India: A History. Revised and Updated (51 page)

Another scheme, supposedly designed to afford flanking support for the Khorasan venture, went ahead. This time, explains Barani, the object was to ‘bring under the dominion of Islam the mountain[s] which lie between the territories of Hind [India] and those of China’. An expedition of at least sixty thousand duly headed off into the western Himalayas. It
probably got no further than the outer ranges in Kulu or Kumaon and was there heavily defeated by ‘Hindus who closed the passes and cut off its retreat’. ‘Only ten horsemen returned to Delhi to spread the news of its discomfiture.’
⁴

Meanwhile revolts within India itself seem to have been more or less continuous but to have increased in both frequency and scale as Muhammad’s policies took disastrous effect. Suppressing dissent, whether amongst Muslims or Hindus, he regarded as one of the main tasks of any sultan. It demanded energy and involved considerable expense but, since preserving the integrity of the state was deemed the only way of preventing civil war, he embraced the challenge with stern impartiality plus that awesome sense of duty which characterised all his actions. Justice demanded that rebels must die, and the more disagreeable their death the greater its deterrent effect. One of the first malcontents to fall into his hands was flayed alive; his skin was then stuffed and put on exhibition while its contents were minced, cooked with rice, and served up to the deceased’s family. ‘This revolting cruelty gave a foretaste,’ says one of Muhammad’s sterner critics, ‘of the barbarous, if not fiendish, spirit which characterised the sultan, and it was not long before he displayed it on a massive scale.’
⁵
Muslims suffered quite as much as Hindus, innocent participants as much as guilty instigators. The sultan made no exceptions. Increasingly, though, he saw dissent less as a political challenge and more as a personal affront. A note of puzzlement is detectable in his dialogues with Barani. He dismissed the notion that the severity of his actions might actually engender disaffection, yet was genuinely wounded by what he took to be the obstinacy and ingratitude of so many of the beneficiaries of his rule.

As with Ala-ud-din, the high level of military spending also necessitated draconian fiscal measures. Additional taxes on the cultivators of the Ganga-Jamuna Doab are said to have driven the rich into rebellion and the poor into the jungles. Ferocious reprisals only made matters worse. The land went uncultivated and, when the rains failed, a catastrophic famine beset the whole of upper India, including Delhi. ‘It continued for some years, and thousands upon thousands of people perished of want.’
⁶

Following Barani, Muhammad’s critics place the blame squarely on the sultan. Others see his additional taxes as negligible and certainly no worse than Ala-ud-din’s exactions. The famine they attribute to drought; and the sultan’s efforts to alleviate it become the most notable aspect of the disaster. Both Barani and Ibn Batuta acknowledge the depth of royal concern and note the measures taken to relieve distress by distributing existing grain stocks and arranging imports from further afield. Subsequently vast sums
were disbursed to agents who undertook to bring wasteland into cultivation in an attempt to pre-empt future famines. This admirable initiative failed utterly. As Muhammad’s reign degenerated into chaos, the agents simply pocketed the cash advances. His successor would be obliged to write them off.

Like Ala-ud-din, Muhammad bin Tughluq was attracted by more radical economic solutions. He did not resurrect the idea of managing the market, but instead conceived the yet more innovative expedient of bypassing the currency. The problem seems to have arisen not from the treasury’s depletion but from a shortage of silver. Gold, thanks to hoards like those from the ‘Aladdin’s cave’ in the south, was plentiful; but when it was released into circulation it strained the fixed monetary ratio between gold and silver. With a coinage that was ‘more efficiently controlled than any Middle Eastern or European currency of the period’,
⁷
the sultan was obliged to introduce gold coins of new weights plus heavily adulterated silver ones. Apparently influenced by reports of China’s paper currency, he further introduced a token coinage of brass and copper to augment the silver coinage. ‘The scheme was on the whole quite good and statesmanlike.’
⁸
It might even have worked had he been able to regulate the supply of these tokens and had the sultanate been reckoned credit-worthy. In the event the sultan’s excesses, rather than the state of his treasury, undermined confidence, while smiths and metalworkers found the new coins absurdly easy to forge. Within two years the sultan was obliged to withdraw the lot, buying back both the real and the counterfeit at great expense until mountains of coins had accumulated within the walls of Tughluqabad.

This disastrous experiment seems to have been undertaken in the early years of his reign and to have been quickly followed by another: the removal of the capital from Delhi. In its stead Muhammad decreed that Devagiri, the city in Maharashtra from whose fang-like fortress the Seuna king Rama-chandra had so dismally failed to defy Ala-ud-din, should henceforth be the hub of his realm. He knew the place well from having made it his headquarters while fighting against the Kakatiya king of Warangal during his father’s reign. Now renamed Daulatabad, it was well sited for controlling the rich but troublesome provinces of Gujarat and Malwa and for making the sultanate’s rule more effective in the peninsular kingdoms which had been overrun, but far from pacified, by Ala-ud-din, Malik Kafur and others.

But Devagiri/Daulatabad was all of fourteen hundred kilometres from Delhi, whose pampered citizens were disinclined to desert what Ibn Batuta judged ‘one of the greatest cities in the universe’. They evinced no gratitude
for the generous compensation given for their Delhi properties, nor for the elaborate arrangements made for their journey, nor for the comfortable reception being organised for them in Daulatabad. Once again the sultan was obliged to resort to force.

As well as sound strategic reasons for relocating his capital – like Daulatabad’s greater security from Mongol attack – Ibn Batuta suggests that Muhammad had other reasons for evacuating Delhi. Its vulnerability to famine might have been one of them, but there was also a personal motive. In dealing severely even with Muslim miscreants, in refusing to heed the advice of established counsellors, and in promoting newcomers and Indian Muslims of low-caste origin, Muhammad had already alienated the city’s Islamic intellectual elite of Turks, Persians and Afghans. A stream of anonymous poison-pen letters now confirmed his suspicions of the
ulema
, whose hostility may also account for the adverse criticism of chroniclers like Barani. Removal from Delhi was a convenient way of disrupting this opposition and, when the move was resisted, of punishing it.

Tales of the city being demolished and burnt, of a nonagenarian being turfed out of his deathbed, of a blind man being ordered onto the road tied to a horse’s tail (‘only one of his legs reached Daulatabad’
⁹
), and of a cripple being fired south by
manjanik
(catapult), sound like exaggerations. So may be the ‘many who perished on the road’. But that Delhi was indeed deserted is attested by all. It may have been speedily repopulated. Ibn Batuta writes of other provinces being ordered to send people to reoccupy it. Moreover the whole scheme was soon abandoned, so that many of those who had reached Daulatabad, or were strung out along the road, were soon trailing back. Certainly Delhi had made something of a recovery by 1333 when Ibn Batuta first saw it. He found it magnificently appointed, although still somewhat thinly inhabited for a city of its size. Despite this renaissance, the disruption would not easily be forgotten, let alone forgiven. With his second monumental miscalculation, Muhammad had forfeited the trust of even loyal supporters. The swell of disaffection now exhibited itself in a crescendo of often simultaneous revolts.

Despite this overwhelming evidence of his unpopularity Muhammad remained on the throne until 1351, a reign of twenty-six years. Bengal had been virtually written off; the rajput princes of Rajasthan were reasserting their autonomy; in both Andhra and the Tamil country Muslim commanders established independent dynasties. Elsewhere lesser officers, mostly of Mongol and Afghan origin, repeatedly mutinied; Malwa and Gujarat heaved with dissent; the southern Deccan was experiencing a Hindu revival; something similar was underway in coastal Andhra; Sind revolted; civil war
continued to flare up in the Ganga-Jamuna Doab – in all, Barani lists some twenty-two major rebellions. If in the early years of his reign Muhammad had won the sultanate’s best chance of an Indian empire, in the latter years he lost it irrevocably.

Yet in Delhi his authority seems never to have been seriously challenged, and of the plots which dogged the reigns of other sultans little is heard. Far from incompetent, let alone insane, Muhammad bin Tughluq deserves credit less for his long-remembered experiments and more for his unquestioned ascendancy during a period of appalling turmoil, not all of it of his own making. An able commander who was rarely worsted in the field, and an effective administrator whose minor reforms and directives had genuine merit, he was also comparatively free of religious and ethnic bigotry. Perhaps he more than any of the sultans glimpsed the potential of an Indo– Islamic accommodation. Even his draconian severity seems to have had its desired effect. He died while pursuing rebels into the wastes of Sind. Although poison would later be suspected, from the contemporary accounts it seems certain that his labours were indeed crowned with that rare royal accolade of a natural death.

No less remarkable was the comparatively smooth succession which followed. Although a child, said to be his son, was briefly promoted as his successor, it was generally agreed that Muhammad bin Tughluq had no sons. The impostor was quickly retired to the nursery and Feroz Shah, Muhammad’s cousin and designated heir, quietly succeeded. Already into his forties, Feroz yet managed to occupy the throne for thirty-seven years (1351–88). No less quietly, and with all the caution of advancing years, he endeavoured to preserve and pacify what remained of the sultanate’s authority, proving to be a conservative in matters of religion and a consolidator in affairs of state. Although he received an exceptionally favourable press thanks to his deference to the
ulema
, even his eulogists fail to disguise the fact that he made no attempt to re-establish the sultanate’s authority in the Deccan or the south, that two expeditions into Bengal were largely fruitless, and a six-year campaign in Gujarat and Sind nearly disastrous.

Only his leisurely excursion into Orissa in 1361, supposedly in search of elephants, can be claimed a success. Hitherto largely ignored, what Feroz’s chronicler calls this ‘happy and prosperous country’
¹⁰
received a rude awakening as the temple-building Ganga dynasty was routed and the great shrine of Lord Jagannath at Puri desecrated. Infidels received no favours from the orthodox Feroz, and there may be truth in the massacres allegedly inflicted on the local population. Yet in the end the country, now less happy, less prosperous, and less seventy-three elephants, was duly
returned to its Hindu rulers. They, like others, soon neglected any tributary obligations to the Delhi invader.

Military manoeuvres apart, Feroz’s record bears gentle scrutiny. He forswore the cruel excesses of his predecessor, showed a genuine regard for the welfare of his people and won wide support. Land revenue in those areas still administered by the sultanate was set at what seems to have been an equable rate and the
jizya
tax was extended to all non-Muslims, including the hitherto-exempt brahmans. Budgetary strains were further eased by abolishing the cash payment of the military and reverting to the system of remuneration by revenue grants. Since these grants often became hereditary, instant popularity was being bought at the price of eventual disarray. Large numbers of slaves, on the other hand, most of whom were Hindu captives, were rescued from penury and either enrolled as bodyguards or given productive work in the cities’
kharkhanas
(workshops). Thirty-six of these establishments, some with a workforce of thousands, were maintained by Feroz, mainly to supply the court with high-quality weapons, gems, robes and perfumes and to serve the sultan’s ambitious building programmes.

Under the city-based dispensation of Islam, the buildings inevitably included another new Delhi. Erected several kilometres to the north of Tughluqabad, Feroz Shah’s city and
kotla
(citadel) has long since been engulfed by more recent Delhis; below its ramparts, where once refreshingly flowed the Jamuna, heavy traffic now eddies in a sluggish fog of exhaust. Yet on its skyline there still protrudes one of the two Ashoka pillars which on Feroz’s orders were so laboriously shipped downriver. Curious about their inscriptions, Feroz asked local brahmans for a translation; they expressed themselves mystified.

The sultan’s tomb, ‘an austere, plain block of grey sandstone’,
¹¹
stands in the urban oasis of Hauz Khas where, beside a reservoir built by Ala-ud-din Khalji, Feroz constructed gardens and one of many important
madrasseh
(colleges). Further afield he won acclaim for undertaking the first major irrigation projects with the construction of canals from both the Jamuna and the Sutlej. He also founded provincial cities, many of them called Ferozabad, including that which he later changed to Jaunpur. Jauna was the birth name of Muhammad bin Tughluq; Feroz, at least, continued to hold his predecessor in high regard.

Jaunpur, and the Awadh region of eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar which it commanded, was conferred on Malik Sowar, a eunuch-slave redeemed by Feroz and who, proving exceptionally able, was given the title of Sultan-ush Sharq. Taking advantage of the chaos which followed Feroz’s death, it was this man who founded the Sharqi kingdom of Jaunpur and whose successors – necessarily adopted and apparently of African origin – would soon defy and briefly eclipse the Delhi sultanate in the Gangetic plain.