In Delhi, these issues were settled when Aibek’s favourite slave, Iltutmish, defeated both his fellow slave cohorts and his former master’s son, Aram Shah, after which he claimed the throne. However, a contradiction lies at the heart of Iltutmish’s momentous reign, which lasted from 1210 to 1236. Though himself a slave – indeed, a slave of a slave – Iltutmish assiduously endeavoured to establish the Delhi sultanate as a hereditary monarchy, endowed with all the trappings of Persian imperial symbolism and rituals. This effort began immediately on the death of Aibek, whose own son, Aram Shah, had staked a claim to the throne. But Iltutmish confronted and defeated the party of Turks loyal to Aram Shah, who died in the conflict. Then, in an attempt to defuse the bad press surrounding his usurpation of power and his killing of Aibek’s son, Iltutmish married Aibek’s daughter. This made him the son-in-law of his deceased master – not quite the same as a direct descendant of Aibek, but a close approximation thereof.49
Although doubts about the legality of Iltutmish’s rise to power lingered for at least another century, in the short run a string of military victories over his rivals in north India quelled such grumbling. Five years after Aibek’s death a bitter dispute broke out between Iltutmish and Yildiz over who had the better claim to royal authority. Not only had Yildiz been a favourite slave of Sultan Muhammad Ghuri, but that sultan had manumitted him and given him the throne of Ghazni and was even said to have adopted him as his son. So in 1215, when he marched from his base in Lahore down to Delhi to challenge Iltutmish, Yildiz confronted the latter with the words, ‘You know that I am fitter than you to rule the kingdom of Hindustan … for I am in the position of a son to the late king … I am as good as a descendant of the kings of Iran … As for you, you are but a slave of the slaves of the king.’ To which Iltutmish retorted:
O reputed king and son of kings. You know that today the dominion of the world is enjoyed by him who possesses greater strength. The principle of hereditary succession is now extinct; long ago Destiny abolished the custom … You cannot take the world through inheritance and boasting; you can take it only by wielding the sword in battle.50
In their own battle, Yildiz was defeated and killed. In 1217 Iltutmish then seized Lahore from Qubacha, and in 1225 Bengal from its independent Khalaji rulers. In 1226 he reconquered from recalcitrant Indian rajas the fortress of Ranthambhor, claimed at the time to be so impregnable as to have defied attacks by some seventy kings through the ages. Finally, a year later he defeated and killed Qubacha, bringing both Sind and the southern Punjab under his control. In sum, by 1227 Iltutmish had brought the northern and southern Punjab, Sind, Bengal and eastern Rajasthan under Delhi’s sway.
In addition to these stunning military victories, three developments originating beyond India further contributed to Iltutmish’s consolidation of power, and to the Delhi sultanate’s growing prestige and authority. First, in 1215 Ghurid influence in Afghanistan, already greatly diminished for nearly a decade, was altogether extinguished by a rival Central Asian sultanate, that of Khwarazm (1077–1231). Thus ended the novel experiment of a wider, Perso-Indian empire that, based in the remote mountain fastness of central Afghanistan, had briefly straddled the Iranian plateau and north India. With the Ghurids eliminated from the political scene, the fiction of north India’s slave sultanates being part of a larger, Afghan-based empire had ended; Iltutmish now governed his kingdom from within India, as an Indian sovereign. An autonomous Delhi sultanate had become realized.
Second, during the years 1219–21 Genghis Khan, the founder of the Mongol empire in eastern Asia, burst into western Asia. Offended by the insolent behaviour of the same ruler of Khwarazm who a few years earlier had annihilated the Ghurids, the Mongol leader personally marched across Asia to punish the impudent monarch. In the course of this expedition, Mongol cavalry inflicted fire and fury throughout Central Asia and Khurasan, driving many thousands of terrified town-dwellers and semi-nomadic peoples into India, where they sought and found refuge. It was a propitious moment both for them and for Iltutmish, who needed men skilled in civil and military affairs in order to govern his fledgling kingdom. The influx of a host of refugees in search of a stable state with a successful and generous Muslim ruler boosted the sultan’s claims to being precisely that sort of sovereign. For Iltutmish and the youthful Delhi sultanate, then, the Mongol holocaust in Central Asia proved a timely boon, unlike the catastrophe it represented for millions in Asia and the Middle East.
And third, in 1229 the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, still technically the supreme sovereign over the various sultanates of the eastern Islamic world, sent a robe of investiture to Iltutmish, confirming his position as India’s only legitimate Muslim monarch. This deed of recognition carried much symbolic weight for the throngs of refugees who had fled from the pagan Mongols and sought a secure state ruled by a Muslim. The period 1215–29, then, marked the emergence of the Delhi sultanate as the dominant power in north India. At the same time, Delhi itself swelled to become one of the world’s major cities. A contemporary traveller estimated that it contained twenty-one neighbourhoods, gardens stretching some twenty kilometres, 1,000 madrasas, seventy hospitals, 2,000 inns, extensive bazaars, numerous public baths and reservoirs.51 The city also claimed one of the most stunning minarets on earth – the Qutb Minar, begun by Aibek around 1195.
What did the contours of the Delhi sultanate’s society in the thirteenth century look like? Contemporary Persian chronicles present a simple picture of a monolithic ruling class of ‘Muslims’ superimposed over an equally monolithic subject class of ‘Hindus’. But a closer reading of these same sources, together with Sanskrit ones and material culture, suggests a more textured picture. First, the ruling class was far from monolithic. The ethnicity of Turkish slaves, the earliest generation of whom dated to the Ghurid invasions of India, survived well into the thirteenth century. For a time, even Persian-speaking secretaries had to master Turkish in order to function.52 There persisted, moreover, deep cultural tensions between native Persian-speakers – whether from Iran, Khurasan or Central Asia – and ethnic Turks. Nizam al-Din Auliya (d. 1325), Delhi’s renowned Sufi shaikh, characterized Turks as rude, bellicose and vain, reflecting a view, prevalent among many native Persians of the day, that Turks were uncultured boors who had illegitimately monopolized power and privilege.53 Such animosities were amplified by the asymmetrical power relations between ethnic Turks and Persians, often depicted in the literature as ‘men of the sword’ and ‘men of the pen’ respectively. The latter had inherited a deep attachment to the nobility of blood and hereditary authority, whether in the form of landed aristocracies or dynastic kingship. And yet, as writers employed in the sultanate’s secretarial establishment, Persians found themselves having to serve powerful Turkish commanders who, as slaves, were anything but high-born. Legally, in fact, they were only commodities.
Moreover, not all ethnic Turks were military slaves, as streams of free-born Turks also flowed into India following repeated Mongol devastations of their Central Asian homelands. Nor were all the commanders, whether slave or free-born, ethnic Turks. Some had come from the interior of Iran, others from the oasis towns of Khurasan and Central Asia. And others were Khalaji tribesmen, humble pastoralists from southern Afghanistan. We also hear of remnants of north India’s old military aristocracy – men described as thakurs and ranas – who served in the sultanate’s armed forces, and of other Indians promoted even to the rank of senior slaves of the sultan. Muslims of the early sultanate were also divided along religious lines. While patronizing clerics of both the Shafi‘i and Hanafi legal traditions, Iltutmish marginalized charismatic Sufi shaikhs whose popularity among commoners might have posed a threat to the court’s authority. This was because many rural Muslims felt a closer bond to Sufi shaikhs who had no formal connection with the court than they did to state-appointed clerics who held high offices, much less to ethnically alien slave commanders posted in their regions.54
In addition, Sultan Iltutmish, for all his rhetoric of being India’s sole legitimate Muslim ruler, continued to issue coins with the old bull-and-horseman motif and a Sanskritized form of his name and title: Suratana Śri Samsadina, the latter referring to his given name, Shams al-Din. He also enlarged Delhi’s Qutb mosque by three times in order to accommodate the many immigrants from beyond the Khyber who had flocked to Delhi during his reign. And he added three storeys to the city’s famous minaret, the Qutb Minar. Notably, he placed a seven-metre iron pillar in the centre of the mosque’s oldest courtyard, on a direct axis with its main prayer chamber. Originally installed in a Vishnu temple to announce the military victories of a fourth- or fifth-century Indian king, the pillar was now associated with Iltutmish and his own victories. In transplanting the pillar in this way, the sultan broke with Islamic architectural conventions while conforming to Indian political traditions. For in 1164, within living memory of Iltutmish’s installation of the Vishnu pillar in Delhi’s great mosque, Vigraharaja IV Chauhan (r. 1150–64) recorded his own conquests on the same stone pillar on which the emperor Ashoka had published an edict back in the third century BC.55
Iltutmish’s death in 1236 plunged the sultanate into another crisis of governance. The issue, again, was whether the state would continue to be run by slaves (or former slaves), as had been the case in the days of Muhammad Ghuri, Aibek and Iltutmish himself, or whether it would become a hereditary monarchy on the Persian model, with Iltutmish the dynastic founder. The sultan clearly intended the latter outcome, and in fact four of his children did succeed to the throne. However, whereas most of Iltutmish’s senior slaves remained loyal to the late sultan’s offspring owing to their long association with the court, the loyalty of his junior slaves – younger men more recently recruited for royal service – was more dubious. Several months after Iltutmish’s eldest son, Rukn al-Din, acceded to the throne, junior slaves deposed him and replaced him with his sister, Raziyya. Much admired by modern historians as the only Indian woman to rule over Delhi until Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (d. 1984), Sultana Raziyya (r. 1236–40), despite adopting the dress and persona of a male, failed to overcome the same opposition that her elder brother had faced. In 1240 her father’s junior slaves deposed and replaced her with another brother, Bahram Shah, who lasted several years before being replaced by Rukn al-Din’s son, ‘Ala al-Din Mas‘ud Shah. He, too, reigned two years before being replaced in 1246 by yet another of Iltutmish’s sons, Nasir al-Din Mahmud Shah (r. 1246–66). By this time most of Iltutmish’s senior slaves had died off, and a new cohort of slaves had emerged who were loyal only to their own patrons, whether slave or free, and not necessarily to the family of Iltutmish.56
As a mode of governance, then, the institution of hereditary monarchy, launched so hopefully by Iltutmish, fared little better than had that of elite slavery. In fact, what preserved Sultan Nasir al-Din Mahmud on the throne for two decades was not his strength of character, but dissensions among the remaining corps of military slaves and, more importantly, the growing influence of one exceptionally powerful slave, Ulugh Khan. A Central Asian Turk who had been purchased and brought to India towards the end of Iltutmish’s reign, Ulugh Khan would eventually rise to the throne himself as Sultan Ghiyath al-Din Balban. But first, during the twenty years of Nasir al-Din’s reign, he served as the sultan’s deputy, or ‘viceroy’ (na’ib), the virtual power behind the throne.57 In order to enhance his personal clout, Ulugh Khan recruited his own corps of Turkish slaves, supplemented by a large body of free Afghans. This further complicated an already socially complex ruling class, as high-born Persian-speaking ‘men-of-the-pen’ tended to stereotype Afghans as fierce, uncultured brutes, much as they had earlier stereotyped ethnic Turks. Yet Ulugh Khan’s policy of creating a personal support base composed of uprooted outsiders was hardly unique in the history of the Delhi sultanate. Empowering people of humble origins and placing them in contexts alien to their social background ensured their dependence on their masters. As a Central Asian Turk who himself had experienced the life of a deracinated outsider in the court of Delhi, Ulugh Khan clearly understood the merits of this strategy.
In 1266 Nasir al-Din died, and Ulugh Khan, who may well have had a hand in his master’s demise, rose to power as Sultan Balban (r. 1266–87). Many themes from Iltutmish’s reign were now repeated: a high-ranking slave would manoeuvre himself into a position to seize supreme power; more Mongol invasions would drive streams of traumatized and uprooted Khurasani and Central Asian refugees into India; such invasions would justify keeping the state on a nearly permanent war footing; and Sultan Balban, once secure on the throne in 1266, would endeavour to shake off his slave identity and establish a dynasty. But in this he proved no more successful than his former master. His first son and chosen successor predeceased the sultan by several years, having died fighting the Mongols. Balban then selected as his successor his second son, Bughra Khan, whom he had appointed governor of Bengal. But on the sultan’s demise in 1287, Bughra Khan preferred to rule that distant and ever-rebellious province as an independent king rather than involve himself in Delhi’s affairs. In the end, Balban was succeeded by Bughra Khan’s son and grandson, but the two together lasted only three years before a clan of outsiders, the Khalajis, swept aside the short-lived house of Balban and established a new dynasty that would rule the sultanate from 1290 to 1320.
Balban’s reign saw the perennial tension between elite slavery and hereditary monarchy come to a head. He continued to recruit elite slaves, whom he appointed as governors and military commanders, but this only perpetuated an institution that he otherwise sought to replace by grooming his sons to succeed him. Even though he preferred to have his own bloodline continue in royal succession, he could not relinquish the strategic advantage of having a body of kinless outsiders wholly dependent upon his patronage. But in the end, it was the slave institution that ultimately disappeared, and here, too, Balban’s actions played a role. With the dying-off of the senior slaves who, like himself, had formerly served Iltutmish, Balban allowed the children of those slaves to inherit the offices of their fathers. They did so, moreover, as free men. Despite their ‘low’ social origins, some even took on the pretensions of high-born aristocrats. But by this time the core rationale of the slave system had become irredeemably eroded. By default, after Balban’s reign the Delhi sultanate would be ruled as a hereditary monarchy under a succession of dynastic houses.
Balban’s most lasting legacy was to extend the sultanate’s authority not only to urban centres beyond Delhi, but into the north Indian countryside too. As regional commanders sought to consolidate their individual power bases in the provinces – either as agents of Delhi’s authority, or as independent actors seeking protection from that authority – they inevitably made alliances with local chieftains and other remnants of India’s old ruling aristocracy, including the latter’s dependants. This had the effect of simultaneously indigenizing and deepening the roots of Delhi’s authority in rural areas. Balban also enlisted woodcutters to accompany his military campaigns, in order to clear the thick forests between the Jamuna and the Ganges. In this he aimed both to remove the physical cover of suspected rebels and to open up new lands for arable agriculture, which in turn expanded the agrarian economy and the state’s revenue base. Finally, the sultan recruited Afghans from beyond the Khyber and resettled them on the newly reclaimed forest lands. These policies encouraged the emergence of rural networks of commercial exchange that linked the countryside more tightly with urban centres. Such market towns, or qasbahs, would provide the true foundation of the sultanate, firmly rooting it in India’s economy, society and culture. By the early fourteenth century, the areas most directly affected by Balban’s forest-clearing operations had become so prosperous that their revenues were reserved for the state, and not entrusted to nobles.58
Further deepening the sultanate’s moral authority were the activities of Sufi shaikhs who comprised the informal ranks of Muslim piety in thirteenth-century north India. Many such men had joined the tide of migrants who, dislodged from their homelands in Khurasan or Central Asia, arrived in India from the 1220s on. By mid-century, mystical fraternities centred on the lodges of charismatic shaikhs had begun to appear throughout north India, especially in areas distant from Delhi. Among the more illustrious names were Jalal al-Din Tabrizi (d. 1244/5) in Bengal, Farid al-Din Ganj-i Shakar (d. 1265) in the western Punjab, Baha al-Haq Zakaria (d. 1267) in the southern Punjab and Khwaja Gurg (d. 1301) in eastern Uttar Pradesh. Such figures espoused open disdain for the glitter and corruption of this world, which they viewed as a moral disaster zone to be transcended by arduous austerities and mystical practices. Furthermore, members of Delhi’s court and conservative clerics harboured suspicions about men who claimed esoteric knowledge and a special relationship with God, both of which were denied to ordinary humans. Conflicting political positions also divided the court and such Sufis. Despite their possession of worldly might, sultans could only envy the popularity of charismatic shaikhs who were widely believed to possess miraculous powers such as the ability to predict the future, cure the sick or provide physical protection to travellers in certain regions. Especially after 1258, when Mongol troops razed Baghdad and abolished the Abbasid caliphate, such shaikhs seemed to offer religious direction in a world that otherwise lacked a moral centre. In effect, they provided a spiritual counterpart to the political safe haven that the Delhi sultanate had given uprooted refugees arriving from beyond the Khyber.
At the centre of power in Delhi, meanwhile, conservative thinkers such as Ziya al-Din Barani (d. c.1357) complained that Hindus of that city enjoyed a social status as high as or even higher than Muslims:
And in their Capital [Delhi], Muslim kings not only allow but are pleased with the fact that infidels, polytheists, idol-worshippers and cow-dung [sargin] worshippers build houses like palaces, wear clothes of brocade and ride Arab horses caparisoned with gold and silver ornaments … They take Musalmans into their service and make them run before their horses; the poor Musalmans beg of them at their doors; and in the capital of Islam … they are called rais [great rulers], ranas [minor rulers], thakurs [warriors], sahas [bankers], mehtas [clerks], and pandits [priests].
He then considered non-Muslim religious practices under sultanate rule:
In their capital [Delhi] and in the cities of the Musalmans the customs of infidelity are openly practiced, idols are publicly worshipped … they also adorn their idols and celebrate their rejoicings during their festivals with the beat of drums and dhols [a two-sided drum] and with singing and dancing. By merely paying a few tankas and the poll-tax [jizya] they are able to continue the traditions of infidelity59
Barani’s pointed remarks allow several inferences. First, under the sultanate’s rule high-status Indians continued to enjoy their traditional social privileges, and Hindu religious practices flourished. Second, conservative members of Delhi’s Muslim intelligentsia were appalled at such things. And third, by adopting a pragmatic live-and-let-live policy regarding religious pluralism, rulers prioritized socio-political stability over narrowly interpreted religious dictates. That is to say, sultans ignored the rantings of conservative intellectuals such as Barani.
It is more difficult to know how the sultanate’s non-Muslim subjects assessed their rulers and their claims to legitimate authority. But clues can be found in contemporary inscriptions that were not patronized by the sultanate, or even known to its officers. A striking example is in Sanskrit and is dated 1276, in the middle of Balban’s reign, recording the construction of a well in Palam, not far from Delhi. The state took no part in authorizing or financing the well, which had been patronized by a Hindu landholder, Thakur Udadhara, to benefit local villagers and to accumulate religious merit for himself. He and the inscription’s Brahmin author, Pandit Yogishvara, therefore had no discernible motive for flattering ruling authorities. In any event, since the inscription was composed in Sanskrit and not in the court language of Persian, it was presumably not intended to be read by government officials. It is therefore likely that its references to ruling authorities reflected the candid views of the patron and the village community for which the well had been built.
The text conformed to a format found in inscriptions sponsored by Hindu courts throughout India. Pandit Yogishvara preceded the particulars regarding the well with a flowery panegyric to the reigning monarch identical to those that Brahmins had for centuries been using for their Hindu royal patrons. He mentions not only the reigning sovereign, Sultan Balban, but the entire line of rulers, both Turkish and Indian, who had reigned over the Delhi region in the preceding several centuries:
Salutation to Ganapati. Om. Salutation to Śiva …
The land of Hariyanaka [upper India] was first enjoyed by the Tomaras and then by the Cauhanas. It is now ruled by the Shaka [‘Scythian’, or Central Asian] kings. First came Shahabadina [Shihab al-Din (i.e. Muhammad) Ghuri], then Khudavadina [Qutb al-Din Aibek], master of the earth …
In his [Sultan Balban’s] kingdom, abounding in benign rule, extending from Gauda [Bengal] to Gajjana [Ghazni], from the Dravida region [south India] and from the Setubandha [to the north] where the entire region was filled with inner content, the earth bore vernal floral charms produced by the rays of the innumerable precious stones and corals which dropped on it from the crowns of the bent heads of the rulers who came from every direction for his service. He, whose legions daily traversed for a bath the earth both eastward to the confluence of the Ganges with the [Bay of Bengal] and westward to the confluence of the Indus with the sea … The dust raised by the hooves of whose cavalry marching ahead of his army stops the enemies in front.
He, the central gem in the pearl necklace of the seven-sea-girt earth, Nayaka Śri Hammira Gayasidina [Ghiyath al-Din Balban], the king and the emperor reigns supreme … When he went forth on a military expedition, the Gaudas [Bengalis] abdicated their glory; the Andhras through fear sought the shelter of holes, the Keralas forsook their pleasures; the Karnatas hid themselves in caves; the Maharashtras gave up their places; the Gurjjaras resigned their vigour …
The earth being now supported by this sovereign, Śesha, altogether forsaking his duty of supporting the weight of the globe, has betaken himself to the great bed of Vishnu; and Vishnu himself, for the sake of protection, taking Lakshmi on his breast, and relinquishing all worries, sleeps in peace on the ocean of milk.60
By 1276, Hindu subjects living near Delhi had evidently integrated the sultanate’s ruling authority into their historical memory and their understanding of political legitimacy. As masters of north India, the Tomara dynasty (early eleventh century to 1152) was followed by the Chauhans (late tenth century to 1192), who were seamlessly followed by the Turks (Scythians), namely Muhammad Ghuri, Aibek and their successors. Balban himself is entitled ‘Nayaka Śri Hammira’ – nayaka being Sanskrit for a powerful lord. The author sees no sharp break, much less a civilizational rupture, between Indian and Turkish rule. One dynasty simply succeeds another, as Balban’s reign is smoothly accommodated within conventional Sanskrit tropes of powerful and worthy rulers. The author’s hyperbole regarding the sultan’s success in smashing his rivals could have been applied to any number of Indian monarchs of that day or earlier, while the sultan’s sovereign domain is generously (though inaccurately) said to have extended from Bengal to eastern Afghanistan, and deep into south India. Most poignant is the statement that under Balban’s benign rule India enjoyed such stability and contentment that even Vishnu – the great god who appears periodically in various incarnations to rescue human affairs in times of distress – could sleep peacefully on an ocean of milk, without a care in the world.
The inscription’s bombastic rhetoric praising Sultan Balban takes us full-circle to the beginning of this chapter, which discussed Rajendra Chola’s 1022 attack on Bengal. Two and a half centuries before Pandit Yogishvara spoke of ‘the crowns of the bent heads of the rulers who came from every direction for his service’ when referring to Balban, a Tamil poet had described Rajendra’s victories in terms of ‘his lotus feet [all along] being worshipped by the kings of high birth who had been subdued [by him].’ Rhetorically, the two statements are virtually interchangeable. Their only notable difference is that, whereas the Tamil poet was a paid servant of the Chola court, Pandit Yogishvara had no official connection with the Delhi sultanate. From this ‘worm’s-eye’ perspective of Delhi’s ruling class, it meant nothing that the sultan was Muslim and Yogishvara a Hindu; what mattered was that the people who produced this text viewed their rulers in Delhi as legitimate and protective.
From the vantage point of a more distant, bird’s-eye perspective, however, the inscription suggests how far the Persian and the Sanskrit worlds had already begun to overlap and even penetrate each other. Even though Balban’s chroniclers might clothe his regime in a Persianate discourse of worldly power or in an Islamic one of pious rectitude, unbeknownst to the court, and located only twelve kilometres from his palace, the sultan and his regime were perceived – literally inscribed – within a Sanskrit discourse of worldly power and moral authority.