Two outstanding themes of fourteenth-century India were the expansion and contraction of the Delhi sultanate’s political frontiers and, more quietly, the diffusion of institutions, norms and tastes informed by the circulation of Persian texts. The two processes were not unrelated. The spread of Persianate culture accompanied the establishment of new urban centres, which in turn followed the sultanate’s annexation of new territories.
Sizeable settlements to the south and east of Delhi began to appear in the second half of the thirteenth century after Sultan Balban’s punitive raids against rebels in those regions. In the course of these raids, Balban cleared the jungles of present-day Rohilkhand, enlarging the agrarian base that could support both migrants from north India and refugees arriving from beyond the Khyber Pass displaced by Mongol invasions. In the more arid Punjab to the west of Delhi, it was a technological innovation that helped increase agricultural production. Already by the twelfth century, and possibly earlier, the Punjab had seen the introduction of the Persian wheel, a mechanical device for raising water from open wells. Powered by draught animals and using wheels, gears, a crankshaft and buckets, the device could raise water from depths of ten to twenty metres, distributing it over the land through troughs and channels. The technology considerably expanded the production of the Punjab’s primary grain crop, wheat, which in turn sustained growing urban settlements in Delhi’s western and southern hinterlands.
Called qasbahs in the original sources, settlements established in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century north India were typically walled towns garrisoned by troops sent out from Delhi and placed under the control of trusted governors. Such a site was Chanderi, in present-day northern Madhya Pradesh. Established in the fourteenth century and defended by several hundred soldiers supported by light cavalry, this walled and fortified town guarded the routes from Delhi leading south to Gujarat and the Deccan.13 In nearby Gwalior, another such frontier qasbah, some 600 cavalry were deployed.14 Among the most strategically significant of such frontier towns was Kara. Located at the intersection of both overland and riverine routes in the central Ganges valley, this town served as a staging point for operations directed east into the Bengal delta or south into central India. It was also a major gathering point for tribute in the form of elephants sent to Delhi from Bengal or Orissa.15
The sultanate’s authority beyond Delhi was further deepened by the iqta‘ institution. Although intended to decentralize government by allowing iqta‘dars to collect their salaries from their land assignments, thereby sparing central authorities from sending cash salaries across dangerous roads to reach provincial officers, the practice had a more subtle consequence. Whereas *iqta‘*s in older regions near Delhi were generally given to trusted men from families with generations of service to the sultanate, those on the political frontier were often awarded to Indian officials who had served defeated regimes. Politically and culturally, then, the institution helped indigenize the sultanate, since it assimilated local elites as petty iqta‘dars. This not only accommodated Indians to a ruling power whose historical roots lay beyond the Khyber Pass: it also exposed them to sensibilities carried by the circulation of Persian texts at the local, qasbah level. The influx of Persianized Turks from Central Asia and the Iranian plateau further contributed to the diffusion of Persianate culture and the sultanate’s authority. These included literati, engineers, artisans of all sorts, soldiers and administrators already familiar with Persianate governance. The arrival of such immigrants proved a boon for Delhi’s rulers, who made every effort to welcome them, as is suggested by the lavish gifts with which Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq welcomed Ibn Battuta to his court.
Finally, in nearly every provincial centre of the sultanate there resided a Sufi shaikh who belonged to one or another spiritual order, each order cultivating a distinctive regimen of spiritual techniques or exercises aimed at attaining a heightened awareness of the divine presence. Literature composed by these provincial shaikhs suggests the presence of small, distant and sometimes beleaguered rural communities of Muslims engaged in small-town life or farming.16 Yet shaikhs residing in such qasbahs were very much connected to metropolitan Delhi. Just as the sultanate’s central administration sent governors to provincial towns, so too did prominent Sufis in Delhi send their leading disciples; there they were often patronized by those same governors. In this way, networks of Sufi shaikhs overlapped those of the sultanate’s government.
In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, during the Delhi sultanate’s most expansive phase, the capital’s leading Sufi was Shaikh Nizam al-Din Auliya, a renowned and highly revered figure whose tomb-shrine in Delhi continues to be a central focus for Sufi practices today. His followers included not only adherents of the Chishti path of spiritual discipline, as supervised by the shaikh himself, but also the cream of Delhi’s intellectual elite. His khanaqah – a Sufi’s residence and locus of teaching – thus emerged as a major hub from which his disciples were sent to the sultanate’s far-flung provinces. During Qutb al-Din Mubarak Khalaji’s reign, for example, the shaikh sent his disciple Maulana Yusuf down to Chanderi; subsequently, the soldiers garrisoned there became loyal followers of Yusuf’s Sufi master in Delhi.17 Nizam al-Din also extended Chishti networks by sending his own cloaks (khirqas) to designated followers living in the frontier town of Kara, further down the Ganges valley. Having been worn by the shaikh himself, a khirqa conveyed to its recipient the authority, prestige and charisma of a Sufi master. The passing of such robes from shaikhs to disciples thereby strengthened spiritual networks across space and spiritual lineages across time.
Among Nizam al-Din Auliya’s most prominent disciples were the two principal Persian poets in India at the time, Amir Hasan and Amir Khusrau, and the leading historian, Ziya al-Din Barani. As writers whose works enjoyed wide circulation, the three men were in effect publicists for Shaikh Nizam al-Din and his order and, indirectly, for the policies and ideology of the sultanate that patronized them. This implicit alliance between Sufis and the sultanate in the fourteenth century contrasts with the situation prior to Balban’s reign (1266–87), when the court in Delhi marginalized or even coerced Sufi shaikhs and their institutions. The court’s informal affiliation with the Chishti order, in particular, had a further effect of indigenizing the sultanate since the major shrines of that order were all located within India, unlike the foundational shrines of most other orders in India, which were located in Central Asia or the Middle East. This made India itself the spiritual home of Chishti Sufism. Seeking to establish their legitimacy both as Muslims and as Indians, Delhi’s rulers consequently turned to prominent Chishti shaikhs for blessings and support.
The charismatic authority of eminent Sufi shaikhs, however, was a double-edged sword. Just as Sufis could help transmit Delhi’s political authority to its far-flung provinces, Sufis patronized by provincial authorities could be enlisted to bless their patrons’ rebellions against Delhi. Such revolts, after all, were integral to the nature of a sultanate, since any powerful governor or iqta‘dar could, under the right circumstances, turn his province or land assignment into the nucleus of a new sultanate. Everybody knew that India’s first sultanate, the Ghaznavids, had been launched in eastern Afghanistan by a powerful iqta‘dar of the Samanid state who had declared his independence from his overlord in Bukhara. It was now India’s turn to experience such splintering, notably in Bengal and the Deccan.