Nowhere were the effects of Timur’s invasion more acutely felt than in the heartland of the former Tughluq domain – the wide, densely populated Indo-Gangetic plain that extended from the Punjab through the upper and mid-Gangetic basin to the Bengal delta. The career of Khizr Khan, a Punjabi chieftain belonging to the Khokar clan, illustrates the transition to an increasingly polycentric north India. Sultan Firuz Tughluq (r. 1351–88) had earlier appointed this chieftain as his governor of Multan. But when Timur’s army sacked Delhi in 1398–9, Khizr Khan shrewdly ingratiated himself with the Central Asian warlord. His efforts paid off. Before leaving India, Timur made the Khokar chieftain governor of the Punjabi cities of Lahore, Multan and Dipalpur. Khizr Khan also visited Timur’s capital at Samarqand to negotiate the annual tribute that he would send to his treasury. Then in 1414, shortly after the death of the last Tughluq monarch and nearly a decade after Timur’s death, he managed to wrest control of Delhi itself and launch his own dynasty of monarchs, the so-called Saiyid dynasty (1414–51). Yet even then he refrained from using sovereign titles, preferring instead to rule as the viceroy of Timur’s son and successor, Shah Rukh of Herat (r. 1405–47), to whom he regularly sent tribute. This was one way that Timur’s legacy lingered on in northern India.
IMAGE Fifteenth-century north India
In the early fifteenth century, however, the danger to Delhi no longer came from the west, but from the newly formed sultanate of Jaunpur to the east. Lying in present-day Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, between the rump Delhi sultanate under Khizr Khan’s successors and Bengal, the kingdom of Jaunpur emerged from a former Tughluq province that attained independence soon after Timur had left India. It was founded by of one of Sultan Firuz Tughluq’s eunuch slaves, the Ethiopia-born Malik Sarwar, whom the sultan had sent to quell rebels in the Jaunpur region. By 1394, however, after his master’s death but before Timur’s invasion, Sarwar had already established virtual independence from Delhi. Then, soon after Timur left India, Sarwar’s adopted son and successor declared his formal independence, thereby establishing the Sharqi dynasty of Jaunpur (1399–1483), so-called because Malik Sarwar had been titled malik-i sharq, ‘king of the East’. The new state was an immediate beneficiary of Timur’s invasion, absorbing many of Delhi’s traumatized scholars, artisans, artists and craftsmen who had managed to escape likely enslavement by fleeing eastwards. This explains why the Tughluqs’ architectural style – a robust, militaristic vocabulary of battered walls, scant ornamentation, engaged corner towers and monumental gateways – figures so prominently in Jaunpur’s early structures, such as the city’s grand Atala mosque (1408).
The sovereigns of Jaunpur, which straddles the middle Ganges and its tributaries, enjoyed ready access to war-elephants, large herds of which roamed the jungles of Bihar and Bengal. Moreover, because the central Gangetic plain was being rapidly converted from forest to rice paddy, the Sharqis’ sovereign territory could support a growing population. The region was therefore something of a frontier zone, with small colonies of Muslim farmers surrounded by larger populations of non-Muslims. The sultanate’s strategic weakness, however, was that it lay far from the great trade routes that brought war-horses from Central Asia to India. Jaunpur therefore lacked easy access to the most important military commodity in premodern South Asia, since war-horses were generally more reliable and efficacious in combat than elephants, even if less fearsome. Partly for this reason Jaunpur’s rulers sought to take over what remained of the Delhi sultanate, for Delhi, unlike Jaunpur, was well positioned to acquire the long strings of war-horses that wound their way from beyond the Khyber Pass to Indian markets. By the mid fifteenth century, moreover, the tiny kingdom of Delhi ruled by the Saiyid sultans had shrunk to but a shadow of its former self. As was wittily said of the dynasty’s last monarch, Sultan ‘Alam Shah (r. 1445–51), ‘the kingdom of the king of the world [shah-i ‘alam, i.e. ‘Alam Shah] extends from Delhi to Palam’.1 Since the latter is located near New Delhi’s international airport, the dictum refers to an area spanning a mere thirteen kilometres! What little remained of Sultan Muhammad Tughluq’s once-mighty empire had literally become a joke, and Delhi itself a minor but tempting target for ambitious neighbours.
But after ‘Alam Shah, Delhi saw a new dynasty of sultans, the Lodi rulers (1451–1526), under whose reign the old Delhi sultanate experienced something of a renewed lease of life. Moreover, the rise of this dynasty in the heart of the broad Delhi plain – historically, north India’s geopolitical cockpit – reveals a prominent feature of the long fifteenth century: the immigration and settlement of ethnic Afghans across the breadth of upper India. For centuries, Afghans had played a central role as merchants and transporters, responding to the subcontinent’s insatiable demand for Central Asian war-horses. Throughout those centuries, caravans had moved horses from Bukhara and other collection points south and east across the rugged Afghan mountains and through the several passes in the Sulaiman range that led down to the Punjab plains, thence to north India’s horse markets. These caravans were necessarily well armed, for reasons made clear by the English scholar Simon Digby. Recalling his days as a youth in India in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Digby writes:
I saw the last survivors of these horse caravans, great processions with thousands of men, with women and children marching beside their Bactrian camels, when I was a young man, though by that time the route had changed to the Khyber further north [rather than the Gomal Pass further south], and they mainly engaged in the trade of dry fruit from Gilgit. They were still a formidable armed entity on the march, with very small boys carrying rifles, women unveiled and sometimes also armed – altogether several thousand people. The caravans going into the north Indian plains in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had to be sufficiently powerful in their arms and their fighting tactics to be able to defeat any local ruler who would rather confiscate their horses and other goods than pay for them.2
Having once settled down in upper India, many Afghan horse-merchants parlayed their commercial connections – and their access to Afghan warriors – into power, a process facilitated by north India’s fragmented, post-Timurid political landscape. Throughout the first half of the fifteenth century, rulers of the Saiyid dynasty relied on the support of well-connected Afghans to fend off attacks from the sultans of Jaunpur. This inevitably drew Afghans deeper into north India’s political affairs, giving them secure footholds on an unstable geo-political chessboard. The founder of the Lodi dynasty, Bahlul Lodi (r. 1451–89), first reached India from Afghanistan with a long caravan of horses, for which the Saiyid government paid him with a land assignment instead of cash. That land soon became his political base. Later he was appointed governor of the Punjabi city of Sirhind. In 1451, with the abdication of the last Saiyid ruler, Sultan ‘Alam Shah (the ‘king of the world’), Bahlul emerged well positioned to become sultan himself. Then, as sovereign of Delhi, he recruited more Afghans as commanders and cavalrymen to defend the city from its hostile neighbours, in particular the sultans of Jaunpur. One of those sultans, Jaunpur’s Husain Shah Sharqi (r. 1458–83), repeatedly challenged Bahlul Lodi for the control of Delhi. But in 1483 Bahlul counter-attacted, seized Jaunpur and drove Husain Shah into exile in Bihar.
Notwithstanding the strategic advantage of their relative proximity to Afghanistan and its horse-suppliers, Bahlul Lodi and his successors, Sikandar (r. 1489–1517) and Ibrahim (r. 1517–26), had constantly to cut deals with other Afghan clans. Since all Afghans were bound by codes of honour obliging them to take revenge on perceived infringements to their dignity, Lodi chieftains were constrained in their efforts to create a hierarchically ordered monarchy of the sort set up by their Khalaji or Tughluq predecessors. Once established in Delhi, Bahlul Lodi appealed to Pashtun chiefs back in Afghanistan to migrate with their men to India in order to provide manpower for his fledgling kingdom, promising to share his possessions with them as brothers. In response, his kinsmen reportedly descended from the Afghan mountains ‘like ants and locusts’, according to one chronicler, and were rewarded with *iqta‘*s over which they enjoyed considerable autonomy. Nor did the sultan have a throne erected for himself; rather, so we are told, he ‘shared the carpet with his peers’.3 Bahlul’s successors did try to centralize power somewhat: his son Sikandar arrogated the right to choose which son of a deceased iqta‘dar’s progeny might inherit land and soldiers. And Ibrahim, the dynasty’s third and last sultan, went further by requiring his Afghan kinsmen in the sultanate to observe proper court ceremonies. But such measures threatened the cohesion of the Lodi state, which in Bahlul’s day had been governed as a confederation of loosely aligned chieftains with only tenuous loyalty to Delhi.
Although Bahlul Lodi had invoked Afghan sentiment and culture to attract his kinsmen to India, and although the Lodi regime was dominated by ethnic Afghans, calling the Lodis an ‘Afghan’ dynasty is not fully accurate. None of the three Lodi sultans enjoyed a monopoly of Afghan talent in India, since Afghan immigrants had settled across the entire Indo-Gangetic plain, especially in the Sharqi sultanate of Jaunpur. The Lodis even employed non-Afghans to check their Afghan rivals. Some Afghans residing within Lodi territory and theoretically loyal to the Lodi cause actually opposed the regime. In fact, the fateful 1526 invasion of India by Babur – the event that would overthrow the Lodis and establish the Mughal empire – was launched after Afghan chieftains in Lodi-administered Punjab had invited that Central Asian prince, then ruler of Kabul, to intervene in Delhi’s affairs.