Although Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq ruled the Delhi sultanate for only twenty-six years, the spectre of this towering and complex figure loomed over the entire fourteenth century. When he came to power in 1325, the sultanate had reached the height of its might, prestige and cultural florescence. By that time, the state no longer relied on recruiting luminaries from beyond the Khyber, since a class of India-born intellectuals had emerged within the Delhi sultanate. The most famous of these, the brilliant poet Amir Khusrau, was just as proud of his Indian heritage as he was skilled at turning a Persian verse. Nor were the Khalaji or Tughluq courts the sole foci of intellectual talent: men of letters attached themselves to the khanaqahs of charismatic Sufi shaikhs across all of north India.
Underlying the prosperity and power of the Khalajis and Tughluqs in the fourteenth century was the minting of precious metals that had been plundered from Indian capitals in the preceding century – first under the Ghurids, and then under Iltutmish, Balban and their respective successors. The entire period from 1192 to 1325 had seen a self-sustaining cycle whereby plundered specie was converted to minted money to purchase foreign war-horses, pay troops and defend the north-west frontier from Mongol incursions. But by the 1340s, when the peak of Tughluq power coincided with the middle of Muhammad bin Tughluq’s extravagant reign, that treasure had become exhausted. Regions once well integrated into the Tughluqs’ revenue system rose in open rebellion against central authority and would soon emerge as independent sultanates. The first of these secessions occurred in Bengal, led by Shams al-Din Ilyas Shah in 1342. This was followed just five years later by the loss of the sultanate’s Deccan dependencies and the appearance of the independent Bahmani and Vijayanagara kingdoms. Fiscally, the sultanate’s loss of Bengal and the Deccan led to a silver famine that hindered its ability to purchase war-horses or pay its troops at the same levels as previously.57
But even as former provinces such as Bengal, the Deccan and ultimately Gujarat pulled away from Delhi’s direct rule, the ideology and institutions of the sultanate form of polity, which had crystallized in Central Asia under Samanid monarchs in the tenth century, continued to flourish in these regions. These included, most importantly, a Persianized conception of the universal monarch, the sultan, assisted by a salaried class of intermediaries standing between the primary producers of agrarian wealth and a centralized state apparatus; the division of sovereign territory into units of land whose revenues were used by those intermediaries to recruit, train and command designated numbers of cavalry; and a commitment to the idea and ideal of justice (‘adl, ‘adalat) as the fundamental justification for wielding worldly power.
Elaborating such core ideas, together with the aesthetic and moral order that underpinned them, was a growing canon of Persian texts that circulated widely across South Asia. Some of the genres and representative authors comprising the canon at this time included works of epic poetry (Firdausi), Sufism (Sana’i, ‘Attar, Rumi, Hujwiri), morality (Hafez, Sa‘di, Tusi, Amir Khusrau), romance literature (Nizami), science (Ibn Sina), history (Ibn Balkhi, Bayhaqi) and politics (Nizam al-Mulk). Transmitted through ever-widening networks of literati, Sufi shaikhs, mercenaries, artists, merchants and so on, these texts moved within the sovereign territories of established sultanates, as well as, increasingly, lands that had never been exposed to direct sultanate rule. Yet across South Asia, one can see the uneven penetration of the core ideas that constituted the Persianate world. Kashmir, landlocked and secluded in its mountain fastness, had never been conquered by a Persianized state such as the Delhi sultanate. Yet, in the course of the fourteenth century, it assimilated many of the ideas that informed those states.
Towards the very end of the fourteenth century, however, much of South Asia would be subjected to dramatic changes after the destruction of Delhi and the virtual decapitation of the sultanate owing to the devastating invasion by the Central Asian warlord Timur. Although the state had been in decline ever since the 1340s, its near-collapse, catalysed by Timur’s invasion, set in motion a new series of historical forces that altered the course of India’s history for ever.