by John Keay
Despite this overwhelming evidence of his unpopularity Muhammad remained on the throne until 1351, a reign of twenty-six years. Bengal had been virtually written off; the rajput princes of Rajasthan were reasserting their autonomy; in both Andhra and the Tamil country Muslim commanders established independent dynasties. Elsewhere lesser officers, mostly of Mongol and Afghan origin, repeatedly mutinied; Malwa and Gujarat heaved with dissent; the southern Deccan was experiencing a Hindu revival; something similar was underway in coastal Andhra; Sind revolted; civil war continued to flare up in the Ganga-Jamuna Doab – in all, Barani lists some twenty-two major rebellions. If in the early years of his reign Muhammad had won the sultanate’s best chance of an Indian empire, in the latter years he lost it irrevocably.
Yet in Delhi his authority seems never to have been seriously challenged, and of the plots which dogged the reigns of other sultans little is heard. Far from incompetent, let alone insane, Muhammad bin Tughluq deserves credit less for his long-remembered experiments and more for his unquestioned ascendancy during a period of appalling turmoil, not all of it of his own making. An able commander who was rarely worsted in the field, and an effective administrator whose minor reforms and directives had genuine merit, he was also comparatively free of religious and ethnic bigotry. Perhaps he more than any of the sultans glimpsed the potential of an Indo – Islamic accommodation. Even his draconian severity seems to have had its desired effect. He died while pursuing rebels into the wastes of Sind. Although poison would later be suspected, from the contemporary accounts it seems certain that his labours were indeed crowned with that rare royal accolade of a natural death.
No less remarkable was the comparatively smooth succession which followed. Although a child, said to be his son, was briefly promoted as his successor, it was generally agreed that Muhammad bin Tughluq had no sons. The impostor was quickly retired to the nursery and Feroz Shah, Muhammad’s cousin and designated heir, quietly succeeded. Already into his forties, Feroz yet managed to occupy the throne for thirty-seven years (1351–88). No less quietly, and with all the caution of advancing years, he endeavoured to preserve and pacify what remained of the sultanate’s authority, proving to be a conservative in matters of religion and a consolidator in affairs of state. Although he received an exceptionally favourable press thanks to his deference to the ulema, even his eulogists fail to disguise the fact that he made no attempt to re-establish the sultanate’s authority in the Deccan or the south, that two expeditions into Bengal were largely fruitless, and a six-year campaign in Gujarat and Sind nearly disastrous.
Only his leisurely excursion into Orissa in 1361, supposedly in search of elephants, can be claimed a success. Hitherto largely ignored, what Feroz’s chronicler calls this ‘happy and prosperous country’10 received a rude awakening as the temple-building Ganga dynasty was routed and the great shrine of Lord Jagannath at Puri desecrated. Infidels received no favours from the orthodox Feroz, and there may be truth in the massacres allegedly inflicted on the local population. Yet in the end the country, now less happy, less prosperous, and less seventy-three elephants, was duly returned to its Hindu rulers. They, like others, soon neglected any tributary obligations to the Delhi invader.
Military manoeuvres apart, Feroz’s record bears gentle scrutiny. He forswore the cruel excesses of his predecessor, showed a genuine regard for the welfare of his people and won wide support. Land revenue in those areas still administered by the sultanate was set at what seems to have been an equable rate and the jizya tax was extended to all non-Muslims, including the hitherto-exempt brahmans. Budgetary strains were further eased by abolishing the cash payment of the military and reverting to the system of remuneration by revenue grants. Since these grants often became hereditary, instant popularity was being bought at the price of eventual disarray. Large numbers of slaves, on the other hand, most of whom were Hindu captives, were rescued from penury and either enrolled as bodyguards or given productive work in the cities’ kharkhanas (workshops). Thirty-six of these establishments, some with a workforce of thousands, were maintained by Feroz, mainly to supply the court with high-quality weapons, gems, robes and perfumes and to serve the sultan’s ambitious building programmes.
Under the city-based dispensation of Islam, the buildings inevitably included another new Delhi. Erected several kilometres to the north of Tughluqabad, Feroz Shah’s city and kotla (citadel) has long since been engulfed by more recent Delhis; below its ramparts, where once refreshingly flowed the Jamuna, heavy traffic now eddies in a sluggish fog of exhaust. Yet on its skyline there still protrudes one of the two Ashoka pillars which on Feroz’s orders were so laboriously shipped downriver. Curious about their inscriptions, Feroz asked local brahmans for a translation; they expressed themselves mystified.
The sultan’s tomb, ‘an austere, plain block of grey sandstone’,11 stands in the urban oasis of Hauz Khas where, beside a reservoir built by Ala-ud-din Khalji, Feroz constructed gardens and one of many important madrasseh (colleges). Further afield he won acclaim for undertaking the first major irrigation projects with the construction of canals from both the Jamuna and the Sutlej. He also founded provincial cities, many of them called Ferozabad, including that which he later changed to Jaunpur. Jauna was the birth name of Muhammad bin Tughluq; Feroz, at least, continued to hold his predecessor in high regard.
Jaunpur, and the Awadh region of eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar which it commanded, was conferred on Malik Sowar, a eunuch-slave redeemed by Feroz and who, proving exceptionally able, was given the title of Sultan-ush Sharq. Taking advantage of the chaos which followed Feroz’s death, it was this man who founded the Sharqi kingdom of Jaunpur and whose successors – necessarily adopted and apparently of African origin – would soon defy and briefly eclipse the Delhi sultanate in the Gangetic plain.
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DELHI – OLD AND NEW
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Numerous other powers would wax brightly as the later Tughluqs presided over the contraction of the Delhi sultanate. In 1388 Feroz’s long-awaited demise produced another long and bloody succession crisis which overturned Delhi’s remaining authority. Ten years later, in 1398, the city itself was overturned when Mongol forces under Timur the Lame (Tamberlane), fresh from the conquests of Persia and Baghdad and now firm adherents of Islam, crossed the Jamuna just below Feroz’s kotla.
With little difficulty the Mongols defeated the incumbent sultan and then for three days indulged in an orgy of rapine and killing. According to Timur’s personal record, the gold, silver, jewels and precious brocades defied accounting. Exclusively Muslim quarters of the city were spared; everywhere else was sacked, and the entire Hindu population was either massacred or enslaved. ‘Although I was desirous of sparing them,’ wrote Timur in his unconvincing memoir, ‘I could not succeed, for it was the will of God that this calamity should befall the city.’12
KAFTAN AND LOINCLOTH
It was not the end of the sultanate or of Delhi. Timur soon withdrew; the Tughluq sultan duly returned to his devastated capital; and two subsequent dynasties, the Saiyyids from 1414 and the Lodis from 1451, both Afghan in origin, continued to rule amidst the ruins throughout the fifteenth century. But under the Saiyyids an authority which had once embraced most of the subcontinent was so reduced that it barely extended beyond the village of Palam, the site of Delhi’s first international airport. The Lodis scarcely restored that authority, although they did restore some respectability by overcoming Jaunpur and overhauling the administration. Powerless to control erstwhile provinces and frequently under threat of invasion from them, Delhi was now just one of many, often more innovative and illustrious, power centres. If in pre-Islamic times the division of the subcontinent into strong independent states based on ancient identities of lineage, language, dynastic tradition and economic interest was the norm, then India was simply reverting to type.
Despite two centuries of dominance in most of northern and western India, the sultanate had failed to establish a pan-Indian s
upremacy, and had not even attempted an Indo-Islamic accommodation. True, in the cities the Hindu population had come to terms with their Muslim overlords: some enterprises, like the royal mints, remained exclusively in Hindu hands; many Muslims took Hindu wives; Indian captives often converted to Islam; and some converts had achieved high office. Yet in Delhi, as in the sultanate’s provincial capitals, the court remained largely a preserve of the Turkish, Persian and Afghan elites. The same was true of membership of the ulema, of senior posts in the administration, and of much of the military. Ethnic as much as religious exclusivity made the Delhi regime totally alien to most of India’s peoples.
Arriving at Multan, then the frontier city of Muhammad bin Tughluq’s kingdom, in 1333, Ibn Batuta had observed how other new arrivals from west and central Asia all sought recruitment into the sultan’s service. Most were mounted and, as sowars (troopers), they had to perform some equestrian manoeuvres before being enrolled in the armed forces. Others sought royal patronage as artisans, scholars, merchants or administrators. Very few looked beyond such patronage. Most trade, most industry and all financial services remained in Hindu hands. But as the English ‘nabobs’ of the eighteenth century would discover, this could be mutually advantageous. Ibn Batuta noted how Hindu banking houses in Multan grew wealthy by advancing to penniless hopefuls from central Asia such gifts as were suitable for presentation to the sultan – horses, slaves, brocades, jewels. The sultan invariably returned a far more valuable present from which the newcomer could repay with interest the Delhi agents of his Multani backer. It was official policy to encourage a stream of immigration; and such were the opportunities offered by India and such the turmoil elsewhere in Asia that the flood of adventurers from all over the Islamic world rarely dried up.
Ibn Batuta found that in Delhi most newcomers expected ‘to gain riches and then return to their countries’13 – again just like the eighteenth-century English ‘nabobs’. As Delhi’s authority declined, aggressive new sultanates on India’s Islamic frontier in Bengal, Gujarat, Malwa and the Deccan boosted the market for military personnel and offered even better prospects for plunder, promotion and remunerative revenue assignments. In fact these independent sultanates had by the fifteenth century become the real lands of opportunity. Scholars, jurists and artisans gravitated towards the more generous patronage on offer. Merchants readily took to supplying and servicing the lucrative Arabian Sea trade from the peninsula’s west coast ports. It was by way of sailings from the Red Sea that Gujarat acquired a large community of African Muslims. Meanwhile the influx of Persians and Afghans into the Deccan would give to the Bahmanid sultanate and its successors a strongly Persian and Shi’ite flavour. This would survive into the twentieth century in the case of Hyderabad, one of these successor states.
If, as Ibn Batuta says of Delhi in the fourteenth century, many Muslim fortune-seekers looked forward to a rich retirement in their original homelands, of elsewhere in the fifteenth century this seems not to have been the case. Most stayed, prospered, married and settled. With the substantial addition of Mongol recruits and Indian converts, the Muslim community was not only growing but constantly renewing itself; as with horses so with men – a steady stream of central Asian imports was seemingly vital to the virility of Muslim rule.
The Muslim elite demanded of India’s idolatrous natives no more than occasional collaboration and no less than total submission. Islamic jurists argued not over whether Hindus should be obliged to pay the jizya (the tax on non-Muslims), but whether they should be allowed to pay it. Death was the only penalty prescribed for idolaters by most Islamic schools of law; only the daringly indulgent adherents of the Hanafi school argued that the jizya was an acceptable alternative. Otherwise Hindus, although occasionally serviceable and often diverting, were beneath contempt. Like the white sahibs of European colonialism, the true believers of the sultanate saw India simply as a source of wealth, a scene of adventure, and a subject for moral indignation spiked with prurient fantasy. They too, indeed, were colonialists. Compromise with the natives was as unthinkable as it was preposterous.
For the tag of ‘the greatest medieval traveller’ Ibn Batuta’s only rival was Marco Polo. Arriving at India’s opposite extremity when he called at one of the Tamil ports en route from China in C1290, Marco Polo tells of trying to have a coat made. To his surprise he found that in peninsular India there were no tailors or seamstresses. In fact there was very little clothing at all, and what there was was neither cut nor sewn. A single length of cloth was simply tied or wrapped about the person, a custom which still survives in the wearing of the sari, the shawl, the lunghi and the dhoti. Bespoke apparel may not have been a Muslim innovation, but it came late and from the colder north. Indeed, in many parts of India tailoring remains a Muslim preserve.
Sailing on to Quilon in Kerala, a port which Ibn Batuta likened to Alexandria as one of the busiest in the world, Polo noted how Hindu kings were as scantily dressed as their poorest subjects; even soldiers, when riding into battle, wore next to nothing. ‘Men and women, they are all black, and go naked, all save a fine cloth worn about the middle.’ Even to one coming from the East, so many bared chests and unbodiced breasts were a novelty. Like the international set who in the 1930s would be so charmed by the topless fashions still prevailing in Bali, the last outpost of Hindu society in south-east Asia, Marco Polo drew his own questionable conclusion: ‘They look not on any sin of the flesh as a sin.’14
That Hindu society continued to challenge the austere morality of both Islam and Christendom well into the fifteenth century is clear from the account of a Russian merchant. Athanasius Nikitin, a native of Tver (Kalinin) on the Volga, reached India in C1470, so barely thirty years ahead of Vasco da Gama. He too arrived by sea, but from the Persian Gulf rather than round Africa, and like other Gulf traders he brought horses. According to Polo, the Pandyan ruler of Madurai imported two thousand horses a year ‘and so do his four brothers’. They needed so many because of fatalities caused by the climate and unsuitable feeding; even if they bred, they produced ‘nothing but wretched wry-legged weeds’. By land to the north and by sea to the south, the import of bloodstock was India’s main extravagance.
Nikitin came ashore at the port of Chaul, about fifty kilometres south of modern Bombay (Mumbai). ‘This is an Indian country,’ he announces in his scatty but endearing memoir.
People go about naked, with their heads uncovered and their breasts bare, the hair tressed into one tail, and thick bellies. They bring forth children every year and the children are many … When I go out many people follow me and stare at the white man. Women who know you willingly concede their favours for they like white men.15
Abdu-r Razzak, another fifteenth-century visitor to the Deccan, noted that only Muslims wore trousers and kaftans (long coats). Heading an embassy from Shah Rukh of Samarkand, who was Timur’s son and successor, Abdu-r Razzak found royal audiences in India a severe trial. The Zamorin of Calicut, another major port in Kerala, or the king of Vijayanagar would be coolly seated wearing little but pearls and a dazzling ensemble of gold jewellery while he, ‘in consequence of the heat and the great number of robes in which he was dressed, drowned in perspiration’.16 Whether admiring the intricate sculpture of the great Hoysala temple at Belur or ogling the courtesans of Vijayanagar, ambassador Razzak showed unusually catholic tastes. Such descriptions, though, merely point up the chasm of convention which separated Muslim and Hindu.
It was not just a question of ethnic or doctrinal differences. Two diametrically opposed codes of social behaviour had collided: one universal, inflexible, authoritarian and obligatory which upheld the equality of individual believers and theoretically promoted a strong sense of community; the other India-specific, sectional, discriminatory and hierarchical which denied equality and revelled in diversity. The social and cultural differences were as fundamental as they were obvious. To the Hindu the stiff brocade kaftan and the ankle-tight trouser must have seemed like some kind of confinement; to
the Muslim the cotton loincloth – as finely woven, according to Polo, ‘as a spider’s web’ – was disgustingly indecent. The veil and the zenana concealed Islam’s womenfolk; the copious jewellery and the waist-level lunghi merely advertised Hindu femininity.
When that grim ‘warrior tomb’ of the Tughluqs was under construction below the ramparts of Tughluqabad in Delhi, a thousand kilometres away on the shore of the Bay of Bengal at Konarak the Ganga kings of Orissa had just completed one of the most elaborate and ambitious temples ever conceived. Dedicated to the sun-god Surya, it incorporated the idea, also associated with Apollo, of the sun being drawn by a chariot. Colossal stone wheels, each intricately carved, were positioned along its flanks and a team of massive draught horses, also stone-cut, reared seawards, apparently scuffing and snorting under the strain. Even in its partially reconstructed state, the conceptual scale of this temple is overwhelming, and so too the rich variety of its sculptural ornamentation which, as usual, includes many mithuna (intertwined couples) busy making ingenious love. To Muslims, for whom any representational art is anathema, it would have been the abomination of abominations. But then to Hindus the plain profile of the Tughluq tomb with its sloping sides and martial pretensions must have seemed pathetically primitive. Their aesthetics appeared irreconcilable. Mutual incomprehension seemingly precluded accommodation, let alone acculturation.
