The establishment of the Ghaznavid (977-1186) and the Ghurid (1163-1214/ 1215) Sultanates in Khurasan in East Iran and the modern regions of Afghanistan was a part of the process through which the authority

of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate devolved to local Sultanates throughout the Central Islamic Lands. It was addition­ally significant because it brought the northwestern tracts of the South Asian sub­continent, especially Punjab and eventually Sindh, under the political influence of these new political formations.

Ghurid political and military interventions in South Asia are sometimes identified as the chronological beginning of the Delhi Sultanate and of processes that initiated Islamization and Persianization in the subcontinent.² The Ghurids could hardly be the conscious agents of such momentous events; their establishment were of more modest standing. Through the 1180s and 1190s, when the Ghurids first attacked and established dispersed garrisons in the modern provinces of Punjab, Sindh, and Haryana, and captured Delhi in 1192, they adhered to the Karramiya creed, a liter- alist interpretation of Islamic scriptures in considerable disrepute among scholastic circles because of their anthropomorphic over-readings.³ Moreover, their military commanders in North India from the 1190s were overwhelmingly his elite mili­tary slaves (Mu‘izzi bandagan-i khass),⁴ and the dynasty organized according to

¹ On the Ghaznavids, see the still unreplaced Bosworth 1973 reprint and now Flood 2009 and Anooshahr 2018b.

² For an early iteration of this argument, see Habibullah 1976 reprint, and for later revisions, Wink 1997 and Auer 2012. See Anooshahr 2018b for an important recent elaboration on the nature of Ghaznavid interven­tion in North India.

³ Flood 2005.

⁴ Bandagan is the plural of banda, literally military slave(s). They would be graded according to years of service, proximity, and trust to the monarch. This trust would lead to their appointment as governors and mil­itary commanders, and Persian sources, like the thirteenth-century chronicler Juzjani 1963-1964, describing them as bandagan-i khass. Since they were slaves and without a social identity of their own, they were given new names by their masters which included the nisba, which indicated their social or regional identity. Slaves

Sunil Kumar, The Delhi Sultanate as Empire In: The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197532768.003.0020. Ghurid traditions of governance closer to tanistry and coparcenership rather than the Ghaznavid paradigm of absolutist monarchical rule idealized in eleventh- and twelfth-century Persian literature.^[1495]

The Ghurid bandagan in North India were the slaves of the ruler of Ghazni Mu‘izz al-Din Ghuri. Since Abbasid times, Muslim state-craft had often relied on recruiting an elite guard of slave soldiers to fashion the monarch with a degree of independence from entrenched political networks. As is the case with all slaves, these mamluks or here bandagan, were natally alienated and socially dead, but they were different from agrestic and domestic slaves since they were specially trained in warfare and governance, carefully nourished as intimates within the household of the Ghurid monarch, and gradually introduced to public power and responsi­bility.

This was also certainly an exaggeration. In the years after Sultan Mu‘izz al-Din Ghuri's death (1206- 1220s), his military slaves did not remain loyal to his successors in Ghazni. They successfully petitioned for their freedom, they were in conflict with each other over precedence, and they strove to turn their governorships (iqtas) into autonomous realms during the decades of the early thirteenth century. Hence, these decades would make more sense if they were appropriately understood as the period of the North Indian Sultanates when the regime based in Delhi was not the most significant in the congeries of ambitious principalities.^[1497] Judging by the patterns of immigration in the early thirteenth century, the significant center of power was initially regarded as Lahore, then Uchch and Multan, and—only after incessant military campaigns that lasted until 1228—Delhi.

The slow rise to power of Delhi was aided by the invasion of Afghanistan by the Khwarazm Shah, followed very quickly by the invasions of the Mongol Chinggis Khan and his retinues. These invasions commenced in 1215 and definitively snapped the ties of the North India Sultanates with Afghanistan. Other than destroying the Ghurid Sultanate and Ghazni, the Mongol invasions also sapped the resources of Sultan Nasir al-Din Qubacha (1206-1228), the ruler of Uchch and Multan, pro­viding the newly enthroned ruler of Delhi, Sultan Shams al-Din Iltutmish (1210­1236), the opportunity to gradually expand his influence and defeat his rivals. Although the Mongols would continue to ravage the tracts of Punjab and Sindh through the next half-century, they rarely intruded into the tracts surrounding would carry the nisba of their master: hence Mu‘izz al-Dins slave would carry the nisba Mu‘izzi and later Sultan Shams al-Din Iltutmish's slave would be called the Shamsi bandagan (see later in the chapter for further details).

Table 20.1 Delhi Sultanate Regimes, 1206-1526

Delhi and the modern region of Haryana. The presence of the Mongols created a political barrier between North India and Afghanistan, providing the Delhi sultan the context to militarize his regime for defensive purposes and the opportunity for his realm to appear as the refuge of Muslims fleeing Mongol depredations.^[1498] The latter would linger as an important characteristic of the Delhi Sultanate through much of its history in the coming centuries.

The emergence of the Delhi Sultanate was a slow, discontinuous process and as we turn to its study in somewhat greater detail, it is perhaps relevant to clarify at the outset that it was not one homogenous dynasty: the appellation refers to a se­ries of dynasties that had their capitals in Delhi from ca. 1210 to 1530 ce. Table 20.1 provides a brief outline of these dynasties and some of their monarchs referenced in this chapter.

This listing obscures the level of internecine conflict that bisected the politics of the Sultanate.^[1499] It also obscures the attenuated control that these regimes had over much of North India and the Deccan for the larger period of their governance; their conquests were frequently ephemeral, with annexed areas constantly searching for autonomy from Delhi. Hence the need for the further historiographical clari­fication: if the Delhi Sultanate is regarded as an “empire,” it is usually done so as a precursor, and as is the fate of many precursors, a smaller, less efficient version of the grander Mughal Empire.^[1500]

Creating a hierarchy of empires based on their abilities to manage vast, contrasting territories and people is hardly useful. As the chapters in this volume underline, the understanding of empires, territories, and subjects has to be pliable enough to embrace political formations that are temporally and spatially very different from each other.^[1501] The Delhi sultans may not match the Mughal rulers in their ability to maintain the integrity of their domains, but the difference itself makes it worth­while to probe the reasons for the high regard proffered to these regimes a lot more seriously. The Delhi Sultanate straddled three centuries in the Middle Ages that reflected dynamic social and cultural change, and the transient nature of their political formations was not unusual for their time. And yet, the Delhi Sultanate differed from its peers in the unique ways in which the traditions of governance that emerged during their period of rule created the sense of a composite empire that outlasted its individual regimes.

Within this expansive question are smaller ones which require some detailing because of their particular historiographical complexities. To begin with, it is important to keep in mind that the Persian chronicles (tawarikh) report on the Delhi Sultanate in a largely synchronic manner. While they sometimes describe the Sultanate in the most inflated terms, they rarely display any concern for historical processes or structural changes. The histories mention differences in the fortunes of the regimes that comprised the Sultanate but usually ascribe these shifts to monar­chical agency. In other words, the Persian evidence provides little explanation for the structural integrity which they ascribe to the Sultanate, focusing instead on the idiosyncrasies—good or bad—that sometimes gripped its dynasts. The structural features that they associate with the Sultanate are “Islamic” and/or “Turkish”— religious and ethnic markers that homogenized and distinguished their rule from preceding and subsequent political formations. Little historiographical attention was paid to why Persian chroniclers resorted to such discursive appellations; they were often uncritically appropriated into modern scholarship. One consequence of pursuing such a reading was the positing of the Sultanate as the first great rup­ture in Indian history, when the ancient-feudal-Hindu world gave way to the medieval-centralized-Muslim/Turkish one. It set the Sultanate apart from all other regimes, marking it, in the words of two well-known historians, their contrasting perspectives notwithstanding, as the “Foundation of Muslim Rule in India,” and the creation of an “Indian medieval economy”^[1502]

While this chapter disagrees with these readings, it does so by focusing on its pri­mary question: the nature of the Sultanate as an empire. The lineaments which gave the Sultanate its character as an empire were historically constituted by multiple agencies and not just those of the conventionally understood state. These agencies remained centers of power, oftentimes of robust influence, through regime change, the collapse of monarchical authority, and transitions in their own constituencies. As a result, the historiographical distinction sometimes made between the two phases, the empire as hegemon distinguished from the empire in decline, does not make much sense in the context of the Sultanate.^[1503] We can comprehend the Sultanate as “empire” only if we can disaggregate the structures that comprised power and authority until they are no longer coeval, even if they are supportive of the “idea” of a monolithic state.

In the following three sections of the chapter, I chart the histories of these agents and ideas and how they shaped the Sultanate world. I commence this diachronic analysis in section 20.1 with a narrative outline of the various dynasties, their dif­ferent backgrounds and seizure of power, expansion and contraction of territory, economic and fiscal management, administrative and military personnel, and the governance of subjected people. Section 20.2 takes a more precise look at the social history of the Sultanate, keeping in mind the complex expansion of the participants involved in the making of the regimes, the contested idea of the Muslim commu­nity, their contextual locations, textual production, and its relationship to discursive modes of communicating power and authority. The concluding section (20.3) goes back to the question of empire to consider the emergence of a transregional polit­ical system that was ultimately pretty ephemeral when considered conventionally as a state formation, but which generated synthetic ideas of a state and politics, a vo­cabulary of service and participation, of skills that could be gained and reproduced, cultural mores that identified the parochial-rustic from the urbane-cosmopolitan. These were lived changes even if, given their pre-modern provenance, they were seldom self-reflexively articulated or theorized. We can access them in the textual records of the period as descriptions of actions, as incidental explanations of events, and the historian can notice the impact of history in the difference with which these ideas were communicated over time. These were centuries of momentous change that retrospective accounts in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would historiographically differentiate from their own world as the period of the Delhi Sultanate.

The materials in the three sections obviously interweave with each other, es­pecially since they are diachronically organized to identify conjunctures and transitions across a variety of themes and principal actors. It is important to comprehend how the sixteenth-century Sultanate was very different from that of the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, but it is equally important to notice how the transformations carried with them aspects and concerns of earlier periods.

I.