The Age of Wrath: A History of the Delhi Sultanate (14 page)

The royal military escort on the opposite bank of the river watched this horrid scene with dismay, but there was nothing that they could do about it, as it would have been suicidal to cross the river and confront Ala-ud-din, as the sultan was already dead, and Ala-ud-din’s army was very much larger than the sultan’s military escort. So the royal contingent quickly retreated to Delhi. Meanwhile the spear-mounted severed head of Jalal-ud-din was sent around for display in the nearby areas, as the proof of Ala-ud-din’s triumph and succession.

This was in July 1296. Jalal-ud-din had reigned for just six years when he was assassinated.

When the news of the assassination of Jalal-ud-din reached Delhi, his widow, Malika-i-Jahan, immediately placed her youngest son, Qadr Khan, ‘a mere lad’, on the throne, presumably because her eldest surviving son, Arkali Khan, was away in Multan at that time, and the throne could not be left vacant. But this hasty act of the queen—whom Barani describes as ‘one of the silliest of the silly’—created divisions among the Delhi courtiers. And it so upset Arkali Khan that he made no move to aid his mother and defend the family throne.

Ala-ud-din was at this time hesitating about his next move, but the news of Arkali Khan’s discontent emboldened him to proceed to Delhi right away. As Ala-ud-din set out for Delhi he, in his characteristic spirit of caution and daring, took care to win over the local people to his side by literally showering on them, at every stage along his way to Delhi, gold and silver coins, by using a portable catapult. People in droves therefore flocked to him. A large number of soldiers also joined him along the way, so that in a couple of weeks, by the time he reached the environs of Delhi, his army burgeoned into a formidable legion of 50,000 horse and 60,000 infantry. In public perception the future now clearly belonged to Ala-ud-din, so there was a general scramble, particularly among the nobles and the top officers of the Sultanate, to join him. ‘He then won over the maliks and amirs by a large outlay of money, and those unworthy men, greedy for gold … and caring nothing for loyalty … joined Ala-ud-din,’ observes Barani. ‘He scattered so much gold that the faithless people easily forgot the murder of the late sultan, and rejoiced over his succession.’

Meanwhile Malika-i-Jahan sent an army from Delhi under royal officers to block Ala-ud-din’s advance, but they, instead of opposing him, promptly
defected to him, and were, according to Barani, rewarded by Ala-ud-din with ‘twenty, thirty, and even fifty mans of gold. And all the soldiers who were under these noblemen received each three hundred tankas.’ In that predicament Malika-i-Jahan wrote to Arkali Khan in Multan requesting him to forgive her folly of raising her young son to the throne (‘I am a woman, and women are foolish,’ she wrote) and asking him to rush to Delhi and mount the throne. But Arkali—whom Barani describes as ‘one of the most renowned warriors of the time’, and would have probably made a great sultan—declined the offer, as most of the nobles had by then joined Ala-ud-din, and it was too late to stop him. She then sent Qadr Khan, the boy sultan, with an army to oppose Ala-ud-din, ‘but in the middle of the night the entire left wing of his army deserted to the enemy with great uproar,’ records Barani. Qadr Khan then hastily retreated to Delhi, and he and his mother collected whatever treasure they could immediately gather and fled from the city for Multan in the dead of the night.

Ala-ud-din then advanced on Delhi, even though it was, as Barani notes, ‘the very height of the rainy season’ and roads had turned into marshes. But his progress was slow, and it was only towards the end of 1296, some five months after he murdered his uncle, that he reached Delhi.

ALA-UD-DIN ENTERED DELHI with great pomp, and was formally enthroned there, and he took up his residence in the Red Palace of Balban. His immediate concern was to win over to his side the prominent people of the city, and this he successfully did by liberally scattering gold and honours among them. ‘He had committed a deed unworthy of his religion and position, so he deemed it … [prudent] to cover up his crime by scattering honours and gifts upon all classes of people,’ states Barani, whose own father and uncle were among the principal beneficiaries of Ala-ud-din’s bounty. ‘People were so deluded by the gold which they received that no one ever mentioned the horrible crime that the sultan had committed.’

After securing his position in Delhi, Ala-ud-din sent an army to Multan, where it captured Arkali Khan and Qadr Khan along with their principal followers. The princes were, on the orders of Ala-ud-din, immediately blinded, and were later put to death, and their mother was taken to Delhi and locked up in a prison. ‘The throne was now secure. The revenue officers, the elephant keepers with their elephants, the kotwals with the keys of the fort, the magistrates, and the chief men of Delhi went over to Ala-ud-din, and a new order of things was established,’ records Barani. ‘His wealth and power were great, so whether individuals gave their allegiance or whether they did not, mattered little, for the khutba was read and coins were struck in his name.’

In the second year of his reign Ala-ud-din turned to the task of firming up his authority over the nobles. He had, during the early stages of his usurpation, distributed vast wealth among the nobles to win them over to his side, but he was sagacious enough to know that, though this was crucially beneficial to him initially, it entailed a major risk, as it inflated the ego of the nobles with the feeling that the sultan had come to power because of their support, and that he was now indispensably dependent on them for remaining in power. Ala-ud-din therefore, now that he was secure on the throne, wanted to make it clear to the nobles that instead of he being dependent on their support, they were dependent on his favour.

To prove this point he dismissed from service or otherwise disgraced several of his top officers. He was particularly severe with the nobles who had switched sides and had opportunistically joined him as he usurped the throne, deeming them to be untrustworthy men—those who had betrayed their former master could very well betray their present master as well, he felt. ‘The maliks of the late king, who deserted their benefactor and joined Ala-ud-din, and received gold by
mans
and obtained employments and territories, were all seized in the city and in the army, and thrown into forts as prisoners,’ records Barani. ‘Some were blinded and some were killed. Their houses were confiscated … and their villages were brought under the public exchequer. Nothing was left for their children … Of all the amirs of Jalal-ud-din, only three were spared by Ala-ud-din … These three persons had never taken money from Sultan Ala-ud-din. They alone remained safe, but all the other Jalali nobles were exterminated root and branch.’ Ala-ud-din spared the three high-principled loyalists of Jalal-ud-din, because he felt that such people could be trusted, and that their unfailing loyalty to their master merited respect.

ALA-UD-DIN WAS IN many respects a most unusual person—and a most unusual monarch. And he was amazingly successful in all that he did, even in the many revolutionary reforms that he introduced, some of which were far, far ahead of his times. ‘The character and manners of Sultan Ala-ud-din were strange,’ states Barani. ‘He was bad-tempered, obstinate, and hard-hearted, but the world smiled upon him, fortune befriended him, and his schemes were generally successful. So he became … more reckless and arrogant … He was by nature cruel and implacable, and his only concern was for the welfare of his kingdom. No consideration of religion, no regard for the ties of brotherhood or filial relationships, no care for the rights of others, ever troubled him.’ He was entirely unsentimental and ruthlessly efficient. Success was all that mattered to him.

And, most unusual of all in that age of minimal governments, Ala-ud-din ran a maximal government. There was hardly anything in the empire that he did
not seek to control and manipulate. And he had to his credit the introduction of several daringly innovative and brilliantly successful administrative and economic reforms. Curiously, he was illiterate—as was the great Mughal emperor Akbar—but that proved to be an advantage for him, as he could innovate freely, without being burdened by conventional wisdom.

‘He was a man of no learning and he never associated with men of learning. He could not read or write a letter,’ scorns Barani. ‘But when he became king, he came to the conclusion that polity and government are one thing, and the rules and decrees of religion are another. Royal commands belong to the king, legal decrees rest upon the judgment of kazis and muftis. In accordance with this opinion, whatever affair of the state came before him, he only looked to the public good, without considering whether his mode of dealing with it was lawful or unlawful. He never asked for legal opinions on political matters, and very few learned men visited him.’

Barani’s comment that Ala-ud-din ‘only looked to the public good’ was meant as a criticism, but to the modern reader it would seem to be a high compliment. The sultan ruled his vast empire with firmness and energy, even with wisdom, and on the whole his rule was beneficial to the people, and under him they lived in greater security and comfort than under any other king of the Delhi Sultanate.

Ala-ud-din was undeniably one of the greatest rulers in Indian history. Unfortunately, in contrast to his splendid public achievements, he had to endure much misery in his private life. He had married his cousin, Jalal-ud-din’s daughter, but she turned out to be a veritable shrew, as was her mother, and the two of them together made his domestic life utterly wretched. ‘The wife of Ala-ud-din tormented him,’ states Ibn Battuta, a fourteenth century Moorish traveller in India. The sultan was a maniac for control, but he could not control his wife. Though he had other wives, domestic disharmony would have been galling to him, especially as he was obsessed with being in control of everything.

The sultan compensated the miseries of his private life with outstanding achievements in his public life. ‘One success followed another,’ reports Barani. ‘Despatches of victory came in from all sides; every year he had two or three sons born; affairs of the state went on according to his wish and to his satisfaction; his treasury was overflowing, boxes and caskets of jewels and pearls were daily displayed before his eyes; he had numerous elephants in his stables and 70,000 horses in the city and environs; two or three regions were subject to his sway; and he had no apprehension of enemies to his kingdom or of any rival to his throne.’

Ala-ud-din had several major military achievements to his credit. But he was not rapacious in his conquests, and was usually generous and honourable
in his treatment of the rajas he subjugated, and he often reinstated them on their thrones as subordinate rulers. He was no doubt a despot, as the rulers of the age invariably were, but he was not a whimsical despot. All his policies were formulated, and actions taken, only after very careful consideration, not on impulse. He, as even Barani admits, usually ‘consulted and debated with wise men by night and by day as to the best means’ for achieving his goals. He was even amenable to criticism, and often rewarded those who boldly gave him sensible though unpalatable advice. And, most unusual and laudable of all, he had a genuine concern for the welfare of the common people. Also, contrary to what Barani says, Ala-ud-din enjoyed the company of scholars and creative people, and was a patron of Amir Khusrav and Amir Hasan, renowned poets.

ALA-UD-DIN WAS INVARIABLY successful in all his ventures, and his successes, if we are to believe Barani, fantastically inflated his ambition. ‘His prosperity intoxicated him,’ states Barani. ‘Vast desires and great aims beyond him, or a hundred thousand like him, laid their seeds in his brain, and he entertained fancies which had never occurred to any king before him. In his exaltation, ignorance, and folly, he quite lost his head, forming the most impossible schemes and nourishing the most extravagant desires.’

Some of Ala-ud-din’s schemes, as reported by Barani, were certainly megalomaniacal. ‘If I am inclined, I can … establish a new religion and creed; and my sword, and the swords of my friends, will bring all men to adopt it,’ he once told his nobles. He also dreamed of world conquest. ‘I have wealth and elephants and forces beyond calculation. My wish is to place Delhi in charge of a vicegerent, and then I myself will go out into the world, like Alexander, in pursuit of conquest, and subdue the whole habitable world,’ he vaunted. ‘Every region that I subdue I will entrust to one of my trusty nobles, and then proceed in quest of another. Who is there that will stand against me?’ He even assumed the title Sikandar Sani (Second Alexander), and had the title stamped on his coins and inserted in the
khutba
read at Friday prayers. ‘His companions, although they saw his … folly and arrogance, were afraid of his violent temper, and applauded him,’ comments Barani.

It was Barani’s uncle Ala-ul Mulk, the kotwal of Delhi and one of the close associates of Ala-ud-din from the time before his accession, who finally opened the sultan’s eyes to the absurdity of his chimeric schemes. This noble used to attend the royal court only on the new moon days because of his ‘extreme corpulence,’ but one day when he attended the court, the sultan asked his opinion about his grand projects. And the kotwal made bold to submit: ‘Religion and law and creeds should never be made the subjects of discussion by Your Majesty, for these are the concerns of prophets, not the business of kings. Religion and law spring from heavenly revelation; they are
never established by the plans and designs of man … The prophetic office has never appertained to kings, and never will … though some prophets have discharged the function of royalty. My advice is that Your Majesty should never talk about these matters.’ The sultan, according to Barani, ‘listened, and hung down his head in thought … After a while he said, “Henceforth no one shall ever hear me speak such words.”’

But what about his plan for world conquest, Ala-ud-din then asked. ‘The second design is that of a great monarch, for it is a rule among kings to seek to bring the whole world under their sway,’ the kotwal admitted, but cautioned that what was possible for Alexander might not be possible for any king anymore. ‘These are not the days of Alexander,’ the kotwal cautioned. ‘But what is the use of my wealth, and elephants and horses, if I remain content with Delhi, and undertake no new conquests?’ the sultan persisted. ‘What will then be said of my reign?’ The kotwal then advised the sultan that before planning world conquest he should first effectively defend his kingdom against persistent Mongol incursions, and then conquer the vast unconquered regions of the Indian subcontinent. But even these practicable goals, the kotwal warned, would be difficult to achieve ‘unless Your Majesty gives up drinking excessively, and keeps aloof from convivial parties and feasts.’ Ala-ud-din was pleased with this frank and sensible counsel, and he honoured the kotwal with a robe of honour and various other valuable gifts.