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POLITICAL CULTURE AND SERVICE UNDER THE NORTH INDIAN SULTANATES, 13-16TH CENTURIES
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Author(s):
SUSHIL MALIK
Vol - 2, Issue- 2 ,
Page(s) : 46 - 49
(2011 )
DOI : https://doi.org/10.32804/CASIRJ
Abstract
Histories of the Delhi Sultanate are usually organised into rather simple binaries: years of centralised governance of the Sultans of Delhi are measured against years of decentralised rule under the ‘regional’ Sultanates. Historians frequently arrange their narratives to describe the origin-apogee-decline career graph of the Sultanate where ‘stasis and decline’ is usually the chapter before the epilogue on the years after the Timurid invasion (1398/99) and the fragmentation of the Tughluqid dominion. The inordinate persistence of this representation is surprising, not least of all because it is in the face of some recent scholarship on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, not least of all Dirk Kolff and Simon Digby. Dirk Kolff’s observations on the culture of service, naukarī, the search for military employment compensated by a salary and/or other social and political rewards, was placed as a distinguishing feature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, setting this period apart from the one prior to Timur’s invasion. In Kolff’s analysis, neither the decline of the Sultanate nor Timur were primary contributors to the making of this new political culture.
- This paper has profited from the critical interventions of Samira Sheikh and Francesca Orsini. I am grateful to Francoise ‘Nalini’ Delvoye for the opportunity to first think about the subject in my lectures at the EPHE in 2006. Anjali Kumar, as always, was a part of its writing. It would have been a lesser paper without Sikandar Kumar’s perspicacious engagements with its arguments. I am grateful to Ali Anooshahr and Pankaj Jha for making the texts of Mushtaqi and Vidyapati available to me.
- Note Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: a Political and Military History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, whose penultimate chapter, ‘Stasis and Decline: Firuz Shah and his successors’, is followed by ‘Epilogue: c. 1400-1526’.
- Dirk Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: the ethnohistory of the military labour market in Hindustan, 1450-1850, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; Simon Digby, War Horse and Elephant in the Delhi Sultanate: A Study of Military Supplies, Karachi: Orient Monographs, 1971; idem, ‘Anecdotes of a Provincial Sufi of the Dehli Sultanate: Khwāja Gurk of Kara’, Iran, 32, 1994: 99-109; idem, ‘Before Timur came: Provincialization of the Delhi Sultanate through the fourteenth century’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 47, 2004: 298-356; idem, ‘Two Captains of the Jawnpur Sultanate’, in Jos Gommans and Om Prakash, ed., Circumambulations in South Asian History : Essays in Honour of Dirk H.A. Kolff, Brill: Leiden, 2003, pp. 159-78; idem, ‘The Indo-Persian Historiography of the Lodi Sultans’, in F. Grimal (ed.), Les Sources et le temps, Pondichéry: Ēcole Française d’Extrême Orient, 2001, pp. 243-61; idem, ‘‘Abd al-Quddus Gangohi (1456-1537 A. D.) : the Personality and Attitudes of a Medieval Indian Sufi Shaykh’, Medieval India : a Miscellany, III, Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1975, pp. 1-66; idem, ‘Dreams and Reminiscences of Dattu Sarvani, a Sixteenth Century Indo-Afghan Soldier’, Indian Economic and Social Economic and Social History Review, 2, 1965: 52-80, 178-94. Digby’s contributions are considered slightly later in the paper.
- For details on the huge standing army of the two monarchs see Peter Jackson, ‘The problems of a vast military encampment’, in R.E. Frykenberg (ed.), Delhi through the Ages, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 18-33 and more tangentially Irfan Habib, ‘The price regulations of ‘Ala al-Din Khalji--a defence of Zia Barani’ Indian Economic and Social History Review, 21, 1984: 393-414.
- All of the founding dynasts of the Khalaji, Tughluq, Sayyid and Lodi regimes were immigrants to the subcontinent and originally frontier commanders. For a more detailed response of the Persian literati to these groups of people see Sunil Kumar, ‘The Ignored Elites: Turks, Mongols and a Persian Secretarial Class in the early Delhi Sultanate’, Modern Asian Studies, 43, 2009: 45-77, and idem, ‘Courts, Capitals and Kingship: Delhi and its Sultans in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries CE’ in Albrecht Fuess and Jan Peter Hartung (eds), Court Cultures in the Muslim World: Seventh to Nineteenth Centuries, London: SOAS/Routledge Studies on the Middle East, 2011, pp. 123-148.
- See for example the early work of B.D. Chattopadhyaya, ‘Origin of the Rajputs: the Political, Economic and Social Processes in early Medieval Rajasthan’, Indian Historical Review, 3, 1976: 59-82, oddly missing in Kolff’s bibliography. And from the adjoining region of Transoxiana and Afghanistan, but considering historical processes that have a bearing on South Asia, see Jean Aubin, ‘L’ethnogénèse des Qaraunas’, Turcica, 1, 1969: 65-94.
- For an important overview on the sources of this period and the historiographical issues they raise for the historian, see Francesca Orsini, ‘How to do multilingual literary history? Lessons from fifteenth and sixteenth century north India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 2012: 226-46.
- Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian’, Critical Inquiry, 18, 1991: 84.
- While the term bandagī has not been used by historians [as yet] to unravel aspects of pre-modern political culture, the term itself is not a neologism. See for example, Ziya’ al-Din Barani, Fatāwā-yi jahāndārī, edited by A. Salim Khan, Lahore: Idarah-i Tahqiqat-i Pakistan wa Intishgah-i Punjab, 1972, p. 333. The term seems to have had considerable currency as a title in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. For a notable example consider the title of Khizr Khan, the founder of the Sayyid dynasty (1414-21). See Yahya Sirhindi, Ta’rīkh- Mubārak Shāhī, edited by M. Hidayat Hosain, Calcutta: Bibliotheca Indica, 1931, p. 181 and the title of the monarch ‘Bandagī rāyāt-i a‘lā’ Khiżr Khān’. This would translate literally as 'In the Service of the Exalted Banners’. Sirhindi’s anecdotes on the monarch’s Sayyid status would suggest a reference to ‘service to the banners of the Prophet’. But there is enough ambiguity to allow readers to consider a possible genuflection towards Timur: see Sirhindi, p. 182, and the title of the monarch stated as bandagī’i bandagān rāyāt-i a‘lā’ and the conclusion to this paper for a further discussion of post-Sultanate usages of bandagi.
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