ppt

1. Shadows of Gods 1186 AD to 1526 AD
•In 1186, the Ghaznavids exterminated and after the second battle of
Tarain in 1192, Delhi fell to Ghorid arms.
•Shihabbudin Ghori “must have become familiar at Ghazni with the
traditions of the empire in India.
•The “attraction” of raising a slave corps “to make his writ run” and
secure his lands and riches from “clannish co-sharers” was no doubt
considerable.
•Shihabbudin died in 1206. The Indian provinces came under the
control of his slaves. Amongst them Iltutmish (1210-1236) can be
regarded as the “true founder” of the Delhi Sultanate.

2. Important Note
• Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our
utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting
enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free,
and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically.
• Men love freedom, and the freedom of individuals in society
requires some regulation of conduct, the first condition of
freedom is its limitation; make it absolute and it dies in chaos.
• So the prime task of government is to establish order;
organized central force is the sole alternative to incalculable and
disruptive force in private hands. Power naturally converges to a
center, for it is ineffective when divided, diluted, and spread.
• Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
• And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a
few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of
gangsters get control. History has proven that.

3. Delhi Sultanate 1206 to 1526 AD
• The sultanate lasted from 1206 to 1526. Over the course of these three hundred
and twenty years, five dynasties rose and fell.
• Slave (Ghulam) Dynasty 1206 to 1290 AD
• Khilji Dynasty 1290 to 1320 AD
• Tughlaq Dynasty 1320 to 1414 AD
• Sayyid Dynasty 1414 to 1451 AD
• Lodhi Dynasty 1451 to 1526
• The core military and economic institutions of these dynasties were not specifically
‘Islamic’.
• They were expected, however, to patronize those who were holy and learned.
• The sultans themselves were not religious leaders. Like non-Muslim rulers, they
did not gain their authority through their own holiness or sacred learning but
through their military and governing skill.
• Of the sultans those that merit the greatest attention are the Shamsid
Iltutmish,the Ghiyathid Balban (1266-87), Alauddin Khalji (1296-1316), and
theTughluqids Muhammad Shah (1324-51) and Firuz Shah (1351-88).

4. Delhi Sultanate 1206 to 1526 AD
• The subjects of the dynasties were primarily non-Muslim, designated as zimmi,
‘protected people’, left to their own law and customs. They were, in principle,
liable to a capitation tax (jizya) but not subject to military conscription.
• The Sultanate rulers, as for the Mughals who succeeded them, Islamic
ambitions focused on extending Muslim power, not on conversion.
• The sultanate was unstable in comparison to the mono-dynastic Maurya and
Gupta empires. However, the total period of effective rule, for all the dynasties
combined, is approximately one hundred and fifty years.
• In terms of territorial extent, the Delhi Sultanate is comparable to the Gupta
Empire.
• The core area of the Delhi Sultanate was the Indo-Gangetic plain. Geographic
subunits in the plain region are often determined by rivers.
• Under Muhammad Shah Tughluq, the Sultanate attained its greatest level of
territorial expansion and comprised twenty four provinces that corresponded to
“ancient natural divisions

5. Delhi Sultanate 1206 to 1526 AD
• When the imperial center weakened, the geographic subunits
would emerge as independent entities.
• The first to rebel were the furthest removed from the center such
as the provinces of Bengal and Gujarat.
• The mountainous regions and deserts, where conquest would cost
far more than the land could yield in taxes, the sultans did not
venture unless necessary.

6. Administration in Delhi Sultanate
• The central state was organized into four ministries and several departments.
• Revenue, local government and administration, markets, and war, enjoyed full
ministerial status while departments dealt with the administration of justice, the
admiralty, slaves, and agriculture.
• Irrigation, canals, reservoirs, subsidies for farmers, centrally controlled or
coordinated grain storage, road construction, palace construction, fortifications,
and the post were also important functions of the state.
• Police functions were performed by the military in conjunction with
metropolitan and village authorities.
• The tax on land was the principal source of income and was collected directly by
amils appointed, dismissed, and transferred, by the revenue office.
• The record of arable land was kept by the patwari and was communicated
directly to the center.
• Land was divided into khalsa (crown) and iqta (revenue assignments) and the
sultan was “the biggest landholder in the kingdom, in fact the only one whose
property had an undisputed legal basis. He could choose the most fertile tracts of
land and employ the resources of the state to enhance their productive capacity.
• The ministry for markets was the second greatest source of revenue for the state.

7. Administration in Delhi Sultanate
• It was responsible for the issue of licenses, regulating prices of commodities,
collecting duties, standardizing weights and measures, the registration of
tavern keepers, and related economic functions.
• Inspectors were appointed to ferret out violators of the price controls,
transaction procedures, and standards.
• The regulatory mechanism was strict the miscreant had his joints “opened” by
a sword.
• Wealthy traders were dependent on royal favor and patronage.
• Superintendents and nobles were placed in charge of royal factories that were
manned by skilled slaves or wage laborers.
• Alauddin Khalji owned fifty thousand slaves, and Firuz Tughluq owned nearly
two hundred thousand, of which twelve thousand were craftsmen and forty
thousand were with the “royal equipage”.
• Whether the treasury was filled by loot from campaigns, taxes from land,
duties on merchants, or the sale of surplus from royal factories one point was
clear to all that the wealth of the land and its treasury were the personal
possessions of the sultan who spent and did as he pleased.

8. Military Administration in Delhi Sultanate
• The writ of the sultan ran so long as he commanded overwhelming military
force.
• The war ministry was responsible for the administration of the army, which was
subdivided into infantry, archers, and cavalry.
• The army was directly recruited by the sultan’s appointed officials, paid fixed
wages, equipped at state expense, maintained in peacetime, and subject to
reporting and surveillance in the forms of descriptive rolls, inspections, and
espionage.
• Alauddin Khalji confiscated of “all private property” and “all existing grants”,
he was motivated by the need “to maintain a standing army and do so on fixed
pay.
• Alauddin’s economic policy certainly had a devastating impact on the richer
Hindu cultivators and revenue farmers who “are said to have become so poor
that no trace of gold or silver or money remained in their houses and their wives
were compelled to work as maid servants for wages.

9. Local Government and Judicial Administration
• The communication of orders to governors and officials in the provinces and
districts was entrusted to the ministry of local government.
• There was plenty of “red tape "and the insularity of village life did much to sap
society’s power to resist the state and heighten the sense of alienation from the
central authority.
• The standing of village headmen can be gauged by the fact that local officials
could “rope ten or twenty headmen and extract taxes by means of blows and
kicks.
• The Chief Qazi at Delhi was an appointee of the sultan who held office at his
pleasure. Qazis dealt with disputes involving Muslims and there were no
professional lawyers to provide litigants with advice and representation.
• Qazi did not deal with disputes related to the administration and, the sultan, as
the highest court of appeal, could interfere with any court or overturn any
judgment.
• The “laws of the Sultanate” can indeed “be summarized in one phrase – the will
of the sultan.”

10. Role of the Ulemas
• The ulema propagated the doctrine that resistance to the sultan was a sin as
well as a crime and asserted that there was no difference between obedience to
God and obedience to the sultan.
• Indeed, it was claimed that Islamic traditions upheld the principle “If there be
no Sultan, the people will devour one another.”
• The ulema in the judiciary and, like the Brahmins in the Maurya and Gupta
empires, had little interest in opposing an executive that rewarded their
compliance with robes, honors, pensions, and status.
• Ibn Battuta, for example, was appointed Qazi of the Malikites by Muhammad
Shah Tughluq, granted a “pension” of twelve thousand dinars, and assigned the
revenues of five villages.
• The sympathies of the ulema lay with the winning side in any confrontation.
• In 1257, Ulemas “conspired with Mongol protégés” and were prepared to
betray “Muslim political power in India instead of safeguarding it.
• The sultan, therefore, was not without justification for having confined the
ulema to “purely judicial or theological matters” or reserving the right to
overrule their decisions.

11. Role of the Ulemas and Bureaucratic Intelligentsia
• Muhammad Shah Tughluq accomplished the “decentralization of the Chisti
Sufis "and, subsequent to their dispersal and “humiliation”, they “became less
ascetic and accepted favors from rulers or nobles”.
• The Suhrawardi Sufis, on the hand, “remained on cordial terms” with the state
and were used by Muhammad Shah Tughluq “for political ends”.
• In addition to the ulema and Sufis, the sultan had at his disposal a bureaucratic
intelligentsia dependent on the state for livelihood.
• Sikandar Lodhi (1489-1517) insisted “on a certain educational level” for his
officers and replaced Hindi with Persian “as the language of the lower
administration.”The latter measure forced Hindus to learn Persian or face
elimination from the administrative class.
• Effective control over the activities of his appointed servants was a serious
problem. Following ways were adopted to maximizing control:
• Rely on slaves, As they were the property of the sultan and lacked their own
family and social base, they were less likely to revolt or disobey.

12. Bureaucratic Intelligentsia
• Another method was to was to appoint only those individuals of good birth to
important positions on the assumption that the well-born were less likely to be
ambitious.
• Third way, which climaxed under Muhammad Shah Tughluq, was to give
preference to foreigners, or the foreign qualified, in recruitment to
government service. Ibn Battuta observed that the majority of “his courtiers,
palace officials, ministers of state, judges, and relatives by marriage are
foreigners.
• The recruitment of imported personnel had two major advantages from the
sultan’s point of view.
• One was that, like slaves, they lacked local roots, while the other was their good
birth, education, and ignorance of Indian conditions.
• Many of the foreigners were driven more by a desire to acquire a fortune from
state service and retire to their native land.
• The heterogeneity of the bureaucratic class that resulted from this policy
further eroded the potential for collective action against the sultan.

13. Terror of the Sultan
• The most effective means of control that the sultan had his disposal was terror.
• The two dimensions of this device were omniscience, or inculcating terror of
the sultan’s knowledge, and omnipotence, or terror of the sultan’s wrath.
• The intelligence service ensured the former and directed the coercive apparatus
at the sultan’s disposal.
• A judicious mixture of the two elements ensured that the sultan was feared and
obeyed.
• Balban’s policy of assassination and surveillance towards the leading Turkish
nobles and their partisans is a well-known example of the state successfully
employing asymmetric violence against perceived opponents.
• Under Alauddin Khalji, the superintendent of the market was accompanied by
an intelligence officer, overseers were responsible for reporting on prices,
village headmen performed guard duty on highways and kept a watchful eye on
outsiders, and even young children were used to “detect malpractices.
• Spies and informers were appointed and moved about “constantly from dawn
till darkness in the midst of the poor and destitute.

14. Atmosphere of Perpetual Suspicion
• The “atmosphere of perpetual suspicion and distrust "that pervaded the Delhi
Sultanate.
• Reports about international arrivals were “minutely scrutinized” by the sultan
and no entry was allowed until permission came from the imperial capital. The
sultan’s eyes and ears in the provinces was the postmaster, who reported on “all
that happens” in the towns and districts.
• Communications sent by couriers on foot changed hands every one-third of a
mile, and those on horse changed every four miles.
• The infliction of pain – physical, psychological, economic, social, and moral –
on those who disagreed with the sultan, rebelled against him, or were suspected
of malcontent, was the function of the coercive apparatus.
• Balban’s suppression of the revolt in Bengal led by his governor Tughril Khan.
That the rebellious governor was killed is hardly unexpected for the rebel had to
either prevail or perish. The vengeance that was subsequently wrought on his
family, comrades, and supporters.

15. Conclusive Derivation
• The Delhi Sultans used construction materials from destroyed temples in their
monuments and placed idols in the gateways of mosques so that the faithful
may tread on them to and from worship. The conquest of Benares, in 1194-95,
resulted in the conversion of one thousand “idol temples” into “houses for
Muslims”
• The culture of power of the Delhi Sultanate very nearly approximates the
pattern of ideocratic arbitrary rule characteristic of the Maurya and Gupta
empires.
• Differences fall primarily in the realms of idiom and rhetoric and had no
positive impact on the exercise of power by the state. The sultan, styled as the
“Shadow of God”, had the power to override any law, eliminate any subject,
and dismiss any official.
• The people ruled by these autocrats knew “no rights, only obligations”.
• Society, divided into insular sub-political villages and urban centers dependent
on the state for sustenance, had neither an inner mechanism for change nor a
sound socioeconomic base from which to challenge the state and organize a
measure of lawful opposition.

16. • A combination of religion, language, ethnic background, and the continuous
arrival of foreigners, circumscribed the ability of the ruling elite to assimilate or
understand the people they ruled.
• Thus, state and society were adversaries locked in a war of attrition, unable to
contribute constructively to one another’s development.
• Wealth that was not dependent on the sultan’s order was perceived as an actual
• or potential threat to it. Private property was at the mercy of the state, merchants
were kept firmly under control, and village headmen served, for all practical
purposes, as low-grade employees of the sultan.
• The justice system, which combined Islamic courts with the older system of
arbitration, was subservient to the wishes of the sultan, who meted out arbitrary
justice. The military, which was the major consumer of public finances and the
major cause of the sultan’s economic policy, was directly headed by the sultan to
minimize the possibility of a coup.
• In short, the sultan combined in his person supreme administrative, economic,
legal, religious, and military, power, brooked no opposition, and tolerated no
autonomous institutions. The nature of the bureaucracy ensured that the sultan’s
idiosyncrasies, both good and bad, would be magnified and felt throughout the
machinery of government and the land so governed.

17. • A weak sultan would soon have his powers appropriated by his vizier.
Under the Sayyid dynasty, the vizier assumed the role of military
commander and auditor general, in addition to the normal role as head of
the revenue department.
• Only the cultivation of trust, regard for law, and shared values can, in time,
lead to the establishment of a stable and enduring political system. An
omnipotent, unaccountable, and erratic, state, like the Delhi Sultanate, only
depletes the reserves of these “social virtues.