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With the second largest population of Muslims in the world,
India is as Islamic a country as any other.
Conventional wisdom has it that Islam first came to India
with the conquest of Sindh by Mohammed Bin Qasim in the early years after 800 A.D.
Ironically, both North Indian historians and their Pakistani counterparts subscribe to this theory.
The fact is that the oldest mosque in India was built on this site in Kerala.
Even before the advent of Islam,
the Arabs had established several trading settlements along the Malabar Coast.
After the Arabs had converted to Islam, their faith was imported into India along with their merchandize;
dissimilar cargos brought in aboard sea-faring-Dows, of the kind that are still made in this region.
The Arabian trading communities gradually established themselves and their religion.
The Muslim community on the Malabar Coast,
a result of a marriage between the Arabs and the local population,
are called the Moplas.
The term is derived from 'Mapilla' meaning 'bride-groom' or 'child'.
The echos of the Arab influence on the culture of the Moplas can be heard in the music of A.R.Rahman.
It is continuities like this that make up India's cultural mix.
The very name India is derived from the name of the river Sindhu (also known as Indus).
The West at various points of time refered to the land as 'Ind', 'Indya', or 'Hindustan'.
The Sindhu river has also given its name to the region that forms its most important hinterland, Sindh.
A century after Islam arrived on the Malabar Coast, another wave of Islam reached Sindh
and in due course, spread from there to other parts of the sub-continent.
Around the same time, Islam was also taking root in different areas of the world
and its effects varied from region to region.
Kosambi comments on the spread of Islam -
"Barely a 100 years after the Prophet's death, Islam spread from Europe to Asia.
In Europe, it liberated the peasants from exactions of the Church and the kings.
In Persia, Islam liberated the peasants from exactions of the kings and nobles."
In India, Kosambi compares the coming of Islam with the coming of the Aryans
and says that Islam brought in new technology and freed forces of production.
But this is not exactly true because while the Aryans brought huge areas under the plow,
Islam did not do so.
What the muslims did was they brought in a lot of technology.
They brought in Chinese porcelain, tea, silk and gun-powder.
But they did not really change the forces of production in a drastic sense.
However, what they did was, they did liberate the peasants to a certain extent and provided force.
That Force rather than religion became the basis of the State.
Delhi was the theater where the State manifested itself most forcefully.
And it is here that much of the action took place during what is known as the Delhi sultanate.
Along with the Roman Empire, this is the only example
where a long period of imperial system is not known so much by dynasties
but the locus of power, the capital, Delhi.
And that names it Delhi Sultanate.
The second thing is that 'Sultanate' gives clearly the indication that this imperial system
was not based on any ideology, not any creed, not any basic principle, but purely on naked brute force.
The word Sultanate is derived from...
its origin is "Sult" and the dictionary meaning of Sult is 'power'.
Away from the seat of power, the peasant at the bottom of the heap continued to toil
much as his forefathers had done in the centuries before Islam.
The Persian wheel was one of the technological innovations of that period.
But for the common man, the wheel of time turned much as it always had.
Ancient beliefs and ways of life persisted.
The remains of the Buddhist Stupa over the ruins of Mohenjodaro
are a reminder of pre-Islamic Buddhist presence in Sindh.
In fact, the first Muslim raids in Sindh and elsewhere under Mohammed Bin Qasim were made easier
by the hostility between Buddhist peasants and the Brahmins, who had overthrown Buddhist rule.
After they had conquered Sindh, the aim of the muslims
was to secure an outlet to the sea via the Indus river.
This took 200 years to accomplish,
not such a long period in a land where time takes its own monumental pace to become history.
History has many methods of inventing itself and re-inventing itself.
And monuments have many meanings.
Sometimes, these meanings are deliberate.
Monuments are built and then rebuilt.
On the other hand, many monuments have people just move into them
and give meanings which are very different from the ones originally intended.
Take the case of monuments associated with Mohammed Ghazni.
Mahmood Ghazni raided India around 1000 A.D. and it is well known that he went up to Somnath temple and destroyed it.
Centuries after his time, the Somnath temple was rebuilt.
It is not so well known that
Mahmood ghazni also destroyed a large number of Ismaili settlements and mosques on his way,
suggesting in fact, that his raids had more to do with plunder than with religion.
Mahmood Ghazni's raids are vivid in popular memory.
But in reality, they did not have a lasting effect.
Later incursions by the muslims were more significant.
They tended to move into previously inhabited sites as the recent archaeological findings at LalKot near Mehrauli show.
Earlier, PrithviRaj Chauhan is said to have ruled from the fort here.
Later, Delhi was to have many incarnations here and elsewhere.
At Kara, near Allahabad, a tale is still told of the bitter enmity between the chivalrous PrithviRaj chauhan
and his unwilling father-in-law Jaichand.
[Raja Jaichand used to live here.
The conflict over Sanjukta resulted in the attack and capture of this place
by Mohammed Ghori.
It happened thus-
When Prithviraj took away Sanjukta, Jaichand invited the Muslims to attack Prithviraj.
After defeating Prithviraj, the Muslims turned back and attacked Kara and defeated and captured Jaichand.
So, Prithviraj Chauhan came here and he took Sanjukta away on horse.
That is the only instance on record of Kara being disgraced in such a manner.
It was Mohammed Ghori who consolidated the Muslim rule by defeating the feudal Rajput rulers of North India.
The various dynasties that followed Mohammed Ghori built up on that foundation.
Qutbuddin Aibak, Ghori's slave as well as one of his generals,
founded what is today called the Slave dynasty.
Qutbuddin began the construction of one of India's recognizable monuments, the Qutb Minar at Delhi.
It's not clear what its original purpose was
although it was evidently built with material taken from Hindu and Jain temples.
This structure has intrigued visitors for centuries.
Was it a symbol of the imperial aspirations of Qutbuddin and his successor iLtutmish?
Did the mighty tower seek to convey the same message of imperial might
as the nearby iron pillar had done for centuries?
And what does it stand for today
when both space and time have acquired new dimensions?
Situated within the labyrinths of what is now known as old delhi,
this humble grave is just as eloquent in its way as the most flamboyant of the monuments of the Delhi sultans.
The grave is that of Razia Sultan, daughter of iLtutmish and the first woman ruler in India.
Razia met a tragic end.
A victim of patriarchy and of the Palace intrigues, which were an endemic feature of the Sultanate.
This placid setting on the Gangetic delta, or Doab, was the unlikely launching pad
for one of the master intriguers of this period.
Alauddin Khilji began somewhat humbly from Kara (near Allahabad)
where his life had been made most miserable by his nagging wife and his mother-in-law.
Possibly to escape them, he proceeded to Devgiri (Aurangabad) in the Deccan
and conquered the formidable Yadava fort there.
Returning North with the massive *** from his Deccan campaign,
Alauddin plotted to kill his uncle, the King Jalaluddin.
Jalaluddin met his untimely end in the waters of the Ganga at Kara.
Alauddin Khilji then established himself as a ruthless ruler at Delhi.
He took on the the invading Mongol hordes from the fort he built at Siri.
Today, its crumbling remains share the skyline of south Delhi with brash pretenders.
At nearby Haus Khas, children play in the shadow of a once sinister monument from the times of Alauddin Khilji.
The Chor-Minar is a very interesting structure.
It was built by Alauddin Khilji, possibly to strike terror in the hearts of thieves
and perhaps even of the Mongols who raided Delhi.
Their severed heads used to be stuck to poles
and the poles used to be stuck to the holes on the wall of the Minar.
This obviously put the fear of God or at least the fear of the Sultan into the heads of wrong-doers.
Alauddin Khilji established an empire which was based more or less on the principles of the ArthShastra
which prescribed a centralized rule
which would be carried out through the enforcement of very strict discipline in many spheres.
One of the things which he carried out was price control.
Alauddin used to send little boys from his court to various shop-keepers
and asked them to buy things
to examine whether the shop-keepers had short-changed or short-weighed the goods.
If it was found that the shop-keepers had short-weighed,
then the soldiers used to be sent
in order to cut off equivalent amounts of meat from the haunches of the shop-keepers.
There were many cases of over-weighing in Sultan Alauddin Khilji's time.
In a way, Alauddin tried to recreate the centralized empire that the Mauryans had built more than 1500 years earlier.
This is the imperial phase.
Almost the whole of India right up to Madurai is brought under one single political system
which, in the background of the political fragmentation and small petty states warring against each other,
was definitely a very significant step.
The second thing is that this centralization also results in a different kind of thing.
And that is that now the Government goes down to the level of the villages, the countryside, and establishes authority.
This is done through the revenue system.
The entire revenue is collected through the intermediaries (no doubt about it).
Then it goes back to the center and from the center, again, it gets back in terms of commission on wages to the officers.
I compare this system to the modern electrical grid system.
Earlier you had local powerhouses generating electricity for local consumption.
Now what happens is that a person sitting there is controlling the distribution, collection and generation.
So that is where you find that in terms of the structure of the Government,
this was a very fundamental development.
The other thing is bureaucracy.
Paper, as you know, came into India very late, with the Turks.
And yet we find in the description that, say, Parsh gram or any small kind of snacks,
shopkeepers were selling it in wrapped paper which is astounding.
all this from the raddi (trash) that was being disposed off by the bureaucracy,
so much paper comes in.
So this is another thing where you find the records and officers and clerks and Ummaas, and other people sitting down,
jotting down notes, and giving instructions - paperwork goes on.
Ironically, the bureaucracy in Alauddin's time provided the Sultan with an efficient system of revenue collection
which made the empire extremely prosperous.
In a fashion similar to that of the Mauryans, Alauddin decreed that there was to be one rule for the payment of tribute.
This became applicable to all - from the chieftains to the scavenger.
The heaviest tribute was 'NOT' to fall on the poorest.
All cultivation was to be carried on by measurement at a certain rate for every unit.
Half the produce was to be paid and this rule was to apply without the slightest distinction.
Another rule related to buffaloes, goats and other milk-giving animals.
A tax for pasturing at a fixed rate was to be levied on every house so that no animal however wretched could escape the tax.
Quite obviously, Alauddin did not go out of his way to court popularity.
The revenue that Alauddin accumulated enabled him to begin the construction of a tower,
the Alai Minar, which was to be so tall that it would dwarf the Qutb Minar.
It remained unfinished and stands perhaps as an appropriate symbol of Alauddin's reign.
The Tughlaqs who followed the Khiljis also had a chequered history.
The Tughlaqabad fort on the outskirts of Delhi is a reminder of the reign of Ghiyasuddin tughlaq.
His rule came as a welcome relief to the class of feudal land-holders who had dreaded Alauddin's exactions.
Alauddin had whipped the nobility into shape.
But Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq once again tried to strengthen his hand by making concessions to the feudal aristocracy and the land-holders.
There is an interesting story about the construction of the Tughlaqabad fort.
The saintly sheikh Nizamuddin Auliya was in the middle of a project
to provide the people with a tank to collect rainwater
when Sultan Ghiyasuddin announced his plan to build the massive fort.
All laborers working on private projects were ordered to report immediately to the king's works.
The Sheikh requested the Sultan to spare a few men for his Baoli but was refused.
Upon this, Nizamuddin is said to have cursed the fort -
"या रहे उजड़, या बसे गुज्जर"
(यातो किला उजड़ जाए या यहां चरवाहे रहें)
"It will either remain uninhabited or will be occupied by the wild Gujjars."
As it happens, the prophecy did come to pass.
When Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq was in Bengal,
he was told that Sheikh Nizamuddin Auliya was questioning the king's authority.
The Sultan decided to come to Delhi to punish Nizamuddin.
At which point, Nizamuddin is supposed to have said,
"हुनूज दिल्ली दूर अस्त"
("दिल्ली अभी दूर है।)
"Delhi is still far away."
What actually happened was that when the Sultan reached the borders of Delhi,
his son, who later went on to be known as Sultan Mohammed Bin Tughlaq,
erected a massive welcome arch
and precisely at the moment when Pappa dear was under the arch and the son was not,
the arch came collapsing down killing Ghiyasuddin.
The reign of Ghiyasuddin lasted only 5 years.
The martial and arrogant sultan lies buried in this tomb at Tughlaqabad.
And the fort to this day lies abandoned; Overgrown and frequented only by Gujjars and their herds.
Ghiyasuddin's son and successor was not just an inventive parricide.
Mohammed Bin Tughlaq did many other things some of which were fairly significant.
Everytime you handle a currency note for instance...
think of Mohammed Bin Tughlaq.
It was he who started token currency in India.
Mohammed Bin Tughlaq did not like the fort that Ghiyasuddin had built.
And he moved away from here all the way to Daulatabad in the center of India.
The reason was that he was afraid that the Mongols who were coming down the hills
and through the plains of Punjab would attack delhi, which was fairly vulnerable.
He wanted also to place the capital in an area which was central to the whole of India.
Already, the concept of India was emerging; the concept of India as one geographical entity with a center.
And the center was the geographical center which Mohammed Bin Tughlaq chose.
The shifting of the capital to this fort at Devgiri, which Aluddin Khilji had conquered earlier,
was perhaps the supreme act of imperial arrogance in this period.
The entire population of Delhi was given just 3 days to make the move.
The Daulatabad fort as it was renamed represents the state-of-the-art security measures of the period.
But no amount of theoretically uncrossable moats, labyrinthine secret passages and mazes
could prevent the fort from being repeatedly breached.
Naturally, the method used was not brute force but treachery and deceit.
Daulatabad fell and did so repeatedly.
It fell precisely because the nature of feudalism which sustained it was over-elaborate.
It did not have the support of its peasantry
nor did it have such devotion among the courtiers that they would 'NOT' betray it to the enemy.
Mohammed Bin Tughlaq's successor Feroz Shah built yet another Delhi and named its central fortress after himself.
The Feroz Shah Kotla was the capital from which the new Sultan reinforced the Feudal hierarchical order.
Feroz shah dug 2 canals from the Jamuna and the Sutlej both via Karnaal into Delhi
and had many lesser waterworks built.
He is also responsible for imposing the Jaziya poll tax on hindus
thereby instigating religious discrimination, a feature that showed up time and again in India,
Yet, what this Muslim Sultan is best known for today
is the care with which he transported two Ashokan Pillars to delhi.
He had them re-erected there as symbols of imperial concern
for the ancient and wondrous artifacts of Indian civilization.
If Islam had taken firm roots in India by this time,
it was not just due to the efforts of Kings and soldiers.
Among its greatest popularizers were the sufis like Khwaja Moinuddin chisti,
whose durgah at Ajmer is venerated equally till today by hindus and muslims alike.
What Sufism achieved was the synthesis of several strands of religious thought
and it sought to popularize this through the language of the common people.
In India itself, several 'Silsilas' (traditions of Sufi thinking) flourished.
The most enduring was the Chistiya silsila.
The branches at Chist near Hirat have not survived.
But the Silsila founded by Khwaja Moinuddin in India flourishes until today.
The Dargah of Sheikh Nizamuddin Auliya is a shrine
dedicated to the most famous successor of Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti.
Nizamuddin's teachings draw from Islamic, hindu, Buddhist and Christian traditions.
The most famous disciple of Nizamuddin Auliya was the great poet, musician, courtier and historian Amir Khusro.
He is said to have invented the Sitar and in his verses,
he raised the status of the Hindavi language which drew from Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian.
Sultans came and went but
It is Amir Khusro who best represents the period when India further evolved its composite culture.
The relationship between the spiritual seers and the secular state
reached its high point 200 years later under Akbar the Great
who built the Buland Darwaza at the feet of his Sufi mentor Sheikh Salim Chisti.