For most of the twelfth century, the Seljuqs and Ghaznavids ruled over Khurasan and Afghanistan respectively. But this changed in the latter part of that century when the Ghaznavids’ steady decline created a power vacuum in eastern Afghanistan and the Punjab. That vacuum would be filled not by the Ghaznavids’ historic rivals, the Seljuqs, but by one of their own former client states – Ghur, a kingdom centred in the remote and rugged heart of Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush Mountains. Rising from obscurity in the mid twelfth century, chieftains of this kingdom would soon roll over the Ghaznavids on their way to defeating the dominant martial lineage of northern Rajasthan, the Chauhans, thereby paving the way for the establishment of the Delhi sultanate (1206–1526).
IMAGE Ghurids and Mamluks, 1175–1290
Whereas the Ghaznavid ruling family had originated as Turkish slaves who cultivated and patronized cosmopolitan Persian culture, the Ghurids were free, pastoral chieftains in a culturally marginalized and geographically remote backwater of Afghanistan. They had been converted to Islam only a few generations before they abruptly broke out of their mountain strongholds on to the plains of India, adhering until the late twelfth century to an obscure but zealous sect, the Karramiya, considered deviant by mainline Sunni Muslims. Ethnically they were of eastern Iranian origin, but their dialect of Persian was so distinct from that of contemporary Iran or Khurasan that the Ghaznavid sultan Mas‘ud needed the help of interpreters when he campaigned in their territory.33
The chiefs of Ghur would not remain obscure for long, however. In the mid twelfth century they burst on to the world stage, building with astonishing speed a multicultural empire that straddled both sides of the Hindu Kush range. To the east, their capture of Ghazni in 1148 marked their first toehold on the north-western rim of the subcontinent. To the west, in Khurasan, they seized from the Seljuqs the cosmopolitan city of Herat in 1175, and in 1201 the oasis cities of Merv, Tus and Nishapur. Two brothers co-governed the sultanate during its rapid expansion in the last quarter of the twelfth century. The senior partner, Sultan Ghiyath al-Din bin Sam (r. 1163–1203), ruled from the Ghurid capital of Firuzkuh in west-central Afghanistan and focused on first conquering and then governing the great Khurasani cities long associated with urban Persian culture: Herat, Nishapur, Tus and Merv. His aspirations to appropriate this culture are seen in his renovation of Herat’s congregational mosque, next to which lies his own mausoleum. A culturally rich and cosmopolitan city, Herat at this time was reported to have had 12,000 shops, 6,000 baths and 444,000 households34 – figures that, though probably inflated, would have far surpassed contemporary Paris’s estimated population of 110,000.
Ghiyath al-Din’s younger brother and junior partner in this diarchy was Shihab al-Din bin Sam, or Mu‘izz al-Din, commonly known as Muhammad of Ghur, or simply Muhammad Ghuri (r. 1173–1206). He governed Ghazni in eastern Afghanistan and for more than three decades used that city as a base for launching military and political operations in north India. These began in 1175, when he marched through the Kurram Pass to the middle Indus valley and attacked the Isma‘ili Muslim community in Multan. Three years later he advanced into Gujarat, sacking the Śiva temple at Kiradu. Up to this point, the sultan was following Mahmud of Ghazni’s policy of a century and a half earlier, raiding Indian sites for plunder in order to finance his dynasty’s imperial ambitions to the west. But his intentions soon turned to seizing and holding territory in upper India. In 1176 he captured Peshawar and secured the Khyber Pass, giving him direct access to the Indian plains from his base in Ghazni. In 1181 he attacked but failed to capture Lahore, capital of the last Ghaznavid sultan, Khusrau Malik (r. 1160–86). The next year he secured his southern flank to India by seizing the Sindi port of Debal. In 1186 he successfully took Lahore, finally extinguishing the Ghaznavid dynasty. Then in 1191 he engaged the Chauhan maharaja, Prithviraj III, at Tarain, 120 kilometres north of Delhi. Here the sultan suffered his first defeat, as well as a wound to his arm caused by an Indian spear.
Muhammad Ghuri spent the next year regrouping in Ghazni. There he prepared for a return engagement with Prithviraj, training his cavalrymen and their horses to combat the Chauhans by having them attack mock elephants made of mud and wood.35 In 1192 the two armies fought a rematch, again at Tarain, where the sultan carried the day and Prithviraj was captured.36 Over the next ten years Muhammad Ghuri’s armies attacked and annexed political centres across the whole of north India – Meerut, Hansi, Delhi, Kol (modern Aligarh), Benares, Ajmer, Bayana, Ujjain, Badaun, Kanauj, Gwalior and Kalinjar.37 Meanwhile, having evolved so quickly from a remote mountain chiefdom to a sprawling sultanate spanning north India, Afghanistan and Khurasan, the Ghurid leaders shed their former provincial identity and adopted a more cosmopolitan posture, embracing both the substance and the trappings of the Persianate bureaucratic and centralized state. This included proclaiming their sovereignty at the Friday prayer and using the imperial umbrella (chatr) and kettle-drums (naubat), both of them Persianate symbols of political authority. They also discarded the modest title of malik al-jabal, ‘king of the mountains’. Ghiyath al-Din now grandly styled himself ‘the most exalted sultan’ (sultan al-a‘zam) and Muhammad Ghuri ‘the great sultan’ (sultan al-mu‘azzam). Finally, in 1199 they embraced Sunni Islam, abandoning their earlier adherence to a provincial Islamic sect.38
What motivated the Ghurids to appear so suddenly in this manner, and what explains their remarkable success? An obvious factor was the power vacuum created by the decline of their two powerful neighbours: to the west, the Seljuq Turks of Khurasan, and to the east their former overlords, the Ghaznavids. Later Indo-Muslim chroniclers – and in their turn, British colonial historians – construed Ghurid operations in north India as motivated by the ideals of Islamic holy war (ghaza). But no contemporary inscription, coin or chronicle identified Muhammd Ghuri or other Ghurids as holy warriors.39 Moreover, the sultan’s raids in India were initially targeted not at Hindu states but at Muslim ones – Isma‘ilis in Multan and the Ghaznavids in Lahore. Yet the sultan’s armies clearly aimed at overthrowing ruling Hindu houses and annexing their territory following raids on Delhi and regional capitals in the modern districts of Ajmer, Patiala, Karnal, Aligarh and Benares – all of them seized in 1193–94. To this end, their armies destroyed Hindu temples patronized by defeated rulers, which followed the traditional Indian practice of desecrating royal temples of defeated monarchs, thereby detaching enemy rulers from the most visible sign of their former sovereignty.40 On the other hand, the construction of large congregational mosques on some of these same sites signalled an intention to replace the authority of a defeated enemy with a new tradition of governance.
The governing structure that Muhammad Ghuri established in north India suggests yet another motivation for the conquest. Although he and his brother Ghiyath al-Din shared their kingdom’s sovereignty, they governed their respective domains very differently. To the west, in newly conquered territories in Khurasan, Ghiyath al-Din planted members of the Ghurid clan as his governors. By contrast, Muhammad Ghuri excluded his clan members from administering the annexed territories in India, preferring instead Turkish slaves personally loyal to him, together with reinstated Indian rulers under the authority of those slaves. As men uprooted from their native lands and kinfolk, these slaves had entered the sultan’s household as fictive sons utterly dependent on their master-sovereign. Although Ghiyath al-Din also held slaves, they were not placed in responsible administrative or military positions. It seems likely, then, that Muhammad Ghuri’s momentous invasions in India were driven, at least in part, by a desire to carve out a semi-autonomous domain for himself, where he would not have to share rulership with collateral branches of his own clan.41 Shortly after defeating Prithviraj III Chauhan in 1192, Muhammad Ghuri ordered his slave Qutb al-Din Aibek to push further east. This resulted in the conquest of Delhi, with both that city and the old Ghaznavid capital of Lahore placed under Aibek’s governorship. The sultan’s other most trusted slaves continued to expand and consolidate Ghurid authority across the Indo-Gangetic plain from their respective bases – Taj al-Din Yildiz in the strategic zone between Ghazni and the Indus valley, Baha al-Din Tughril in Bayana (in eastern Rajasthan) and Nasir al-Din Qubacha in Sind.
Having violently annexed so much north Indian territory, Muhammad Ghuri sought to minimize the disruption of the conquest by establishing continuities with the pre-conquest order. At the local level of political authority, landed elites appear to have remained in office, since no contemporary inscriptions suggest that they had been displaced.42 At the upper level, leading political figures were also maintained in power. Whereas the Chauhan raja Prithviraj III had been captured in 1192 and soon thereafter put to death, his son was installed as a tributary king to the Ghurids, ruling over both Ajmer and the formidable hill fort of Ranthambhor. Although Prithviraj’s brother revolted shortly after the conquest, his nephew Govindaraja remained loyal to the Ghurids, for which he was rewarded with a robe of honour. The Chauhan prince reciprocated by sending Muhammad Ghuri a series of exotic golden sculptures, which were forwarded first to Ghazni and then to the Ghurids’ court in Firuzkuh in the Afghan highlands.43 By such measures the Chauhan line was allowed to continue, albeit subordinate to the Ghurid victors. Similarly, in 1196 the Ghurids redefined the Parihara raja of Gwalior as a subordinate ruler at that strategic fort. In Benares, leaders of the Gahadavala dynasty (late eleventh to mid thirteenth centuries) were reinstated in power, also as tributary kings. And in 1201–02, when the sultan’s armies stormed Anahilapataka (Patan) in Gujarat, the defeated raja of the Solanki dynasty (mid tenth to late thirteenth centuries) was restored to power, again as a tributary king to the Ghurids.44 In short, the sultan positioned himself as an overlord reigning over a circle of Indian authorities identified in the Persian sources by such royal titles as rais, ranas or thakurs. Symbolizing his new political status in India, Muhammad Ghuri seems to have sent to his subordinate Indian rulers signet rings with his name engraved in Sanskrit.45 Members of the former Indian ruling classes would thereby have been folded into a larger imperial order that adhered to Persianate ideologies and institutions. Yet, viewed from below, India’s first sultan effectively established a classical Indian mandala, or circle of sovereignty, with himself at its centre.
Circulating through many hands, the words and images stamped on Ghurid coins served as one of the few ways the new rulers could communicate their political ideology to their subjects. Significantly, the sprawling new state adopted a Janus-faced policy of projecting two different self-images to its different constituencies. Coins issued from Ghazni and circulating in the western, Muslim districts of the Ghurid empire conformed to the numismatic standards of the Islamic world. These carried no images, only Arabic calligraphy, with Muhammad Ghuri bearing the title sultan al-mu‘azzam, ‘the great sultan’. By contrast, coins issued from India followed north Indian standards of weight and metallic purity while maintaining the same iconographic programme used by the defeated Chauhan lineage. These coins depict a bull on one side and a horseman carrying a spear on the other, features that had appeared on the coins of north Indian dynasties for centuries. On the coins’ reverse side Muhammad Ghuri’s name appeared in Devanagari script, prefaced with the Sanskrit honorific title śri. Some of his coins even included an image of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, while on the reverse side the sultan’s name, again in Devanagari script, was preceded by either śri or hammira, a Sanskritized form of the Arabic amir [see Fig. 2]. Apart from projecting an image of political continuity with north India’s defeated dynasties, the new government was also aware of the conservative instincts of India’s merchant classes, which resisted new coinage types. Issuing coins with familiar metallic purity, weight, script and images was therefore vital for avoiding disruptions in commerce.46
In 1196 Muhammad Ghuri ceased directing operations in India and joined his elder brother in campaigns in Afghanistan and Khurasan, succeeding him as supreme sultan when Ghiyath al-Din died in 1203. Events beyond the Khyber, however, soon threw north India into a crisis of authority. In 1204 Muhammad Ghuri suffered a crushing military defeat at the hands of Turkish rivals in Khurasan, as a result of which Ghurid power there, and then in Afghanistan itself, all but vanished. In 1206 the sultan was assassinated while offering evening prayers. With the Ghurid state now in disarray, his senior slaves in India, cut adrift from Firuzkuh after their master’s death, asserted separate claims to sovereign authority. Yet, as former slaves of Muhammad Ghuri with no blood connection with the Ghurid dynastic house, none of them had any legal right to rule over the others. Moreover, during the last ten years of Muhammad Ghuri’s reign while he was absent from India, his slaves had conducted military campaigns without their master’s direct supervision. In doing so, they acquired a host of local clients and dependants, while becoming fiercely competitive with each other.
Although the launching of the Delhi sultanate as a unified state is customarily dated from 1206, when Muhammad Ghuri died, what actually occurred in that year was the outbreak of protracted civil wars among the late sultan’s principal slave commanders. Aibek, Tughril, Qubacha and Yildiz all became legally manumitted on their master’s death; moreover, their mutual rivalries, dormant as long as their master was alive, now broke out into the open. Nobody at the time could have predicted that Delhi, under Aibek, would ultimately emerge as north India’s pre-eminent capital, or that the Delhi sultanate would become India’s pre-eminent state. Even when Aibek died in 1210, north India remained fragmented by these civil wars: Sind and Multan were held by Qubacha, Lahore by Yildiz and Bengal by the political descendants of its conqueror, Bakhtiyar Khalaji.47 Especially intense was the struggle between Qubacha and Yildiz over Multan and Lahore, and, after 1216, between Qubacha and the rulers in Delhi for control of the whole of north India. Indeed, between 1206 and 1228 an outside observer might well have concluded that the flourishing court of Nasir al-Din Qubacha at Uch, and not that at Delhi, would most likely become the prime centre of Turkish power in north India. During his long reign, Qubacha sought to create an Indus valley–Arabian Sea maritime circuit, centred on his court at Uch. His port of Mansura, in the Indus delta, was connected commercially with the Gujarati ports of Diu, Broach and Cambay, and with Arabian ports in Aden and Muscat, while to the north he maintained overland commercial ties with Lahore and Kabul. And, like his rivals and fellow slaves, Qubacha adorned his court with the brightest luminaries he could find: Sufi shaikhs, artisans of all sorts and historians commissioned to place his reign in larger geographical and chronological frameworks.48
In Delhi itself, meanwhile, just four years after the succession crisis precipitated by Muhammad Ghuri’s death, another one broke out when Aibek was killed in a freak polo accident. If the crisis of 1206 had arisen over which one of Sultan Muhammad Ghuri’s slave commanders would succeed their master, that of 1210 centred on whether Aibek would be succeeded by his natural son or by one of his own slaves. The deeper issue was the very nature of kingship in north India. Would the throne of Delhi follow the Persian model of hereditary monarchy, in which a single royal family was sovereign, generation after generation? Or would it follow the early Ghaznavid tradition, in which kingship devolved to a sovereign’s slave, and then to the slave of that slave? And if the latter, then which of the master’s slaves would inherit the master’s patrimony?