The Age of Wrath: A History of the Delhi Sultanate (46 page)

The village scene in medieval India varied considerably from region to region, India being a vast and diverse country. In most parts of India villagers led an isolated, self-sufficient life in medieval times, needing hardly anything from outside the village to meet their meagre requirements. It was only the temple fairs in the neighbouring towns once a year or so that brought villagers out of their seclusion. But there were also regions in India where villages were contiguous, and villagers had a broad social life. ‘The country is but small, yet it is so full of people, that it may well be called one town,’ says Barbosa about Kerala.

TRAVEL FACILITIES, LIKE everything else in medieval India, varied considerably from region to region. The best roads in India at this time were in the Indo-Gangetic Plain, the east-west and the north-south arterial roads passing thorough Delhi. It was a laudable traditional practice of kings and chieftains in premedieval India to plant shade trees and fruit trees along roads, and this practice was continued by medieval rulers. Thus Battuta found that the nearly 1000 kilometre long road between Delhi and Daulatabad was all along the way ‘bordered with trees, such as the willow and others, so the traveller might think himself in a garden.’ Similar was the observation of the anonymous author of
Mukhtasiru-t Tawarikh
some three centuries later: ‘On
all roads shady and fruit trees are planted on both sides. Wells and tanks are dug which contain fresh and sweet water in abundance. The passengers go along the roads under the shadow of the trees, amusing themselves, eating the fruits and drinking cold water, as if they are taking a walk along the beds of a garden.’ And in faraway Kerala, Battuta found that the roads there ‘run through orchards.’

Mukhtasiru-t Tawarikh
further states that ‘on all public roads and streets strong bridges are made over every river and rill, and embankments are also are raised.’ This clearly is an exaggeration. Bridges across rivers were rare in medieval India—rivers were usually crossed by boats, or waded across during the dry season. Paes found that in Vijayanagar people crossed rivers ‘by boats which are round like baskets; inside they are made of cane, and outside are covered with leather. They are able to carry fifteen or twenty persons. Even horses and oxen cross in them if necessary, but for the most part these animals swim across. Men row the boats with a sort of paddle, and the boats are always turning round, as they cannot go straight like others. In all the kingdom … there are no other boats but these.’

There was a fair amount of long-distance river traffic in medieval India, particularly down the Ganga-Yamuna river system. But road travel was easier and faster, and had greater facilities. Pillars with travel directions were erected on all important roads. ‘All along the road [from Delhi to central India] … there are pillars, on which is engraved the number of miles from each pillar to the next,’ reports Battuta. ‘Lofty minarets are made at the distance of each kos to indicate the road,’ states
Mukhtasiru-t Tawarikh
. There were even public transport facilities in some places. According to Afif, a courtier chronicler of Firuz Tughluq, there was in his time very heavy traffic between Delhi and Firuzabad, and ‘to accommodate this great traffic, there were public carriers who kept carriages, mules and horses, which were ready for hire at a settled rate every morning … Palanquin-bearers were also ready to convey passengers. The fare of a carriage was four silver jitals for each person; for a mule, six; for a horse, twelve; and for a palanquin, half a tanka. There were also plenty of porters ready for employment by anyone, and they earned a good livelihood.’

There were also rest houses along the main roads. ‘At every two
parasangs
inns are built of strong masonry for travellers to dwell in and take rest,’ states
Mukhtasiru-t Tawarikh
. ‘Every kind of food and drink, all sorts of medicines, and all kinds of necessary instruments and utensils can be obtained at each inn.’ This is also reported by Battuta: ‘At each of these stations the traveller finds all that he needs, as if his … journey lay through a market.’ According to the mid-fifteenth century Russian traveller Nikitin, ‘In the land of India it is the custom of foreign traders to stop at inns; there the food is cooked for the
guests by the landlady, who also makes the bed and sleeps with the stranger. Women that know you willingly concede their favours, for they like white men.’

Similar facilities were available even in the peripheral regions of India. ‘The road over the whole distance runs beneath the shade of trees, and at every half-mile there is a wooden shed with benches on which all travellers, whether Muslims or infidels, may sit,’ reports Battuta about his experience in Kerala. ‘At each shed there is a well for drinking water and an infidel in charge of it. If the traveller is an infidel he gives him water in vessels; if he is a Muslim he pours the water into his hands, continuing to do so until he signs to him to stop … At all the halting places on this road there are houses belonging to Muslims, at which Muslim travellers alight, and where they buy all that they need.’

In North India there were, in medieval times, several deep and elaborately constructed step-wells along the main roads, which had pavilions attached to them, providing resting places for travellers. ‘Kings and nobles of the country vie with one another in constructing them along the highroads where there is no water,’ notes Battuta.

THESE FACILITIES WERE however available only on just a few major roads. Travel in medieval India was usually quite hazardous, especially in the sparsely populated regions, because of the menace of highwaymen and the lack of proper roads there. Even the environs of major cities, including Delhi, were not always secure, as brigands openly rampaged through the land at the slightest sign of weakness in government. And trans-regional travellers often had to pass through dense forests, which were particularly dangerous places, as they were infested with bandits and wild tribes, apart from wild animals.

Travel security varied greatly from region to region in India.
Mukhtasiru-t Tawarikh
is clearly utopianising medieval India when it states that ‘merchants and tradesmen and all travellers, without any fear of thieves and robbers, take their goods and loads safe to distant destinations.’ Battuta also at times indulged in similar fantasies. ‘I have never seen a safer road than this,’ he writes about his experience in Kerala, ‘for they put to death anyone who steals a single nut, and if any fruit falls no one picks it up but the owner.’

Several regions of India in medieval times were entirely trackless, and sometimes even sultans lost their way there, as it once happened to Firuz Tughluq while returning to Delhi from Orissa. And nearly everywhere in India monkeys were a major nuisance to travellers, even to armies. ‘Several times when I encamped in these mountains great numbers of monkeys came into the camp from the jungles and woods, both night and day, and laid their claws upon whatever they could find to eat, and carried it off … At night they stole little articles and curiosities,’ writes Timur about his experience in India.
Because of all these diverse perils people usually travelled in large groups, and whenever possible they accompanied trade caravans, which had armed guards.

Indian summer was yet another hazard that travellers had to cope with. ‘The heat was so intense that my companions used to sit naked except for a cloth around the waist and another cloth soaked with water on their shoulders; this dried up in a very short time, so they had to keep wetting it constantly,’ writes Battuta about his experience in Sind. Summer was particularly brutal in 1505, the year in which a devastating earthquake struck Agra. That year, recounts Ni’matullah, ‘the heat of the air became so intense that almost all people fell grievously sick of fevers.’

As in everything else in medieval India, the mode of travel also varied from region to region. In peninsular India, according to Nikitin, people did not travel on horses, but used ‘oxen and buffaloes … for riding, conveying goods, and every other purpose.’ And in Kerala ‘no one travels on an animal … and only the sultan possesses horses,’ states Battuta. ‘The principal vehicle of the inhabitants is a palanquin carried on the shoulders of slaves or hired porters; those who do not travel on palanquins go on foot, be they who they may. Baggage and merchandise is transported by hired carriers, and a single merchant may have a hundred such or thereabouts carrying his goods.’

Because of these diverse modes of travel and transport, and the general difficulties of the roads, the pace of travel was very slow in medieval India. Thus, according to Battuta, it took forty days to cover the 1000 kilometres between Delhi and Daulatabad, even though the highway between these two cities was one of the best in India. Travel was considerably slower in the peninsula, because there were hardly any roads there. ‘The country of Ma’bar (the Tamil country), which is so distant from the city of Delhi that a man travelling with all expedition could reach it only after a journey of twelve months,’ states Amir Khusrav, medieval Indian poet-chronicler.

Over the millennia, from the Old Stone Age, or perhaps from an even earlier period, to well into late medieval times, many diverse races had debouched into India, as migrants or invaders, through the defiles in the Hindu Kush mountains on the north-west border of the subcontinent. These mountain passes were among the most active trans-continental migration routes of races in the premodern world. And nearly all the diverse people who entered India through these passes made India their homeland. The many different races in the subcontinent today are all migrants. None are natives.

The invasions of Turko-Afghans and Mughals into India in medieval times were the last of the major people movements into India, and they radically altered the socio-cultural profile of the country. Though India would later, in early modern times, come under the dominance of yet another foreign power, the British, that involved no notable alteration in the population profile of India, as there was hardly any migration of Englishmen into India. In contrast to this, both the Turko-Afghan and the Mughal invasions of India resulted in radical changes in the racial makeup of India, as those invasions led to large-scale migrations into India by Central Asian and the Middle Eastern Muslims, who saw India as a land of opportunity, and were drawn to it by the prospect of gaining wealth and power. Further, India was for many of them a safe haven into which to escape from the racial and political turmoil in their homeland.

The consequences of the invasion of India by Turko-Afghans were fundamentally different from those of all previous invaders—while all the people who previously entered India had eventually blended smoothly and indistinguishably into Indian society by adopting Indian religion, social customs, cultural values, and even local languages, this did not happen in the
case of Turko-Afghans, because in all these matters the culture of Indians was totally antithetical to that of Turks.

Unlike polytheistic Hinduism, which could absorb into it any number of new deities, beliefs and practices, and had a society divided into numerous hereditary, hierarchal and exclusive castes, each of which had its specific profession, Islam was a monotheistic religion which, though it had some sectarian divisions in it, was essentially a cohesive religion with only one god and one basic set of beliefs and practices. And its society was egalitarian, without any birth determined, caste-like social divisions in it, so anyone from any racial, social or family background could take up any vocation in it, aspire to occupy any office, and gain any social status.

These socio-religious differences led to a sharp divergence in the attitudes of Muslims and Hindus towards each other. The Hindu attitude towards Muslims was similar to the tolerant-intolerant attitude of Hindu castes towards each other. Hindus had no objection to Muslims keeping to their beliefs and practices, just as they had no objection to the different castes and sects of Hindus keeping to their particular beliefs and practices. But they would not tolerate the intermixing of the two communities, just as they would not tolerate the intermixing of different castes. Similarly, though Hindus normally had no objection to serve under a Muslim employer, they would avoid all social interaction with him. Typical of this was the experience of Battuta in Kerala, about which he writes: ‘It is the custom of the infidels in the Mulaybar lands that no Muslim may enter their houses or eat from their vessels.’ For Hindus, particularly for high caste Hindus, Muslims were untouchables. Muslims had no such apartheidal prejudices. They did treat Hindus as second class citizens, but this was not an irreversible birth-determined status division, as in Hindu society, for even Hindus of the lowest of the low outcastes were, on being converted into Islam, treated as equals to everyone else in that society, and the personal status of an individual depended solely on his abilities and achievements, not on his birth. So a person who was on the bottom rung of Hindu society could rise to the highest rung of Muslim society.

BECAUSE OF THIS antithetical character of Hinduism and Islam, there was very little socio-cultural interaction or mutual influence between the two communities, despite their several centuries long coexistence in India. In fact Muslims and Hindus mostly lived physically separated from each other—while most Muslims lived in towns (serving the government as soldiers and civil servants, or engaged in various occupations, as artisans, merchants, and so on) the vast majority of Hindus lived in villages (mostly as farmers and farm-labourers). And even in towns, where the two communities coexisted, they lived
in different wards of towns, as an extension of the traditional Hindu practice of different castes living in different parts of towns and villages.

However, despite the sharp socio-religious segregation between Hindus and Muslims, there was some amount of interaction between the two communities in towns, and they did have some influence on each other. But these influences were mostly superficial, and were confined to a few small groups. The most obvious instance of this was that the Hindu political elite in North India gradually took to the Turkish mode of dress and adopted some Turkish social practices, and the Turks in turn adopted certain practices of the Hindu aristocracy. And in religion, the mystic movements in both religions did exert some influence on each other.

On the whole, Muslim rule did not make any notable difference in the lives of the vast majority of Indians, and hardly anything changed in Hindu society because of Muslim influence. Nor did anything change in Muslim society consequent of its interaction with Hindu society, except that the Hindu converts to Islam carried some of their traditional practices with them into Islamic society. For the most part, the two communities remained sharply divided and incompatible. They coexisted, but did not interact.

There were some curious internal paradoxes in both Hindu and Muslim socio-religious systems. Islam as a religion was adamantine in character and was generally impervious to external influences, but Islamic society was open and fluid, into which people of any race or clan or social background could enter on becoming Muslims, and play any role according to their interest and ability, without being restricted to any birth-determined roles. The values and practices of Hindu religion and society were the exact reverse of this. Hinduism was a fluid, diversified and ever-changing religion, open to various external influences, but Hindu society was adamantine in character, which had place only for those who were born as Hindus, and in which a person born into a particular caste could not ever change his caste and social status, and was bound to the occupation of that caste, whatever be his interest and ability.

There were however some exceptions in these matters, in Hindu as well as Muslim society. Thus, even though Muslim society in theory was an open and egalitarian society, which had no social divisions based on race or clan or birth, in practice it had divisions based on these factors. On the other hand, Hindu society, despite its seeming rigidity and imperviousness, was in fact a porous society, and it had over the centuries absorbed numerous foreign people and non-Aryan local tribes and their cults into it. This however was not done by performing any rite, as in the case of the conversions of outsiders into Islam or Christianity, but through a process of osmosis, by which outsiders and their cults inconspicuously, and without any formal process, seeped into Hindu society over several centuries.

But this was a process of community transition, not of individuals. Normally it was impossible for any outsider individual to enter Hindu society, for Hinduism has no conversion rites to admit non-Hindus into its fold. To be a Hindu one has to be born a Hindu. But in this too, as in nearly everything else in the ever-rigid-ever-flexible Hindu society, there were exceptions, though rare, by which elaborate rites were performed to induct non-Hindu rajas, chieftains and other important persons into Hindu society at appropriate social levels. This process involved the fabrication, through the connivance of colluding priests, of a myth that the conversion seeker belonged to a family that had originally been a Hindu, but had lost its religion and caste because of its deviant practices, and that he could be therefore restored to his family’s original religion and caste through certain purification ceremonies.

ISLAM AND HINDUISM were totally antipodal in religion and society. Nevertheless the attitude of the Muslim rulers in India towards their Hindu subjects was in most cases accommodative rather than suppressive. It necessarily had to be so, for pragmatic reasons. From the purely religious point of view, the sultans had to do what they could to fetter or eradicate Hinduism, and thus promote Islam, but from the practical point of view they needed to patronise Hindus, for they could not possibly govern their Indian kingdoms without the services of Hindus, as they did not have the requisite administrative organisation or personnel, or the local knowledge, to do that. The sultans therefore treated Hindus as zimmis, protected non-Muslims, by which Hindus were allowed, though with some restrictions, to maintain their social customs and observe their religious practices; they were even allowed to perform rites which were abominable to orthodox Muslims, such as sati, and animal and human sacrifices.

In the early history of Islam, the zimmi privilege was accorded only to Jews and Christians, while the followers of other religions were required to become Muslims or be exterminated. But when Islam expanded beyond Arabia, its homeland, the zimmi privilege was, for various practical reasons, extended to the people of other religions as well, including Hindus. In India, the sheer vastness of the non-Muslim population made it in any case physically impossible to extirpate them. Furthermore, Hindus were the primary economically productive people of the land, particularly in agriculture, so to massacre them, or even to oppress them beyond endurance, would have been counterproductive for the sultans, for that would have been to uproot the very plants that nourished them.

Hindus were treated as second class citizens in Muslim states, but as citizens nevertheless. They had their own rights. The discriminatory treatment that Hindus received at the hands of Muslim rulers would not have troubled them
much, for most Indian communities were subject to worse discrimination in their own rigidly hierarchal caste society. For most Hindus, Muslims would have seemed like just another segment in their own labyrinthine society. Hindus and Muslims did live separately; but then so did the different Hindu castes. Even in the matter of jizya, not many Hindus would have felt it as a particularly discriminative tax, for Muslims also had to pay a community tax, zakat. Besides, jizya was usually imposed on individuals only in towns, while in villages it was imposed as a collective tax.

ON THE WHOLE the life of the vast majority of the common people under Muslim rule in India remained the same as what it was before the Muslim invasion. This was mainly because the impact of Muslim rule was largely confined to towns, while most Indians lived in villages where there were hardly any Muslims. Even in towns, where there was a fair amount of interaction between Hindus and Muslims, the treatment of Hindus by the sultans, even by the most bigoted of them, would not have been anywhere near as ruthless as described by Muslim chroniclers seeking to eulogise their kings. To most Indians, the sultans would not have seemed any more oppressive than their own rajas. Whether it was a raja or a sultan who ruled over them made little difference in the generally wretched life of the common people in India.

Muslim courtier chroniclers, most of whom were hyper-orthodox, generally tended to gloatingly exaggerate the severity of the persecution of Hindus by sultans, which they considered as a most praiseworthy act. Thus Barani, while lauding the slaughter of Hindus by Mahmud Ghazni, wished that the sultan had campaigned in India once more, and had ‘brought under his sword all the Brahmins of Hind who … are the cause of the continuance of the laws of infidelity and the strength of idolaters … [and had] cut off the heads of two hundred or three hundred thousand Hindu chiefs.’ Similarly, Barani exaggeratedly lauded Ala-ud-din for his oppression of Hindus, stating ‘that by the last decade of his reign the submission and obedience of the Hindus had become an established fact. Such a submission on the part of the Hindus has neither been seen before nor will be witnessed hereafter.’ Reality, though harsh, was not quite so harsh.

Curiously, while the Muslim intelligentsia was generally aggressive in its attitude towards Hinduism, the Hindu intelligentsia was entirely passive in its response to the establishment of the Muslim rule in India. There is hardly any mention of the Turkish conquest of India in the Sanskrit works of the early middle ages. This was perhaps because the preoccupation of the Hindu intelligentsia was with transcendental matters. The general attitude of fatalism among Indians—that whatever happens is fated to happen—also no doubt contributed to the apathetic attitude of Indians to the circumstances of their
life. And this was one of the major factors that enabled a small group of Turko-Afghans to rule over an infinitely larger number of Indians for several centuries without any major resistance.

The general attitude of Muslims, the masters, towards Hindus, the subjects, was of scorn. And there was, inevitably, a good amount of persecution of Hindus by the sultans, though it was nothing comparable to what it could have been, given the totally antithetical nature of the two socio-religious systems. Very many Hindu temples were demolished by the sultans, and their idols smashed or defiled. Ostentatious Hindu religious celebrations were forbidden in Muslim states. And there were several instances of the general massacre of Hindus by the sultans. Some of these acts were revoltingly savage, such as the mass slaughter of Hindu men, women and children by a mid-fourteenth century sultan of Madurai, which was excoriated even by Ibn Battuta, a fellow Muslim. ‘This,’ commented Battuta, ‘was a hideous thing such as I have never seen being indulged in by any king.’ But such acts of savagery were random, not systematic, and they seem to have been motivated more by the need to terrorise a conquered people into servility, than by religious fervour, though religious fervour was also undeniably present.