Although the Delhi sultanate was still in its ascendency of wealth and power at the turn of the fourteenth century, by mid-century the state was on the wane. On nearly all its frontiers Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq’s patchwork empire experienced rebellions, most dramatically in Gujarat. Topographically, this region is far less uniform than the Bengal delta, the valley of Kashmir, or even the Deccan plateau. Gujarat’s long coastline jutting into the Arabian Sea for centuries exposed the region to outsiders who came as invaders, settlers and, especially, merchants. The latter integrated Gujarat with wider Indian Ocean networks of trade, making it one of the most globalized regions in the world – in contrast to the nearly hermetically sealed Kashmir. Unlike Gujarat’s coastal areas, the hinterland of the Saurashtra peninsula is an arid and hilly mix of desert and scrubland, and hence a mainly pastoral region. Historically, nomadic herding communities moved in from Rajasthan to the north-east and from Sind to the north-west. Eastern Gujarat features a fertile north–south corridor of rich farmland, capable of producing surplus food and cash crops, especially cotton. These geographical differences engendered distinctive occupational specialists: cosmopolitan merchants along the coasts, pastoral nomads in Saurashtra, and grain-producing agriculturalists in the eastern corridor. Yet despite their differences, Gujarat’s subregions were historically interdependent. Rulers in the eastern corridor, for example, took measures to enhance region-wide security with a view to promoting coastal trade.50
From the mid tenth to the mid thirteenth centuries, kings of the Solanki dynasty ruled over most of the region from their capital, Anahilapataka, in eastern Gujarat. Theirs was a period of unprecedented prosperity for the many seaports that dotted the coastline along Saurashtra and both sides of the Gulf of Cambay. Already in 916 the port of Chaul, just south of modern Mumbai, had a community of 10,000 people descended from mixed marriages of Arab merchants and local women.51 As early as 971, a congregational mosque was built to accommodate the many foreign merchants who had taken up residence in the great commercial entrepôt of Cambay.52 The cosmopolitan nature of coastal Gujarat is captured in a thirteenth-century inscription at Veraval, the site of the temple of Somnath and one of the more important pilgrimage centres in western India. As noted in the preceding chapter, contemporary Sanskrit inscriptions convey a business-as-usual atmosphere at this commercially important site, notwithstanding Mahmud of Ghazni’s plundering the temple in 1026. More than two centuries later, in 1264, a Sanskrit and Arabic bilingual inscription at the same site records the construction of a mosque patronized by an Iranian merchant from the Persian Gulf named Nur al-Din Firuz. The Arabic text refers to the deity worshipped in the mosque as Allah, and describes Nur al-Din as ‘the king [sultan] of sea-men, the king of the kings of traders’ and ‘the sun of Islam and the Muslims’. By contrast, the Sanskrit text identifies the deity worshiped in the mosque as Viśvanatha (‘lord of the universe’), Śunyarupa (‘one whose form is of the void’) and Viśvarupa (‘having various forms’). It identifies the prophet of Islam as a bodhaka – that is, ‘preceptor’, ‘elder’ or ‘wise man’, and the mosque’s patron, Nur al-Din Firuz, as a dharma-bhandaya, or ‘supporter of dharma’ – that is, cosmic/social order as understood in classical Indian thought.53
While the inscription’s Arabic text reflects the perspective of the mosque’s Muslim patron, its Sanskrit counterpart reveals that of the proximate Hindu population, which identified the supreme deity of Islam with Viśvanatha, the prophet of Islam with an Indian bodhaka, and Nur al-Din Firuz with a ‘supporter of dharma’. Informing these theological representations was the context in which the inscription appeared. In order to build the mosque, Nur al-Din needed the approval of the temple’s trustees, who apparently controlled the land he acquired. Since merchants and customs houses paid taxes to the temple, both the temple priests and the town’s governing classes would have approved the project. They all had a shared interest in attracting long-distance merchants such as Nur al-Din to trade, settle and worship in the town. The particulars of Hindu and Muslim theology were accordingly adjusted to ensure that cash kept moving and that all would profit.
Of course, wealthy commercial or pilgrimage centres such as Veraval also attracted outside invaders. In 1216, the Solanki overlords of Somnath had to fortify the temple to protect it from attacks by Hindu rulers in neighbouring Malwa. In 1243, when the Solanki rulers were overthrown by one of their own former vassal clans, the Vaghelas, these new rulers moved quickly to ensure the security of routes leading to and between prosperous coastal towns such as Veraval. But by the early fourteenth century, outsiders more distant than Malwa had cast their eyes on those towns. From Delhi, ‘Ala al-Din Khalaji’s generals launched their first invasion of Gujarat in 1297, and by 1306 they had swept away the Vaghela dynasty altogether. Revealing their intention not to plunder but to govern the region, the Khalajis replaced the topmost layer of the former Vaghela rulers with their own governor, renamed the former Vaghela capital Patan, built a large congregational mosque there, and garrisoned strategic forts with mainly Afghan soldiers. They also allowed native landholders to retain their former positions, so long as they paid taxes to their new overlords. Finally, they made conciliatory gestures toward the Jains, one of Gujarat’s largest and most prosperous trading communities, by restoring and patronizing their temples.
When Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq rose to power in 1325, however, Delhi took steps to impose a more direct rule over Gujarat. In Patan, the sultan replaced the province’s single governor with two chief officers, one for the army and another for finance, and took several major land assignments (iqta‘) under his personal control. Architecturally, the clearest statement of the regime’s presence was its patronage of one of India’s most imposing mosques built in this period – the congregational mosque of Cambay, the most commercially vibrant of Gujarat’s seaports in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Located at the head of the gulf bearing its name, Cambay directly linked the maritime world of the Indian Ocean with Gujarat’s rich, eastern agricultural zone, and beyond that with overland routes leading up to Delhi. Given that Tughluq power was based on its cavalries, and that Cambay was the principal seaport through which Delhi imported its war-horses – thousands arrived annually from across the Arabian Sea – the city was also of vital strategic importance. At one point, the Tughluq officer who patronized the city’s congregational mosque had held the post of Superintendent of the Royal Stable,54 suggesting the overlap of Tughluq imperial power, commerce, access to war-horses and piety. Visually projecting that nexus, the mosque loomed over the city’s bustling harbour, architecturally imposing itself on its visitors. Ibn Battuta praised the seaport as ‘one of the most beautiful cities as regards the artistic architecture of its houses and the construction of its mosques’.55
By the 1330s, however, Muhammad bin Tughluq’s seemingly arbitrary policies of reshuffling his appointees, which involved the dismissal of even experienced officers, created an atmosphere of insecurity throughout the realm. In peripheral provinces, where sheer distance from Delhi worked against the government’s ability to impose its will, rebellion always threatened. As new territories were annexed by the Khalajis and Tughluqs, large numbers of Afghans were garrisoned in frontier forts as high-ranking officers and ordinary soldiers. But by the late 1330s, when these elements threatened sedition – not only in Gujarat, but also in Malwa and the Deccan – the sultan sent in Indian and older, Turkish, regiments to stabilize matters.56 In Gujarat a group of Afghans challenged and defeated an imperial army in Baroda in 1344 and then marched directly on Cambay, which also fell under its control. At this moment a certain Taghi, a former high-ranking officer whom the sultan had capriciously dismissed from his court, was being held in Cambay, about to be exiled to Yemen. But when the rebels seized control of the city, they liberated Taghi and went on to declare an independent sultanate in central Gujarat.
Resolving to take matters into his own hands, in January 1345 the sultan left Delhi for good, destined to spend his last six years tirelessly suppressing rebellions in both Gujarat and the Deccan. After first recovering Cambay and making Broach his headquarters, he moved on Daulatabad in an unsuccessful effort to quash the Deccan uprising. While still there, in early 1346 he received the news that Taghi and a large force of rebels had seized Gujarat’s provincial capital of Patan and were on their way to Cambay. By the time the sultan returned to Gujarat, Taghi had already seized Cambay and was besieging Broach. But on the sultan’s arrival, Taghi retreated into the Gujarat hinterland and defiantly executed the Tughluq provincial governor, whom he had been holding hostage after seizing Patan. For the next year the sultan pursued Taghi, who continued to elude imperial troops in both eastern Gujarat and Saurashtra. In September 1347, the sultan received the grim tidings that his army in the Deccan had been completely routed. This only stiffened his resolve to capture Taghi, who soon joined forces with rebellious chiefs at the fort of Junagadh, in central Saurashtra. Although the chieftains holding that fort submitted to the sultan in 1349, Taghi once again escaped, this time fleeing westwards to Sind. Since that region had never been annexed to the Delhi sultanate, the sultan hoped both to capture the fugitive rebel and to return to Delhi having added a new province to his realm, compensating for the loss of the Deccan.
But this was not to happen. In mid 1350, just as his officers were drawing up plans to cross the desolate Rann of Kutch – the huge salt marsh separating the Saurashtra peninsula from the mouth of the Indus – the sultan was stricken with a violent fever. By December he had recovered sufficiently to start moving his army towards Thatta, the capital of the Samma chieftain then ruling lower Sind. But in March 1351, with his army within just forty kilometres of the Sindi capital whose fort he was about to besiege, the sultan died. Tughluq fortunes had reached a low point from which they never fully recovered. As the late sultan’s army hastily returned to Delhi, the rebel Taghi was still at large, Sind remained unconquered, Gujarat slipped into a state of semi-autonomy and the Deccan had achieved complete independence.