty as the period of unity and empire that framed the intervening fifteenth century of disunity and fragmented regional rule. It was significant that the Tabaqat framed the history of their rule in this way, but it carried even greater import when, a few decades later, this history of Hindustan was recounted and enlarged by Firishta to include the regions of South India still outside Mughal control. By modern standards Firishta's was the first comprehensive history of “India/ Hindustan” and it was also one of the early histories to be translated into English by Alexander Dow in 1768 and by Jonathan Scott in 1794. These communicated the history of India in a European language and with it the sense of the Delhi Sultanate as an imperial precursor of the Mughals.72Although Nizam al-Dins and Firishtas histories continued to be interrogated and refined by successive generations of historians, it is significant that modern positivistic and materialist notions of empire accessed and confirmed the vision of these early-modern narratives in writing a modern political-economic history of the state.
Lost in transmission was the telling context of why a Mughal text congealed the regimes of disparate Delhi sultans into a composite Sultanate that was regarded as the pre-history of the Mughal Empire. This was somewhat akin to the choice that Sultanate historians displayed when they looked toward the Ghaznavids and the Seljuqs for cultural inspiration, ignoring the Ghurid-Shansabanids because they did not quite measure up to the levels of imperial urbanity that “the people of the pen” deemed as a legitimate heritage.There is no gainsaying that by modern yardsticks, the several regimes that comprised the Delhi Sultanate were unsuccessful in their political and economic endeavors at controlling and integrating large territories over the long duration. But the Sultanate was more than the sum of their sultans, their campaigns, and their administrations. Between the military adventurers of different backgrounds, the ‘ulama, the Persian secretarial classes, and the Sufis, they created a complex and variegated vision of power and authority, which made Hazrat-i Dehli into the “axis of Islam.” Even during the apogee of its most ambitious political ventures, rival perceptions of lordship and community were manifest in the ambitious efforts of military adventurers to shrug off prejudice, sometimes inverting to their advantage its normative inequalities. Sultanate governors claimed that they were like slaves, even as they sought greater autonomy. And in the intellectual discussions and dialogue between courtiers and Sufi masters, textual innovation transpired along paths created by social and intellectual networks that sustained the dissemination of ideas and teachings. Coming together during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of expansion and opportunity, these cultural resolutions identified pathways and questions that continued to tease and provoke for decades to come. The Mughal chronicler Nizam al-Din was not unique in recognizing the deep historical significance of the Delhi Sultanate.
But even as he gathered its significance, Nizam al-Din can also mislead us, as indeed might have been his intention: unlike his presentation of the past, which would always underline political deficiency, the empire of the Delhi sultans was always more than the congeries of its rulers and dynasties.72
Kumar 2007, 352-361.
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