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IT MUST HAVE SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME. After the disastrous First Anglo–Afghan War that started in 1839, the East India Company decided it needed to be on a firmer footing in India. In 1842, an army of retribution had successfully retaken the citadel of Ghazni, where they found two huge gates believed to have been carved from sandalwood and plundered from the Somnath temple in Gujarat in the early eleventh century. Sensing an opportunity to cast the British as rectifiers of the historical harm the Muslims had inflicted on India, the governor of the East India Company, Lord Ellenborough (1790–1871), issued a proclamation that the gates would be returned. The ‘insult of 800 years is at last avenged … the gates of the temple of Somnath, so long the memorial of your humiliation, are [to] become the proudest record of your national glory’. Unfortunately, the gates were not from Somnath. They were not made of sandalwood but deodar and were carved by local craftsmen. Nor was there any reference to the gates being plundered in earlier Muslim chronicles.
A century and a half later, Somnath was in the spotlight again when the president of the Bharatiya Janata Party, L.K. Advani (b. 1927), began his so-called Rath Yatra at the temple. Setting out on 25 September 1990 in a truck made to look like a Hindu chariot, he crisscrossed northern India until he reached Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh. The aim of the yatra was to erect a temple of the god Ram on the site of a mosque built by the Mughal emperor Babur. Advani would live to see the mosque demolished by fanatical Hindu volunteers known as kar sevaks in 1992, but had retired from politics before India’s Supreme Court ruled that a temple could be built on the site in late 2019.
That Somnath’s symbolism is strong enough to unite a rapacious multinational trading corporation and an avowedly nationalist Hindu political party revolves around the controversial figure of Mahmud of Ghazni – the eleventh-century Turkic ruler who launched more than a dozen raids into India. Portrayed by Hindu nationalists and some Indian historians as the devil incarnate, he looms large over the historical narrative of the coming of Islam to the subcontinent and what has happened since.
Sacred to Śiva, the temple of Somnath is located on the shores of the Arabian Sea. Situated inside a fort and surrounded on three sides by water, it was defended only by Brahmins and devout Hindus and fell easily to Mahmud’s forces in 1026. Such was the scale of the carnage that even Muslim chroniclers betrayed a sense of unease when describing it. After stripping the temple of its gold, Mahmud is said to have personally destroyed the giant liṇgam, a representation of Śiva’s phallus, and said to be ‘the greatest idol of al-Hind’. Its fragments were allegedly taken back to Ghazni and incorporated into the steps of its mosque, where they would be defiled daily by the feet of Muslim devotees.
Historians are now starting to question whether Mahmud would occupy the space he now does had it not been for Ellenborough’s ill-advised ‘proclamation’. Over the course of twenty-six years, Mahmud made seventeen raids on India, his objective being plunder, not territorial control. As the Indian historian Romila Thapar points out, there are no references to the raids in contemporary sources aside from a passing mention in a Jaina text. Two centuries later, an Arab merchant who asked to build a mosque in the town was warmly welcomed by the local administration and Somnath’s priests. An inscription in Sanskrit describes the mosque in Hindu terms as a site ‘where people did puja in order to gain merit’ and uses the same wording to denote both Śiva and Allah.
Mahmud’s incursions do raise deeper questions regarding why India was so unprepared to meet the Islamic challenge from the eleventh century onwards. Its wealth, based on a rich agrarian society, should have provided its rulers with ample resources to defend their land militarily. Despite centuries of invasions through the passes leading out of Afghanistan dating back to the time of Alexander, there had never been a collective drive to build defensive fortifications along the border.
So what went wrong? The potential culprits are many and varied: rapacious rulers who taxed peasantry and diverted resources to secular and religious beneficiaries; local chieftains preoccupied with their own internal squabbles and lulled into a false sense of security by perceiving their Muslim foes as raiders rather than potential conquerors; a fragmented political landscape of dozens of regional kingdoms more interested in waging self-destructive wars against one another than forging a national consciousness.
In his prodigious study of the world’s civilisations, British historian Arnold Toynbee adds into the mix the caste system and its effect on disrupting social unity. Sanctioned by the Hindu religion, the caste system ‘is bound to grow to monstrous proportions’, Toynbee wrote. The self-stultified Hindu civilisation ‘had lost its claim to the mimesis of the society at large; nevertheless, it insisted on imposing its will on the society’. This ‘marked the most fateful occurrence’ in ancient India’s history.
Indian historians such as J.L. Gupta describe the Hindu population at the time as a house divided: ‘Their social and national vision had become so narrow that they did not consider themselves to be responsible for the defence of their own hearths and homes.’ India’s internal weaknesses ‘had sapped its vitality’: ‘Its fabulous wealth, weak political structure, and “petrified society” extended an open invitation to the Muslim invaders to lay their hands on its poorly defended treasures.’
While divisions in Indian society played a role, the Muslim invaders had certain military advantages, employing cavalries mounted on swift Central Asian horses and using superior military tactics that emphasised agility over strength of numbers. Their armies also tended to have a permanent core of professional soldiers who were accustomed to fighting together, whereas Indian forces tended to be composed of separate units under individual lords who came together only when required.
COMMERCE BEFORE CONQUEST
India’s contacts with the Arab world predated the rise of Islam by many centuries. Indian merchants employed Arab sailors. Arab cameleers carried merchandise along the Silk Road between the Mediterranean and the subcontinent. Arab trading communities were already well established along India’s west coast, and Indian goods such as cotton and silk, ivory and precious stones, spices and sugar could be found in the markets of Baghdad and Cairo. These links also enabled Indian culture, science and philosophy to spread westwards. The story-within-a-story technique of One Thousand and One Nights can be traced back to the interrelated animal fables found in the Pañcatantra literature of Vedic India and the Buddhist Jātaka tales.
The death of the Prophet Muhammad in 623 triggered a campaign of conquest with few parallels in history. Within twenty years, Muslim armies had conquered much of the Byzantine Empire in Syria and Egypt and the Sassanid Empire in Iraq and Iran. After taking over most of Afghanistan, they reached Sindh in 712, but advanced no further. For the next three centuries, the border between India and its Islamic neighbours ran in a rough line from the Indus River to Kabul. It would not be until the late tenth century that Islamic armies would threaten India. The invaders came not from the existing Islamic outposts in Sindh, but from Central Asia. In around 986, a former slave turned Turkic general named Sabuktigin left his stronghold in the legendary city of Bukhara and conquered Kabul before marching into Punjab. The Shahi king, Jayapāla, put up a strong resistance, but when a massive storm pummelled the battlefield he took it to be an omen and sued for peace. Sabuktigin now controlled the strategic Khyber Pass, a valuable springboard for future raids. But instead of pressing further eastwards, he returned to Bukhara, where he was made caliph, leaving future conquests in the hands of his son Mahmud.
By Mahmud’s own account, he was ‘defective in external appearance’. ‘The sight of a king should brighten the eyes of his beholders, but nature has been so capricious to me that my aspect seems the picture of misfortune,’ he said. Although he is best remembered for desecrating Hindu temples, his first campaign in 1004 was against the Ismailis of Multan in Pakistan. Belonging to the Shia branch of Islam, the Ismailis were considered heretics by Sunni Muslims. Multan was strategically located on the Indus Plain at the crossroad of important trade routes between the Gulf and western India. The city was sacked a second time by Mahmud in 1007. The following year he overran and destroyed the great citadel and temple of Kangra, returning to his capital with 180 kilograms of gold and 2 tonnes of silver as well as coinage worth the equivalent of 70 million dirhams. A similar fate befell the great temple of Mathura, a centre of worship for followers of the god Kṛṣṇa in 1018. The following year he raided Kanauj, capturing all seven forts that defended the city in a single day.
For all his ruthlessness, it is possible to salvage something positive from Mahmud’s legacy. He used the booty of his conquests to erect one of the finest mosques of its day in Ghazni and to assemble a vast library. He cultivated the poet Firdausi, who wrote the Shahnama, an epic poem of the rulers of pre-Islamic Persia, and ordered the scholar Alberuni (also known as al-Biruni) to spend ten years in India, where he learned Sanskrit and translated Hindu texts. Alberuni’s Kitab al Hind or Book of India, which drew largely on Sanskrit sources, is arguably the finest account of the country, its people, philosophies and religions prior to the Mughal period.
Mahmud’s death in 1030 prompted a power struggle sharpened by the unfortunate fact that two of his sons were born on the same day to separate mothers. After his eventual successor Ma’sud was killed in a palace coup, the Ghaznavid dynasty began to decline. In 1173, Ghazni fell to the Ghurids, who then set their sights on the Ghaznavid’s capital of Lahore, which they captured in 1186.
Unlike Mahmud, the Ghurid leader, Muhammad Ghuri, wanted to expand his territories eastwards. His dreams of easy victory were dashed when his army engaged the Rajput prince Prithviraj III at Tarain, north of Delhi, in 1191. Rajput chroniclers still celebrate this victorious battle that saw Ghuri’s forces retreat in disarray after he was struck in the upper arm by a spear and whisked off the battlefield by one of his soldiers. To avenge this humiliation, he punished those soldiers who had fled by parading them in public wearing their horses’ nosebags and eating chaff.
Indian elephants were used as a primary battle engine for over 2000 years across the subcontinent and were valued by rulers far above horses.
Ghuri wasn’t willing to give up so easily. After reassembling his forces, he once again marched eastwards. Despite heading the most formidable force of Rajputs ever gathered, including hundreds of war elephants, Prithviraj was no match for the invaders. According to one account, Ghuri tricked the Rajputs into believing he had agreed to a truce. Lulled into a false sense of security, they spent the night in riotous revelry. Groggy from wine and opium, they were out-manoeuvred by Ghuri’s lightly armed cavalry and Prithviraj was hunted down and killed.
The 1192 rout of the Rajputs at Tarain has been described as ‘the most decisive battle in the history of India’. The ‘key to the Delhi gate’ and the whole of India was now in the hands of Ghuri and his victorious soldiers. Islam had well and truly arrived in South Asia.
THE DELHI SULTANATE
Ghuri didn’t live to see his dreams of empire fulfilled. He was assassinated in 1206 by a member of a rival Islamic sect, leaving his trusted deputy, Qutb ud-din Aybak, to establish the Mamluk dynasty, the first of five successive dynasties that made up the Delhi Sultanate. They were followed by the Khalji, the Tughluq, the Sayyid and the Lodi. The Lodi ruled until 1526, when their sultan, Ibrahim, was killed in a battle against Babur, the first of the Mughals. Each successive dynasty would also leave its mark on Delhi, creating new cities, mosques and tombs that still dot the Indian capital today.
DYNASTIES OF THE DELHI SULTANATE
Mamluk/Slave dynasty (1206–1290)
Khalji dynasty (1290–1320)
Tughluq dynasty (1320–1414)
Sayyid dynasty (1414–1451)
Lodi dynasty (1451–1526)
Three recurrent themes mark the history of the Delhi Sultanate: the bloodshed that almost inevitably accompanied successions to the throne; the ongoing resistance from Indian rulers; and the omnipresent military threats from the west. Their capital, Delhi, was a well-established city that had been inhabited since the sixth century BCE and was considered of strategic and symbolic importance. Under the sultanate, it became a centre of Persian learning. Persianate institutions and practices such as a salaried bureaucracy and military slavery were established. A tradition of spiritually powerful holy men, or Sufis, who practised a more mystical form of Islam gave the religion in India a distinctly softer edge.
The Mamluks were known as the Slave dynasty because many of its rulers had once been captives of their Turkish overlords. The term ‘slave’ was a loose one. After being purchased and converted to Islam (if they weren’t Muslim already), they were trained to hold positions such as ‘keeper of the stables’ and ‘keeper of the hunting leopards’. Some rose to senior military and administrative posts. Their devotion to their masters eclipsed their loyalty to their own kin and ethnic groups. So strong was their loyalty that when engaged to go into battle against the Mongol marauders who periodically threatened India, the mainly Turkish slaves never flinched at fighting their own countrymen.
Qutb ud-din Aybak died in a polo accident in 1210. His successor, Iltutmish, reigned for twenty-six years, long enough to consolidate his power. He also threw open the doors of his kingdom to refugees fleeing the Mongol invasion of Persia. So large was the influx that he tripled the size of the Qutb mosque and added three more storeys to its minaret. The refugees included the cream of Persian scholars, artists and artisans, who filled the ranks of the bureaucracy and judiciary. Persian became the language of government and diplomacy. At the same time, Mongol expansion in the west isolated the Delhi Sultanate from its Islamic counterparts in Mesopotamia and northern Africa, ensuring it would remain an independent state.
The most enduring reminder of Qutb ud-din Aybak’s reign is the Qutb Minar, which rises over the flat plains to the east of New Delhi. The minaret was constructed using the pillars, capitals and lintels of Hindu and Jain temples. The Delhi sultans employed Hindu temple-building techniques and Hindu artisans to construct their mosques.
It is at this point that the exclusively male story of kings, princes and sultans takes an unexpected turn with the coming to power of Raziyya al-Din (1205–1240), the first female ruler of an Islamic dynasty in India. Declaring his sons incapable of leadership, Iltutmish on his death bed proclaimed his thirty-one-year-old daughter, raised as an equal, to be his successor. In 1983, Bollywood would immortalise Raziyya’s story in the controversial film Razia Sultan starring the veteran actress Hema Malini (b. 1948). Released at a time when even kissing in Indian cinema was taboo, the film portrays Raziyya in a fictional lesbian relationship with Khakun (Parveen Babi), one of the women in her harem. In the film’s most famous scene, Khakun draws a feather over her face and either kisses Raziyya or whispers in her ear (such opaqueness was necessary to get past the censors) as the empress is rebuffing the advances of one of her male admirers. Despite having to learn Urdu, walk across the hot desert sands, ride elephants and engage in sword fights while clad in oversized costumes, Malini had, critics agreed, pulled off one of her best performances.
In the film, Raziyya tosses off the ‘emperor’s garb’, which she considers a ‘shroud’ because it is an impediment to finding true love. In real life her motivation for appearing in public unveiled was to be closer to the people. Initially this worked to endear herself to her subjects – but not the ulema or clergy of Delhi. Things took a turn for the worse when her liaison with an Abyssinian slave who supervised the royal horses earned her the ire of provincial governors. She was eventually incarcerated by Altunia, a Turkic slave, while she was putting down a rebellion in Lahore. Turning the tables on those opposed to her, she married Altunia and the two of them led an army of local clans to reclaim her throne.
Popular with the masses, Raziyya appeared unveiled, wearing a cap and coat so she could ‘show herself among the people’.
Raziyya was killed in 1240 after their soldiers deserted them. Though her reign was short, her legacy was significant. After coming to power she issued coins in her name, proclaiming herself to be the ‘pillar of women’ and ‘Queen of the times’, and established schools and libraries. As the scholar S.A.A. Rizvi notes: ‘[Raziyya] combated intrigues competently, displayed a remarkable insight into military tactics, resourcefully implemented her independent decisions, and diplomatically reconciled the recalcitrant iqta [land] holders. Her chief merit was to rise above the prejudices of her age.’
Raziyya’s eventual successor, after the usual jockeying for the throne, was Ghiyath al-Din Balban (r. 1266–1287), who had been bought by Iltutmish as a slave and risen through the ranks to become a trusted member of a junta of Turkish soldiers known as ‘The Forty’. To compensate for his lowly background, he created a court renowned for its pomp and grandeur. His insistence that visitors prostrated and kissed his feet, the Indian historian Jaswant Lal Mehta writes, ‘left the nobility and visitors utterly humbled, terror-stricken and dumbfounded’. According to the court chronicler Barani, not even his domestic servants ever saw him dressed in anything other than royal apparel, socks and headgear. It was said he never laughed. Nor did he allow any courtier to smile in his presence.
Despite his reputation as a despot, Balban’s reign was an oasis of stability in an otherwise tumultuous period. His benign rule created such an atmosphere of peace and contentment that it was said the god Viṣṇu could ‘sleep in peace on his ocean of milk’. His prioritisation of political stability over religious dictates was reflected in his tolerant attitude towards non-Muslims. This prompted outrage from Muslim nobles such as Barani, who were appalled that Hindus were allowed to practise idol worship and infidelity. Referring to Balban, he wrote: ‘Muslim kings not only allow but are pleased with the fact that infidels, polytheists, idol-worshippers and cow-dung worshippers [could] build houses like palaces, wear clothes of brocade and ride horses caparisoned with gold and silver ornaments.’
Following Balban’s death in 1287, his seventeen-year-old son tried unsuccessfully to negotiate the internecine power games that beset the court, opening the way for the army commander Jalal al-Din Khalji (c. 1220–1296) to seize power in a coup d’état and establish the Khalji dynasty. Originally from Afghanistan, the Khaljis had served as soldiers in the Ghurid armies. Following the Mongol invasion of Afghanistan in the twelfth century, they migrated en masse to northern India as soldiers and settlers, gradually rising to administrative and military posts. The dynasty’s greatest ruler, Ala al-Din Khalji (r. 1296–1316) , extended the boundaries of the sultanate south of the Vidhaya mountain range. Under the command of his African slave eunuch Malik Kafur, Ala al-Din Khalji’s armies launched numerous raids into the Deccan, sacking its cities to finance a line of defences to protect dominions from Mongol incursions. For the first time, Muslim invaders reached the deep south of India, plundering temples in Madurai, Srirangam and Chidambaram and bringing back hundreds of tonnes of gold, silver and precious stones. The Somnath temple was ransacked, its liṇgam was once again smashed and its shards incorporated into the steps of a mosque in Delhi. After each raid, the defeated Hindu kings were reinstated on their thrones, provided they publicly acknowledged the overlordship of the Delhi Sultan and sent him a hefty annual tribute.
Ala al-Din Khalji’s fanaticism was tempered by his reforms. He opened public office to commoners, including the non-privileged Muslim immigrants, Indian converts to Islam and even Hindus. The sale of wine and liquor was banned. Harsh penalties helped curb bribery and corruption. He also introduced agrarian reforms that curbed the powers of Hindu middlemen to collect taxes and confiscated all landed properties of his courtiers and nobles to deprive them of the wealth they could use to start an insurrection. A ministry of commerce set prices; shopkeepers who charged above the fixed rates were publicly flogged. The result was an immediate drop in grain prices for consumers that was maintained even in years of drought.
BARANI ON ALA AL-DIN KHALAJI’S RULE: ‘A camel could be had for a dang [farthing], the price of a slave girl was fixed at 5 to 12 tankas and that of a concubine at 20 to 40 tankas. A handsome young lad could be had for 20 to 30 tankas whereas the price of slave labourers varied from 10 to 15 tankas each. With the consumers’ goods and domestic labour so cheap, a man of moderate means could afford to enjoy a happy and comfortable life with one to four legally married wives, a number of concubines and a dozen of slave girls and slave labourers at his beck and call.’
PEAK SULTANATE
Ibn Battuta (1304–1369) has been called the greatest Arab adventurer of all time – the Moroccan equivalent of Marco Polo (almost his exact contemporary). In 1325, the Tangier-born jurist set off on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Instead of returning home, he spent the next three decades traversing most of the known world, from northern Africa to eastern China. Ten of those years were spent in India, the bulk of them at the court of Muhammad bin Tughluq (1290–1351). Described as ‘the most controversial figure ever to rule India’, bin Tughluq’s various epithets included ‘Muhammad the Bloody’, ‘Delhi’s own Nero’ and ‘India’s Ivan the Terrible’. Battuta, who served him for eight years, first as a judge and then as an ambassador, left behind a detailed description of the man – and his contradictions. He was more addicted than anyone Battuta knew to ‘the making of gifts and the shedding of blood. His gate is never without some poor man enriched or some living man executed… For all that, he is of all men the most humble and the readiest to show equity and to acknowledge the right.’
Battuta arrived in Delhi in 1334, as the sultanate was in the throes of a particularly bloody succession crisis following the death of Ala al-Din Khalji in 1316. The most notorious ruler to occupy the throne during this period was the brutal transvestite Qutb al-Din Mubarak, who was assassinated by his catamite slave Khusrau Khan. He stayed on the throne for just four months – long enough to massacre all of al-Din Khalji’s sons and to alienate the nobility, who transferred their allegiance to the sexagenarian army commander Ghiyath al-Din. His rule was also short-lived. In 1325, bin Tughluq disposed neatly of his father by constructing a flimsy timber reception pavilion at Afghanpur, on the banks of the Yamuna River. According to the official version, a lightning bolt hit the pavilion while father and son were dining, bringing down the roof, which killed Ghiyath al-Din. Battuta maintained that the pavilion was deliberately built to collapse easily. When everyone else had gone to prayer, bin Tughluq had ordered elephants to stamp the ground, creating a mini earthquake that caused the structure to collapse.
While violence was no stranger to the Delhi sultans, bin Tughluq took the concept of revenge to new extremes. He ordered one of his enemies be flayed alive, his skin stuffed and put on display, his flesh minced, cooked with rice and served to his family. His administration was no less controversial. He levied so much additional tax on farmers to pay for his vast army that many were forced from the land, leading to a devastating famine. Perhaps his most spectacular failure was the attempt to replicate China’s system of paper money by introducing brass and copper coins that were assigned higher arbitrary value than their metallic content. These proved so easy to forge that the sultan was forced to withdraw them from circulation, buying back real and counterfeit coins in such quantities that ‘heaps of them rose up in Tughluqabad like mountains’.
When it came to the treatment of non-Muslims, however, pragmatism triumphed over religious zeal. Funds were assigned for the repair of Hindu temples, and anyone who paid jizya, a poll tax imposed on non-Muslims, could build places of worship. The importance of the jizya to the revenues of the state neutralised the need for conversions. The fewer the number of Muslims, the more tax collected.
Under bin Tughluq, the Delhi Sultanate reached its greatest geographical extent, encompassing much of western and eastern India and extending deep into the Deccan. The shift in the epicentre of power prompted another controversy – transferring the capital 1400 kilometres south to Daulatabad. According to Battuta, the sultan wanted to punish the people of Delhi for their habit of penning anonymous abusive letters to him. A deeper underlying motive may have been his suspicions that the ulema, or clergy, were planning a revolt. Moving his court and bureaucracy to Daulatabad (or the ‘city of government’, as it had been renamed), a gruelling forty-day journey from the current capital in the heat of summer, earned him few friends among Delhi’s aristocracy, its Islamic clergy, traders and businessmen. Although Battuta noted that so many trees had been planted along the route that walking along it was like ‘going through a garden’, the presence of bandits and armed tribal groups made the journey a perilous one.
In what was a rare event for an Indian ruler, bin Tughluq died of natural causes in 1351 while pursuing rebels in the deserts of Sindh. He was succeeded by his cousin Firuz Shah Tughluq (1309–1388), who inherited a crumbling empire. Large areas that had been under the sultanate’s control in Bengal rebelled and became independent of Delhi but retained their Muslim identities. A poor military strategist who showed no interest in empire-building, Firuz Shah Tughluq watched as further rebellions saw Gujarat slip into semi-autonomy and much of the Deccan achieve complete independence under the Bahmani dynasty. Saddled with an inferiority complex because of his Hindu mother, he took his role as the sovereign of an Islamic state and leader of the faithful seriously. The great Jagannath temple in Puri was desecrated and Brahmins were no longer exempt from paying jizya. Following a well-established precedent, Firuz built a separate city named Firuzabad to the north of Tughluqabad to glorify his rule.
Firuz Shah Tughluq’s death in 1388 sparked yet another succession crisis that left an enfeebled sultanate vulnerable to attacks from outsiders. When the Central Asian warlord Tamerlane (Timur) invaded India in 1398, the sultanate could muster only 10,000 troops and was unable to defend the capital. Tamerlane ordered his troops to spare the lives of Delhi’s citizens, but the reprieve was short-lived. After some of the invaders were caught looting, scuffles broke out and several soldiers were killed. For the next three days, Tamerlane’s forces went on a rampage, killing or enslaving Hindus and pillaging their belongings. As he later recorded in his autobiographical memoir, the Tuzak-i-Timuri:
The spoil was so great that each man secured from fifty to a hundred prisoners, men, women and children. There was no man who took less than twenty. The other booty was immense in rubies, diamonds, garnets, pearls and other gems, jewels of gold and silver, ashrafis, tankas of gold and silver, and brocades and silks of great value. Gold and silver ornaments of the Hindu women were obtained in such quantities as to exceed all account.
The immediate outcome of Tamerlane’s raid was a further fragmentation of the sultanate. New semi-autonomous power centres sprang up in the Punjab and in the Eastern Gangetic Plains, where one of Firuz Shah Tughluq’s Ethiopian-born slaves established a sultanate at Jaunpur. The Sayyid dynasty, which had replaced the Tughluqs, saw its territories shrink to almost nothing. Sultan Alam Shah, one of its last monarchs, was mocked for calling himself ‘the king of the world’ when his dominions extended only as far as the village of Palam, which today is near the city’s international airport.
The arrival of the Lodis in 1451 gave the sultanate a flickering lease of life. Descendants of Afghan merchants and mercenaries, the Lodis were little more than a confederation of loosely aligned states. Their sultans did not build thrones for themselves but shared a carpet with their peers. Not all Afghans residing in the sultanate’s territory were supporters of the regime as Ibrahim Lodi (1480–1526), the last ruler, found out in 1526, when Babur launched a raid on Delhi. The founder of the Mughal Empire probably never would have succeeded had Afghan chieftains in Punjab laid out a welcoming carpet for him.
Promising freedom from caste and idolatry, Sufi orders flourished in cities such as Ajmer and parts of Sindh. Like the devotional bhakti traditions of Hinduism, they were a potentially disruptive force as they bypassed orthodox religious practices to achieve a personal relationship between an individual and god. Muslims, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and Hindus, Sufis proclaimed, ‘all were striving toward the same goal and that the outward observances that kept them apart were false’. Sufi shrines dedicated to saints sprung up all over northern India and were visited by Hindus and Muslims alike.
Nowhere is the confluence of Sufi and Hindu devotionalism more pronounced than in the works of the fifteenth-century poet Kabir. Born into a caste of Muslim weavers, he lived in Varanasi, where his shrine still attracts devotees of all faiths. Legend has it that when he died his body turned into flowers, ensuring that he could not receive either a Hindu cremation or a Muslim burial. Today he has two graves, each tended by the other faith. For Kabir, neither priest nor mullahs were of any consequence. Sincere avowals of faith, no matter how they were expressed, had more chance of reaching the ears of God than precise ritual.
KABIR:
Listen carefully,
Neither the Vedas
Nor the Qur’an
Will teach you this:
Put the bit in its mouth,
The saddle on its back,
Your foot in the stirrup,
And ride your wild runaway mind
All the way to heaven
The Muslim rulers of India from time of the Delhi Sultanate until the early eighteenth century were mostly pragmatists who recognised they were a minority reigning over a large, mainly Hindu population scattered over a vast subcontinent. The armies they maintained were primarily to protect India from the constant threat of a Mongol invasion, rather than to pursue territorial conquest. From ruler to ruler, dynasty to dynasty, Islam swung between being inclusive and iconoclastic, but at no time was there any attempt at mass conversion.
When Hindu temples were destroyed, the aim was to seize their considerable treasures and undermine the political authority of local rulers. For the most part, Hindus, Jains and religious minorities, such as the Jews and Parsis, were allowed to worship their gods without interference. The need to attract Hindus to bureaucratic posts and as soldiers into their armies overruled their desire for proselytising. Hindus generally ran the economy, and Hindu bankers made huge profits by helping newly arrived Muslims from Central Asia buy slaves, brocades, jewels and even horses.
Conquest was more about commerce than conversion. Beyond the Indus River lay a land rich in resources, with one of the most sophisticated economies in the world. It was a land of gold, silver and precious stones, of spices and slaves. Roads were safe, ports efficient, tariffs low. The characterisation of Muslim rulers as destructive and despotic was popularised by the British in the nineteenth century onwards in order to justify their rule as just and benevolent. The communal friction that erupted between Hindus and Muslims around the time of Indian independence, and has simmered ever since, was largely absent during the period when Muslim dynasties were the most powerful force in India.
THE CITY OF VICTORY
Although the territorial gains of rulers such as Muhammad bin Tughluq in South India were generally fleeting, they precipitated the destruction of many existing kingdoms. The most significant outcome of the fluid political landscape that ensued was the establishment of the Vijayanagara Empire in 1336 by Harihara (r. 1336–1356) and his brother Bukka (r. 1356–1377), Hindu converts to Islam who served under and then rebelled against the Tughluqs. According to legend, a Hindu sage recognised Harihara as an embodiment of the god Virupaksha. He switched religions and was allowed to establish a kingdom based on Hindu principles. Named after its capital, Vijayanagara, or City of Victory, it lasted for three centuries and at the peak of its power was the largest state ever created in South India, ruling over a population of around 25 million at a time when the subcontinent had about 150 million people. On reaching the capital in the middle of the fifteenth century, the Timurid ambassador Abd Al-Razzaq (1413–1482) remarked, ‘The city is such that the pupil of the eye has never seen a place like it, and the ear of intelligence has never been informed that there existed anything to equal it in the world.’ The jewellery bazaar was stocked with pearls of such quality ‘that the field of the moon of the fourteenth day caught fire simply by gazing on them’. Its rulers claimed universal sovereignty – their aim was ‘to rule the vast world under a single umbrella’.
Vijayanagara’s main rivals were the Bahmani sultans who ruled from Gulbarga, and the Gajapatis, or Lords of the Elephant, who controlled much of what is now the state of Odisha. Vijayanagara’s pragmatic ruler Deva Rayā II (r. 1432–1446) narrowed the military gap with the Bahmanis by enlisting them into his army, both as officers and foot soldiers. After coming to the throne in 1509, Kṛṣṇa Deva Rayā (1471–1579), considered the greatest of all the Vijayanagara kings, pushed the Gajapatis back to their capital, Cuttack.
Ruling an empire that stretched from the Malabar to the Coromandel coasts, Kṛṣṇa Deva Rayā was one first Indian leaders to welcome European traders to his kingdom and believed that trade was the key to universal sovereignty. A good ruler, he wrote, should oversee the development of harbours so that all important articles such as sandalwood, precious stones and pearls could be freely imported. Foreign sailors who were shipwrecked on his kingdom’s shores should be cared for: ‘Make the merchants of distant foreign countries who import elephants and good horses attached to yourself by providing them with daily audience, presents and allowing decent profits. Then those articles will never go to your enemies.’ Portuguese gunners formed the backbone of his army.
Historians have long seen Vijayanagar’s Hindu rulers as a bulwark against the expansion of Muslim influence into southern India. However, an examination of the kingdom’s culture, society and architecture paints a different picture. From the beginning of their empire, they styled themselves ‘sultan among Indian kings’ (hindu-rayā-suratrana), and absorbed Persianate ideas and practices. The precinct of the capital known as the royal centre incorporated Islamic architectural styles such as domes, pointed arches, cross vaultings and stucco reliefs. Turkish and Iranian soldiers were recruited into the army. Sculptures of Turkish soldiers even guarded some of the city’s Hindu temples.
Abd Al-Razzaq noticed that the king wore a tunic of Chinese silk styled after the royal attire of twelfth-century Iran. Nobles wore brimless headgear that also derived from Persia for public events, switching to traditional South India dress for Hindu religious ceremonies. ‘For these elites, an important sign of the sophistication of the court was precisely its ability to participate in a larger Islamic civilisational sphere, while at the same time continuing to support and patronise what was becoming a distinctive pan-south Indian elite culture,’ writes the historian Rosalind O’Hanlon. The establishment of the Mughal Empire would see these interactions between the Hindu and Islamic spheres reach their zenith.