These harsh condemnations of Ibrahim by the nobles probably have a good amount of exaggeration in them, and were tainted by their resentment of the disciplinary measures that the sultan imposed on them. Ibrahim was indeed a medieval tyrant, but he was not very much worse so than most other Delhi sultans. But he clearly did not trust his nobles, and suspected, rightly, malice in them towards him, and he sought to keep them on a tight leash.
Ibrahim wanted total subservience from his nobles, and, to achieve that goal he sought to create a suitable psychological distance between himself and them. This led to a further tightening of the formal court etiquette introduced by Sikandar. According to Ferishta, Ibrahim declared that ‘kings should have no relations or clansmen, but all should be considered as subjects and servants of the state. The Afghan chiefs, who had hitherto been allowed to sit in the [king’s] presence, were now constrained to stand in front of the throne, with their hands crossed on the breast.’
ALL THIS CREATED considerable resentment among the nobles, whose support was the very base on which the royal throne rested. The situation became worse after Ibrahim’s conquest of Gwalior, a Rajput kingdom that had long defied his predecessors. ‘When the sultan had conquered Gwalior … he waxed very proud, so that he began to maltreat and punish the nobles of his father,’ writes Yadgar. ‘[He] has put 23 of them … to death without any cause … Some he suspended from walls, and caused others to be burnt alive.’ Once he had a whole group of troublesome nobles exterminated by blowing up with gunpowder the building where they had assembled.
‘The sultan has lost his sense; he cannot distinguish between those who serve him well and those who serve him ill,’ commented a grandee. His capricious tyranny made many nobles writhe in anxiety, and it ignited several rebellions. But Ibrahim was also fortunate in having several dedicated nobles in his service, who would not under any circumstance betray him, not necessarily out of loyalty to his person, but out of loyalty to his dynasty. Thus when Azam Humayun, a top noble, was warned that Ibrahim might harm him, and that he should save himself by rebelling, he refused, even though he had then a cavalry force of 30,000 under his command. ‘I cannot act thus,’ he said. ‘I cannot turn aside and blacken my face, let what may happen.’ Predictably, he was presently imprisoned by Ibrahim, and later slain.
Ibrahim had several honourable grandees like Azam in his service, so he had no difficulty in crushing the rebel nobles. The real threat to his throne came from outside India, from Babur, the Mughal ruler of Kabul. But what directly led to the invasion of Babur was the discontent of Ibrahim’s nobles, particularly of Daulat Khan Lodi, the long time governor of Punjab. His son, Dilwar Khan, who was in Delhi, had an inkling of the sultan’s ill will towards his father, so he secretly fled from Delhi to Punjab to warn his father. The warning threw Daulat Khan ‘into deep meditation,’ writes Yadgar. ‘He reflected that if he rebelled he would be accused of ingratitude, and that if he fell into the clutches of the sultan’s wrath, he would not escape alive.’ He also feared that he might not able to prevail over Ibrahim in a military confrontation. So he finally decided to send his son to Kabul to invite Babur to invade India and overthrow Ibrahim. Around this time Alam Khan, a disaffected uncle of Ibrahim, also made a similar appeal to Babur.
This was an opportune development for Babur, for he was at this time being menaced by Uzbegs on the west, and was thinking of India as a possible refuge. So in 1524 he invaded Punjab, and, in alliance with Daulat Khan, defeated the army sent against him by Ibrahim. But instead of handing over the province to the Khan, as the latter had expected, Babur annexed the province to his kingdom and appointed his own officers there. This resulted in the breakup of the alliance, so Babur returned to Kabul to prepare a fresh invasion. During his previous campaign his sole objective was to acquire Punjab as a safe retreat from the menace of the Uzbegs, but he had a much grander plan now, to conquer and rule over Hindustan.
In November 1525, Babur again set out from Kabul for India. He first consolidated his position in Punjab, and then sped—‘like a roaring lion’, as Yadgar puts it—south-eastward towards Delhi, and pitched his camp between Yamuna and the town of Panipat, some 80 kilometres north of Delhi.
Ibrahim Lodi was close by, to the south of Panipat, in a good blocking position to prevent the Mughals from advancing further into India. There was some disquiet in the Sultanate army at this time because some astrologers had predicted that Ibrahim would be defeated in the battle. This apparently induced Ibrahim to hold a grand celebration in his army camp on the day before the battle, to counter the demoralising effect of the astrological predictions and to inspirit his army.
Ibrahim, according to Yadgar, ‘summoned all his nobles and soldiers and ordered them to dress themselves in the best clothes they had with them. He caused his embroidered tents and satin canopies to be erected, and made all the preparations for a fiesta. He threw amongst them all the gold, jewels, pearls and ashrafis which he possessed, and said, “O friends, tomorrow we shall do battle with the Mughal army. If I gain victory, I will endeavour to please you; if I do not, be at least content with these presents and my declared intentions.” The whole of that day was spent in feasting and rejoicing. On the morrow they made ready for war.’
THE BATTLE BETWEEN the rival forces was fought on 20 April 1526. It was a fiercely contested battle—‘so desperate a battle, indeed, had never been seen,’ comments Yadgar. Still, the battle lasted only just a few hours, from sunrise to noon. And Babur, though his army was much smaller than that of Ibrahim, defeated him decisively through the use of clever and innovative tactics.
As the trend of the battle became evident, an Afghan noble appealed to Ibrahim to leave the battlefield, saying, ‘If the king is saved, it will be easy to find another army, and again make war against the Mughals.’ But Ibrahim rejected the plea. ‘O Mahmud Khan, it is a disgrace for kings to flee from the field of battle,’ he said. ‘Look here, my nobles, my companions, my well-wishers and friends have partaken of the cup of martyrdom … My horse’s legs are dyed with blood up to its chest … It is better that I should be like my friends, [lying] in the dust and in blood.’
And that was how it would be. Ibrahim fell in the battle, the first and only sultan of Delhi to die in battle. He had been much vilified in life, but death entirely redeemed his honour. After the battle, Babur went to see Ibrahim lying dead in the battlefield. He ‘beheld that powerful sultan prostrate in the dust and weltering in blood, the royal crown fallen from his head, the state canopy also on the ground,’ reports Yadgar. Ibrahim’s valour in battle elicited the admiration of Babur, and he had the sultan’s body shrouded richly, and buried honourably at the very spot where he had fallen.
‘Sultan Ibrahim’s reign lasted eight years, eight months and thirteen days,’ states Ni’matullah. ‘He was buried in the western suburb of Panipat and his resting place is now frequented by singers and minstrels. Pilgrims make offerings every Friday night to the departed spirit of the sultan and offer charity to the poor.’
Soon after the battle Babur sent his son Humayun to occupy and secure Agra, the Lodi capital. Babur followed him there presently, but did not immediately enter the city. He pitched his camp in the maidan outside Agra and remained there for a week, presumably waiting for an auspicious time to enter the city.
On 10 May 1526, he ceremoniously entered Agra and took up his residence in the royal palace there, as the emperor of Hindustan. And with that ended the over three centuries long history of the Delhi Sultanate.1
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The Snake Pit
The Delhi Sultanate had attained its greatest territorial extent under Muhammad Tughluq, when it stretched over virtually the entire Indian subcontinent. But it was fancy rather than earnest purpose that motivated Muhammad in his conquests, and the final consequence of the venture, as in nearly everything else he did, was the opposite of what he desired, for the mammoth expansion of its territory made the empire ungovernable, and eventually, towards the end of his reign,
led to the beginning of its disintegration. Though this process was interrupted during the reign of Firuz Tughluq—who sensibly focussed his attention on governing efficiently what remained of the empire, rather than on recovering the lost provinces—the atrophying of the empire accelerated after his death, so that by the end of the Tughluq dynasty, the Sultanate had shrunk in size to a tiny state, covering just the city of Delhi and its suburbs. There was some revival of the fortunes of the Sultanate under the Sayyid and Lodi dynasties, but the fate of the kingdom was finally sealed by the invasion of Babur in 1526.
The history of India during almost the entire period of the Delhi Sultanate was one of incessant wars, rebellions and internecine conflicts. The number of these rebellions and conflicts multiplied several times during the final phase of the Delhi Sultanate, when the subcontinent fragmented into numerous kingdoms, which constantly engaged each other in war.
The story of these warring splinter kingdoms, many of them quite small and transient, is dreary. In most cases what we know of their history is a bare list of their kings, the rebellions they faced, and the battles they fought. And even the veracity of these incidents is in many cases uncertain, as their accounts vary from chronicler to chronicler, depending on their partisan affiliation. No worthwhile story can be told of them. The process of the fragmentation of the Sultanate, and the perpetual clashes between these fragments that went on during this period, are, as historical trends, very significant, but the details of the history of the numerous individual kingdoms are of little significance. The pattern of events is important, but not the details of individual events.
THE MOST NOTABLE of the numerous successor kingdoms of the Delhi Sultanate were Sind, Multan, Rajput principalities, Gujarat, Malwa, Khandesh, Jaunpur, Kashmir, Bengal, Orissa, Telingana, Bahmani, and Vijayanagar. Some of the kings of these states were legendary characters, of varied and rich talents, and they deserve to be noticed. One of these notable kings was Rana Kumbha, the mid-fifteenth century ruler of the Rajput kingdom of Mewar. He was a celebrated playwright, an eminent literary critic who wrote an acclaimed commentary on Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda, and was a knowledgeable patron of musicians and architects. Unfortunately, he later went insane and was assassinated by his son.
Equally notable was Sultan Mahmud Begarha of Gujarat, though for entirely different reasons. A late contemporary of Rana Kumbha, Begarha’s very appearance was bizarre. He was a gigantic man, with a beard that reached down to his waist, and a moustache that was so long that it had to be pulled up over both sides of his face and tied into a coiffure. Also, he had a gargantuan appetite, to match his size. And, most curious of all, he took a swig of poison with his meals, which turned his breath, sweat, spittle, semen, urine and faeces deadly poisonous. Not surprisingly, Begarha’s sexual appetite matched his size, and he is said to have kept several thousand women in his harem—he needed so many of them, for every woman he slept with died soon after the coitus, poisoned by his deadly ejaculation.1
Among the provinces of the Delhi Sultanate, the one that occupied the most unique position was Bengal, which pulsed to a rhythm somewhat different from that of the other regions of the empire. Bengal had always enjoyed a fair amount of autonomy, because of its ethnic and cultural distinctiveness, and its great distance from Delhi. And it invariably broke free from the Sultanate at the first sign of political debility in Delhi. The region also went through some very peculiar political convulsions during the medieval period. And it has the distinction of being the only medieval Muslim state ever to be ruled by a Hindu. According to Ferishta, the de facto ruler of Bengal in the early fifteenth century was a Hindu zamindar named Ganesa.
Ganesa exercised regal powers for about seven years, but apparently without assuming the royal title. But his son, who became a Muslim, did ascend the throne, and the dynasty remained in power for nearly a quarter century, but was eventually ousted by a member of the resurgent old dynasty. After this, in the late fifteenth century, Bengal was ruled by Ethiopians for a few years, and then by an Arab.
As in Bengal, the politics of Kashmir too did not quite conform to the Indo-Gangetic Plain pattern. Buddhism had been the dominant religion of Kashmir for many centuries, but it virtually disappeared from there in early medieval times. The state however came under a Buddhist king briefly in the early fourteenth century, when Rinchana, an invader from western Tibet, established his rule there. Rinchana was however a Buddhist only nominally, and was quite savage in his conduct—once, while suppressing a rebellion, he not only impaled the rebels but ‘ripped open with sword the wombs of the wives of his enemies’ and tore out the foetuses in them. But at the other end of the political spectrum, Kashmir in the fifteenth century had the distinction of having had one of the most liberal and tolerant Muslim rulers of medieval India, Zaynul Abidin, who rebuilt some of the Hindu temples demolished by his predecessor, prohibited cow slaughter, permitted sati, allowed the Hindus who had been forcibly converted to Islam to revert to their ancestral faith, and encouraged Brahmins to occupy high official positions.
OF ALL THE many independent kingdoms that emerged out of the fragmented Delhi Sultanate, the most important were two peninsular kingdoms, Bahmani and Vijayanagar, both founded at around the same time: Vijayanagar in 1336 and Bahmani a decade later, in 1347. The histories of these two kingdoms, like that of most other Indian kingdoms of this age, are marked by periodic internal turmoils, internecine conflicts, and endless wars with their neighbours. But unlike the histories of most other kingdoms of the age, which are bare lists of events, there is a good amount of detailed information about these two states and their rulers, in the accounts of Muslim chroniclers, as well as of foreign travellers who visited the region at this time, so their stories can be told in some detail.
Of these two kingdoms, the Bahmani Sultanate endured as a unified state for only about a century and a half, till 1490, and then gradually broke up into five independent kingdoms. However, titular Bahmani sultans continued to occupy their throne till 1527, so that the Sultanate may be said to have endured nominally for 180 years. Vijayanagar endured longer as a unified state, for 229 years, till 1565, when the armies of a league of Deccani sultans in a joint campaign routed the Vijayanagar army in a decisive battle and reduced the kingdom to the status of a minor state. Eventually, even this truncated kingdom fragmented into a number of independent principalities. However, the last reigning dynasty of Vijayanagar survived till the mid-seventeenth century, ruling over Chandragiri, a small realm in South India, so the history of Vijayanagar may be said to have lasted in all for 300-odd years. In the end nearly all the peninsular kingdoms, of rajas as well as of sultans, were obliterated during the tidal sweep of the Mughal empire into the peninsula in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The primary activity of the Bahmani and Vijayanagar kings, as well as of the kings of their successor states, was to wage war against each other, and this went on all through their history. These were singularly savage wars, involving the slaughter of very many thousands of people, soldiers as well as civilians. According to Ferishta, during the reign of the mid-fourteenth century Bahmani sultan Muhammad Shah ‘nearly 500,000 unbelievers fell by the swords of the warriors of Islam, by which the population of the Carnatic was so reduced that it did not recover for several ages.’
Curiously, these wars were fought not to exterminate the enemy, but to gather plunder and to collect tribute—and, most importantly, to vaingloriously demonstrate the military prowess of kings. It was a game, but a savage game. Some districts of the enemy territory were sometimes annexed by the victor, but there was hardly ever any annexation of the whole enemy kingdom. For instance, the only major territory that changed hands back and forth, again and again, during the numerous wars between Vijayanagar and Bahmani kingdoms was the fertile and mineral rich Raichur Doab between Krishna and Tungabhadra rivers. And, although the warring peninsular kings usually belonged to rival religions, Hinduism and Islam, this divergence was hardly ever a decisive facto
r in their relationships, though a religious colouration was sometimes given to their wars, to rouse the zeal of the soldiers, and to justify the brutal reprisals that the adversaries inflicted on each other. Indeed, Hindu and Muslim rulers at times allied with each other to wage wars against the states ruled by kings of their own religion.
THE BAHMANI KINGDOM had in all eighteen sultans in its 180-year long history, though its last five sultans were mere figureheads. The kingdom was founded during the political turmoil of the closing years of the reign of Muhammad Tughluq, when several of his provincial chieftains rebelled against him and founded independent kingdoms. One such chieftain was Hasan Gangu, who seized control of Daulatabad and set himself up as an independent ruler there. On his investiture he took the title Ab’ul Muzaffar Ala-ud-din Bahman Shah, so the kingdom he founded came to be known as the Bahmani Sultanate.
There is considerable uncertainty about Hasan’s background. According to a fascinating but improbable story told by Ferishta, Hasan was originally a farm labourer, who one day, while ploughing his master’s field on the outskirts of Delhi, dug up a copper pot full of gold coins, and he dutifully took it to the landlord, a Brahmin named Gangu. And Gangu, awestruck by Hasan’s probity, took him to the sultan, who then rewarded him by appointing him a captain in his army. The Brahmin then predicted, on the basis of the astrological calculations he made, that Hasan would one day become a king. And this destiny Hasan eventually fulfilled.
Other medieval sources tell a less romantic but more vaunting story, and trace Hasan’s ancestry to the ancient Persian king Bahman. Ferishta however dismisses this story as a fabrication by the sycophantic courtiers of the sultan. ‘I believe his origin was too obscure to be traced,’ Ferishta states, and goes on to assert that Hasan took the appellation Bahman as a ‘compliment to his former master … the Brahmin, a word often pronounced as Bahman. The king himself was by birth an Afghan.’
The Age of Wrath: A History of the Delhi Sultanate Page 30