A Place Within (12 page)

The visitor was Ibn Battuta (1304–1368), perhaps the greatest traveller of the medieval world. In 1325, at the age of twenty-one, saying goodbye to his sorrowful mother and father, he had set off east from his native Tangier with the aim of visiting the holy cities of Mecca and Medina; but the urge to travel proved insatiable, and by the time he returned home to settle, he had spent twenty-nine years on the road, his journeys having taken him across varied lands and seas all the way to China. In the interim he had time to make a sea voyage down the Indian Ocean to the coast of East Africa, up to Mombasa and Kilwa. His last voyage, when he was well on in years, was across the Sahara to the Mali kingdom of West Africa. Back finally in Morocco, in Fez, he prepared a memoir of his travels with the aid of a young secretary. He was not a man of letters, and this was his only book. Its great appeal today
is precisely that it is a memoir: intimate, expansive, unpretentious. Ibn Battuta had to be a survivor, too; his journeys were often hazardous, and he came across rulers who rewarded him and gave him positions in their lands, but who also made him tremble and could have had his head cut off and stuck on a rampart for all to see. Alberuni, the great eleventh-century Persian scholar-traveller, after spending ten years in India learning all he could, produced an invaluable record, but he does not reveal himself so openly. Ibn Battuta gives us the man on the road.

On the way down to Delhi from Multan, Ibn Battuta describes seeing sati processions in which “richly dressed” widows were carried to the cremation site to be immolated with their dead husbands. The Muslim sultans tolerated this practice, which was alien to them, and the traveller’s reaction to the spectacle is only to tell us how happily the women embraced their dead husbands and burnt with them.

It had been eighteen years since Alauddin Khilji had died, and the Tughlaq dynasty was now in place. The sultan was Muhammad Tughlaq, son of Ghiyasuddin, the builder of Tughlaqabad, the third city. Muhammad, credited with arranging the death of his father (who died when a wooden shelter fell on him), had raised a fourth city, essentially comprising the two older Delhis, Alauddin’s Siri and the older Qutb area, which together were enclosed within a protecting wall and given the grand name of Jahanpanah, “Asylum of the World.” This was the city to which Ibn Battuta arrived.

Muhammad Tughlaq was one of the most enigmatic and controversial of India’s rulers, brilliant, idealistic, pious on one hand, and extremely cruel and arbitrary on the other. He learned Arabic so he could read the religious literature first-hand, became adept at the art of calligraphy, and wrote Persian verse. He held learned discussions with Hindu ascetics and Jain scholars, not to mention those of his own faith, and has even been called a nonbeliever and
a rationalist. At the same time his administrative and military achievements were significant and astute; he ruled over a vast empire and defended its borders. Yet to be close to him was to live on the edge. Some historians have called him mad. Ibn Battuta, who wrote in the comfort of his home in Morocco, describes him fearlessly.

This king is of all men the fondest of making gifts and shedding blood. His gate is never without some poor man enriched or some living man executed, and stories are current amongst the people of his generosity and courage and of his cruelty and violence towards criminals.

Soon after his arrival, Ibn Battuta obtained an audience with the sultan. In the magnificent Hall of a Thousand Pillars, he came before the “Master of the World, a tall, robust, white-skinned man seated, his legs tucked beneath him, on a gold-plated throne.” One imagines, standing among the courtiers beside the sultan, the historian Barni (who would also write about this sultan) watching the nervous Moroccan’s performance as he paid his respects. Writes Ibn Battuta,

I approached the sultan, who took my hand and shook it, and continuing to hold it addressed me most affably, saying in Persian, “This is a blessing; your arrival is blessed; be at ease, I shall be compassionate to you and give you such favours that your fellow-countrymen will hear of it and come to join you.”…Every time he said any encouraging word to me I kissed his hand, until I had kissed it seven times, and after he had given me a robe of honour I withdrew.

Craven, but otherwise he might not have lived to tell the tale. There is a charming transparency about him. The sultan appointed
him a qadi, a judge, of Delhi on a lavish stipend. No wonder that he extols the sultan’s “dominant quality” of generosity, even as he talks about his bloodiness.

Although Ibn Battuta describes Delhi as a magnificent city, he also says that it was empty and unpopulated when he arrived. It could not have been quite so, but the statement reflects the fact that this “second Baghdad,” which had trembled under the siege of the Mongols yet staved them off successfully, had recently experienced a terrible upheaval at the hands of its own sultan.

As long as Delhiites did not run afoul of the sultan they could live their lives in peace; what blood was spilt was among the ruling elite. But around 1327 events took place in Delhi that completely shattered this peace. Muhammad Tughlaq decided to move his capital four hundred miles south to Daulatabad, in the Deccan, so it could be at the centre of his vast empire. But he did not merely move his government, he forced the entire upper class to pick up and go along as well, lock, stock, and barrel. These cosmopolitan elites were naturally reluctant to leave the splendour of their great capital—“Hazrat-i-Delhi,” Khusrau had called it—to set up anew in a provincial town in a distant, alien region of the country. Anonymous and abusive letters were thrown into the sultan’s audience hall in protest. The sultan responded with measures appropriate to his nature. Among those who resisted the move were the Sufis, for Delhi had become an important centre for them. Nizamuddin was dead, so a major battle of wills was averted. With the lesser of these men of God, the ruler had his brutal way. They were dragged out of their houses, pulled by their beards, tortured. The khanqahs, the Sufi centres, were emptied. “They walked with loud lamentations, like persons who are going to be buried alive,” says Barni. There were women, children, and the elderly among the migrants, it was summer, and the ground was burning hot.

Within a few years Daulatabad was found unsuitable and the court returned to Delhi, which was, naturally, completely shaken up by these upheavals.

Ibn Battuta arrived in Delhi a few years after this experiment in forced migration was over, and what he writes is from hearsay and rumour, but it is perhaps also indicative of how bitterly the episode was remembered.

The sultan ordered a search to be made for any persons remaining in the town, and his slaves found two men in the streets, one a cripple and the other blind. They were brought before him and he gave orders that the cripple should be flung from a mangonel [a mechanical projectile thrower] and the blind man dragged from Delhi to Daulatabad, a distance of forty days’ journey. He fell to pieces on the road and all of him that reached Daulatabad was his leg. When the sultan did this, every person left the town, abandoning furniture and possessions, and the city remained utterly deserted. A person in whom I have confidence told me that the sultan mounted one night to the roof of his palace and looked out over Delhi, where there was neither fire nor smoke nor lamp, and said, “Now my mind is tranquil and my wrath appeased.”

In 1342, after seven years in Delhi, Ibn Battuta was dispatched by the sultan as his emissary to the powerful Mongol emperor of China. And he was away. He would die happily in his old age in his native Morocco.

And, when they see me march in black array,

With mournful streamers hanging down their heads,

Were in that city all the world contained,

Not one should ’scape, but perish by our swords.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE,
Tamburlaine the Great

The third sultan of the dynasty started by Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq was the gentle Firoz Shah, known as a great restorer, who repaired, among other sites, Aibak’s tower, the Qutb Minar, and Alauddin’s great water reservoir, Hauz Khas. Soon after his accession, he issued a statement prohibiting the use of torture by the state: “…there shall be no tortures, and…no human beings shall be mutilated.” “Terroristic severities have been replaced by mildness, kindness, and affection.” His new Delhi was considerably to the north, by several miles, and called Firoz Shah Kotla (now the site of Delhi’s cricket ground). After Firoz Shah’s death in 1388 there began a rule of ineffectual kings of the dynasty with short-lived reigns. Mongols continued to threaten in the north.

In 1398, the Mongol Timur (known in the west as Tamerlane or Tamburlaine) swept down upon northern India from his capital in Samarkand (in present-day Uzbekistan), leaving behind a trail of utter devastation. The Mongols, who had started out as “heathen” conquerors two centuries before, had become Muslims after their ravaging of Muslim lands. Timur’s purpose in undertaking this current adventure, as he writes in his memoir, was to inflict punishment upon infidels and unbelievers, “for it had reached my ears that the slayer of infidels is a ghazi, and if he is slain he becomes a martyr.” Timur of course had had no qualms thus far about slaying people of any creed, including his own. This time he could not decide whether to attack the infidels of India or China. He picked India. On December 17, after first putting to the sword one hundred thousand captives, by his own account, whose loyalty to him
could not be certain, he met the Tughlaq army in what is the centre of the present city, and overpowered it. The Delhi sultan at first took refuge inside his fort, then in the night he fled into the mountains. Delhi surrendered, and Timur, after much entreaty, promised to spare its citizens. However, a street brawl between soldiers and citizens led to a bloodbath. Of this, Timur himself writes,

The flames of strife were thus lighted and spread through the whole city…. The savage Turks fell to killing and plundering. The Hindusset fire to their houses with their own hands, burned their wives and children in them, and rushed into the fight and were killed…. On that day, Thursday, and all the night of Friday, nearly 15,000 Turks were engaged in slaying, plundering, and destroying…. The following day, Saturday the 17th…the spoil was so great that each man secured from fifty to a hundred prisoners, men, women, and children…. The other booty was immense…. Gold and silver ornaments of the Hindu women were obtained in such quantities as to exceed all account.

This cold-blooded account of a massacre itself makes us wonder how to respond. As Timur says, he said his prayers devoutly. The following day he departed. And the dazed remnants of a citizenry watched the blood-quenched army of the conqueror march away with booty and slaves.

Timur is the national hero of Uzbekistan, where his statues adorn the cities of Tashkent and Samarkand. When he left Delhi he took with him all the artisans, master craftsmen, builders, and stonemasons he could find. Uzbekistan, and especially Samarkand, therefore boasts some of the most beautiful medieval architecture.

Following the Tughlaqs came the Sayyids, and Delhi was by now a provincial city, shorn of its previous prestige and power, the rule of the sultan reduced to a few square miles. It was the dynasty of the Lodis, which came to power in 1451, that brought some of the
former prestige back to Delhi. The second of these kings, Sikander, is buried in a magnificent tomb in the beautiful Lodi Gardens, a popular picnic ground and walking area behind the India International Centre. Sikander’s son Ibrahim, however, had to face the Mongol Babur on the field of Panipat, forty miles from Delhi, in 1526, and was killed while deserting his troops. He is buried in Panipat. The Mughal (Mongol) dynasty of India thus began.

With Babur’s victory at the Battle of Panipat, the Mongols fulfilled their old dream of conquering the enigmatic subcontinent, from whose doors they had been beaten away numerous times over the previous two to three centuries. Babur was descended from both Chinghiz Khan, “the accursed,” as the historians of the sultans had called him, and Timur. With Babur, now began the Mughal Empire (“Mongol” translates to “Mughal” in India), which at its zenith was the greatest in the world, spanning most of the subcontinent and parts of Afghanistan, with more than a hundred million people under its dominion.