Sultanate Regimes, Territories, Economies, and Politics

As mentioned earlier, the origins of the Delhi Sultanate are to be found not in the Ghurid campaigns in North India, but amidst the body of personnel who broke away from the Ghurid patrimony and created their autonomous North Indian Sultanates during 1206-1228.

The Thirteenth Century: Turkish Bandagan and Deracine Traditions under Stress

Delhi emerged as the paramount Sultanate in North India only around 1228, ab­sorbing its contenders, excluding Ghazni, which had by now lapsed into the control of the marauding Chinggisid forces. The reigning sultan of Delhi, Shams al-Din Iltutmish (1210-1236), was a slave of Qutb al-Din Aybeg, one of Mu‘izz al-Dins slave commanders, and he marshalled his forces under his own senior Shamsi bandagan-i khass.^[1505] Iltutmish was an Olperli Turk, and many of his elite slaves were of disparate Turkish and Mongol ancestry, brought to Delhi by merchants from trade marts like Bukhara, Samarqand, and Baghdad. There were some slaves of other ethnicities as well (notably Hindu Khan, captured from Mihir in Central India), but Iltutmish gave them all Turkish titles, using the ethnonym to under­line their exclusiveness and framing their dyadic relationship with their master with ethnic markers.^[1506] Iltutmish's reliance on his Shamsi bandagan-i khass as governors and generals did not alter through his reign, despite the considerable mi­gration into North India of experienced military commanders from distinguished lineages fleeing from the Mongols.

Characteristic to a slave regime where dynastic traditions were weak, succes­sion to the throne followed an irregular pattern after Iltutmish's death. The mon­arch was succeeded by a son, a daughter, a son, and a grandson, all within 10 years, and finally by his youngest son Sultan Nasir al-Din Mahmud II (1246-1266). Iltutmish's descendants fought long but losing battles with the Shamsi bandagan, their father's military slaves who had been appointed as governors of vast ter­ritories and large armies. They constantly intruded in Delhi politics, effectively dictating terms to Iltutmish's successors. Fairly quickly within the three decades of conflict, the khass slaves of Iltutmish were replaced by junior bandagan who were not socialized in maintaining their master's vision of a paramount, mon­olithic Sultanate to the same extent as their predecessors. They provided feeble support to the monarch and competed with each other over precedence. The slave governors located in the eastern province of Lakhnauti (modern Bengal) and the Punjab and Sindh provinces in the west were the first to break free from Delhi's supervision. Those in the “core territories” from Awadh-Kara on the River Saryu in the east, to Samana-Sunam in the Punjab on the west, sought to resist the intrusion of Delhi by consolidating their home bases and allied with neigh­boring chieftains.^[1509] After two decades of conflict among the Shamsi bandagan and successive Delhi sultans, in 1254, Ulugh Khan, a junior, newly purchased slave in Iltutmish's reign and now the commander of the Shivalikh territories in the northwest, seized definitive power in the capital.

Barani's selective rendition of Balban's reign (1266-1287) was also evident in his focus on tropes of Sassanian kingship—courtly ritual and pomp, and careful attention to social hierarchies—supposedly invoked by the monarch as the pri­mary means to restore the authority and dignity of the Delhi sultan.^[1511] Lost in the dissimulation was how the Sultanate had altered in the six decades of conflict, 1236— 1290. In Iltutmish's reign, the Shamsi military cantonments had only limited control over their immediate hinterlands: they controlled the shahr wa qasaba wa muzafat (i.e., “the towns, adjoining forts and neighborhoods”). The state derived its revenue from plunder and tribute remitted by military commanders during their seasonal campaigns after the monsoons and through the winter and early summer months.^[1512] But the ephemeral control over the agrarian economy meant that the state was not as yet reliant on agrarian taxation. By the 1250s, as Shamsi military commanders competed with each other, there was increasing lethargy in responding to the sultan's directives to participate in campaigns, as well as uncertainty regarding the transmission of revenue from their territorial charges, iqta‘. But perhaps most crit­ically, the slave governor, muqti, sought to root himself as an autochthon with local alliances that integrated his territory within the networks of neighboring pastoral and agrarian economies. Sultanate chroniclers read the attempts of the military commanders to establish local alliances and expand their agrarian base as a dire threat—but this reading came from the perspective of Delhi. Juzjani, for example, regarded Qutlugh Khan's conflict with Balban as a sign of rebellion—the alliances of the muqti’ with local chieftains and natives, the mutawattinan, were seen as an at­tempt by the local commander to establish his own homeland (watan), to go native, and repudiate his ties with the Muslim community.^[1513]

By the 1250s, the relationship between the Delhi sultan and his subordinates was prone to rupture at critical junctures, and the metropole's assertion of au­thority under Balban meant constant military campaigns—against recalcitrant Shamsi governors and increasingly into the countryside, against their local allies.

The geopolitics of Balban's age demanded a reorientation of his regime from its original, largely urban profile. Together with smothering local insurrections, the fear of Mongol depredations also forced him to divert his resources to local gov­ernance. Paradoxically, the decline in the intensity of Mongol depredations aided his efforts at local consolidation. Balban's reign coincided with the formation of the Ilkhanid realm and the end to fraternal relations between the collateral Chinggisid lineages, the Jochid, Chaghatayid, and Tuluyid branches, after the death of the Mongol Great Khan Mongke.^[1515] Afghanistan and parts of Khurasan were occupied by Neguderid troops. These troops were eponymously named after their military commander, Neguder, at one time serving with the Jochids in the Trans-Caucasus regions. Their prior affiliation with the Jochids meant that they were in conflict with the Il-Khanids in Iran and the Chaghatayids in Transoxiana in the mid-thirteenth century, and their presence in Afghanistan provided the Delhi Sultanate with a sig­nificant buffer.

Like Iltutmish, Balban appointed his elite slaves to strategic commands, extending the benefits of recruiting deracines and the socially marginal by deploying Afghans whose rustic presence in Sultanate polity was lampooned by the Persian chroniclers of the capital. Balban seldom recruited old Sultanate elites, and only after a judi­cious vetting.

Toward the last years of Balban's reign (1280s), Mongol campaigns renewed as the Neguderid buffer was gradually dispersed. Balban's descendants faced this challenge: his eldest son, Muhammad Khan, governor of Punjab, died while countering a Mongol raid in 1286. The Mongol contingent included elements of the dispersed Neguderids, even as some members of the group had migrated and sought service with the Delhi sultan.^[1516] Together with other Mongol auxiliaries (like the future Sultan Jalal al-Din Khalaji, 1290-1296), they were a new force raised by the Delhi sultans to garrison the Punjab frontier tracts. Other new elements in the Sultanate forces are evident in Prince Muhammad's own allies as he patrolled the Punjab frontier. According to ‘Isami, Prince Muhammad had married the daughter of a “Hindu” chieftain Rai Kalu, an alliance with the pro­verbial “native” frowned upon by the political elite of Delhi.^[1517] It is this marriage, Ziya al-Din Barani hints, which made Prince Muhammad's son, Kaikhusrau, un­acceptable to Delhi courtiers as a possible successor to Balban.^[1518] The emergence of dangerous “outsiders” in the political affairs of the Sultanate was decried by Barani as he narrated the reign of Balban's grandson, Sultan Kaiqubad (1287­1290), when the “sons of slaves” (maulazadas) and Mongol new-Muslims (nau- Musulman) were influential in the capital. Besieged by ambitious commanders in Delhi, Kaiqubad chose a military commander from the frontier, Jalal al-Din Khalaji, to consolidate his position. This only enhanced competition within the dispensation, leading to Kaiqubad's murder and the seizure of the Sultanate by Sultan Jalal al-Din Khalaji (1290-96).^[1519]

The Fourteenth Century: Rooting of Sultanate Elites

The duration of the Khalaji (1290-1320) and Tughluq regimes (1320-1413) marked an immediate change in the profile of the ruling families of the Sultanate and the ruling cohort that brought them to power.

Although immigration, from Afghanistan especially, had continued through the thirteenth century, this had little impact on Delhi and court politics; the ar­rival of the Khalajis and Tughluqs and their cohort was different. They were the new political elites of the capital. Amir Khusrau had divulged that Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq's retinue included a mix of marginalized social groups like the Khokhars, the Mongols, and the nomadic Turkic Ghuzz.

Persian chroniclers tangentially referenced the fissures created by the presence of these “outsiders” in Sultanate society. ^[1521] Barani noted, for instance, that the residents of the old city (Dihli-yi kuhna) communicated their animosity toward Jalal al-Din Khalaji on his accession (1290) and he therefore chose to reside in the adjoining city of Kilukhri, a day's march away. When Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq seized power in 1320, he lived briefly in his master's capital of Siri but moved quickly to his own re­doubt of Tughluqabad (1323). Eventually Muhammad Tughluq was so fed up by the arrogance of the residents of the old city that he forced them to evacuate and travel to Daulatabad in the Deccan. The old city was converted into an army camp filled with newly mustered peasants from the Ganga-Jumna do-ab^[1522]

Political consolidation for the Khalajis and Tughluqs was further complicated by the claims of their families to a share in the patrimony. Offices and governorships were distributed to lineage members, but practically every succession was disputed.^[1523] The ambitions of siblings and collateral lineages also led monarchs like Ala al-Din Khalaji (1296-1316), Muhammad Tughluq (1324-1351) and Firuz Tughluq (1351­1388) to deploy military slaves where Turks were still respected, although bandagan of other ethnicities started gaining prominence as well. In a move that at times

created great confusion in a later historiography on the Sultanate, “Turk” would con­tinue to be used as an exonym, quite devoid of any formal ethnic implication, but ap­plied to describe Sultanate military elites signifying those who possessed power and authority, qualities that were also coupled with arbitrariness.^[1524]

Sultanate governance labored to control the new agrarianate expanse which continued to extend after Balban's reign. Forested tracts were brought under cul­tivation and the exactions on the local chieftains and gentry were immense during the reigns of rulers like ‘Ala al-Din Khalaji (1296-1316). Barani suggests that ‘Ala al-Din had the area under cultivation measured, and that 50 percent of the estimated yield was collected in cash. These fiscal measures assumed the wide dis­persal of Khalaji administrators over much of North India, the actual dimensions of which the nature of the available evidence allows us to only vaguely estimate. Certainly such a measure could only be imposed if the Sultanate received local col­laboration. Barani notes that the local chieftains and landed gentry were severely suppressed by ‘Ala al-Din, an aggressive intervention that could not be sustained by his successors.^[1525] There is increasing evidence through the fourteenth century of Sultanate administrative staff who were converts to Islam and whose pedigree was scathingly recollected by Barani. Barani's bigotry was not shared by the sultans; the vizier of Firuz Tughluq, the famous Khan-i Jahan, was a Brahmin convert to Islam, originally known as Kannu, captured during Sultanate campaigns in South India.^[1526]

Barani's account of Khalaji and Tughluq administration reflects a clear appre­ciation of the intimate connection between gathering revenue for the state and an equitable sharing of agrarian surplus that did not impoverish the peasantry. This, however, might also have been a trope echoing old ideologies regarding the “circle of justice” and providing justice and equitable governance to the peasantry and other laboring classes, serving the author's eventual denouement of the harsh na­ture of Muhammad Tughluq's reign.^[1527]

Military campaigns, the dishoarding of wealth, the clearing of forests, the vitality of inter-regional trade—all of these developments had encouraged a great move­ment of people, creating a vast network of intellectuals and the piety minded. These factors had also made social hierarchies and settlements in the Sultanate garrison towns and their hinterlands far more complex to manage in the fourteenth cen- tury.^[1528] It had also created considerable social mobility and vast ambitions that were not sated by authoritarian interventions from distant Delhi. Throughout the four­teenth century the Sultanate sought to control its increasingly complex population through its provincial governors, muqti‘, but the huge amount of local initiative and resources available to these personnel, and their propensity to ally with local political groups, meant that they could often only be controlled in the short dura­tion, even by ambitious, aggressive monarchs like Muhammad Tughluq.

The inability of the Sultanate to effectively harness the agrarian resources of its North Indian territories to sustain its political ambitions was evident in its re­lentless military campaigns in search of loot and plunder. ‘Ala al-Dins campaigns into Deogir (1296, 1307, 1314), Gujarat (1299-1300), Ranthambhor (1301), Chitor (1303), and Malwa (1305) set up the foundations for successive raids into the Deccan, which continued under Mubarak Shah Khalaji (1316-1320), Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq (1320-1324), and Muhammad Tughluq (1324-1351). Campaigns were launched as far south as Madura in Ma'bar on the Coromandel Coast, the dishoarded wealth yielding vast amounts of gold, elephants, and horses. As in the early Mu‘izzi campaigns in North India, the Khalajis and Tughluqs established gar­rison towns to manage recurrent raids and to control the hinterland, but in the long run, distance, social and cultural differences, and local ambitions of the contestants made integration into the Sultanate impossible.^[1529] The dire need for these resources was accentuated by Delhi's definitive loss of Lakhnauti and the source of much needed silver and war elephants from the east. Indeed, the campaigns into South India brought valuable resources, but the infusion of gold also destabilized the value of silver. Muhammad Tughluq's effort to overcome this quandary through the minting of debased coinage was symptomatic of Sultanate efforts to stay within tested processes of governance even as the world around them was altering at a dy­namic pace.^[1530]

Toward the last quarter of the fourteenth century the autonomy asserted by Firuz Shah Tughluq's provincial governors was attributed by court chroniclers to the monarch's mild, forgiving temperament, a gloss that could not hide the cen­trifugal pressures always present in the organization of the Sultanate and its dis­memberment commencing earlier in Muhammad Tughluq's reign.^[1531] In 1342 ‘Ala al-Din Bahman Shah established the Bahmanid Sultanate. ‘Isami, who was to write his Futuh al-Salatin two decades later, explained to his readers that the “Sanctuary of Islam” had now shifted from Delhi to Daulatabad, the Bahmanid capital.

The Long Fifteenth Century

Many historians date the “decline” of Delhi's imperial stature to the reign of Firuz Tughluq and the sacking of the capital by Timur in December 1398.^[1532] But as we have already noted, the devolution of authority to provincial governors was not a novelty, nor did Timur's invasion create the circumstances for the political dismem­berment of the empire. Provincial governors had constantly tested Delhi's authority

Table 20.2 The Indian Sultanates, ca. 1350-1550

successfully, and as Table 20.2 underlines, the Tughluqid dominion was already parceled among provincial governors during Muhammad Tughluq's reign, much before Timur's invasion.

Timur's invasion did not merely devastate Delhi, but left open the possibility of a later intervention; he appointed Khizr Khan as his deputy to oversee Timurid interests in the Punjab marches. Khizr Khan (1414-1421) went on to seize Delhi and establish the Sayyid dynasty (1414-1451). The new regime recognized the Timurid Shah Rukh as their overlord, a huge transition in relationships for the Sultanate that had regarded the Chinggisid descended states across the Indus as their inveterate enemies. The cessation of conflict in the northwest facilitated an­other spurt in immigration in the fifteenth century, and among the new emigres it was the arrival of the large number of Afghans that altered Muslim demography in North India in the long duration. Unlike their earlier numerically small numbers, Afghan groups now arrived in large agnatic descent groups, one of which went on to capture Delhi and establish the [Afghan] Lodi dynasty (1451-1526), and after a brief Mughal interregnum (1526-1540), the Sur dynasty (1540-1555).

Developments in monarchical ideals that had already been innovatively shaped by Mubarak Shah Khalaji (1316-1320), who had taken the title of caliph, and Firuz Tughluq, whose genealogy of Delhi sultans claimed inherent charisma for the high office, were further honed in the fifteenth century by Khizr Khan's exalted claims to Sayyid status and descent from the family of the Prophet and ‘Ali.^[1533] The most cre­ative reordering was done by the Afghans whose kindred groups were masked as agnatic and eponymous descent lines.^[1534] The Afghans made virtue of their rustic rep­utation; they prized honor, chivalry, and loyalty, deliberately parodying Persianate urbanity, such as the one vouchsafed by the chronicler Barani. As a result, quite in contrast to Barani's Persianized paradigm of the thirteenth-century monarch, the withdrawn, exalted Balban, the sixteenth-century Afghan chronicler Mushtaqi spoke nostalgically of Sultan Bahlul Lodi's reign (1451-1489). He was the acces­sible, just, concerned comrade whose cohort spoke of him endearingly as “Ballu.” The deracine bandagan were no longer the epitome of loyalty; they had given way to the brother (biradar) and the ally-retainer (naukar), people who were free and of honor, but whose loyalty to their master was as commendable as that of a slave.^[1535] This age was aware of birthright, and when the Khalaji dynasts of Malwa (1436­1531) competed with the Lodis for mastery over North India, their chroniclers fashioned a genealogy which made them sons-in-law of the Chinggisids, akin to Timurid Guregin, superior in status to the Sayyid clients of the Timurids and their servants, the Lodis.^[1536]

Even if it were territorially attenuated, the Delhi Sultanate under the Lodis and Surs successfully managed to hold its own against dynamic competitors (regimes identified in Table 20.2). Universal among all these regimes were traditions of alliances with local chieftains who invariably claimed the caste name reserved for warriors, Kshatriya. Other than the emergence of the Rathors of Mewar and Sisodias of Mewar, dynasties that would gain a great reputation eventually, this was also the period when lineages such as the Baghelas established their chieftaincies close to Sultanate territories, but protected by inhospitable terrain and forest. The Baghelas controlled regions south of the Ganges, their redoubts sheltered in the ravines and forests of the Chota Nagpur Plateau but controlling rich agricultural tracts proxi­mate to Varanasi and the river ferries at Kara.^[1537] All these regimes also relied upon administrative elites of mixed denominations whose protocols of state manage­ment reflected considerable similitude, the differing political and cultural affiliations of ruling elites notwithstanding. Also common to these regimes were strong relationships with pietistic elites, endowments to local shrines, and patronage to lit­erary production in Persian and the vernacular Hindavi/Bhaka, of a literature that was often touched by sophisticated mystical cosmologies.^[1538] More than courtly pa­tronage, however, the distinctive intellectual movements that so marked the unique­ness of this period were sustained by overlapping networks of these litterateurs and scholars that radiated to the far reaches of the subcontinent. It is the resilience and spread of these intellectual traditions and their proponents that would leave a huge impress on the practice of governance later under the Mughal regime. Quite in con­trast to the relatively restricted political world of the urban garrisons of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, extolled as the realm of the great Delhi sultans by Persian litterateurs, it was the long fifteenth century and the complex constituency of the fifteenth-century Sultanate and the intellectual networking of this world that would have the greatest impact on later political formations.^[1539]

The changes in the texture of governance, where cultural creativity and political negotiation resided together with military intervention, are well captured in the political language of the century where the non-Muslim Vijayanagar rulers of the Deccan, in constant aggressive competition with the Bahmanid (and its successor) Sultanate(s), would stake its status by taking a title appropriate to its Islamicate cultural milieu: “sultan among Hindu kings” (Hindu-raya-suratrana).^[1540] Similarly, Vidyapati, the polymath Brahmin author residing in the north Bihar region of Mithila, would extol mythologized Brahmin and Kshatriya courtiers responding honorably to the call of duty in the service of Delhi sultans in his Purusa Pariksa.^[1541] The embracing of people and spaces within an expansive cultural realm that was dialogical and multilingual was symptomatic of the great circulation of political traditions and knowledge systems that went beyond the formal administrative and military ambits of Sultanate governance. To comprehend this expanse it is impor­tant to consider more carefully the changes that transpired in Sultanate society and its settlements.

II.