ONE OF THE major concerns of Ghiyas-ud-din as sultan was to recover the territories that the Sultanate had lost during the turmoil following the death of Ala-ud-din, and to restore the Sultanate to its former position of absolute supremacy in the Indian subcontinent. In pursuit of this policy he sent, in the second year of his reign, an army into Warangal, where the Kakatiya ruler Prataparudra-deva had thrown off the yoke of the sultanate and was expanding his territory and power through military campaigns against his neighbours. The Sultanate army, commanded by Ghiyas-ud-din’s eldest son Jauna, then invaded the kingdom and forced the raja, after a prolonged siege, to plead for peace.
But at the point of the conclusion of the campaign, the Sultanate army was suddenly thrown into turmoil by certain mysterious developments. The basic cause of the trouble was that the army had not received any news from Delhi for nearly a month—because the communication link between Delhi and the army had been cut by local rebels—and that led to all sorts of wild rumours to spread in the army. One such rumour was that Ghiyas-ud-din was dead, and that Delhi was in the throes of a political turmoil. It was also rumoured that Jauna was plotting to usurp the throne, and was planning to liquidate some of the senior army commanders whose loyalty to him was suspect. All this created great disquiet among the army commanders, and they, as well as Jauna, retreated in disorder to Devagiri, from where the prince sped to his father in Delhi with a small escort.
This is the story told by Barani. But Battuta offers another explanation for the development, and states that the rumour about Ghiyas-ud-din’s death was deliberately spread by Ubaid, a poet and boon companion of Jauna, on the suggestion of the prince. This, according to Battuta, was done to enable the prince to win the support of the army in his plan to usurp the throne, but the plan failed as the army commanders suspected the truth and deserted the prince, as they did not want to be associated with the planned usurpation.
The version given by Battuta is not credible, because of its inherent improbability—Jauna, as the eldest son of the sultan, had already been designated as the heir apparent, and there was no reason for him to jeopardise that position by rebelling. Besides, subsequent developments also disprove the usurpation attempt theory. On the return of the army to Delhi, the officers who deserted Jauna were put to death by the sultan—the chief deserters ‘were impaled alive, and some of the others with their wives and children were thrown under the feet of elephants,’ reports Barani. In direct contrast to this, Jauna was given a fresh army and sent again against Warangal, where the raja had reasserted his independence. There was evidently no suspicion at all in the sultan about the loyalty of Jauna. This was also proved by subsequent developments. Thus a year or so later, when the sultan set out on a campaign into Bengal, he had no hesitation at all to appoint Jauna as his regent in Delhi.
Jauna’s stature as the heir apparent enhanced considerably after his second Warangal campaign, which was entirely successful. The raja there once again surrendered to him after a brief resistance, and the prince then sent him, along with all his treasures, to Delhi, and annexed the kingdom to the empire. From Warangal Jauna then seems to have advanced north-eastward into Orissa and then southward into the Tamil country, but the accounts about this campaign in contemporary chronicles are confusing. But on the whole the peninsular campaign of Jauna seems to have been quite successful. This is indicated by the grand reception that the sultan accorded to the prince on his return to Delhi.
Ghiyas-ud-din then put Jauna in charge of Delhi and set out for Bengal with an army, to reassert his authority over that rebellious and strife-torn province. After a successful campaign there, which brought most of Bengal once again under the rule of Delhi, the sultan hastened back home, as some disquieting news had reached him about developments in Delhi. This concerned Jauna’s association with Nizam-ud-din Auliya, and the dervish’s prediction in one his trances that Jauna’s accession to the throne was imminent. Other astrologers are also said to have made similar predictions. Hearing all this, Ghiyas-ud-din wrote menacing letters to the astrologers, and sent a warning to Auliya that when he returned to Delhi, the city would be too small to hold them both.
AS IT HAPPENED, it was not the sultan’s threat, but the dervish’s prediction, that came true. When some of Auliya’s devotees warned him of the sultan’s imminent arrival in Delhi, and advised him to leave the city in view of the sultan’s threat, he is said to have replied, ‘Hanuz Dihli dur ast!’—Delhi is still far off!
According to Barani, when Jauna learnt of the sultan’s return, he along with the great nobles in Delhi went forth to receive him, and built for his reception a temporary structure at Afghanpur, a village about a dozen kilometres from Tughluqabad, the capital that Ghiyas-ud-din had built for himself south of Delhi. When the sultan arrived at Afghanpur, the prince and the nobles ceremoniously conducted him to the reception hall they had built there, and served him a grand banquet. Then suddenly, while the sultan was still in the building, ‘a calamity occurred. Like a thunderbolt falling from heaven … the roof of the dais on which the sultan … was sitting fell, crushing him and five or six other persons, so that they all died.’
Battuta describes the incident quite differently. According to him it was the sultan who ordered the reception hall to be built, and it was built on wooden pillars and beams by Jauna in the course of three days. Jauna, according to Battuta, had designed it ingeniously so that ‘it would crash when elephants touched it at a certain spot … The sultan stopped at this building and feasted the people. After they dispersed, the prince asked the sultan for permission to parade the elephants before him.’ During the parade, when the elephants passed along a particular place, the building, as Jauna had planned, collapsed on the sultan, killing him. Though Jauna then ordered pickaxes and shovels ‘to be brought to dig and look for his father, he made signs to them not to hurry, and the tools were not brought till after sunset. Then they began to dig … Some assert that Tughluq was taken out dead; others, on the contrary, maintain that he was alive, and that an end was made of him.’
The mechanical ingenuity attributed to Jauna by Battuta in constructing the collapsible building, though not impossible, seems improbable, and so does his story of the prince making signs (obviously in front of many others) to the rescuers to delay their work. The hastily built structure was probably not quite stable. Ferishta mentions that there was a suspicion of conspiracy behind the accident, but he discredits it, and adds, ‘God only knows the truth.’ Assassinations of kings by their close relatives were all too common in the Delhi Sultanate, so it was natural to suspect conspiracy in every accident. But lack of a compelling motive—Jauna was after all the heir-apparent, and his father was a very old man—and the complicated and chancy device used for causing the sultan’s death, as also Battuta’s marked prejudice against the prince, which is evident in much of what he says about him, make the conspiracy theory implausible.
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Sultan Quixote
Ghiyas-ud-din Tughluq died in early 1325, in the fifth year of his reign. He had built for himself an elegant mausoleum at Tughluqabad, and he was buried there on the very night of his death, in conformity with the Islamic custom of burying the deceased soon after their death. Three days later Jauna ascended the throne, and took the title Muhammad Tughluq. He remained at Tughluqabad for forty days, in extended mourning. ‘When the accursed prince finished his father’s burial he made a display of sorrow while at heart he was happy,’ comments Isami, a contemporary chronicler virulently hostile to Muhammad.
After the period of mourning, Muhammad set out for Delhi in a ceremonial procession. The city was elaborately decorated for the occasion, and Muhammad, basking in the acclamation of the crowds lining the streets, proceeded to the palace of the early sultans of Delhi, and took up his residence there. He then, according to Isami, made a hypocritical declaration: ‘The late emperor’s policy was to administer justice … I shall do the same. The old and the aged in the realm are unto me like my father; t
he youth are like my brothers; … the children in the empire are like my own children … I wish prosperity, peace and long life for all, high and low … I shall rule with justice and enforce it to such an extent that I may fittingly be called the Just Emperor.’
Thus began, with festivities and in great optimism, the most turbulent reign in the over three centuries long history of the Delhi Sultanate. There is a good amount of information on Muhammad in contemporary chronicles. There is even an account of his reign by a foreign traveller, Ibn Battuta, a Moorish explorer, who spent about a decade in India in the mid-fourteenth century, most of it in Delhi, at the court of Muhammad. But these chroniclers were often as confused as modern scholars are about what to make of the motives and actions of Muhammad. There is even some confusion about the chronology of the reign.
The chief chronicler of Muhammad’s reign was Zia-ud-din Barani, who had excellent high level political contacts in the Sultanate, as he belonged to a family of prominent royal officers from the time of his grandfather, and was himself a favourite courtier of Muhammad for some fourteen years, though he never held any official post. Being a courtier had its advantages and disadvantages for Barani as a chronicler—it enabled him to witness at close range many of the events that he wrote about, but he had to be also very careful about what he wrote, for fear of rousing the sultan’s wrath. ‘We were traitors who were prepared to call black white,’ he frankly admits. ‘Avarice and the desire for worldly wealth led us into hypocrisy, and as we stood before the king and witnessed punishments forbidden by the law, fear of our fleeting lives and equally fleeting wealth deterred us from speaking the truth before him.’
But Barani was free of those fears and anxieties when he wrote his chronicle, for it was some years after Muhammad’s death and towards the end of his own life—when he was no longer a courtier, and had little to hope for or to fear from the Tughluqs—that he wrote it. He was therefore brutally candid about the sultan’s misdeeds, though he was also equally appreciative of his good deeds. Battuta is even more candid about Muhammad, for he had nothing at all to fear from the Tughluqs, as he wrote his book in Morocco after returning home from his travels.
The picture of Muhammad that emerges from these and other medieval chronicles is of a psychotic Jekyll-and-Hyde personality, a bizarre blend of antithetical qualities, of good and evil, overweening arrogance and abject humility, murderous savagery and touching compassion. ‘This king is of all men the fondest of making gifts and of shedding blood,’ comments Battuta. ‘His gate is never without some poor man enriched, or some … man executed, and stories are current among the people about his generosity and courage, and about his cruelty and violence … For all that, he is of all men the most humble and the readiest to show equity and justice … Justice, compassion for the needy, and extraordinary generosity’ characterised his conduct. In the colourful words of Sewell, an early modern historian, Muhammad was ‘a saint with the heart of a devil, or a fiend with the soul of a saint.’
Muhammad was a compulsive innovator. But he—unlike Ala-ud-din, the other great reformer sultan of early medieval India—lacked the pragmatism, patience and perseverance needed to execute his schemes successfully, even though several of the schemes he dreamed up were, in themselves, quite sound. All his grand dreams therefore turned into dreadful nightmares, for himself as well as for his subjects. Muhammad however did not see the failure of his schemes as his failure in their execution, but blamed it on the intractability and lack of vision of his subjects. And this turned him vindictive towards the people, treating them not as his subjects, whom he had the duty to protect and nurture, but as his enemies whom he had to chastise. ‘I punish the people because they have all at once become my enemies and opponents,’ he once told Barani. ‘I have dispensed great wealth among them, but they have not become friendly and loyal. Their temper is well known to me, and I see that they are disaffected and inimical to me.’
MUHAMMAD’S FRUSTRATIONS TURNED him into a sadistic, bloodthirsty tyrant. ‘The sultan was far too ready to shed blood,’ reports Battuta. ‘He punished small faults and great, without respect of persons, whether men of learning, piety or high station. Every day hundreds of people, chained, pinioned, and fettered, are brought to his hall, and those who are for execution are executed, those for torture are tortured, and those for beating are beaten.’ Confirms Barani: ‘Not a day or week passed without the spilling of much … blood … Streams of gore flowed [daily] before the entrance of his palace.’ The corpses of those executed were usually flung down at the gate of the royal palace, as a warning to the public to be obedient to the sultan. These executions were carried out on all days, except on Fridays, which was a day of respite for prisoners.
Such punishments, Muhammad believed, were right and proper—and essential. ‘These days many wicked and turbulent men are to be found,’ he one day told Barani, justifying the savage punishments he inflicted. ‘I visit them with chastisement upon the suspicion or presumption of their rebellious and treacherous deigns, and I punish the most trifling act of contumacy with death. This I will do until I die, or until people act honestly, and give up rebellion and contumacy.’ Muhammad was, for a medieval sultan, quite a learned man, but his learning, instead of making him humane, only calloused him. ‘The dogmas of philosophers, which are productive of the indifference and hardness of heart, had a powerful influence on him,’ comments Barani. ‘But the declarations of the holy books, and utterances of prophets, which inculcate benevolence and humility, and hold out the prospect of future punishment, were not deemed worthy of attention.’
In medieval chronicles there are several accounts of the savagery of Muhammad against his own subjects, slaughtering them indiscriminately, plundering and devastating their land. Thus on one occasion, following a rebellion, ‘the sultan led forth his army to ravage Hindustan,’ reports Barani. ‘He laid the country waste from Kanauj to Dalamu, and every person that fell into his hands he slew. Many of the inhabitants fled and took refuge in jungles, but the sultan had the jungles surrounded, and every individual that was captured was killed.’ Comments Sewell: Muhammad ‘exterminated whole tribes as if they were vermin.’
There was an element of revolting fiendishness in some of the punishments that Muhammad meted out. Thus when Baha-ud-din Gurshasp, his cousin, rose in revolt against him, not only was he flayed alive, but his flesh was cooked with rice and sent to his wife and children. In another case, when a pious and venerable Muslim described the sultan as a tyrant, and refused to retract the charge despite being chained and starved for a fortnight, the sultan, according to Battuta, ordered him to be forcibly fed human excrement. So the wardens stretched him on his back on the ground, ‘opened his mouth with pincers and dropped into it human refuse dissolved in water.’
‘The cruelties of this tyrant … surpass all belief,’ comments Nurul Haq, a Mughal chronicler. However, it should be noted that in brutality the difference between Muhammad and most other Delhi sultans was only that of degree, not of kind, though the difference in degree in this case was so extreme as to seem like difference in kind. Of the thirty-two sultans of Delhi, only a couple of them were free of such savagery. Brutality and the terror it evoked were, from the point of view of the sultans, essential for their survival as rulers in that brutal age, particularly in India, where they were a small group of alien invaders ruling over a vast and hostile subject people. But in the case of Muhammad he carried the brutality to such a senseless extreme that it turned out to be counterproductive: it undermined his power, instead of securing it.
Muhammad, concedes Ferishta, was a learned, cultured and talented prince, but adds that ‘despite all these admirable qualities he was wholly devoid of mercy or consideration for his people. The punishments he inflicted were not only rigid and cruel, but frequently unjust. So little did he hesitate to spill the blood of god’s creatures that when anything occurred which excited him to proceed to that horrid extremity, one might have supposed his object was to exterminate the
human species altogether.’
Hanafi, a mid-sixteenth century chronicler, gives a graphic account of one of the sultan’s gruesome acts of tyranny. Muhammad, Hanafi writes, ‘one day … went on foot to the court of Kazi Kamal-ud-din, the chief justice, and told him that Shaikh-zada Jam had called him unjust; he demanded that he should be summoned and required to prove the injustice of which he accused him, and that if he could not prove it, he should be punished according to the injunction of the law. Shaikh-zada Jam, when he arrived, admitted that he had made the allegation. The sultan then enquired his reason [for doing that], to which he replied, “When a criminal is brought before you, it is entirely at your royal option to punish him justly or unjustly, but you go further than that, and give his wife and children to the executioners so that they may do what they like with them. In what religion is this practice lawful? If this is not injustice, what is it?” The sultan remained silent, but after he left the court he ordered the Shaikh-zada to be imprisoned in an iron cage.’ Later he had the Shaikh cut to pieces right in front of the kazi’s court. ‘There are many similar stories of the atrocities he committed. Tyranny took the place of justice.’
MUHAMMAD COMPENSATED HIS many frustrations by assuming a posture of extreme arrogance, of knowing and doing everything better than everyone else in the world. The more he failed, the more haughty he became. According to Barani, the sultan’s pride was so overweening that he could not bear to hear of anyone anywhere in the world as being better than him in any way. And he had, as the predictable corollary of his insane pride, a ferocious temper. But characteristically, as in everything else in him, Muhammad was a weird mixture of contrary qualities in temperament too—if he was grotesque in his wrathful arrogance, he was equally grotesque in his ostentatious displays of abject self-abasement.
The Age of Wrath: A History of the Delhi Sultanate Page 20
