In assessing the impact of the conquest on north India’s subject population, one must distinguish the rhetoric of conquest from the practices of conquerors and rulers. Many contemporary chroniclers were themselves immigrants or their near-descendants, who had been traumatized by the destructive invasions of their native Central Asia by pagan Mongols. They consequently looked to Delhi as a safe haven for themselves and for Islam.61 They also trumpeted a narrative of Muslim invaders triumphantly vanquishing a mass of Indian infidels. But such rhetoric stood at odds with the practice of the Delhi sultanate’s rulers, who needed to govern a huge population accustomed to their own ways of managing affairs. Overruling objections from their more conservative Muslim advisers, they followed the policies of their Ghaznavid and Ghurid predecessors by integrating defeated Indian elites into their political systems and aligning their coinage with indigenous numismatic traditions. Although Brahmins who had been attached to the courts or temples of north India’s defeated ruling houses lost their institutional bases, the many who were not so affiliated continued their traditional vocation as local priests. As long as sultanate officials were seen as preserving the social order, Brahmins such as Pandit Yogishvara appear to have given their assent to Delhi’s rule.
The most immediate consequence of the conquest was that the larger dynastic houses of northern India, together with their courts and the temples that housed their patron deities, were either annihilated or assimilated to the new order, depending on the extent to which they resisted the new dispensation. Second, attacks by Bakhtiyar Khalaji on large monastic establishments in present-day Bihar (i.e. Odantapuri, Vikramaśila and Nalanda) hastened a long-term decline of Buddhism in eastern India, a decline that had already taken place in the rest of South Asia.62 As early as the seventh century Chinese pilgrims had noted a drop in the number of monasteries in Bihar and Bengal, the centre of India’s once-vibrant Buddhist tradition and home of the historic Buddha (d. c.400 BC).63 From the seventh to the twelfth centuries these monasteries continued to shrink in number, and became increasingly scholastic in nature, some of them accommodating thousands of monks. Whereas Indian monasteries had originally relied on the Buddhist lay population for material support, over many centuries the laity had become progressively absorbed in Hindu society, while the Buddha himself became popularly transformed into an incarnation of Vishnu. Detached, then, from lay support, the great academic monasteries of Bihar and Bengal grew increasingly dependent on royal patronage and on income from large, accumulated land holdings.64 In the early thirteenth century these remaining Buddhist institutions received a crippling blow from invading Turks, who probably viewed them simply as big landowners with no significant lay constituency. Within several hundred years they would be largely abandoned.65
Third, the Turkish conquest and the advent of the Delhi sultanate opened up new opportunities for north India’s merchant communities. The sultanate’s commercial integration with the Middle East greatly augmented international trade, thereby expanding the reach of merchants at every level, from long-distance brokers to local retailers in qasbahs. Such trade certainly existed before the Turkish conquest, as is suggested by the image of Śiva’s trident on Ghurid coins struck in Firuzkuh during the 1160s.66 But from the end of the twelfth century, when the Ghurids integrated north India, Afghanistan and Khurasan under a single political umbrella, India’s trade with the lands beyond the Khyber increased exponentially. Most importantly, with the consolidation of the Delhi sultanate in Iltutmish’s reign, silver no longer left India as plunder, as had been the case in early Ghaznavid times. Since Delhi’s rulers now had a stake in enriching their realm, they eagerly resumed normal trade with Central Asia and the Middle East, as a result of which precious metals once again flowed in from those lands. This allowed the sultanate to mint and circulate unprecedented levels of silver-based coinage, most notably under Iltutmish, who established a stable currency based on the silver tanka, to which the modern rupee can be traced.67 The increased amount of circulating cash not only facilitated the pace and volume of commercial transactions, but enabled the state to elaborate a ranked political hierarchy.
Fourth, the establishment of the Delhi sultanate opened up India to a rapid influx of Persian culture, with far-reaching consequences. By a coincidence of some note, the period of Ghaznavid and Ghurid contact with India, stretching from c.1000 to 1206, synchronized with what the British Orientalist E. G. Browne calls the ‘Persian Renaissance’. By that he refers to the flowering of Persian literary activity seen first in Central Asia and Khurasan from the tenth century, and then across the entire Persian-speaking world, reaching its zenith in eleventh-century Ghazni, in eastern Afghanistan.68 It was in tenth-century Central Asia under the patronage of the Ghaznavids’ parent dynasty, the Samanid rulers of Bukhara, that modern Persian first achieved literary status. Under them the poet Rudaki (d. 940/41), celebrated as the father of modern Persian literature, penned thousands of verses. The Samanids also patronized the historian Bal‘ami (d. 974), who adapted for the Persian-speaking world an abridged version of the Universal History of Tabari (d. 923), who had previously chronicled the early Muslim centuries in Arabic. And in the dynasty’s twilight years, the epic poet Firdausi began writing the Shah-nama (‘Book of Kings’). Completed in 1010 under Mahmud of Ghazni’s patronage, this vast literary canvas glorified pre-Islamic Iranian history and mythology, even giving Alexander the Great Persian descent. If, then, Bal‘ami had appropriated for the Persianate world the legacy of early Islam, Firdausi did the same for the legacies of both pre-Islamic Iran and Greek imperialism.69 He also limited the Shah-nama’s Arabic vocabulary to just 4 per cent or 5 per cent of the total, a move that, given the epic poem’s immense popularity for generations of Persian-speakers, contributed greatly to consolidating the modern Persian language.70 Finally, the Shah-nama helped define political and cultural ideals across the Persophone world. In India, the epic would be foundational for newly independent sultans, who commissioned royal editions of the text or reworked imitations of it for their libraries.
What enabled this Persian Renaissance was the political economy of courtly patronage. Across Central Asia and the Iranian plateau, artists and literati from the tenth century on circulated from court to court along well-travelled networks that over time expanded in reach and increased in density, giving the Persian world its institutional infrastructure. Just as these ambitious and talented men sought livelihoods from courtly patronage, rulers desired the prestige and cultural capital that patronizing gifted literary or artistic luminaries could bring to their courts. By the early eleventh century Mahmud of Ghazni, awash with silver plundered from India, was attracting to his court the brightest stars in the galaxy of Persian literati. These included, in addition to Firdausi, such celebrated poets as ‘Unsuri (d. 1040), Farrukhi Sistani (d. 1037), Manuchehri (d. 1040), and the first Persianized intellectual to engage with Indian culture in all its dimensions, the polymath al-Biruni (d. 1048). Slightly later Sana’i (d. 1131), the first of the great mystical poets in Persian literature, was patronized by one of Mahmud’s royal successors in Ghazni, Bahram Shah.71 Mahmud also brought back to Ghazni entire libraries of Persian literature plundered from his conquests in Iran. Importantly, he created the position of official court poet laureate (amir al-shu‘ara).72 Continued by his successors, this office helped secure the nexus between Persian literature and court culture.
Although the Ghaznavids’ last capital and centre of Persian patronage had shifted from eastern Afghanistan to Lahore in the later twelfth century, by the early thirteenth century Delhi was India’s pre-eminent magnet, attracting Persianate literati, artists and artisans. This resulted, in part, from Iltutmish’s defeat of Muhammad of Ghur’s former slaves in the bitter struggle over hegemony in north India. Soon thereafter, and continuing throughout the middle decades of the thirteenth century, the Mongol catastrophe in Central Asia and Khurasan drove thousands of uprooted scholars, soldiers, administrators, Sufis and artisans into the welcoming arms of the fledgling Delhi sultanate. By then a substantial canon of Persian literary works had already emerged73 that would now spread throughout South Asia, which soon became a major centre in its own right for the production, and not just the reception, of Persianate culture. Over the course of the next six centuries, India – not Iran – would become the world’s principal centre for the production of Persian dictionaries.74 The first major anthology of Persian poetry would be compiled not in Central Asia or the Iranian plateau, but in southern Punjab at the court of Muhammad of Ghur’s former slave, Nasir al-Din Qubacha.75
In its earliest encounter with South Asia and the Sanskrit world, then, Persianate learning was brought to India in the vessel of courtly patronage. This would soon change, however, as Persianate culture engaged more closely with that of Sanskrit and with India’s vernacular communities. At the same time, even if the Delhi sultanate was never the unified monolith that its chroniclers might have imagined, the state established by Aibek and consolidated by Iltutmish planted in India the idea of the sultanate as a new and powerful system of governance. This idea would prove to be contagious, as various actors sought to replicate it in regions very far from Delhi. It is that story to which we now turn.