India in the Persianate Age

Highlights

Page 447

One such stereotype is that India had remained a largely stagnant civilization until stimulated by European rule in the eighteenth century. In contrast, the current volume paints a picture of India’s repeated self-transformation during these eight centuries. It was between the eleventh and eighteenth centuries, after all, that India witnessed, among other things, the disappearance of Buddhism, the appearance of the Sikh religion, the growth of the world’s largest Muslim society, the transformation of vast tracts of land from jungle to fields of grain and the integration of tribal clans into the Hindu social order as castes. This era also witnessed India’s emergence as the world’s industrial powerhouse, based on the export of manufactured textiles. The notion that India merely stood still for eight centuries is, to say the least, mistaken. Another stereotype addressed in this volume is the notion of India as a self-contained and territorially bounded essence, historically isolated from outside. Rather, this book stresses South Asia’s contacts with the societies and cultures of Central Asia, Africa, East Asia, South-east Asia and, especially, the Middle East. In fact, most of the historical changes mentioned above cannot be understood without situating India in the context of its relations with neighbouring peoples. A third and related stereotype is that of India as an essentially self-generated Hindu and Sanskritic civilization that evolved on its own, rather than a hybridized composite produced from protracted interaction with other peoples and cultures. The present volume affords an excellent opportunity to examine this theme since its chronological scope covers the period of South Asia’s intense contact with other regions, particularly with the Iranian plateau, with Persian culture and with Islam. Indeed, the period extending from c.1000 to c.1800 is conventionally referred to as India’s ‘Muslim period’, inaugurated by a ‘Muslim conquest’ of India. But there is good reason to question such characterizations.

Note: My goal in reading this book is to explain succinctly and clearly to any person that these 3 ideas are indeed misconceptions. I strongly agree with all of them.

But the danger is that because I want to believe all of these things I don’t evaluate what he’s saying in an unbiased impartial manner.

And also, if I’m unable to summarise the information here I adequately I’ll be in the frustrating position of knowing I’m correct but surrounded by people who think they’re correct.

I think it’s critical that I take copious notes and write a summary of the book before it escapes my memory.

Page 494

As the historian Cynthia Talbot notes, the image of Muslims in contemporary Indian texts ‘oscillated depending on the prevailing political conditions: in times of military conflict and radically fluctuating spheres of influence, the rhetoric was often negative in tone; whereas long-established Muslim rulers were conceptually assimilated into the Sanskritic political imagination’.4 That said, the authors of the Persian chronicles, unlike their Indian counterparts, certainly did see the world through the lens of religion: people were either Muslim believers or infidels. But, we must ask, for whom did these writers speak? It is one thing for a pious chronicler to colour an event in ways that conformed to – or violated – his own sense of a properly ordered world. However, how culturally different communities actually interacted with one another, or what sorts of political and social modi vivendi they reached, can be another thing altogether. This means that, while Persian chronicles are indispensable in reconstructing India’s history in our period, it would be a mistake to rely on that genre alone. Hence the present volume parts company with British-period historians of India, who obsessively adhered to written data to the exclusion of other kinds of evidence and placed excessive trust in Persian chronicles, which for them formed an unshakeable basis for the reconstruction of India’s post-eleventh-century past. Not surprisingly, British histories of India written during the Raj tended to reproduce the very believer-vs-infidel mindset of the chroniclers whose Persian texts they used.

Note: That’s a good start. Taking texts at face value means you believe what the author wants you to believe.

Page 506

Another reason why many nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century historians replicated the religiously defined worldview of medieval Persian chroniclers relates to Britain’s rationale for occupying India. The British came to justify the Raj on the grounds that they had introduced India to an enlightened era of sound and just government, a position logically requiring that rulers immediately preceding them be construed as despotic and unjust. Perhaps the clearest case of history-writing in service of the Raj is the work of Sir Henry M. Elliot, whose translations of Indo-Persian chronicles, Bibliographical Index to the Historians of Muhammedan India, first appeared in 1850. Elliot sought to use such chronicles to show readers how destructive Muslim rulers had been before the arrival of British rule. As he wrote in the Preface: The few glimpses … we have of Hindus slain for disputing with Muhammadans, of general prohibitions against processions, worship, and ablutions, and of other intolerant measures, of idols mutilated, of temples razed, of forcible conversions and marriages, of proscriptions and confiscations, of murders and massacres, and of the sensuality and drunkenness of the tyrants who enjoined them, show us that this picture is not overcharged.5 Elliot presents the advent of European rule, by contrast, as a period ‘when a more stirring and eventful era of India’s History commences; and when the full light of European truth and discernment begins to shed its beams upon the obscurity of the past’. Therefore, he concludes, reading translations of Indo-Persian chronicles – which he characterized as dull, prejudiced, ignorant and superficial – ‘will make our native subjects more sensible of the immense advantages accruing to them under the mildness and equity of our rule’.6 Within seven years, India would be consumed by the horrific Revolt of 1857 and its brutal suppression by British troops. Nonetheless, the rhetoric of the Raj’s ‘mildness and equity’, in contrast to the ‘Muhammadan’ tyranny said to have preceded it, would prevail throughout Britain’s occupation of India.

Note: British had their own agenda

Page 532

The scheme dates at least to the 1817 publication of James Mill’s The History of British India, which divided India’s history into Hindu, ‘Mahomedan’ and British eras.7 This tidy, tripartite scheme was actually a transposition on to India of the same ancient–medieval–modern scheme by which, ever since the Renaissance, Europeans had periodized their own history. In the South Asian case, however, those three temporal units were made to correspond to three culturally defined and supposedly homogeneous communities that had successively ruled most of the subcontinent. Formulated in this way, the system posited two great ruptures in Indian time. The first, which defined the transition from ‘ancient’ to ‘medieval’, implied a descent from an earlier Hindu ‘golden’ age to one of ‘Mahomedan’ tyranny. To India’s British rulers, this decline corresponded to Europe’s fall from an earlier age of Greco-Roman splendour to its own medieval period, initiated by the so-called ‘Dark Ages’. Implicitly, then, the appearance of Muslim Turks in India was analogous to that of the Visigoths or Vandals in Rome: all were construed as alien outsiders whose armed intrusions had violated a sacred realm. Such a formulation allowed British imperialists to imagine India’s second great historical rupture – the transition from ‘medieval’ times (i.e. Muslim rule) to modernity (i.e. British rule) – as having validated the coming of European governance as a blessing for a benighted land. By this self-serving formulation, Britain had liberated India from eight centuries of ‘Muhammadan’ stagnation.

Note: Makes sense for the British

Page 545

While Indian Muslims in the modern period certainly did not share this view of India’s middle period, many did see the advent of Islam as a transformative moment in India’s history. Early leaders of the Pakistan movement, seeking a historical basis for justifying the creation of a separate Muslim state in post-British South Asia, propounded the so-called ‘two-nation’ theory. According to this understanding, India’s Muslims had comprised a homogeneous and self-aware community objectively distinct from India’s non-Muslims ever since the eighth century, when the earliest known Muslim community had appeared in the region. Therefore, the creation of an Islamic state merely acknowledged constitutionally what was held to have been a social reality for over a thousand years. In this way, too, Muhammad bin Qasim, the eighth-century Arab conqueror of Sind, in today’s Pakistan, could be conjured up as a proto-nationalist figure, even as Pakistan’s ‘first citizen’.8

Note: Makes sense for the Pakistanis

Page 553

Conversely, in their efforts to locate their own moments of glory in India’s past, many Hindu nationalists of the first half of the twentieth century imagined rebels against pre-colonial ‘Muslim’ states as heroes who were, in some small or inchoate way, struggling on behalf of an India-wide, pan-Hindu collectivity. Thus in the early twentieth century, during the twilight years of the Raj, two opposing nationalist narratives emerged, both driven by religion. And since any form of nationalism selectively picks and chooses from its past in order to endow the present with meaning, if not inevitability, both Hindus and Muslims politicized South Asia’s history, in particular the eight centuries prior to the British arrival. One community’s heroes became the other’s…

Note: A football game that has never stopped

Page 582

Western Civilization, Dar al-Islam (‘the abode of Islam’), Christendom, the Motherland, the Free World, the Promised Land, the Third World, the Middle Kingdom – these are just some of the terms in which people have imagined geographical space, attempting in each instance to impose culture or ideology on to territory. It can be a vexed enterprise.

Page 610

Fundamentally – and this is the underlying theme of this book – much of India’s history between 1000 and 1800 can be understood in terms of the prolonged and multifaceted interaction between the Sanskrit and Persianate worlds.

Note: I distrust this conclusion because I want it so badly to be true

Page 635

By the fourteenth century Persian had become a vibrant and prestigious literary language, a widely used medium in state bureaucracies, and the principal contact tongue for inter-regional diplomacy along the Silk Road between Anatolia and East Asia. In Mongol-dominated China, it served not only as a lingua franca but as the official foreign language. The Venetian merchant-traveller Marco Polo (d. 1324) mainly used Persian in China, as he did, in fact, throughout his travels on the Silk Road. So did his near-contemporary and even greater globetrotter Ibn Battuta (d. 1377), who travelled many of the same pan-Asian circuits in fourteenth-century Asia.16

Page 646

the steady decline of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, which in theory ruled over the entire eastern Islamic world, including Central Asia; and the infiltration of waves of Turkish-speakers from eastern Asia into urbanized Central Asia and northern Iran. Some came as military recruits, others as pastoral nomadic migrants, others as powerful confederations of warriors. To accommodate these new realities, political thought in South-west Asia underwent drastic revisions. In particular, spiritual and political authority split into separate spheres, with the caliph retaining his religious authority and the sultan exercising effective political power. Making the best of a bad situation, a leading theologian of the time, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111), pronounced that any government was lawful so long as its ruler, or sultan, acknowledged the caliph’s authority in spiritual matters. Reciprocally, caliphs accepted the secular authority of upstart sultans under the fiction of having appointed them to their office.

Page 653

Stoking memories of pre-Islamic Iran, poets and chroniclers endowed these sultans with the same pretentions to absolutist rule as pre-Islamic Persian emperors. In the early twelfth century the historian Ibn Balkhi conceived of kingship in that earlier age as based on the supreme principle of justice, for, he wrote, every king had taught his heir apparent the following maxim: There is no kingdom without an army, no army without wealth, no wealth without material prosperity, and no material prosperity without justice.17 Persian scholars such as Ibn Balkhi made no attempt to yoke state power to Islam or to any other religious tradition; instead, it was justice that bound their world together. Notably, long before Renaissance or Enlightenment thinkers in Europe began theorizing the separation of Church and State, intellectuals in eleventh- and twelfth-century Iran and Central Asia were already doing precisely that. Such a secularist conception of government would have far-reaching implications for rulers styling themselves sultans in areas as ethnically diverse as India. In fact, by the time it reached India, the term ‘sultan’ had become so detached from ethnicity or religion that Hindu rulers, aspiring to the most powerful titles then available to them, adopted it. In 1347 Marappa, one of the founders of the Deccan kingdom of Vijayanagara, declared himself ‘sultan among Indian kings’ (hindu-raya-suratalah), a title used also by his earliest successors.18

Note: I love this conception of justice as the bedrock of a kingdom

Page 685

As the geographical reach of Persian letters expanded, so did the production of dictionaries, whose compilers sought to make literature produced in different parts of the Persophone world mutually comprehensible; by the nineteenth century, many more Persian-language dictionaries had been produced in India than in Iran, suggesting how thoroughly India had been absorbed into that world. Indeed, by the fourteenth century Persian had already become the most widely used language for governance across South Asia, as Indians filled the vast revenue and judicial bureaucracies in the Delhi sultanate and its successor states, and later in the Mughal empire (1526–1858) and its successors. As a result, a wide range of Persian words infiltrated the vocabulary of many of South Asia’s major regional languages.

Note: Azadi 😍

Page 737

This was not Mahmud’s first raid on north India. The sultan had already launched more than a dozen, beginning with an attack in 1001 on Peshawar, at the foot of the strategic Khyber Pass which connects the Afghan highlands with the Indus valley. Almost annually, similar offensives took place against prominent cities of the Punjab and the upper Ganges valley. In each of them, Mahmud’s men brought plundered wealth back through the mountain passes leading to Ghazni. What distinguished the Somnath raid from the others, however, was the way in which it captured the imagination of Persian chroniclers: those contemporary with the raid hailed Mahmud as an arch-iconoclast, piously responding to Islam’s prohibition against image-worship. Subsequent chroniclers even lionized him as the founder of Turkish rule and of Islamic sovereignty in South Asia, although in fact he was neither of these.

Note: Contemporary Writers have their own agenda

Page 743

In striking contrast to Persian chronicles, which made so much of Mahmud’s raid on Somnath, Sanskrit inscriptions recorded by local Hindus made no mention of it at all. On the contrary, accounts dating to the months and years after the raid convey a sense of undisturbed business as usual for both the temple and the bustling seaport of Somnath, a major commercial entrepôt that imported war-horses from the Persian Gulf and exported locally produced textiles to markets around the Arabian Sea. Twelve years after the attack, a king from the Goa region recorded performing a pilgrimage to the temple, but he failed to mention Mahmud’s raid. Another inscription dated 1169 mentioned repairs made to the temple owing to normal deterioration, but again without mentioning Mahmud’s raid. In 1216 Somnath’s overlords fortified the temple to protect it not from attacks by invaders from beyond the Khyber Pass, but from those by Hindu rulers in neighbouring Malwa; apparently, such attacks were so frequent as to require precautionary measures.3 The silence of contemporary Hindu sources regarding Mahmud’s raid suggests that in Somnath itself it was either forgotten altogether or viewed as just another unfortunate attack by an outsider, and hence unremarkable.

Note: Money quote. It was a nonissue

Page 752

In fact, the demonization of Mahmud and the portrayal of his raid on Somnath as an assault on Indian religion by Muslim invaders dates only from the early 1840s. In 1842 the British East India Company suffered the annihilation of an entire army of some 16,000 in the First Afghan War (1839–42). Seeking to regain face among their Hindu subjects after this humiliating defeat, the British contrived a bit of self-serving fiction, namely that Mahmud, after sacking the temple of Somnath, carried off a pair of the temple’s gates on his way back to Afghanistan. By ‘discovering’ these fictitious gates in Mahmud’s former capital of Ghazni, and by ‘restoring’ them to their rightful owners in India, British officials hoped to be admired for heroically rectifying what they construed as a heinous wrong that had caused centuries of distress among India’s Hindus. Though intended to win the latters’ gratitude while distracting all Indians from Britain’s catastrophic defeat just beyond the Khyber, this bit of colonial mischief has stoked Hindus’ ill-feeling toward Muslims ever since.4 From this point on, Mahmud’s 1025 sacking of Somnath acquired a distinct…

Note: Well done my friends.

Page 781

These defeated kings – or at least, the five who survived the Chola invasion – were not executed or publicly humiliated. Instead, they became loyal vassals. Such an outcome conformed to well-defined norms of inter-state politics long canonized in classical Indian thought.7 According to these norms, territory was imagined as something like a large chessboard on which kings manoeuvred with allies and against rivals with a view to creating an idealized political space called the Circle of States, or mandala. The term referred to a series of concentric circles, where one’s own capital and heartland was at the centre, surrounded by a second circle of one’s allies, and a third circle of one’s enemies. Beyond that lay a fourth circle occupied by one’s enemies’ enemies, understood as potential allies with whom a king endeavoured to ally himself. With all of India’s major dynastic houses playing by the same geostrategic rules, the result was not only intense political jockeying and perpetual conflict, but overall stalemate and equilibrium.8 No single dynastic house could achieve lasting dominance over large tracts of territory within India, much less over South Asia as a whole. Indeed, it is hardly surprising that the game of chess itself originated in India around the sixth century, just when these geopolitical ideas were taking hold.9

Note: First time I’m hearing of this mandala theory

Page 820

Rajendra attached great importance to his raid on Bengal and the pots of Ganges water that he brought south to his capital. Not only did he assume the title Gangaikonda-Chola (‘the Chola who took the Ganges River’), but he built a new capital in the Kaveri delta named Gangaikonda Cholapuram, or ‘the city of the Chola who took the Ganges’. This he embellished with a colossal temple to Śiva whose central, nine-storey shrine soars to a height of fifty-six metres. Inside, he had a well dug for the sacred Ganges water into which was placed a statue of a lion, a Chola dynastic symbol. Completed in 1035, the temple served to publicize Rajendra’s military successes in conquering not just neighbouring kingdoms, but – symbolically – all India.

Note: nice. had heard of gangaikonda chola but not this funda

Page 833

Since the Cholas had maintained diplomatic contact with China since 1015, their subsequent control of the Straits of Malacca, together with the tributary suzerainty they exercised over Śrivijaya, enabled direct Indo-Chinese maritime trade, unmediated by Śrivijaya authorities. In effect, the territories under Śrivijaya’s rule became incorporated within the Chola kingdom’s mandala, or circle of tributary states, the legacy of which survives today in the ordinary term for the Tamil coast: Coromandel, a corruption of ‘Chola mandala’.

Note: wow fantastic quiz funda

Page 837

The mandala theory not only informed inter-state relations, however. Its logic also sowed the seeds of decline for its participant states. Since bestowing land on vassals was understood as a mark of royal dignity, the greater a king’s pretensions to imperial grandeur or universal dominion, the more land and authority he was obliged to bestow on courtiers or vassals. But this was ultimately a self-defeating enterprise, as is seen in the case of the Chalukya kings of Kalyana (974–1190), the Cholas’ principal rivals for control of the Deccan plateau. From the mid twelfth century on, that dynasty’s subordinate rulers increasingly appear in inscriptions bearing exalted titles and enjoying powers to grant land, dispose of local revenues, wage war and administer civil and criminal justice. Mere generals were given the most prestigious insignia of royalty, such as the white umbrella, the great drum and the fly-whisk. Although in theory the Chalukya emperor remained the supreme bestower of such honours, over time even this prerogative was delegated to feudal lords in his confidence.12 Ultimately, ceding so much authority only encouraged larger feudatory lineages to assert their autonomy from their imperial overlords, a process that effectively hollowed out the Chalukya crown to an empty shell. By the end of the twelfth century the dynasty’s most prominent vassal states – the Hoysalas in southern Karnataka, the Kakatiyas in Andhra, the Yadavas in upland Maharashtra – had all emerged as independent kingdoms. The pattern was repeated across the

Note: makes sense

Page 854

The king honoured his Cosmic Overlord by patronizing Brahmin priests to interact with the deity and by sponsoring the construction of monumental temples in which that deity’s image was housed. Such ideas radically transformed India’s built landscape, which by the tenth century had become dotted with royal temples. Situated in a king’s capital city, these structures were typically richly endowed, elaborately carved and often covered with gold. But such magnificent monuments carried risks for their royal patrons. Since they visually expressed a king’s claims to legitimate authority, royal temples were also highly charged political institutions, and as such were subject to attack by enemy kings who, wanting to expand their own circle of tributary rulers, sought to desecrate the most visible sign of a king’s sovereignty – his temple.

Note: i guess thats where hes going with this. it was normal to want to attack and desecrate temples bjilt by enemies

Page 918

Central Asian Turks and north Indian warrior clans also inherited very different conceptions of political territory. North Indian ruling lineages were organized in large, patrilineal kin groups which were dispersed on to ancestral lands and controlled the peasant society that produced the land’s surplus wealth. This link between land and kin inclined such clans to identify strongly with particular, ancestral territories. As pastoralists in Central Asia, Turks had also been organized into lineage groups, but their kin ties had been distorted by the institution of military slavery, which detached them from their clans and took them into unfamiliar households in eastern Afghanistan or Khurasan – that is, the Persian-speaking region embracing today’s north-eastern Iran, western Afghanistan and the territory up to the Oxus. Whether as mobile pastoral nomads in Central Asia or as uprooted slaves serving sultanates in Khurasan or Afghanistan, Turks had little or no attachments to ancestral lands. This inclined them to envision political space as open and unbounded, which helps explain the elastic, expansive nature of sultanates, in India or elsewhere. By contrast, states of eleventh-century north India, such as Rajendra Chola’s empire in the south, were rooted in the ideology of the mandala, with its fixed centre based on a maharaja’s palace or royal temple, surrounded by concentric circles populated by allies and enemies.

Note: fascinating

Page 929

What gave the Ghaznavid Turks their special character, and perhaps their clearest contrast with contemporary Indian states, were the geostrategic forces driving their continued raids on north India in the early eleventh century. Those raids aimed not at appropriating territory but at plundering wealthy cities and their temples, especially for gold or silver. Taken back to Ghazni, this bullion was typically melted down into coins to finance campaigns in Central Asia and Iran, where the annexation of land was very much the objective. Cash was also needed for purchasing war-horses, slaves and manufactured goods, and for paying the salaries of Mahmud’s army and administrative hierarchy. As this hierarchy was elaborated, and as the size of the army grew with the addition of more mercenaries or slaves, ever more cash was needed to pay them. This in turn required still more raw treasure, readily acquired by launching more raids, for which still more troops were needed. The result was a self-catalysing cycle that was inherently expansive and predatory, based above all on mobile wealth. The raids also reversed historic patterns in the transregional flow of precious metals.20 Whereas for centuries such metals had poured into India, mainly in payment for textiles and spices, after the early eleventh century the bulk of precious metals began flowing from India to Central Asia and the Middle East, both for trade and for maintaining Ghaznavid armies in those regions.

Note: we need money to pay the army so we can get more money to pay the army

Page 971

Deprived of their direct ties with Central Asia – and with it their access to Turkish slaves, mercenaries and war-horses – the later Ghaznavids lost their wider, imperial vision and acquired the character of a regional, north Indian state. They were certainly not seen as menacing aliens who might have posed a civilizational threat to Indian culture. Contemporary Sanskrit inscriptions refer to the Ghaznavids not as Muslims but as turushkas (Turks), an ethnic term, or as hammiras, a Sanskritized rendering of amir (Arabic for commander), an official

Note: the author is keen to push this theory but this is not good evidence. calling them turks doesnt imply anything about their thoughts

Page 996

The institution of military slavery was also inherited from earlier practice in Iraq. From the ninth century, rulers in Baghdad had recruited Turks in Central Asia to serve the Abbasid caliphate (750–1258), entrusting them with both military and administrative responsibilities. As young men uprooted from their natal communities and recruited for service in a distant court, military slaves embodied a deep paradox. Having no traceable genealogy in a Persian-ordered universe where purity of blood translated into high status, they were lowly non-persons. But as well-trained elite soldiers given arms and close proximity to a ruling dynasty, they possessed power, wealth and the opportunity for advancement. For courts plagued with internal factionalism, it made strategic sense to stabilize central authority by recruiting powerful outsiders from Central Asia’s vast military labour market, and to place them under the tutelage of trusted state officers. These masters trained, equipped, fed and socialized their slave charges into a sultanate’s culture. As kinless aliens, they were rendered totally dependent on their masters, enhancing their presumed loyalty to the state. As the institution matured, ties of mutual trust and affection evolved; slaves close to a royal household were understood as fictive sons who might be praised even above biological sons for their loyalty and dedication.29 For these reasons, from the tenth century to the fourteenth, thousands of Central Asian Turks were recruited to serve not only the Arab Abbasid dynasty in Baghdad but, in far greater numbers, native Persian dynasties such as the Samanids in Bukhara, and later the Ghaznavids and their client chieftains.

Page 029

Whether arriving as invaders or immigrants, then, Persianized Turks brought to India two competing visions of legitimate authority and power: a Sufi discourse that circulated mainly among Muslims, and a courtly discourse that claimed validity across all communities. Both of them, however, sharply contrasted with India’s chessboard-world of the mandala and the digvijaya, which so preoccupied north India’s warrior clans as to blind them to the storm clouds that, by the end of the twelfth century, were gathering beyond the Khyber Pass.

Note: well put

Page 094

To the west, in newly conquered territories in Khurasan, Ghiyath al-Din planted members of the Ghurid clan as his governors. By contrast, Muhammad Ghuri excluded his clan members from administering the annexed territories in India, preferring instead Turkish slaves personally loyal to him, together with reinstated Indian rulers under the authority of those slaves. As men uprooted from their native lands and kinfolk, these slaves had entered the sultan’s household as fictive sons utterly dependent on their master-sovereign. Although Ghiyath al-Din also held slaves, they were not placed in responsible administrative or military positions. It seems likely, then, that Muhammad Ghuri’s momentous invasions in India were driven, at least in part, by a desire to carve out a semi-autonomous domain for himself, where he would not have to share rulership with collateral branches of his own clan.41 Shortly after defeating Prithviraj III Chauhan in 1192, Muhammad Ghuri ordered his slave Qutb al-Din Aibek to push further east. This resulted in the conquest of Delhi, with both that city and the old Ghaznavid capital of Lahore placed under Aibek’s governorship.

Page 120

Symbolizing his new political status in India, Muhammad Ghuri seems to have sent to his subordinate Indian rulers signet rings with his name engraved in Sanskrit.45 Members of the former Indian ruling classes would thereby have been folded into a larger imperial order that adhered to Persianate ideologies and institutions. Yet, viewed from below, India’s first sultan effectively established a classical Indian mandala, or circle of sovereignty, with himself at its centre.

Note: now im confused. i thought the turks didnt believe in the mandala?

Page 162

The deeper issue was the very nature of kingship in north India. Would the throne of Delhi follow the Persian model of hereditary monarchy, in which a single royal family was sovereign, generation after generation? Or would it follow the early Ghaznavid tradition, in which kingship devolved to a sovereign’s slave, and then to the slave of that slave? And if the latter, then which of the master’s slaves would inherit the master’s patrimony?

Page 166

In Delhi, these issues were settled when Aibek’s favourite slave, Iltutmish, defeated both his fellow slave cohorts and his former master’s son, Aram Shah, after which he claimed the throne. However, a contradiction lies at the heart of Iltutmish’s momentous reign, which lasted from 1210 to 1236. Though himself a slave – indeed, a slave of a slave – Iltutmish assiduously endeavoured to establish the Delhi sultanate as a hereditary monarchy, endowed with all the trappings of Persian imperial symbolism and rituals. This effort began immediately on the death of Aibek, whose own son, Aram Shah, had staked a claim to the throne. But Iltutmish confronted and defeated the party of Turks loyal to Aram Shah, who died in the conflict. Then, in an attempt to defuse the bad press surrounding his usurpation of power and his killing of Aibek’s son, Iltutmish married Aibek’s daughter. This made him the son-in-law of his deceased master – not quite the same as a direct descendant of Aibek, but a close approximation

Note: of course he would prefer hereditary style

Page 191

First, in 1215 Ghurid influence in Afghanistan, already greatly diminished for nearly a decade, was altogether extinguished by a rival Central Asian sultanate, that of Khwarazm (1077–1231). Thus ended the novel experiment of a wider, Perso-Indian empire that, based in the remote mountain fastness of central Afghanistan, had briefly straddled the Iranian plateau and north India. With the Ghurids eliminated from the political scene, the fiction of north India’s slave sultanates being part of a larger, Afghan-based empire had ended; Iltutmish now governed his kingdom from within India, as an Indian sovereign. An autonomous Delhi sultanate had become realized. Second, during the years 1219–21 Genghis Khan, the founder of the Mongol empire in eastern Asia, burst into western Asia. Offended by the insolent behaviour of the same ruler of Khwarazm who a few years earlier had annihilated the Ghurids, the Mongol leader personally marched across Asia to punish the impudent monarch. In the course of this expedition, Mongol cavalry inflicted fire and fury throughout Central Asia and Khurasan, driving many thousands of terrified town-dwellers and semi-nomadic peoples into India, where they sought and found refuge. It was a propitious moment both for them and for Iltutmish, who needed men skilled in civil and military affairs in order to govern his fledgling kingdom. The influx of a host of refugees in search of a stable state with a successful and generous Muslim ruler boosted the sultan’s claims to being precisely that sort of sovereign. For Iltutmish and the youthful Delhi sultanate, then, the Mongol holocaust in Central Asia proved a timely boon, unlike the catastrophe it represented for millions in Asia and the Middle East. And third, in 1229 the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, still technically the supreme sovereign over the various sultanates of the eastern Islamic world, sent a robe of investiture to Iltutmish, confirming his position as India’s only legitimate Muslim monarch. This deed of recognition carried much symbolic weight for the throngs of refugees who had fled from the pagan Mongols and sought a secure state ruled by a Muslim. The period 1215–29, then, marked the emergence of the Delhi sultanate as the dominant power in north India. At the same time, Delhi itself swelled to become one of the world’s major cities.

Note: wow. in just a few short years Delhi was established

Page 210

What did the contours of the Delhi sultanate’s society in the thirteenth century look like? Contemporary Persian chronicles present a simple picture of a monolithic ruling class of ‘Muslims’ superimposed over an equally monolithic subject class of ‘Hindus’. But a closer reading of these same sources, together with Sanskrit ones and material culture, suggests a more textured picture. First, the ruling class was far from monolithic. The ethnicity of Turkish slaves, the earliest generation of whom dated to the Ghurid invasions of India, survived well into the thirteenth century. For a time, even Persian-speaking secretaries had to master Turkish in order to function.52 There persisted, moreover, deep cultural tensions between native Persian-speakers – whether from Iran, Khurasan or Central Asia – and ethnic Turks. Nizam al-Din Auliya (d. 1325), Delhi’s renowned Sufi shaikh, characterized Turks as rude, bellicose and vain, reflecting a view, prevalent among many native Persians of the day, that Turks were uncultured boors who had illegitimately monopolized power and privilege.

Note: How does this matter to Hindus who were left out of power whether the Turks and Persians got along or not?

Page 259

A Central Asian Turk who had been purchased and brought to India towards the end of Iltutmish’s reign, Ulugh Khan would eventually rise to the throne himself as Sultan Ghiyath al-Din Balban. But first, during the twenty years of Nasir al-Din’s reign, he served as the sultan’s deputy, or ‘viceroy’ (na’ib), the virtual power behind the throne.57 In order to enhance his personal clout, Ulugh Khan recruited his own corps of Turkish slaves, supplemented by a large body of free Afghans. This further complicated an already socially complex ruling class, as high-born Persian-speaking ‘men-of-the-pen’ tended to stereotype Afghans as fierce, uncultured brutes, much as they had earlier stereotyped ethnic Turks. Yet Ulugh Khan’s policy of creating a personal support base composed of uprooted outsiders was hardly unique in the history of the Delhi sultanate. Empowering people of humble origins and placing them in contexts alien to their social background ensured their dependence on their masters. As a Central Asian Turk who himself had experienced the life of a deracinated outsider in the court of Delhi, Ulugh Khan clearly understood the merits of this strategy.

Note: Reminds me of Facebook importing people from Russia and India

Page 310

At the centre of power in Delhi, meanwhile, conservative thinkers such as Ziya al-Din Barani (d. c.1357) complained that Hindus of that city enjoyed a social status as high as or even higher than Muslims: And in their Capital [Delhi], Muslim kings not only allow but are pleased with the fact that infidels, polytheists, idol-worshippers and cow-dung [sargin] worshippers build houses like palaces, wear clothes of brocade and ride Arab horses caparisoned with gold and silver ornaments … They take Musalmans into their service and make them run before their horses; the poor Musalmans beg of them at their doors; and in the capital of Islam … they are called rais [great rulers], ranas [minor rulers], thakurs [warriors], sahas [bankers], mehtas [clerks], and pandits [priests]. He then considered non-Muslim religious practices under sultanate rule: In their capital [Delhi] and in the cities of the Musalmans the customs of infidelity are openly practiced, idols are publicly worshipped … they also adorn their idols and celebrate their rejoicings during their festivals with the beat of drums and dhols [a two-sided drum] and with singing and dancing. By merely paying a few tankas and the poll-tax [jizya] they are able to continue the traditions of infidelity59 Barani’s pointed remarks allow several inferences. First, under the sultanate’s rule high-status Indians continued to enjoy their traditional social privileges, and Hindu religious practices flourished. Second, conservative members of Delhi’s Muslim intelligentsia were appalled at such things. And third, by adopting a pragmatic live-and-let-live policy regarding religious pluralism, rulers prioritized socio-political stability over narrowly interpreted religious dictates. That is to say, sultans ignored the rantings of conservative intellectuals such as Barani.

Note: Sounds terrible lol. Great quote for people who think Muslim rule was terrible for Hindus.

Page 353

By 1276, Hindu subjects living near Delhi had evidently integrated the sultanate’s ruling authority into their historical memory and their understanding of political legitimacy. As masters of north India, the Tomara dynasty (early eleventh century to 1152) was followed by the Chauhans (late tenth century to 1192), who were seamlessly followed by the Turks (Scythians), namely Muhammad Ghuri, Aibek and their successors. Balban himself is entitled ‘Nayaka Śri Hammira’ – nayaka being Sanskrit for a powerful lord. The author sees no sharp break, much less a civilizational rupture, between Indian and Turkish rule. One dynasty simply succeeds another, as Balban’s reign is smoothly accommodated within conventional Sanskrit tropes of powerful and worthy rulers. The author’s hyperbole regarding the sultan’s success in smashing his rivals could have been applied to any number of Indian monarchs of that day or earlier, while the sultan’s sovereign domain is generously (though inaccurately) said to have extended from Bengal to eastern Afghanistan, and deep into south India. Most poignant is the statement that under Balban’s benign rule India enjoyed such stability and contentment that even Vishnu – the great god who appears periodically in various incarnations to rescue human affairs in times of distress – could sleep peacefully on an ocean of milk, without a care in the world.

Page 440

Although the Ghaznavids’ last capital and centre of Persian patronage had shifted from eastern Afghanistan to Lahore in the later twelfth century, by the early thirteenth century Delhi was India’s pre-eminent magnet, attracting Persianate literati, artists and artisans. This resulted, in part, from Iltutmish’s defeat of Muhammad Ghuri’s former slaves in the bitter struggle over hegemony in north India. Soon thereafter, and continuing throughout the middle decades of the thirteenth century, the Mongol catastrophe in Central Asia and Khurasan drove thousands of uprooted scholars, soldiers, administrators, Sufis and artisans into the welcoming arms of the fledgling Delhi sultanate. By then a substantial canon of Persian literary works had already emerged73 that would now spread throughout South Asia, which soon became a major centre in its own right for the production, and not just the reception, of Persianate culture. Over the course of the next six centuries, India – not Iran – would become the world’s principal centre for the production of Persian dictionaries.74 The first major anthology of Persian poetry would be compiled not in Central Asia or the Iranian plateau, but in southern Punjab at the court of Muhammad Ghuri’s former slave, Nasir al-Din Qubacha.75

Page 472

Before becoming sultan himself, Balban had urged Sultan Nasir al-Din to undertake military campaigns deep into India’s interior – not out of greed, nor with a view to annexing territory, but to use its wealth to finance the defence of north India from Mongol invasions.2 For the threat of Mongol attacks did not end with Genghis Khan’s initial invasions of India in the 1220s; they continued throughout the thirteenth and deep into the fourteenth centuries. Balban well understood the importance of stationing garrisons in the frontier towns of the Punjab and in the passes leading from the Afghan highlands to the Indus plain below. It would be the court’s far-sighted geopolitical vision that spared India from the devastation sustained by the peoples of China, Central Asia, Russia and the Middle East.

Note: Very interesting! I always assumed the Mongols didn’t turn to India because they had other fish to fry. But if they had done so, it would have meant rich pickings for relatively little effort.

Page 528

In 1320, Khalaji forces annexed the provincial town of Bijapur, some 350 kilometres south of Devagiri, and raised a mosque there named after its new governor, Karim al-Din. Built under the supervision of a local Hindu architect, this mosque closely engaged with the local culture, as the placement of its reused columns adhered to long-established principles of Hindu temple design. Stone-cutters visually connected the new, Khalaji era with the former Yadava age by continuing the same diamond motif on the upper half of the mosque’s Mecca-facing prayer niche as was found on the niche’s lower half, a reused door jamb of a temple sanctum. The prayer niche’s upper half also contains the Arabic verse, ‘let there be no compulsion in religion’ (Qur’an 2:256), suggesting the new regime’s non-coercive public posture vis-à-vis the region’s non-Muslim population. The Devagiri and Bijapur mosques thus reflect two distinct faces of Khalaji authority in the Deccan: whereas the former projected an image of Delhi’s imperial power and grandeur, the latter conveyed a desire to connect the new regime with local elites and their cultural traditions.

Page 587

Muhammad bin Tughluq’s destruction of the Warangal temple while prince and his patronage of the Kalyana temple while sultan did not, however, reflect his alleged bipolar personality. Rather, the two cases indicate how a temple’s political environment dictated official policy towards it. Temples associated with enemy kings whose territories lay in the path of the advancing Tughluq army were liable to be destroyed, as happened at Warangal. But any structure brought within the orbit of sovereign territory, such as Kalyana’s Śiva temple, was understood as state property and therefore subject to government protection, provided its local patrons remained loyal to the state.

Note: I guess this is his main evidence for the temple-destruction-is-normal theory

Page 693

The charismatic authority of eminent Sufi shaikhs, however, was a double-edged sword. Just as Sufis could help transmit Delhi’s political authority to its far-flung provinces, Sufis patronized by provincial authorities could be enlisted to bless their patrons’ rebellions against Delhi. Such revolts, after all, were integral to the nature of a sultanate, since any powerful governor or iqta‘dar could, under the right circumstances, turn his province or land assignment into the nucleus of a new sultanate.

Page 728

Exasperated with its wayward province, Delhi temporarily ceased mounting costly operations to keep it within its grip. Indeed, the founder of Delhi’s Khalaji dynasty, Sultan Jalal al-Din (r. 1290–96), indicated his disdain for the delta by rounding up 1,000 criminals from the Delhi region, loading them on to boats and floating them down to the Ganges delta where they could be set free.18 Within a century of its conquest, then, Bengal had passed from being a prized possession of the Delhi sultanate, whose capture had occasioned the minting of gold commemorative coins, to a dumping ground for the capital’s social undesirables. We also see in this incident an early manifestation of the sort of north Indian, or, more precisely, Punjabi chauvinism towards the Bengal delta that would be echoed in the aftermath of the Mughal conquest of the region in the late sixteenth century.

Page 893

To the south of the Krishna, meanwhile, the new state of Vijayanagara asserted very different claims to legitimate rule. Its authority was based on a goddess cult that had emerged as early as the seventh century on the southern banks of the Tungabhadra River, a major tributary of the Krishna. At that time the site was known simply as Pampa’s tirtha – or the ‘crossing’ of the river goddess Pampa – where passing chieftains would halt and make votive offerings during military campaigns. By the ninth century the first stone temple had appeared at the site, dedicated evidently to this goddess. By the early eleventh century, donations were being made to the male deity Mahakala Deva, the violent aspect of Śiva. By the twelfth century, a temple complex dedicated to Virupaksha, who represented Śiva’s more universal and benign aspect, had emerged. Unlike the earlier phase, when she was merely protected by Mahakala Deva, to whom she was in no way subordinate, the river goddess Pampa was now reduced to a subordinate status as Virupaksha’s consort. Moreover, south Indian texts had begun describing Pampa’s marriage to Virupaksha in terms paralleling the all-Indian story of Śiva’s marriage to the goddess Parvati.38

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