The Age of Wrath: A History of the Delhi Sultanate (37 page)

VIJAYANAGAR IS OFTEN portrayed as the champion of the revival of Hindu political power, religion and culture, and as an inveterate antagonist of Muslim kingdoms. But this is not borne out by facts. Though Vijayanagar was the most powerful Hindu kingdom that existed in the entire Indian subcontinent during the nearly half a millennium period from the conquest of India by Turks at the close of the twelfth century to the establishment of the Maratha state by Shivaji in the mid-seventeenth century, and though its rajas were all devout Hindus, and several of them were keen and knowledgeable patrons of Hindu religion and culture, the primary motive of the rajas was to gain and expand their political power, and not to resuscitate Hindu religion and culture. In fact, Harihara and Bukka, the founders of the Vijayanagar kingdom, had at the
outset of their political career embraced Islam, because it suited them then, but later reverted to Hinduism, because it suited them then.

Being a Hindu kingdom was incidental to the political history of Vijayanagar. It is significant that the initial territorial expansion of Vijayanagar was not into any Muslim kingdom, but into the Hindu kingdom of Hoysalas, and that too when Hoysalas were engaged in a conflict with the Muslim kingdom of Madurai. Indeed, the expansion of Vijayanagar in its entire history was mostly into Hindu kingdoms, and not into Muslim kingdoms. And throughout its history Vijayanagar was as much engaged in battles with Hindu kingdoms as with Muslim kingdoms. Nor did Vijayanagar kings have any hesitation to ally with sultans against Hindu kings. But then, nor did sultans have any hesitation to ally with Hindu kings against Muslim rulers. The wars of these kings hardly ever had anything to do with religion, but were fought primarily to defend or conquer territory. Though a religious colouration was often given to these campaigns, this was done primarily to gain military advantage by igniting the martial fervour of their soldiers.

In the case of both Bahmani and Vijayanagar, religion subserved politics. Vijayanagar was not an anti-Muslim state. It in fact had a large number of Muslim officers and soldiers in its army, that too in the critically important divisions of cavalrymen, archers, cannoneers and musketeers. Devaraya II in particular took care to show various special favours to his Muslim soldiers; he built a mosque for them, and even placed a copy of Koran on a desk in front of his throne. As for the Deccan sultanates, they all had a large number of Hindu contingents in their army, and their rulers sometimes entrusted the defence of key forts to Hindu officers, as Nizam Shah of Ahmadnagar is recorded to have done.

The Vijayanagar rajas were generally quite liberal in their religious attitudes. ‘The king allows such freedom that every man may come and go and live according to his own creed without suffering any annoyance … whether he is a Christian, Jew, Moor or Heathen,’ notes Duarte Barbosa, a Portuguese chronicler in India in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. ‘Great equity and justice is shown to all, not only by the ruler but by the people to one another.’ There were several instances of acts of liberalism by sultans also. Thus when Sultan Ali Adil Shah of Bijapur heard of a tragedy in the family of King Ramaraya of Vijayanagar—the death of a son of Ramaraya—he personally went to Vijayanagar to console him. And Ramaraya in turn received the sultan with utmost courtesy; Ramaraya’s wife even nominally adopted the young sultan as her son. But on the whole the rajas, being polytheists, were far more tolerant in religious matters than the sultans, who were monotheists.

This liberality and religious tolerance of the rajas however generally applied only in their treatment of their own subjects. In the enemy territory they often
acted as vandals, destroying mosques or using them as stables, and enslaving or slaughtering Muslims, and violating their women. This was the common practice of all invading armies during medieval times. In fact, the excesses of Hindu armies in this were not usually as excessive as those of Muslim armies.

On the whole the Vijayanagar rajas provided as good a government as was possible in that age and place. They cleared forests and brought new lands under cultivation, built dams and tanks and irrigation canals. Trade was encouraged. They also systematised revenue administration, rationalised the tax system and abolished vexatious minor taxes. All this contributed to the prosperity and contentment of the people—as well as, of course, to the power of the raja. ‘In power, wealth, and extent of the country’ Vijayanagar was much superior to the Bahmani Sultanate, concedes Ferishta. Exclaims Razzak: ‘The city of Vijayanagar 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.’ Vijayanagar, according to Paes, was ‘the best provided city in the world.’

There was however a dark side to this effulgent picture. The kingdom was ever riven by internal dissensions and conflicts, and was engaged in incessant wars with other kingdoms. Its political history, like the history of most early medieval Indian kingdoms, is a sordid story, though it also had a few periods of impressive material prosperity and cultural efflorescence.

The history of early medieval India was like a roller-coaster ride—there were spectacular highs and lows in it, but hardly any progress. This was true of nearly all the kingdoms of the age, those of rajas as well as of sultans. It is on the whole a sordid tale of treachery, rebellions, usurpations, murders, fiendish punishments, and barbaric mass slaughter.

The dominant Indian kingdom of the age was the Delhi Sultanate. This was essentially an alien military dictatorship—it was established by conquest, and was preserved by ceaseless military campaigns throughout its over three-century-long history. Except in a few rare cases, mostly in the peninsula, the Turco-Afghans, unlike the Mughals who succeeded them as the dominant rulers of India, did not sink their roots into the Indian soil, but remained aliens throughout their history. Though theirs was not a foreign rule in the sense that their home base was outside India, theirs was essentially a rule by foreigners.

The Turco-Afghans were a miniscule community in India, ever struggling for survival in the vast and churning sea of native Indians and their subjugated but not pacified rajas. That vulnerability put the sultans in a state of perpetual insecurity, which in turn disposed them, for self-preservation, to be brutal oppressors of the natives.

The survival anxiety of the sultans was further intensified by the fact that the Turco-Afghans even among themselves lacked unity, and were riven into various factions. The Delhi Sultanate was ever seething with conspiracies and rebellions. The law that prevailed in it all through its history was the law of the jungle. Its provincial governors often assumed postures of rivalry with their sultan, and they tended to rebel and establish independent kingdoms whenever the central authority in Delhi weakened. And when one uprising
was suppressed by the sultan, another uprising broke out elsewhere in the empire. And the rebel governors and chieftains chastised by the sultan often turned rebels again when the royal forces withdrew. Sometimes the officer sent to suppress a rebellion himself turned rebel. This went on and on.

In Delhi itself the sultan was ever under the threat of being overthrown or assassinated, and of having his throne usurped by one of his top nobles or close relatives, particularly by his brothers, as it did indeed happen on several occasions. Even the reign of the ruthlessly efficient Ala-ud-din Khalji was beset with rebellions; there were, as the fourteenth-century chronicler Barani notes, several successive insurrections at one stage during his reign; there was even an attempted assassination of the sultan by one of his nephews seeking to usurp the throne.

This roiling state of affairs went on all through the history of the Delhi Sultanate. There was hardly a year, perhaps even hardly a month, free of internal military clashes somewhere in the empire. Scarcely anyone had any enduring loyalty to anyone. Those who plotted to betray their sultan often had betrayers against them in their own group. And those who bowed before a sultan one day unhesitatingly bowed before his assassin the next day.

All this gave the Delhi Sultanate a disquieting appearance of transience. Yet, amazingly, the Sultanate endured for over three centuries. There were, however, as many as five dynasties in the history of the Delhi Sultanate—Slave, Khalji, Tughluq, Sayyid and Lodi—and within each of these dynasties too there were several internal upheavals and usurpations. The Delhi Sultanate had, in all, 33 sultans in its 320-year-long history, their reigns averaging less than ten years. In contrast, during the entire history of the Mughal Empire, which was of about the same length as the history of the Delhi Sultanate, there was only one ruling dynasty, and during the 181-year-long high period of its history, from the invasion of Babur to the death of Aurangzeb, it had just six emperors, and the average length of their reign was over thirty years, which was more than three times the length of the average reign of the Delhi sultans. There were hardly any enduring periods of internal peace during the history of the Sultanate, except perhaps for a while during the reigns of Ala-ud-din Khalji and Firuz Tughluq. Though there were some attempts to consolidate and systematise the administration of the empire by some sultans, these had no lasting results.

A CURIOUS ASPECT OF the history of the Delhi Sultanate was the opportunistic collaboration of rajas with sultans. The rajas, if they had acted in concert, could have probably obliterated the Sultanate. Fortunately for the Sultanate, there was no prospect of any such alliance among the rajas, as there was absolutely no national spirit in that age, no awareness of India as a distinct
nation, or of Indians as a distinct people. The rajas were solely concerned with preserving or augmenting their personal power and fortune. And to gain that objective they were often willing to collaborate with the sultans against their own compatriots.

The attitudes of the Muslim political class were also equally opportunistic. Just as there were many instances of rajas allying with sultans against fellow Hindu rulers, there were also many instances of sultans allying with rajas or using Hindu military contingents, against fellow Muslim rulers. Even Mahmud Ghazni, despite his reputation as a ruthless exterminator of Hindu kingdoms, had a large Hindu contingent in his army, and so had his son Masud. Masud in fact treated his Hindu officers in every way as equals to his Muslim officers, and employed them in the same high offices in which he employed his Muslim officers. Indeed, he valued their services so highly that he sternly warned his Muslim officers against offending the religious sensibilities of their fellow Hindu officers in any way.

Similarly, a Muslim governor of Gujarat under the Delhi Sultanate at one time ‘encouraged the Hindu religion … and promoted … the worship of idols,’ in order to gain the support of Hindus for his planned rebellion against the Delhi sultan, states Ferishta, a late sixteenth century Mughal chronicler. And, in a similar development in Hindu polity, king Devaraya of Vijayanagar took care to place a copy Koran on a desk in front of his throne, so that his Muslim officers could perform obeisance before him, without violating their religious injunctions.

It was all a power game. And in that game religion invariably subserved the political and military goals of kings. So sultans often collaborated with rajas in their battles, even in their battles against Muslim kingdoms; conversely, rajas often collaborated with sultans in their battles, even in their battles against Hindu kingdoms. For nobles and common people too religion usually subserved their temporal interests. And just as Hindu soldiers and officers freely served under sultans, so also Muslim soldiers and officers freely served under rajas.

And there is at least one instance of a Hindu being the ruler of a Muslim kingdom. This was Ganesa, a zamindar in Bengal in the early fifteenth century, who, according to Ferishta, ‘attained great power and predominance during Shihab-ud-din’s reign, and became the de-facto master of the treasury and kingdom.’ And on the death (or assassination) of the sultan, Ganesa usurped the royal power and ruled Bengal for about seven years, though he probably did not physically occupy the throne. But on Ganesa’s death, his son, who had become a Muslim, ascended the throne and ruled the state for sixteen years; and he, though outwardly a Muslim, appointed Brahmins as his ministers, and even had a Brahmin as his court priest.

Elsewhere in India too the relationship between the Hindu and Muslim ruling classes was quite fluid. Hindu chieftains and zamindars in Muslim kingdoms generally held virtually independent sway over extensive territories, and they were not usually interfered with by the sultans as long as they regularly paid to the sultans the tributes and taxes due to them. This was not, however, a relationship of mutual trust and compliance, for payments from the local chieftains often had to be exacted from them by force by the sultans, and payments were usually withheld by the chieftains whenever the power of the overlord weakened. But this was the normal conduct of local chieftains everywhere in India, irrespective of whether the king was a Hindu or a Muslim.

MEDIEVAL ISLAMIC SOCIETY was basically egalitarian. It had no caste-like divisions, so any person of any social or racial background could aspire to any position in it, including that of the sultan. In principle no one could ascend the throne by birthright, but could do so only by virtue of his merit or power, and on being acknowledged as sultan by the leaders of the Muslim community.

This political fluidity was the main reason for the many violent succession conflicts in the history of the Delhi Sultanate. Indeed, such conflicts were considered as the legitimate means for proving the capabilities of the contenders. And proving one’s merit for the throne often meant exterminating one’s rivals. Peaceful succession to the throne was rare in the Sultanate—or, for that matter, in Hindu kingdoms, in Vijayanagar, for instance. Though there were a few instances of the courtiers choosing the sultan by consensus from among the rival contenders, normally they had no choice but to acknowledge as sultan the man who gained the throne, by inheritance or by force. The courtiers then affirmed their allegiance to the new sultan by taking a formal oath of fealty to him.

Initially, till the reign of Balban, there was no great status difference between the sultan and his nobles; the sultan was then a
primus inter pares
, a first among equals, more a leader than a ruler. Later however the sultans generally claimed that the occupation of the throne endowed them with
farr
, divine effulgence, which distinguished them from all other people. Balban further claimed that he was ruling as the vicegerent of god on earth, thereby implying that the sultan had the divine right or sanction to be the ruler, and that to disobey him would be to disobey god. But this quasi-divine attribute of the sultan, in Balban’s view, was as much a responsibility as a privilege, and he maintained that one gains the effulgence of the sultan not by just sitting on the throne, but by the manner in which he rules, serving the interests of the people and ensuring their welfare. In his view only those rulers in whose kingdom there was not a single naked or hungry man deserved to be called a sultan.

Ala-ud-din Khalji also claimed absolute royal power, but he based that claim on realpolitik, not on any theological principle. As he once candidly told a qazi, he did not know, and did not care for, theological prescriptions, but did what was essential ‘for the good of the state and the benefit of the people.’ Ala-ud-din in fact, despite his dictatorial nature, was one of the few Delhi sultans who showed a genuine concern for the welfare of his subjects, and did what he could for the betterment of the conditions of their life.

Ala-ud-din was a political realist. He held that whatever be the Islamic theory of monarchy, and whatever be the pretence of sultans, in reality the basis of royal authority was the sultan’s military might, his ability to coerce others to submit to his will. Though there were in Islam various socio-religious prescriptions about the scope of the sultan’s power, and about what he should and should not do, most sultans in practice treated their kingdom as their private possession, which they could rule without any constraints whatever. The powers that an individual sultan exercised were limited only by what he was capable of exercising. In theory, the primary duty of the sultan was to protect his subjects and to provide for their welfare, but in practice his primary concern—often his sole concern—was to preserve and expand his power. According to Barani, haughtiness and egomania characterised the conduct of most sultans.

IN THEORY, SULTANS everywhere in the Muslim world were the proconsuls of the Caliph, who was the head of all Muslims throughout the world, in temporal as well as in spiritual matters. The practice in the Muslim world indeed matched this principle in the early period of Muslim history, when Muslim political power was largely confined to Arabia and its adjacent lands, and there was only one Caliph. Later however, as the Muslim empire expanded into the lands of several other races and cultures, and the religion itself split into different sects and factions, there also came to be several Caliphs, and their status declined to that of mere figureheads. Still, Muslim kings everywhere generally continued to acknowledge, at least nominally, the Caliph as their overlord, and they continued to receive honours from him with a show of deep respect. It was useful to do so, for it legitimised their rule and validated their policies and actions, particularly in the eyes of orthodox Muslims. The sultans therefore usually included the Caliph’s name in the khutba recited in their kingdoms, and had his name inscribed on the coins they issued. Several Delhi sultans in fact expressly sought investiture by the Caliph, and some, notably Muhammad Tughluq, were ostentatiously demonstrative in displaying their subservience to him, though in reality they ruled as totally independent autocrats.

Rajas had no such pretence of grand, transnational affiliations. But in other respects Hindu kingdoms were also marked by the dichotomy between the
professions and the practices of their rulers. The political ambiance of Hindu kingdoms therefore was not very different from that of Muslim kingdoms, in broad terms though not in detail. The primary concern of rajas, as of sultans, was for the preservation and expansion of their power, rather than for the welfare of their subjects, as they generally professed. As a medieval Indian saying had it,

What matters it to us

whether Rama reigns

or Ravana reigns?

That was the reality. But kings, particularly rajas, generally professed commendably high ideals, which are fascinating in themselves, though they had little connection with political reality. Thus in a story told by Muhammad Ulfi, a fourteenth century chronicler, a Hindu raja asserts: ‘It is the paramount duty of all those in whose hands authority and power are placed, to walk in the path of justice and benevolence, in order that those who are weak should be strengthened and protected by the law, and that those who are wealthy should enjoy their riches in peace and security.’