Slaves were of course bonded to their owners, so they had very little personal freedom. But talented and loyal slaves were usually rewarded by their masters by manumitting them. In some cases it was an advantage to be a slave, particularly to be the favourite slave of a sultan or a high official, for that opened up for the slave an avenue for rapid career advancement. A royal slave could even succeed his master on the throne, as indeed three slaves did in the Delhi Sultanate. The first dynasty of the Delhi Sultanate—which ruled the empire for 84 years, from 1206 to 1290—is usually described as the Slave Dynasty, for all the ten rulers of the dynasty were either manumitted slaves or descendants of slaves.
Slaves served in a wide variety of occupations in early medieval India, in administration, army and economy, as well as in households. Royal bodyguards were invariably slaves, Ethiopians slaves being particularly favoured for that service. But very few of the royal slaves were for personal attendance on the sultan; rather, they were mostly treated like any other government staff and assigned to various official duties. This was particularly so in the case of the slaves of Firuz Tughluq, who took special care to treat them well and to employ them in various productive occupations, and thus turn them into economic assets of the state. ‘In all cases, provision was made for their support in a liberal manner,’ states Afif about Firuz’s treatment of his slaves. Sultans generally assigned responsible work to most of their slaves, though some slaves were also employed as entertainers or as menial workers in the royal household. During the reign of Kaiqubad, the last slave sultan, who was a heedless voluptuary, slave boys and girls were, according to Barani, given special training in music, dance, coquetry, and the erotic arts, for those were the primary interests of the sultan.
Slavery declined in the late Sultanate period, and became quite insignificant during the Mughal rule. Babur does not mention slaves at all in his autobiography. However, slavery did exist in India during the Mughal period, as European travellers noted, but their numbers were insignificant, and nearly all of them were domestic slaves. There were no state slaves under the Mughals.
WOMEN GENERALLY SUFFERED far more discrimination than slaves in medieval India, in all sections of society, but more so in upper caste Hindu society, though there were some commendable exceptions to this. Their life was confined to their family. They had no social role whatever. In fact, in medieval Hindu society their position was much worse than what it was in ancient India, where there were hardly any lifestyle restrictions on women, and they ate and drank whatever their men ate and drank. Ramayana, for instance, relates that Sita, the ultimate Hindu ideal of wifely propriety, drank wine in the company of Rama, her husband. But later the scene changed altogether, and Smriti rules of medieval India severely circumscribed the life of Hindu women, and ordained that a wife who drank liquor should be superseded, or even abandoned.
On the whole, women had very low social standing in medieval India. The only notable exception to this was in the matrilineal Nair society of Kerala, where women enjoyed a status equal to that of men. Also, among the poor all over India, women enjoyed a good amount of freedom, for their lives were too basic to be segregated into male and female domains. It was mainly the middleclass women who suffered most from social constraints.
Illiteracy was very common among medieval Indian women, and in some Hindu castes it was even considered shameful for respectable women to be literate. In upper class Muslim society, women had to observe purdah, and were secluded in the zenana, the female quarters of their home. They were not allowed to have any contact with any men other than the members of their immediate family. And when they appeared in public, they had to wear the burqa, a shapeless, sack-like outer garment that covered their entire body from head to foot, leaving only a narrow veiled opening over the eyes. Among the affluent, women travelled in closed litters. Even in mosques women were segregated from men. In some Islamic societies women were not even allowed into mosques, as Prophet Muhammad is said to have preferred women to pray at home. Affluent Hindus, particularly the political aristocracy in North India, in time adopted some of the Muslim social practices, such as sequestering their women, to gain social recognition by the Muslim ruling class.
Despite these various restrictions on the life of women in medieval India, women in royal and aristocratic families, in Hindu as well as Muslim society, generally led a good life, and enjoyed all the creature comforts available in that age. They also exercised a fair amount of influence on government and society from behind the curtain of the zenana, by acting through intermediaries. Sometimes they even took part in battles. Thus when Delhi was attacked by a rebel force when sultan Buhlul Lodi was away on a campaign, and there were only very few soldiers in the fort then, a number of women under the leadership of a woman, Bibi Matu, put on male attire and took up combat positions on the battlements of the fort, to scare away the attackers. Similarly, the concubine of a rebel noble in Sind—‘a strumpet who was indeed surpassingly beautiful’—took over the captaincy of the noble’s army when he fell in battle. She, according to Yadgar, ‘put on a suit of armour, bound round her waist a gilt quiver and, placing a helmet on her head, joined the army.’ The ultimate political status that any woman gained during the Sultanate period was by Raziya, who ascended the throne in Delhi on the death of her father, Sultan Iltutmish, and proved herself to be better than many sultans, in administration as well as in battle.
On the whole Muslim women, despite purdah, enjoyed higher status and greater freedom in society than most Hindu women. They could inherit property and obtain divorce, privileges that Hindu women did not have. In several Hindu communities, such as among the Rajputs, the birth of a girl child was considered a misfortune, and female infanticide was widespread, but Muslims did not have that practice.
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Ideal and Reality
The traditional Indian prescription for sensible living was to divide man’s life into four successive stages—brahmachari (student), grihastha (householder), vanaprastha (anchorite), and sanyasi (religious mendicant). Each of these stages, except the last stage, had its own specific pursuits: acquisition of knowledge as brahmachari, fulfilment of social and family responsibilities as grihastha, and spiritual quest as vanaprastha. And finally, after fulfilling all these duties, in the last stage of his life, as sanyasi, man renounces all human pursuits, both temporal and spiritual, and frees himself from life even while living.
This was the ideal. The reality was quite different. Hardly anyone, except a few exceptional individuals, went through all the prescribed four stages of life. The sole concern of nearly everyone was to earn a good livelihood and lead a pleasant life as a householder. In this mundane scheme of life, the most important events in the life of an individual were getting married and begetting children. These were the essential first steps for man to fulfil his responsibilities to his family, his society, and his species.
Marriage was considered particularly essential for women, and it was a matter of disgrace for a family to have unmarried adult women at home. But getting daughters married off entailed huge expenses—in Hindu as well as Muslim society, but more so in Hindu society—which were beyond the means of many families. In Delhi the sultans sometimes provided financial assistance to needy Muslim parents, to help them out of their embarrassing predicament of not having funds to marry off their daughters suitably. Thus Firuz Tughluq, according to Afif, ‘founded an establishment for the promotion of marriages’, which granted funds to poor Muslims to dower their daughters. Hearing about this, ‘people … flocked to the city from all parts of the country, and received grants for purchasing housekeeping requisites for their daughters.’
Among the affluent, it was considered essential to celebrate marriages lavishly, as demonstrations of their family status. Marriage celebrations in royal families were naturally the grandest, and were festive occasions for all in the royal capital. Thus, according to Amir Khusrav, on the occasion of the marriage of prince Khizr Khan, Ala-ud-din Khalji’s son
, the whole city of Delhi was magnificently decorated with triumphal arches, and the public were entertained with music and dance, illuminations, jugglery, acrobatics, and so on.
MOST MIDDLE AND upper class families in medieval India were polygamous, in Hindu as well as Muslim society. Muslims were permitted by their religion to have four legal wives. Besides, they could have any number of concubines they fancied, and some Muslim kings and nobles maintained incredibly large harems. Thus Begarha, the sultan of Gujarat, had in his harem ‘three or four thousand women,’ reports Varthema. And Khan-i Jahan, an Andhra Hindu convert to Islam who became the vizier of Firuz Tughluq, was, according to Afif, ‘much devoted to the pleasures of the harem, and sought eagerly for pretty handmaids. It is reported that he had 2000 women of Rum and Chin in his harem, where he spent much of his time notwithstanding his onerous official duties.’ Such sexual profligacy involved no social disapprobation in medieval Indian society; rather, it was prestigious for a man to have a large number of wives and concubines. Says Battuta about himself: ‘It is my habit never to travel without [my slave girls].’
As for the rule that Muslims could have only four legal wives at a time, it could be easily circumvented, for divorce and remarriage were easy in Islam. The process for divorce was for the husband to merely say talaq—I divorce you—three times before his wife, after which he could right away marry another woman. This meant that men could divorce and marry any number of wives in succession, without going through any elaborate legal process. Similarly, a woman too could divorce her husband and marry another man, though the process involved in this was more complicated than in the case of divorce by men. And she could have, at least in theory, any number of husbands in succession, though at any given time she could have only one husband.
The facility for easy divorce in Islam led to the practice of some people entering into temporary marriages, sometimes for just a few hours. This form of marriage, termed muta marriage among Shias, was common in Maldives, the island chain off the southern tip of India. ‘When ships arrive, the crew marry wives, and when they are about to sail they divorce them,’ reports Battuta from his personal experience. ‘The women never leave their country.’
Unlike in Islam, there was no restriction at all in Hindu society about the number of wives a man could have. ‘The inhabitants of this region marry as many wives as they please,’ comments Venetian traveller Nicolo Conti about what he observed in Vijayanagar in the early fifteenth century. Indeed, having a large number of wives was, for upper class Hindus, a means to flaunt their socio-economic status—as well as their sexual prowess! Some Hindu rajas are known to have had a prodigious number of wives. Achyutadeva, the mid-sixteenth century king of Vijayanagar, had as many as 500 wives, according to Fernao Nuniz, a contemporary Portuguese trader-traveller. This is most likely an exaggeration, but probably not a gross exaggeration. Even Krishnadeva, whose preoccupation with wars and administration would have left him with little time for dalliance, had twelve wives, according to Paes.
Unlike polygamy, polyandry was rare in India, and the only people who practiced it routinely were Nairs of Kerala. ‘Among them there is a tribe in which one woman has several husbands,’ notes Abdur Razzak, the mid-fifteenth century Persian royal envoy in India, about what he observed in Kerala. ‘They (the husbands) divide the hours of the night and day amongst themselves, and as long as any one of them remains in the house during his appointed time, no other can enter. The Samuri (Zamorin) is of that tribe.’
‘Each [Nair] woman has from two to ten known [lovers],’ states Tome Pires, an early sixteenth century Portuguese pharmacist-traveller in India. ‘The more lovers a Nair woman has, the more important she is.’ Adds Portuguese traveller Duarte Barbosa, who was also in India in the sixteenth century: ‘Nayre women of good birth are very independent, and dispose of themselves as they please with Bramenes and Nayres, but they do not sleep with men of castes lower than their own under pain of death … The more lovers she has the greater her honour. Each one of them (her lovers) passes a day with her from midday on one day till midday on the next day, and so they continue living quietly without any disturbance or quarrels among them. If any of them wishes to leave her, he leaves her, and takes another woman, and she also, if she is weary of a man, tells him to go, and he does so, or makes terms with her.’ No ceremony at all was involved in accepting or discarding a lover.
This freewheeling amatory practice continued among Nairs well into modern times, as Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, a Scottish physician who was in India in the first decade of the nineteenth century, noted. Nair women, he writes, ‘marry before they are ten years of age … but the husband never cohabits with his wife … She lives in her mother’s house, or, after her parent’s death, with her brother, and cohabits with any person she chooses of an equal or higher rank than her own … It is no kind of reflection on a woman’s character to say that she has formed the closest intimacy with many persons; on the contrary, the Nair women are proud of reckoning among their favoured lovers many Brahmins, Rajas, or other persons of high birth … In consequence of this strange manner of propagating the species, no Nair knows his father, and every man looks on his sisters’ children as his heirs.’
Marriage customs in medieval India, like everything else, varied greatly from region to region and community to community. But generally speaking, women were not allowed to marry below their caste, though men could do that. In most communities marriage between close relatives was also forbidden. For instance, among high caste Maharashtrians, they ‘do not marry their relatives, except those who are cousins six times removed,’ notes Battuta. But first cousin marriages and uncle-niece marriages were common in South India.
SEXUAL PROMISCUITY WAS pervasive in medieval Hindu society. ‘Great licentiousness prevails in this country among women as well as men,’ writes Abu Said, an early tenth century Arab historian. Ibn Khurdadba, another Arab writer of about the same period, confirms: ‘The king and people Hind regard fornication as lawful.’ In that social milieu, illegitimate children were common, and they usually had no stigma attached to them. Indeed, even a child born out of the extramarital liaison of a woman was considered legitimate. ‘If a stranger has a child by a married woman, the child belongs to her husband, since the wife, … the soil in which the child is born, is the property of the husband,’ observes al-Biruni, an eleventh century Ghaznavid chronicler.
Because of this general laxity in sexual matters in Hindu society, abnormal sexual practices like homosexuality and pederasty were rare in it. According to al-Biruni, Hindus considered sodomy as revolting, as revolting as eating beef, which was the ultimate revolting act a Hindu could commit. But these deviant sexual practices were common in Muslim society. Even some of the sultans were bisexual or homosexual. In medieval Muslim society, as in ancient Greece, none of that entailed any strong disapprobation. Thus sultan Mubarak, a successor of Ala-ud-din Khalji, spent his whole time ‘in extreme dissipation,’ reports Barani. ‘He cast aside all regard for decency, and presented himself decked out in the trinkets and apparel of a woman before his assembled company.’ Similar was the conduct of Kurbat Hasan Kangu, a fourteenth century sultan of Ma’bar (Tamil Nadu), who, when he held court, ‘appeared decked out hand and foot with female ornaments, and made himself notorious for his puerile actions,’ notes Afif.
Muslim women too sometimes strayed, though they were usually very carefully guarded. But when caught, they, even royal women, were savagely punished. Thus, according to Battuta, Sultan Muhammad Tughluq once had a princess stoned to death ‘on a charge of debauchery or adultery.’ Muhammad’s successor, Firuz, was also quite severe in dealing with such matters, and he, as he notes in his autobiography, even prohibited women from going to the tombs on holy days, for that offered an opportunity for ‘wild fellows of unbridled passion and loose habits … [to indulge in] improper, riotous actions. I commanded that no woman should go out to the [sacred] tombs under pain of exemplary punishment.’
Ano
ther matter in which Muslims and Hindus differed radically was in their attitude towards prostitution. Islam considered prostitution a major sin, but Hindus viewed it as a normal and legitimate aspect of social life. In ancient India, in Mauryan Empire for instance, there were even state run brothels. Similarly, in medieval times brothels were run as a government sanctioned service in Vijayanagar, and they were a source of revenue for the state. According to Razzak, the state derived 12,000 fanams (small silver coins) a day from ‘the proceeds of the brothels,’ and used that revenue to meet the salary of a large number of policemen.
The brothels in Vijayanagar city were located on both sides of a long and broad avenue behind the state mint. ‘The splendour of those houses, the beauty of the heart-ravishers, their blandishments and ogles, are beyond description …,’ reports Razzak. ‘[In the afternoon] they place at the doors of these houses, which are beautifully decorated, chairs and settees on which the courtesans seat themselves. Everyone is covered with pearls, precious stones, and costly garments. They are all exceedingly young and beautiful. Each has one or two slave girls standing before her, to invite and allure [passers-by] to indulgence and pleasure. Any man who passes through this place makes choice of whom he will.’
THE FOOD HABITS of Hindus in medieval India were quite different from what they were in earlier times. Indian society in ancient and early classical period was quite permissive in the matter of food, and allowed all people, irrespective of their class and sex, including the priestly class, the freedom to eat whatever they liked, even beef, drink alcohol and take psychotropic drugs. The scene changed altogether by the middle of the first millennium CE, when the caste system tightened its iron grip on Hindu society. Caste regulations then defined and enforced the food and drink rules applicable to each caste, and these rules played a crucial role in segregating castes.
The Age of Wrath: A History of the Delhi Sultanate Page 47