The Ignored Elites: Turks, Mongols and a Persian Secretarial Class in the Early Delhi Sultanate
Article in Modern Asian Studies · January 2009
SUNIL KUMAR
Department of History, Delhi University, Delhi, India
Email: afsoskhan@yahoo.co.in
الكشف عن الموروثات المنسية: الأتراك والمغول وطبقة السكرتارية الفارسية في تاريخ النخبة في سلطنة دلهي المبكرة/ الجزء الأول
Abstract
The consolidation of the Delhi Sultanate coincided with the Mongol devastation of Transoxiana, Iran and Afghanistan. This paper studies the Persian literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries invested as it was in the projection of the court of the Delhi Sultans as the ‘sanctuary of Islam’, where the Muslim community was safe from the marauding infidel Mongols. The binaries on which the qualities of the accursed Mongols and the monolithic Muslim community were framed ignored the fact that a large number of Sultanate elites and monarchs were of Turkish/Mongol ethnicity or had a history of prior service in their armed contingents. While drawing attention to the narrative strategies deployed by Sultanate chroniclers to obscure the humble frontier origins of its lords and masters, my paper also elaborates on steppe traditions and rituals prevalent in early-fourteenth-century Delhi. All of these underlined the heterogeneity of Muslim Sultanate society and politics in the capital, a complexity that the Persian litterateurs were loath to acknowledge in their records.
This paper is a part of a larger study on Tughluqabad, which will be incorporated in my forthcoming book provisionally titled Sites of Power and Resistance: A Study of Sultanate Monumental Architecture. An earlier version of ‘Tughluqabad’ and this paper was drafted years ago under the supervision of John F. Richards. I am extremely grateful to him for his comments, for all his kindness and support while I was at Duke. Earlier incarnations of the paper profited from the comments of David Gilmartin, Sanjay Subrahmnyam, Kristen Neuschel, Charles Young, Steven Wilkinson, Judith Dillon, Joe Arlinghaus and Ann Farnsworth. The comments of audiences at Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi School of Sociology, Columbia University and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris, were extremely useful during revisions. This version of the paper was presented at the conference on ‘Expanding Frontiers in South Asian and World History’ held at Duke University in September 29–30, 2006. I would like to thank participants at the conference for their comments, the anonymous referee for the careful reading of the paper, and Anjali Kumar for patient discussions on the subject. Introducing the Sultanate Frontier Military Commanders
Social
and political formations in the Indus and Gangetic plains were not unduly
troubled by political developments in the mountainous Hindu Kush or Karakorum
regions in the north-west. These lands were too poor and fragmented to support
large state systems and the pastoral inhabitants of the area indulged in
relatively localized plundering expeditions into the plains. Although trade routes
into Iran and Central Asia were more easily disturbed by the turbulent politics
of the region, Afghanistan seized the attention of political regimes in north
India only when the area became a part of larger geopolitical developments.
In
the tenth through the twelfth centuries this happened when the Ghaznavid and
Ghurid regimes attempted to sustain their control over eastern Iran by the
revenues extracted from north India. The challenges posed by these developments
were completely dwarfed by the Chinggisid invasions of the thirteenth
centuries. The Mongols seized much of western Punjab and periodically
threatened the Gangetic plains, destroying agriculture, displacing pastoralists
and pillaging cities. Beyond the very real threat of Mongol depredations was
the ‘great fear’ that gripped the land in the 1220s and after, when it seemed
as if a holocaust of proportions already witnessed in eastern Iran,
Transoxiana, and Afghanistan was awaiting north India.1
The
need to secure the Sultanate regime from Mongol marauders led to the
delineation of a ‘frontier’ that needed to be defended. At least during the
early-thirteenth century this was carried out through garrisoned cantonments in
the Punjab. These cantonments were placed under trusted slave-commanders, the
bandagan-i khass, of the monarch. They were of Turkish origin, but the
patronage of their master, together with systematic efforts to bond and
incorporate them in the household of the monarch, oriented their allegiance
away from their ethnic roots and towards the realm of Delhi. Judging by their
military records Turkish slaves did not hesitate in opposing the invading
Mongol hordes, which carried in their train a large number of Turks. In other
words, shared ethnicities notwithstanding, Sultanate commanders on the frontier
were acculturated to serve a regime that oriented them in ways quite distinct
from their original steppe habitats.2 The frontier between the Mongols and the
Sultanate was therefore marked by different cultural and political orientations,
even if the social groups who inhabited the region were not always dissimilar.
This
paper is concerned with developments of a slightly later period—the decades
after the 1250s—when political fragmentation within the Delhi Sultanate and the
Mongol confederacies complicated relationships across the Punjab frontier. In
the years after Shams al Din Iltutmish’s death (1236) increasing competition
amongst Sultan ate slave commanders drove discontented amirs into alliances
with the Mongols.3 Concurrently, the old concordance amongst the Chinggisid
descendants was ending and the lands of eastern Iran, Afghanistan and
Transoxiana were populated by rival political dispensations. Internal conflict
and the search for alternative opportunities pushed many Mongol commanders and
their subordinates into Hindustan and the service of the Delhi Sultans.4
Although Mongol raids into north India continued through the second-half of the
thirteenth century, there was considerable migration of Mongol and Turkic
groups searching for Sultanate patronage and instances of disaffected Sultanate
amirs looking for allies in Mongol camps.
In focusing upon the second-half of the thirteenth and the early fourteenth century, the first part of my paper draws attention to the recruitment of frontiersmen by successive Sultanate regimes to guard the Punjab marches from Mongol depredations. The old traditions of policing the frontier by slave commanders slowly shifted to include new bodies of immigrants who had intruded into the region. These developments were first noticeable in the reign of Balban (1266– 87) and Kaiqubad (1287–90) and then more apparent during the succeeding Khalaji regime (1290–1320). Political fortunes in the marches of the Punjab, areas that lay in the interstices between the Mongol and Sultanate dominions, fluctuated constantly and military successes (and failures) were often transient. Service here, remote, as it was, from the cohering and disciplinary structures of Delhi, also allowed for great opportunities. Ambitious Sultanate commanders adroitly used frontier manpower resources to accumulate large war bands and construct local reputations as warriors and patrons even as they remained marginal, distant groups in the courtly intrigues of the capital. And yet, when the opportunity presented itself, these frontier commanders possessed sufficient assets and initiative to march into Delhi, seize power and establish their own dynasties. Nor were these exceptional moments in the history of the Sultanate. Although in this paper I study the Khalajis peripherally and give greater attention to the early Tughluq regime, it is important to note that every Sultanate dynasty from 1290 through 1526—the Khalaji, Tughluq, Sayyid and the Lodis—had frontier origins.
The following sections of my paper unravel the social and cultural backgrounds of the frontier commanders and study the ways in which these might have complicated their relationship with Delhi. During the Khalaji regime many of the frontier commanders and their contingents were of Turkish or Mongol background and had a record of past service with Chinggisid subordinates active in the Afghanistan region. Hence the curious paradox in the deployment of these commanders: many of the frontiersmen patronized by the Delhi Sultans shared a history of past service and cultural affinities with the very people who periodically threatened the Sultanate.5 Although their loyalties and investments in the cause of the Delhi Sultans must have been adequately ascertained to justify their deployment, these frontier commanders had not undergone the processes of training and acculturation characteristic of the bandagan-i khass. They were not a deracinated group but had arrived in the Sultanate with intact lineage networks and were linked to significant parts of their retinues by shared natal, ethnic and/or past service associations. Although they had accepted service with the Delhi Sultans and went on to become monarchs themselves, we are indifferently informed about the extent to which these military commanders and their retinues had made the transition from their old steppe-descended, frontier milieux to the urbane world of Delhi. Certainly, prior to their arrival as Sultans, Delhi’s literati had looked askance at people of similar social and cultural profiles. What was their reaction when groups of frontiersmen arrived in the capital as lords and masters?
As
I argue in this paper, not only is the evidence on this subject extremely
scanty, it is also deliberately evasive. The discourse of the
fourteenth-century Persian historical narratives (tawarikh) carried their
author’s vision of an ideal public order tempered by their class, cultural and
ethnic prejudices. This was transcribed into an idealized history of the court
of Sultan Mahmud Ghaznavi and held as a touchstone of good governance to be
followed by future generations. These social and intellectual precommitments
meant that the lords and masters of Delhi could not be reported as frontiersmen
or ex-servants of the loathed Chinggisids. To have done so would have conveyed
the sense of a Sultanate in crisis and decline.6 To communicate the sense of
stability and order, on the other hand, frontier commanders like Ghiyas al-Din
Tughluq had to be creatively reinvented as paradigms of virtue, a veritable
‘saviour of Islam’.
Although the narratives of Sultanate histories were selective in their inclusion of information, there were other more episodic records that provided incidental information on the backgrounds of the Delhi Sultans. I use these not just to detail the frontier origins of the monarchs of Delhi, or study the impact of their arrival as Sultans on a world that had only recently treated them as ‘rustics’. As I argue in the concluding sections of the paper, it is crucial for historians today to draw attention to the ways in which the chronicles and eulogies of the Delhi Sultans ignored crucial aspects about their protagonists, how their silences and elisions (and sometimes their ignorance) misrepresented the character of their patrons. It is absolutely vital that we foreground the discursive intervention of the Persian chronicles in their representations of Sultanate history because without a sensitivity to their objectives and their prejudices we will never be able to disengage and texture their representations of a monolithic Islam, a hegemonic state and a timeless Persianate culture. Retrieving the history of the frontier military commanders allows us to recall the role of a vital, if marginalised, group of people involved in the framing of Sultanate history. That these marginalised groups happened to be the political elites and Sultans of Delhi is in itself a telling commentary on the state of the evidence and the dire need to renarrativise the history of the Sultanate. To that end my paper starts with an analysis of the reportage on the Khalajis and the Tughluqs during their deployment as frontier commanders.
The
Origin of the Khalajis and Tughluqs as Frontier Commanders
Trying
to follow the early history of the founders of the Khalaji and Tughluq regimes
is easier said than done. Despite the importance of Jalal al-Din Khalaji
(1290–96) and Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq (1320– 24) in the history of the Sultanate,
Persian chronicles are remarkably silent about their frontier backgrounds. It
is from a fifteenth-century chronicle that we know the name of Jalal al-Din
Khalaji’s father, Yughrush.7 We have to turn to Il-Khanid chronicles to learn
that Jalal al-Din was the Mongol commander (shahna) of Binban, just west of the
Indus.8 Amir Khusrau quotes him on his exploits against refractory Mongol and
Afghan tribes in the Salt range. He does not provide any context to these
events which, if not hyperbole, might have occurred before he joined service
with the Delhi Sultans.9 An incidental reference in Juzjani informs us that the
son of Yughrush (Jalal al-Din?) visited Delhi with a Mongol embassy in 1260.10
It is not clear when Jalal al-Din started serving the Delhi Sultans but it must
have been a few years later, sometime during Balban’s reign. ‘Isami mentions
that he was in the service of Balban’s younger son, Prince Bughra Khan.11 The
account is chronologically unclear but this must have occurred before 1280
while the Prince was still located in Samana, a town which would later become
Jalal al-Din’s headquarters.
Jalal
al-Din’s political influence increased as commander of the north west marches
until Sultan Kaiqubad invited him to the capital as a counterweight to the old
Balbani elites and the new parvenu commanders entrenched in Delhi. Although
given the exalted title of Shaista Khan and the military assignment of Baran,
Jalal al-Din found it difficult to integrate himself in the politics of the
court especially with the murder of the young Sultan. Faced with political
marginalization he acted against the clique who controlled the capital and
seized the throne in 1290. Even after his accession, insurrection led by
members of the old regime continued and it was not until 1292 that his reign
approximated some degree of stability.12
As obscure as Jalal al-Din’s early history is the past of Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq, the other military commander on the north-west frontier who went on to become Sultan. Although Amir Khusrau provided a eulogy of Ghiyas al-Din’s campaign against the usurper Khusrau Khan Barwari (1320), we are informed by the Moroccan traveller, Ibn Battuta, and not a chronicler of the Delhi court, that Ghiyas al-Din was a Qara’una Turk.13 Aubin had clarified years ago that the Qara’una epithet was used to describe the followers of the Mongol commander Neguder who belonged to the Jochid-Golden ¨ Horde dispensation. Neguder and his followers were marooned in ¨ the Afghanistan-Khurasan region as the territories under the sons of Chinggis Khan hardened into antagonistic regimes.14 In the 1260s the Qara’unas found themselves sandwiched between the Il-Khanid and the Chaghatayid realms on the one hand and the territory of the Delhi Sultans on the other. They were eventually scattered amongst the other Mongol groups but their identities were not completely erased. In his description of the areas near Ghazni in the early-sixteenth century, the Mughal Emperor, Babur, noted, ‘in the mountains of Ghazni are Hazaras and Neguderis, amongst some of whom Mongolian ¨ is spoken’.15
Ghiyas
al-Din was not a great Neguderid amir when he migrated to ¨ India. According to
Ibn Battuta he worked for a merchant as a humble keeper of the horses, perhaps
a cattle driver (gulwaniya > guala), and received patronage first from Ulugh
Khan, the brother of Sultan ‘Ala al-Din Khalaji.16 Amir Khusrau was less
explicit. He recalled Ghiyas al-Din’s statement about his early years as a
nomad (awara mardi) when the patronage received from Sultan Jalal al-Din
Khalaji (not Ulugh Khan in this version) raised him to high status.17 The
discrepancies amongst his early patrons notwithstanding, there is no dispute
about how Ghiyas al-Din’s military activities on the frontier improved his
fortune until by the second decade of the fourteenth century he was commander
of Dipalpur, with some respect as a successful general against the Mongols.18
His frontier background and his successes did not endear him with the Khalaji
military commanders and Amir Khusrau details their refusal to join him in his
effort to remove Sultan Khusrau Khan Barwari from power.19 Like Jalal al-Din
Khalaji, Ghiyas al-Din was also outside the charmed circle of military
confreres in the capital and, as an outsider, not regarded worthy enough to be
a potential candidate to the throne of Delhi.
The
progenitors of both, the Khalaji and the Tughluqid regimes shared many
features. Both had served the Mongols in the early part of their careers and both
had risen to power as ‘wardens of the marches’. In trading their old Mongol
associations for opportunities present in the service of the Delhi regime, the
two protagonists were representative of the larger social and political milieu
on the north-west frontier of the Sultanate that we have already described.
Unlike
many other migrant Mongol commanders who had made their way to Delhi, both
Jalal al-Din and Ghiyas al-Din stayed on the frontier. They had greater success
here than their compatriots in Delhi many of whom were indicted in conspiracies
and purged in ‘Ala’ al-Din Khalaji’s reign. And yet, when they tried to
capitalize on their achievements on the frontier and seize power in the
capital, they were opposed by the military elite. Their indifferent networks of
political support in Delhi certainly weakened their cause in the capital. But
as I will show in the following sections, the arrival of frontiersmen in the
capital was also the cause of considerable unease, an awkwardness that the
seizure of political authority was not quite able to erase from the narratives
of the court chroniclers.
Frontiersmen,
the Tughluqs and Delhi’s Persian Literati
Although
all the records relating to Jalal al-Din Khalaji and Ghiyas al Din Tughluq
underline the distance of the two frontier commanders from the Delhi-based
elites, the narratives of the Persian chronicles remained quite neutral, if not
eulogistic, about their personal qualities. Their early histories were quite
ignored and, as we noticed, only Ibn Battuta recalled Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq’s
origins as a keeper of horses, perhaps a cattle driver (gulwaniya). But the
future Sultans also brought to Delhi their contingents and associates recruited
from the frontier tracts. And their qualities were sometimes expatiated without
as much reservation. To place some of these sentiments in context it might be
useful to reflect upon some of the early instances that we have of Sultanate
recruitment of frontier groups.
In
1260, 6 years before his accession, the future Sultan Balban had deployed
Afghans in areas just south of the capital. These were a new group of people
not mentioned as a part of any Sultanate military contingent prior to this
date. The impact of these warriors on the Delhi literati was evident in
Juzjani’s awe-struck description of their fearful, strange presence:
...
each one of them, one could say, is like an elephant with two braided manes (du
ghazhgha) on [their] broad shoulders, or is like a bastion (burji)... and each
one of them would seize a hundred Hindus, [whether] in the mountain or the
jungle, and on a dark night would reduce a demon to helplessness.20
In
marked distinction to Turkish slaves brought to the Sultanate from the Eurasian
steppes, whose fighting qualities and abilities to adapt in their host
societies were applauded by early-thirteenth century chroniclers, Juzjani
underlined how the Afghans were a strange, unfamiliar body of soldiers.21
Although Balban went on to deploy the Afghans in armed camps around Delhi, they
remained socially and culturally distanced from the world of the urbane
literati. Sometime around 1280, a decade before Sultan Jalal al-Din Khalaji’s
arrival in Delhi, Amir Khusrau penned a letter to Ikhtiyar al-Din Begtars
complaining about his plight at being forced to reside near Afghans. Amir
Khusrau noted:
In
this (?) fortress live the Afghans—nay man-slaying demons, for even the demons
groan in fright at their shouts. Their heads are like big sacks of straw, their
beards like the combs of the weaver, long-legged as the stork but more
ferocious than the eagle, their heads lowered like that of the owl of the
wilderness. Their voices hoarse and shrill like that of a jack-daw, their
mouths open like a shark. Their tongue is blunt like a home-made arrow, and
flings stones like the sling of a battering ram. Well has a wise man said that
when speech was sent to men from the sky, the Afghans got the last and least
share of it.22
Amir
Khusrau was more ambiguous when it came to a description of Ghiyas al-Din
Tughluq’s armed forces as they marched to the capital. In the Tughluq Nama,
Amir Khusrau’s eulogy to the monarch, the author noted ‘his troopers were
mainly from the upper lands (iqlim-i bala, a euphemism for Khurasan and
Transoxiana) and not Hindustanis or local chieftains. They included Ghuzz,
Turks and Mongols of Rum and Rus and some Khurasani Persians (tazik) of pure
stock (pak asl)’.23 To this motley crowd, ‘Isami detailed the presence of
Khokars, a body of frontier pastoralists, forever in conflict with Sultanate
armies and at least one Afghan commander.24
The Turks and Mongols mentioned by Amir Khusrau are of some interest. If we take the latter first, the reference to Mongols of Rum and Rus referred to the Mongols who occupied the Eurasian steppes in pre-modern Russia, the dasht-i Qipchaq, at this time under the hegemony of the Golden Horde. The Neguderids/Qara’unas (of which ¨ Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq was a part) belonged to this larger body of people. Amir Khusrau was actually quite familiar with them; he was briefly captured by a Neguderid in ¨ 1285. In his elegy written at the death of Balban’s son, Amir Khusrau had described his captor as a Qara’una, a coarse detestable being:
He
sat on his horse like a leopard on a hill. His open mouth smelt like an
arm-pit, whiskers fell from his chin like pubic-hair’.25
Harsh
sentiments, perhaps, and brought about by the experience of captivity no doubt;
Amir Khusrau certainly never repeated these sentiments in the Tughluq Nama
dedicated to his Qara’una patron.
Amir
Khusrau had mentioned Turks as well. The first were the Ghuzz, Turkoman nomads,
present in the Afghanistan region. These were fragmented, pastoral groups who
nomadized in the Khurasan, Transoxiana, Afghanistan belt and had a long history
of conflict with regimes as diverse as the Seljuqs, the Ghaznavids and the
Ghurids. Sultan Mu’izz al-Din Ghuri had managed to secure Ghazni only after
clearing the Ghuzz out of the region in the 1170s.26 So far as I know there is
no prior reference to their movements in the subcontinent beyond the Punjab.
In his other reference to Turks in Ghiyas al-Din’s retinue, Amir Khusrau conflated them with the Mongols of Rum and Rus presumably because they belonged to the same dasht-i Qipchaq region. This would be the large, loosely organized confederacy of the Qipchaq Turks lately feeling the impact of Chinggisid invasions. Many Qipchaq tribes came under the dominance of the Jochids and were absorbed in their military retinues. Some of them had already made their way into Hungary where they were known as the Cumans.27 Others were enslaved and sold in Egypt and India. In Egypt they formed the ruling elite of the Mamluk (Bahri) Sultanate and in India they were the dominant Turkish group in the political dispensation of Sultan Iltutmish. Their presence in the Kabul region into the sixteenth century—or certainly the memory of their presence—is suggested by Babur who mentioned a Qipchaq road, a Qipchaq pass on the Andarab River in the vicinity of Kabul, even a Qipchaq gate in the city of Herat.28 Like the Ghuzz, the Qipchaqs were a fragmented body of people seeking sanctuary from Mongol incursions in enclaves of sanctuary between large state formations. They congealed into war bands and, when not predators themselves, were an accessible body of recruits for military command ers like Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq on the north-west marches of India.
How
did Delhi’s Persian literati respond to the arrival of these people in Delhi?
The level of discretion displayed by the Persian chroniclers in their accounts
of frontiersmen-turned-Sultans and their retinues does not mean that they knew
very little about the Turk and Mongol tribes or their dispersal in Central
Asia. Indeed, they often used the ethnic term ‘Turk’ in a very generic sense to
signify a military slave or a military commander.29 And yet the occasional
usage of very precise markers clarified that Persian chroniclers possessed a
relatively clear knowledge of Turko-Mongol ethnicities, tribal affiliations and
dispersal in the lands adjacent to the Sultanate.
In
his Tabaqat-i Nasiri (completed ca 1260) Minhaj-i Siraj Juzjani provided the
provenance of the Turkish slaves purchased by the Delhi Sultan. These range
from fairly precise identification of clans and tribes like the Ilbari/Olperli
and Qipchaq to vaguer references to a ¨ ‘Turk from Rum’ or ‘[Qara] Khita’i’.
There is nothing particularly exceptional about this information. It is when
Juzjani enlarged on Sultan Balban’s background that he displayed the extent of
his knowledge regarding the eastern Qipchaqs. He mentioned that Balban was an
Ilbari/Olperli Turk, a tribe associated with the Qipchaq, ¨ Qanqali and
Yimak.30 In the concluding verse to his chronicle he eulogized Balban as ‘Khan
of the Ilbari/Olperli and Shah of the Yimak ¨ [Khan-i Ilbari ast wa Shah-yi
Yimak]’.31 That they were all associated tribes in close proximity to each
other is clarified in his account of the campaigns of Batu, Khan of the Golden
Horde, in the region of the dasht-i Qipchaq. Juzjani listed Batu’s victories
against (amongst others) the tribes of the Qipchaq, Qanqali, Yimak, Olperli and
Rus. ¨ 32
Details
mentioned by Juzjani echo in Amir Khusrau’s incidental remarks concerning the
spread of the Turkish language in north India.
In
the Nuh Sipihr (completed 1318), the author observed that there were three
pearl-like languages in the world: Arabic, Persian and Turkish. While Arabic
was used by those in the religious sciences for scholastic purposes [‘ilmwari],
Turkish possessed a grammar and dictionary [ahl-i hunar sarfeh-yi surf wa
lughat-i zir o zabarwan] but was used (only) by the administrators and the
military personnel [sahib-i ‘amilan; saran-i sipah].33 Amir Khusrau further
noted that the Turkish language came from the Qanqali, Uyghur, Irti (? =
Irtyush?) and Ghuzz tribes, from the lands of the Qipchaq and Yimak. It then
spread through the world.34
Although
in the Nuh Sipihr Amir Khusrau never clarified whether Turkish was spoken in
India, suggesting instead that Persian or the vernacular subcontinental
languages were more popular, in the Dibacha-i Diwan Ghurrat al-Kamal (compiled
1286–93) he made some other interesting observations. Here he exclaimed at the
unique linguistic abilities possessed by Persian scholars of Hindustan in
mastering foreign languages. ‘I have seen many Persians, not Turks [chandin
tazik na Turk]’, commented the Persian poet, ‘who have learnt Turkish
studiously and industriously [ba-ta’allum wa kasab], in Hindustan. And they
speak [Turkish thus] that (when) the eloquent speakers of that language,
(fusaha’yi an ta’ifa), come from Turkistan/‘upper lands’, they are astonished
[furu mandand].35
According
to Amir Khusrau, Persian litterateurs in India— individuals like himself—had
mastered Turkish because it was the language of governance, and they had learnt
these languages without ever visiting the ‘upper lands’. The possibility that
this was no idle pastime but a consequence of the need for patronage was
incidental to his fulsome remarks about the superlative intellectual capacities
of the Persian secretaries to learn foreign languages. At any rate, an aspiring
courtier such as Amir Khusrau, searching for patronage amongst frontiersmen of
Turko-Mongol background, displayed a remarkably cogent knowledge of Turkish
tribes and their relationships with each other. This was obvious from the
confident connections he made between the Qipchaq and Yimak/Kimak tribes.
In
the tenth century the Qipchaqs were dependent but distinct from the northern
Yimak/Kimak people from whom they had already separated. By the twelfth century
the two groups were in association again, but the Yimak/Kimaks were the
dependent, depleted group who had migrated south to settle near the Qipchaqs in
the Khwarazm region. Both Juzjani and Amir Khusrau remained sensitive to these
associations. This is further clarified by the connections they made between
the Qanqali, the Irtyush and the Olperli tribes located on ¨ the eastern belt
of the dasht-i Qipchaq, all of whom, as P. Golden has shown, were a part of the
Qipchaq confederacy.36 Chinggisid invasions had devastated these tribes,
pushing survivors westwards. Nor were they secure here: Juzjani described how
in the western lands of the dasht-i Qipchaq, the Golden Horde under Batu,
conquered, enslaved and dispersed these groups.
While
the information on the Turkish tribes is extremely fragmented in Sultanate
chronicles it is also unexpectedly accurate; the Persian literati based in
Delhi were remarkably well informed of geopolitical developments in the steppe
‘upper lands’. This information may have reached them from a variety of
intermediaries: geographical texts and travelogues perhaps, as also travellers
and merchants, and most definitely their kin—Amir Khusrau himself was of
Turkish descent. Their sources notwithstanding, it was certainly germane
information to carry as the literati searched for patrons amongst immigrants
from the ‘upper lands’.
And
yet this was a knowledge that the Persian secretaries chose, as it were, not to
wear on their sleeves. As we have already noticed, their scanty remarks
concerning the Turko-Mongol provenance of the Tughluqs and their frontier
retinues were quite remarkable for their silences. Equally noteworthy was their
actual cognizance of the background and languages of these new migrants. The
silences and elisions were deliberate, a difficult task because frontier
commanders who went on to become Sultans were also the subjects of their
elaborate eulogies. These eulogies had to reinvent their protagonists in ways
that displaced their troublesome ethnicities. Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq is a good
example of this phenomenon
The
Qara’una military commander who arrived to sedentary habits only as an
adolescent is remembered in Persian historiography primarily as a warrior in
the cause of Islam. According to the mid-fourteenth-century historian, Ziya’
al-Din Barani, Ghiyas al-Din stood as an impenetrable wall against the
onslaught of the Mongols. This service on the frontier was further embellished
by his actions against the reigning usurper, Sultan Khusrau Khan Barwari.
Persian chronicles were not only depreciative of Khusrau Khan’s slave origins,
his recent conversion to Islam and his apostasy after becoming Sultan, they
also condemned him for murdering and despoiling the harem of his master,
Mubarak Shah Khalaji (1316–20). If Islam was threatened by the Mongols across
the frontier, it was challenged in the capital by the usurper-Sultan under
whose malevolent influence all appropriate norms governing service and loyalty
were forsaken and idol worship had commenced in the palace. In these
circumstances, Barani narrated, Ghiyas al-Din fulfilled the promise carried in his
title: by thwarting Mongol invasions and overthrowing Khusrau Khan Barwari, he
was indeed the ‘saviour of religion’.37
Amir
Khusrau’s text complicated Barani’s narrative by recollecting sufficient
details about the frontier commander’s retinue and the degree of animosity he
faced in Delhi.38 But this also served a useful purpose. Despite the odds faced
by the frontier commander, and at the brink of disaster, Ghiyas al-Din’s
fortune changed because of divine benediction. Even though rectitude was by his
side he was almost bested in battle until a God-sent opportunity turned fortune
in his favour.39 As the account of his reign unfolded in these histories,
Ghiyas al-Din proceeded to rule according to the norms of governance of his
more worthy predecessors. The Qara’una frontier commander together with his
retinue of Ghuzz, Turks and Mongols of Rum and Rus, and a smattering of Khokars
vanished as if they had never existed.
Persian
Historiography and the Turks and Mongols
Imbedded
in the narrative of Ghiyas al-Din’s rise to power and accession to the throne
were all the tensions faced by the Persian literati as they wrote their
histories of the Delhi Sultanate. The literati were a fairly composite body of
people with some training in Islamic theology and jurisprudence and
considerable facility in Persian prosody and poetry. Their juridical training,
their skills in diplomatics, accountancy, as scribes and raconteurs made them a
very valuable body of people in the administration of the Sultanate. Their
intellectual training, acquired skills and professional preferences are an
important reason why I use the euphemism a ‘Persian Secretarial Class’ to
describe them. Although a small number of these individuals had appeared in
north India at the end of the twelfth century, their large-scale immigration
into north India occurred during the 1220s following the invasions of the
eastern Iranian lands by Chinggis Khan and his commanders. By training and
disposition, by their shared aristocratic backgrounds and, not least of all,
through their shared traumatic experiences of displacement and immigration, the
literati were an extremely class conscious, conservative body of people. They
linked their interests with the state and produced histories (tawarikh) that
valorized the stable and safe universe that hazrat-i Dehli, the sacred city of
Delhi, provided to Muslims while the rest of the Islamic world was in ruins.40
These
literati presented a synthetic image of an ideal Muslim Persianate civilization
whose finest protocols were present in the court of the Delhi Sultan. And yet,
it is important to note they did not all speak with one voice. We need to
distinguish the early-thirteenth century authors from the mid-fourteenth, two
ends of a continuum which was bisected, so to speak, by the maverick Amir
Khusrau.
Thirteenth-century
chronicles were produced during the rule of the Turkish Slave regime, a time
when the rulers and dispensers of patronage were of unfree origin. As I have
detailed elsewhere, Turkish military commanders were rich, powerful and could
be generous patrons but, in the context of the aristocratic pretensions of the
litterateurs and their violent experience of the Turks and Mongols, writing a
panegyric for Turkish slaves demanded considerable ingenuity. But these Turks,
Fakhr-i Mudabbir and Juzjani argued, were quite different from their marauding
compatriots in the steppe. Turkish slaves did not carry any lingering affection
for their ‘hearth and homes’ in the steppes.41 Instead, once they were reborn
as servants of Islam they brought glory to their master. Juzjani sometimes
ruminated on how the protagonists in his work were not ordinary Turks. They
were of aristocratic families in the steppes (thus, Iltutmish and Balban),
removed from the steppes and their families to serve a greater destiny.42 Their
passage into slavery was God’s way of rescuing them from the Mongol holocaust
and casting them on a path where they were fated to be rulers and protectors of
Islam in India. The quality of being a Turk, per se, was not a problem in these
texts; it was their slave origin that posed the conundrum. Elaborate attempts
were therefore made to discuss one without the other and when the two could not
be resolved it was left to the mystery of divine providence where their positive
contributions as Sultans in the service of Islam remained as proof of
supernatural intervention.43
We
need to keep in mind that these records were produced in the early years of the
Sultanate and its chroniclers struggled to place the history of the regime
within a constellation of Muslim Sultanates. This was a Herculean enterprise
because it seemed at that time that the Mongol holocaust marked the end of
history itself. While Juzjani’s chronicle mimed the traditions of ‘universal’
history it carried no grand theorization regarding the arrival of Islam in
India or of the nature of the political regime. Juzjani’s narrative, and those
of his contemporaries, rarely shifted beyond the annals of events, battles and
literary tropes recording the victory of Muslim arms against infidels.44
By
contrast, mid-fourteenth-century histories were far more complicated. They were
produced by authors of subcontinental provenance, descendents of ´emigr´es who
had prospered in their new homes. By the middle of the fourteenth century they
had family histories that boasted of aristocratic, urbane accomplishments.
These authors were also distant from many of the events that they described and
the hindsight allowed them the perspective to contextualize their world within
a larger political experience of Muslim governance on Islam’s eastern frontier.
In the 1350s, scholars such as ‘Isami and Barani were the first to suggest that
the prehistory of the Delhi Sultanate lay in the Ghaznavid state and that its
ruler, Mahmud Ghaznavi, provided the foundation and inspiration integral in the
making of the Delhi regime. The Mongols and infidel Hindus were the great
‘Others’ in these narratives and the Persianate and class conscious,
aristocratic virtues of the ideal state were creatively memorialized in the
Ghaznavid state, now the templates for the Delhi Sultanate.45 Cast within a
historical narrative it allowed for a more self-reflective, linear rooting of
the Sultanate in the great traditions of Muslim statecraft. But it also left
little space in these narratives for frontier commanders and their
retinues—with ‘breath that smelt like an arm-pit’ with ‘voices hoarse and
shrill as a jackdaw’—whose origins lay amongst the Mongol hordes or frontier
tribesmen who were the great threat to the Sultanate. These people were
reinvented like Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq as the ‘saviour of religion’, and their
more problematic qualities were blithely ignored.
Bisecting
the two worlds was the maverick figure of Amir Khusrau: the son of a Turkish
slave, born and brought up in Patiali and Delhi, whose personal experience
never went beyond the subcontinent. He was a court eulogist and a poet,
comfortable and proud of his background and of his skill as a litterateur, able
to reproduce the most difficult literary styles and innovate with great ease.
His grand paeans extolled the virtues of respective patron-Sultans setting new
standards in form, style and rhetoric. And yet it was when he wrote about his
domicile, his craft, and his friends that a rare sensitivity and eloquence
crept into his work. He received patronage from different Sultans but rendered
homage only to his pir Shaykh Nizam al-Din Auliya, near whom he was eventually
buried. His historical works were constructed around specific themes and
episodes: the victories of ‘Ala al-Din Khalaji, the seizure of power by Jalal
al-Din Khalaji and Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq, the meeting between father and son,
the rulers of Lakhnauti and Delhi.46 These were not large texts and the
constant shifts in themes, styles and patrons also meant that the author never
theorized on the role and character of the Delhi Sultanate. If there was an
overarching, comprehensive ideology regarding its political manifestation, it
was to suggest that the subcontinent—more so than the Sultanate—housed a
vibrant and unique Persian culture.47 This allowed the incredibly successful
court poet the freedom to discourse and insert random insights regarding the
conditions of his age. These were fleeting remarks and observations but, as we
have already noticed, they covered subjects that were often erased in the
master narratives of the fourteenth-century grand histories.
Through this paper, it is the information provided by Amir Khusrau that often led to a further interrogation of other literary materials. But it has also left us with a host of unanswered questions. It is clear from the information already discussed that the Sultanate was not a cultural monolith, that its rulers came from social and cultural backgrounds quite distinct from that of its Persianate secretarial class who provided the histories and eulogies of the state. These differences generated some discomfort especially when these ‘frontiersmen’—a useful term to capture their marginal status in the representations of urbane, Persianate Sultanate society—emerged as the lords and masters of the realm.48 In the next section, I interrogate the Persian materials further to see how some of these tensions were manifest in their records.
Turko-Mongol
practices and a Persianate Muslim Order
Delhi
was the ‘Sanctuary of Islam’ for a large number of immigrants of different
social backgrounds, ethnicities and regions. A poet such as ‘Isami writing in
the mid-fourteenth century dutifully recorded the diverse backgrounds of these
people but also went on to suggest that the common denomination of being
‘Muslim’ bonded immigrants as they sought asylum from the Mongols.49
Penetrating this discourse is extremely difficult; it was certainly a subject
that the Sultanate chroniclers did not want to accommodate in their narratives.
Once the frontier commanders became Sultans, however, ‘difference’ was harder
to ignore and their new patrons tested the creativity of their eulogists in
interesting ways. They introduced traditions that were clearly outside the experience
of the Persian literati and yet many of their novel practices were seamlessly
assimilated in the records of the chroniclers without a comment. There were
other Turko-Mongol traditions of the ´emigr´es that were far harder for the
Persian literati to gloss. In their efforts to work out resolutions—not always
very effective ones—literary materials of the time left spaces that can be
usefully enlarged for an insight into the dialectical processes through which a
Persianate Muslim order was rather uneasily fashioned. The evidence on the
subject is quite dispersed and rather than pursuing random and decontextualized
instances I have selected three examples through which I can develop the range
of cultural interaction more precisely in my discussion.
The first example concerns an administrative system used by ‘Ala’ al-Din Khalaji and Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq. Concerning the vital communication system established by Ghiyas al-Din to knit his expanding empire, Barani refers to ulagh/ulaq on several occasions as a ‘horse-post’ without any need for further elaboration.50 The same institution was described by the Morrocan traveller Ibn Battuta, who found the system novel enough to merit a description. He distinguished ulagh/ulaq, a horse-post, from dawa, a courier who travels on foot.51 Clearly the system was new; but it did not have a long life. At the end of the sixteenth century the Mughal historian Nizam al-Din was not at all confident that his audience would know the meaning of the term. When he narrated the events of Ghiyas al-Din’s reign and mentioned the ulagh/ulaq system he explained the term with a synonym: ‘During this time, the dak chowki, which in the language of those people was called ulagh/ulaq, arrived from Delhi and brought orders’.52
Barani
did not need to explain the meaning of ulagh/ulaq because his audience was
familiar with it. There is no evidence to suggest, however, that they knew of
its history and that it was an administrative innovation authored by Chinggis
Khan, a universally hated figure in Sultanate historiography. The Mongol
historian, Juwaini, clarified that ulagh/ulaq was a courier system that
connected the vast Mongol domains of the Great Khan. His history had explained
how it was originally one of the qubchur taxes, a contribution levied upon the
Mongols for providing mounts and other sustenance for the couriers. This
changed through the thirteenth century until ulagh/ulaq came to be a tax levied
on the peasantry. Certainly by Ghazan Khan’s reign (1295–1304) it was a part of
the qalan taxes levied on non-Mongols.53
It
was clearly in its late-thirteenth century form that Barani used the term
ulagh/ulaq when he was describing the postal relay system in ‘Ala’ al-Din
Khalaji and Ghiyas al-Din’s reign. Under Ghiyas al-Din ulagh/ulaq was a courier
system maintained through local provisions/taxation, connecting Delhi with its
frontier regions. The mutations in the ulagh/ulaq system could have occurred
independently in the Sultanate and Il Khanid territories; otherwise its
transmission into Khalaji and Tughluq administration was very quick—‘Ala’
al-Din Khalaji and Ghazan Khan were contemporaries. In Ghiyas al-Din’s reign
this courier system had broken down while Ulugh Khan, the future Sultan
Muhammad, was besieging Arangal in the Deccan.54 It is unlikely that ulagh is
of an earlier Oghuz inheritance: the Seljuqs (of Qiniq, Oghuz background) much
to the wazir Nizam al Mulk’s dismay, paid scant attention to the barid (postal,
spy system) network within their dominion and much of the Siyasat Nama was
spent marketing its virtues.55 Certainly, by the time that the Qara’una
military commander Ghiyas al-Din used the system, it had reached a stage of
development roughly coterminous with the Chaghatayid and the Il-Khanid
political dispensations (post-1227 and post-1256, respectively).
Although
the usage of the ulagh system by Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq does show Sultanate
administrative proximity to a Mongol source, it did not carry with it any
implication of large-scale social and political reorganization as it had for
the Mongols under Chinggis Khan. In other words, ulagh/ulaq did not challenge athe structures of early fourteenth-century Sultanate society. For a narrator
such as Barani it was an efficient administrative system and, since its
provenance was without any apparent consequence, it provoked little interest.
For all that it seemingly mattered, ulagh/ulaq was a new name grafted on to old
administrative procedures that were revamped and made more efficient during
dynastic change.
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