by John Keay
Such fearless feats of arms won the applause of Qutb-ud-din Aybak and brought followers flocking to the Khalji standard. Bakhtiyar had then ventured through south Bihar and, in another daring escapade, captured Nadia, the capital of the Senas, which dynasty had succeeded that of the Buddhist Palas as the most important in Bengal. With just eighteen followers Bakhtiyar is supposed to have gained entrance to the Sena palace and surprised King Lakshmanasena in the middle of lunch. The Senas’ other capital of Lakhnauti, otherwise Gaur on what is now the Indo – Bangladesh frontier, was also taken. With Lakhnauti as his headquarters, Bakhtiyar continued east into Assam and then ‘Tibet’ – which was probably not the country now so designated but perhaps Bhutan. Howsoever, the Himalayas were certainly too physically challenging for the Khalji forces, most of whom perished in a swollen river. Bakhtiyar made it back to the plains but, a broken man, he either died or was killed soon after.
This was in 1205, and from then onwards the governorship of Bengal and Bihar had been bitterly contested by various Khaljis who acknowledged Delhi’s supremacy only on the rare occasions when the sultan’s support was deemed personally advantageous. Iltumish endeavoured to rectify the situation by invading Bengal in 1225. Its incumbent Khalji was obliged ‘to place the yoke of servitude on the neck of submission’ and yield a hefty tribute; then he reverted to his bad old ways. A year later the sultan sent his son Nasir-ud-din to repeat the treatment. This time the Khaljis were routed, their ruler killed and their capital occupied; the problem looked to be solved. But such calculations took no account of Bengal’s notorious climate. Nasir-ud-din suddenly sickened and died. Again Bengal, that ‘hell full of good things’ as the Mughals would call it, slipped the leash and again (in 1229) Iltumish had to invade. His settlement barely lasted until his death, whereupon Bengal, Bihar and sometimes Awadh became again effectively independent. Although over the succeeding century this situation was occasionally threatened and briefly reversed, ‘between 1338 and 1538, for long two hundred years, Bengal remained independent without interruption.’16
Delhi’s chances of reasserting its authority there or anywhere else declined sharply after Iltumish. Before dying of natural causes, a feat which even contemporary writers found worthy of special note, Iltumish had wavered between nominating as his successor a remaining but ineffectual son and an inspirational but gender-handicapped daughter. The son, though liked, had his own handicaps, including a vindictive and detested mother and a predilection to ‘licentiousness and debauchery’. Mother and son duly indulged their respective passions during a seven-month period. It barely qualified as a reign, and they were both then toppled by the daughter, the redoubtable Raziya.
Sultan Raziya was a great monarch. She was wise, just and generous, a benefactor to her kingdom, a dispenser of justice, the protector of her subjects, and the leader of her armies. She was endowed with all the qualities befitting a king, but she was not born of the right sex, and so in the estimation of men all these virtues were worthless. (May God have mercy on her!)17
Nevertheless, continued Minhaju-s Siraj, ‘the country under Sultan Raziya enjoyed peace and the power of the state was manifest’; even Bengal made a grudging submission. This was short-lived, and the calm merely presaged a storm. Raziya’s reign lasted barely four years (1236–40). Perhaps her decision to dispense with the veil and, in mannish garb of coat and cap, to ‘show herself amongst the people’ was unnecessarily provocative to Muslim sensitivities. So too may have been the appointment as ‘personal attendant to her majesty’ of Jamal-ud-din Yakut, an ‘Abyssinian’ who was probably once a slave and very definitely an African. A liaison so conspicuous duly brought unfavourable comment from the historian Isami. Declaring that a woman’s place was ‘at her spinning wheel [charkha]’ and that high office would only derange her, he insisted that Raziya should have made ‘cotton her companion and grief her wine-cup’.
These lines, written in 1350, are of additional interest in that, according to Irfan Habib, India’s most distinguished economic historian, they contain ‘the earliest reference to the spinning wheel so far traced in India’. Since the device is known in Iran from a prior period, ‘the inference is almost inescapable that the spinning wheel came to India with the Muslims’.18 So did the paper on which Isami penned his patronising lines, palm leaves having previously served as a somewhat friable writing surface. Both introductions were of incalculable value. Governance and taxation would be expedited, and literature, scholarship and the graphic arts revolutionised by the availability of a uniform writing material which could be readily filed and bound. In fact it became so common that by the mid-fifteenth century Delhi’s confectioners were already wrapping their sticky halwa in recycled writing paper, a practice which would continue until the triumph of the polythene bag and then revive after polythene’s environmental disgrace.
* * *
THE DELHI SULTANATES (1) The ‘Slave Dynasty’ 1206–90
* * *
Likewise, the charkha greatly boosted the production of yarn and no doubt provided employment for many more weavers. High-quality cotton textiles had long been an important export; but thanks to the spinning wheel and other innovations, India’s cottage-based cotton industry would in time become a barometer of national self-esteem. In adopting the charkha as the symbol of Indian independence, Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress Party were not, however, courting Muslim votes. The irony of predominantly Hindu India sporting a national icon of Islamic provenance went unnoticed.
Raziya was elbowed aside by a junta of Turkish, and of course male, chauvinists. While bravely dashing across the Panjab in high summer to douse a revolt at Bhatinda, she was isolated by the conspirators, her Abyssinian friend was killed, and she ended a prisoner in the fort she had come to redeem. There she managed to win the backing and affection of one of the conspirators. They were married and, gathering further support, marched on Delhi. Perhaps if the conduct of their forces had been left to the experienced Raziya, they might have prevailed. But, as a wife, she deferred to her husband and they were heavily defeated. Next day, while fleeing the battlefield, the newlyweds ‘fell into the hands of Hindus and were killed’.
Known as ‘The Forty’ or ‘The Family of Forty’, the Turkish military oligarchs who now dominated Delhi affairs intrigued both against one another and against a more amorphous grouping composed of Indian converts to Islam and eminent refugees from Afghanistan and beyond. At the whim of these cut-throat godfathers young and ineffectual sultans were casually summoned and quickly despatched, usually to the hereafter.
Raziya’s demise had been followed almost immediately by another Mongol eruption. In 1241 the invaders sacked Lahore, whose ruins were then picked over by the predatory Ghakkars. Unlike Delhi, Lahore thus lost all trace of its Ghaznavid and Ghorid past and has no monuments prior to those of the Mughals. That the Mongols did not then take advantage of Delhi’s strife-torn predicament is largely thanks to Ghiyas-ud-din Balban, another Turkish slave who, while loyally dictating policy for the ineffectual Sultan Nasir-ud-din, was briefly disgraced but, eventually and allegedly, poisoned the sultan to secure his own succession.
During forty years as the effective (1246–65) and then actual (1265–87) ruler, the stern and merciless Balban held the Mongols at bay with a skilful mixture of force and diplomacy. Ghenghiz Khan was now dead, but his successors readily championed the cause of one of Sultan Nasir-ud-din’s brothers plus other claimants to the Delhi throne; they frequently intervened in the tortuous affairs of Sind; and they advanced to the Beas river in the Panjab. This necessitated the diversion of the sultanate’s best troops and most reliable commanders to patrolling the new frontier. ‘If this anxiety … as guardian and protector of Mussulmans, were removed,’ Balban is supposed to have said, ‘I would not stay one day in my capital but would lead forth my army to capture treasures and valuables, elephants and horses, and would never allow the Rais and Ranas [i.e. the rajputs and other Hindus] to repose in quiet at a distance.’19 While the
Mongols threatened the very existence of the sultanate, even plundering raids into Hindu India, let alone conquests, were in abeyance.
Several Mongol incursions were indeed frustrated, but in 1260 Balban fêted an embassy from Hulagu, grandson of Ghenghiz Khan. Despite Balban’s boast that up to fifteen ex-rulers of Turkestan, Khorasan, Iran and Iraq were enjoying asylum in Delhi, some sort of working relationship seems to have been established between the two neighbours. Balban could now concentrate on shoring up the status of the sultanate and securing his existing possessions. Perhaps influenced by all those royal refugees from the north-west, he introduced into his court an elaborate system of precedence and protocol modelled on Persian practice. The sultan being ‘the shadow of God’ and his vice-regent on earth, it was fitting that he be honoured as such. With drawn swords fearsome retainers now constantly attended the royal presence. Those who would approach the throne must abase themselves, performing zaminbos (‘kissing the ground’) and paibos (‘kissing the [royal] feet’) as they advanced. Any infringement of this rigid decorum brought instant and bloody punishment.
With an equally heavy hand, Balban’s forces put down insurrections in the Ganga-Jamuna Doab and cleared the region round Delhi of both the marauding Mewatis and the scrub jungle in which they found sanctuary. A major expedition into Bengal, whose governor was again in revolt, took three years and was distinguished by more ferocious reprisals. But on the sultan’s return, his most capable son and preferred successor was killed in a skirmish with the Mongols. Balban, now said to have been in his eighties, never recovered from this blow. When not presiding, grim-faced, over his terrified courtiers, he is said to have spent his nights howling with grief for the ‘martyr-prince’. In 1287 death brought relief to the tortured sultan. Not, however, to his kingdom, which plunged into another bloodstained succession crisis.
A grandson, who quickly replaced the one Balban had nominated as his successor, celebrated his succession by renouncing the austerities of the previous reign and embarking on a riot of indulgence. The young sultan, says Ferishta, ‘delighted in love and in the soft society of silver-bodied damsels with musky tresses’. Delhi welcomed the change; ‘every shade was filled with ladies of pleasure and every street rung with music and mirth.’20 But such was the young sultan’s abandon, such the heavy inebriants and the musky tresses, that within three years the handsome and affable prince was reduced to a gibbering wreck. Meanwhile Balban’s trusty lieutenants had been eliminated by the new sultan’s self-appointed keeper, an evil genius who was himself then poisoned by jealous opponents. ‘What little order had been maintained in the government was now entirely lost,’ according to Ziau-ud-din Barani, the author of an important history, who was a boy about Delhi at the time. The still young but now paralysed and imbecilic sultan was replaced by his son, a three-year-old toddler. In his name cradle-snatching rivals continued to manoeuvre and fight for office.
The dénouement of this 1290 crisis saw the remnants of the Turkish ‘Forty’ outwitted by rivals belonging to the same Khalji tribe who had earlier conquered Bihar and Bengal. Despatching two sultans in quick succession – both the paralytic father and his wretched child – the Khaljis ended the so-called ‘Slave dynasty’ and proclaimed one of their seniors, Jalal-ud-din Feroz Khalji, as the new sultan. A kicking toddler was thus replaced by a grey-bearded patriarch as the Khalji dynasty began its thirty-year tenure of the throne of Delhi.
Jalal-ud-din Feroz, sometimes called Feroz Shah I, was an unlikely instrument of revolution. A Turk, though not exactly a young one, he also displayed a clemency unheard of in the annals of the sultanate. It even won him a certain popularity. Conciliating rivals and forgiving enemies, he ‘weaned the citizens of Delhi from their attachment to the old family’, says Ferishta. Such policies melted even Mongol hearts. The trickle of defectors from the Mongol khanates who were embracing Islam and transferring their loyalties to the sultanate briefly became a flood. But such leniency also severely tested the loyalties of his Khalji supporters and offered much encouragement to potential opponents. Amongst the latter was the sultan’s nephew, who was also his son-in-law and a keen student of the earlier Khalji campaigns in Bengal.
* * *
THE DELHI SULTANATES (2) The Khalji Dynasty 1290–1320
* * *
This man was Ala-ud-din Khalji, and the lesson he drew from his kinsmen’s experiences in Bengal was that plunder and conquests made at the expense of Hindu India could significantly enhance his challenge for the sultanate. After a lull of nearly a century during which the tide of ‘Muslim conquest’ in India had if anything receded, another giant surge was about to carry it deep into the peninsula.
ALADDIN’S CAVE
By now, the end of the thirteenth century, the still-Hindu Deccan and south had witnessed further dynastic change. Yet the pattern of struggle, modelled on the symmetry of the mandala and consummated in the compass-boxing digvijaya, remained the same. So too does our limited perception of it. Unenlivened by the gossipy narratives beloved of Muslim writers, the contemporary history of Hindu India has still to be laboriously extrapolated from the sterile phrasing and optimistic listings favoured by royal panegyrists and fortuitously preserved in a few literary compositions and numerous stone and copper-plate inscriptions. The formality of such sources drains their content of vitality and, without the labours lavished by the likes of Tod on the rajputs, the history of the Deccan is liable to appear as arid and confusing as its geography.
Lest this should prove to be the case, it must suffice to note that in the western Deccan the Western Chalukyas, those doughty opponents of the great Cholas of Tanjore, had succumbed, like their Rashtrakuta predecessors, to the rising power of two erstwhile feudatories, one of which now dominated Karnataka and the other Maharashtra. As Yadavas, both these new dynasties claimed descent from the Vedic Yadu lineage, once of Mathura and of Dwarka in Saurashtra. They were not ‘Rajpoots’ in the geographically-specific sense used by Tod, and not certainly even ksatriya, a caste that is practically unknown in peninsular India. Yet as befitted a lineage that could claim Lord Krishna as a Yadava, they too revered the martial ethic.
Of these two Yadava dynasties, the Hoysalas of Halebid are the more epigraphically articulate. Originally a hill-people from the Western Ghats just north of Coorg, they had carved out a small kingdom around Belur (two hundred kilometres west of modern Bangalore in southern Karnataka) in the tenth century. In the eleventh, as ‘the rod in the right hand of the Chalukya king’, Hoysala forces had served with distinction against both the Chola kings Rajaraja and Rajendra and against King Bhoj’s Paramara successor in Malwa. More territory had been acquired, more scholars and adventurers attracted to the Hoysala court and, with the establishment of a new capital at Dorasamudra (now Halebid), twelve kilometres from Belur, the usual clustering of dynastic sites was under way. ‘Striking hostile princes in a brilliant way as if they were balls in a game,’ says an eleventh-century panegyrist (who must by now have been reborn as a cricket commentator), ‘that famous [King] Vinayaditya ruled like Indra from the west as far as Talakad, until the circle of the Earth cried out “Well done, Sir!” in approval.’21
Imperial ambitions had first been entertained by the Hoysalas in the early twelfth century when the spectacularly ornate temples of Chenna Kesava at Belur and of Hoysalesvara at Dorasamudra-Halebid were designed to celebrate it. This bid for supremacy throughout Karnataka proved premature, but towards the end of the century, at about the same time as Prithviraj was succumbing to Muhammad of Ghor at Tarain, the Hoysalas successfully exploited a do-or-die struggle between the Western Chalukyas and the invading Kalachuris of Madhya Pradesh. Ballala II, the greatest of the Hoysala kings, thus added to his ancestral domains most of northern Karnataka and, by exploiting a similar conflict between the Chola and Pandya rulers in the Tamil country, also emerged with an important slice of the Kaveri plain around Srirangam (Trichy). A new chronological era was adopted by Ballala’s royal bards, and so were the usual
imperial titles, plus many besides. Gloriously if briefly the Hoysalas were paramount throughout most of the Kannada-speaking Deccan, and could pose as arbiters in the lusher lands below the Eastern Ghats.
There, in the Tamil country, their main rivals were the Pandyas of Madurai who in the 1250s under the great Sundara Pandya overthrew the Cholas and blunted the Hoysala thrust. The Pandyas also struck north deep into the Telugu-speaking Andhra country, where an important dynasty called the Kakatiyas had replaced the Eastern Chalukyas of Vengi. Thus it was the Pandyas from Madurai, the Hoysalas of Karnataka and these Kakatiyas of Warangal (their capital, near the later Hyderabad), together with their respective feudatories, who controlled most of the south when, as the thirteenth century drew to a close, Ala-ud-din Khalji began to formulate his plans.
North of the Hoysalas, and barring any access to the south via the western Deccan, there ruled those other beneficiaries of the Chalukyan decline who also claimed Yadava descent. Indeed they are often referred to as the ‘Yadavas of Devagiri’. Since Maharashtra was their homeland they are also described as Marathas, although the correct name of the dynasty is Seuna, or Sevuna. These Seunas, then, once feudatories of the Rashtrakutas and then of the Chalukyas, had taken the latter’s capital of Kalyana in C1190. Although boxed in on all sides – by the Hoysalas to the south, the Kakatiyas to the east, the Paramara rajputs of Malwa in the north and the Solanki rajputs of Gujarat in the west – they had yet carved out a substantial kingdom embracing most of what is now the state of Maharashtra. Very roughly, the Seuna kingdom therefore corresponded to the territory of the ancient Shatavahanas and the early Rashtrakutas.