Persian chronicles compiled in the fourteenth century convey the impression of the Delhi sultanate’s sovereign territory as a politically uniform terrain. Even if reality never did match such a monolithic vision, it was at least possible to imagine the sultanate in such terms. But Timur’s sack of Delhi upended all that, setting off a chain reaction of processes that would define the long fifteenth century.
First, Timur’s invasion was followed by former Tughluq governors declaring their independence from Delhi and setting down roots in their respective regions, a process already begun in Bengal and the Deccan when those regions were lost to Delhi in the mid fourteenth century. Second, the shrinking of Delhi’s political authority disrupted overland trade routes that carried caravans of war-horses from Central Asia to north India. As a result, independent rulers were forced to rely less on cavalry and more on war-elephants, to which they had ready access, together with manpower recruited not from upper India or points west, but from India’s own military labour markets, especially the lower Ganges region, or Purbiya.
Third, new groups were staking claims to high social or political status. In the late fifteenth century, when Jaunpur was conquered by a partially revived Delhi sultanate under the Lodi sultans, Purbiya’s military manpower was contracted by brokers in central India for labour further west, in particular in Malwa. As soldiers from eastern India serving in Rajasthan and Malwa, these men acquired the identity of Purbiya Rajputs, and finally of Rajputs, a process suggesting how the military labour market itself enabled the assimilation of new groups into this emerging ethnic category. In Gujarat, as tribal and pastoral communities migrated into or near more hierarchical, agrarian societies, they too claimed Rajput identities, seeking valorization for their claims to aristocratic, or even royal, status. Bardic poets facilitated these efforts by celebrating the warrior ideals of those communities and by linking the ancestors of their chiefs with prestigious kshatriya lineages.
Fourth, the post-Timur era saw ceaseless alliance-building and alliance-shifting at multiple levels – between households, between chieftains and between states. In a world made less secure by the loss of an imperial centre, many were left to their own devices politically. Clients sought patrons, patrons sought allies. Political capital was measured by the cash in one’s treasury, the size of one’s household and the number of women serving as collateral in negotiating alliances with other parties. No alliance was iron-clad, and no agreement final; anything could be negotiated or renegotiated. This made for a volatile political environment, for neither allies nor enemies were permanent. Military service was often no more than a temporary arrangement made on a face-to-face basis, with no stabilizing mechanism that might guarantee contractual agreements. With political loyalties so thin on the ground, patrons and clients alike were constantly forging and abandoning alliances. The flow of troops from one contractor to another could make or break a kingdom.87
Fifth, the era witnessed an extraordinary spurt in the use of written vernacular languages, both for literature and for governmental record-keeping. In the politically fragmented world of post-Timur north India, newly formed sovereign states and politically emergent communities patronized literary works in the tongue of their immediate locale. Vernacular literatures also channelled the torrent of devotional poetry that swept over the land, composed by bhakti poets who exuberantly celebrated an unmediated presence of the divine. Yet the emergence of written vernaculars did not displace Sanskrit or Persian. Upwardly mobile chieftains, aspiring to claw their way into the world of classical Indian kingship, sought the prestige associated with Sanskrit.88 In Gujarat, Sanskrit texts were patronized both by the sultan and by chieftains challenging him. In the 1460s the Sanskrit poet Udayaraja produced a lengthy panegyric of Sultan Mahmud Begada, the Rajavinoda.89 Yet at about the same time, the poet Gangadhara wrote Sanskrit plays at the courts of two chieftains – one in Champaner, the other in Junagadh – whom he lionized as mighty kshatriya warriors, even while advising them to submit to the sultan’s greater power.90 Further north, the Rajput chieftain of Gwalior, Dungar Singh Tomar, sent two Sanskrit treatises on music to Sultan Zain al-‘Abidin of Kashmir, who famously patronized both Sanskrit and Persian literary works, and even bidirectional translations between the two cosmopolitan traditions.91 Operating across the whole of western India, Jain merchants or high-ranking administrators commissioned the production of Sanskrit texts and biographies.
Persian also flourished in this age of growing vernacularism, but, as with Sanskrit, it was put to new uses. Although the age of grand, pan-Indian chronicles had ended with Timur’s invasion, Sufi shaikhs everywhere continued to produce treatises and biographies in Persian, and provincial courts from Kashmir to the Deccan to patronize provincial histories in the language. In fact, as Persian grew progressively provincialized in the decades following Timur, it also became more firmly rooted in India’s linguistic landscape. Considerable Persian vocabulary entered regional Indian languages at the very time that those languages were achieving literary status.92 More Persian dictionaries were produced in India in the fifteenth century than in Iran, or for that matter in the entire world outside India. Although multilingual, these dictionaries used Persian as their medium, that is, the language to which others were made to relate. The large number of Persian dictionaries produced at India’s provincial courts suggests a need for some pan-Indian cultural centre of reference that might fill the void created by the loss of Delhi as a political one.93
Finally, the sort of restless movement that was occurring at the linguistic level – the appearance of written vernaculars, the translations of Sanskrit texts into regional tongues, the new roles played by both Sanskrit and Persian – reflect what was simultaneously happening at the social level. Jains had become well integrated into sultanate courts as administrators, financiers and mint-masters.94 Fifteenth-century Sanskrit texts reveal the normality of Hindu princes, even those of the kshatriya class, serving Muslim rulers and fighting non-Muslim antagonists in performing that service.95 Conversely, Sufi romance stories of the premakhyan genre show the extent to which Persianate society in post-Timur upper India had absorbed Indian sensibilities.
Developments in Bengal epitomize the growing fluidity between the Sanskrit and Persianate worlds. In his Sri Caitanya Bhagavat, a popular Bengali Vaishnava work composed in the 1540s, the poet Vrindavan Das referred to the Bengal king as raja, not sultan. Another Vaishnava poet, Jayananda, referred in his Caitanya-Mangala to the sultan not only as raja but as iśvara (‘god’), and even as Indra, the Vedic king of gods.96 During their installation ceremonies, the sultans of Bengal sent for water from Ganga Sagar, the ancient holy site where the old Ganges River emptied into the Bay of Bengal; they then washed themselves in that holy water in the manner of earlier Hindu sovereigns.97 And in their public architecture, those sultans yielded so much to local conceptions of form and medium that, as one art historian observes, ‘the country, originally possessed by the invaders, now possessed them’.98