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SULTANATE LITTERATEURS AND MILITRAY
1
Author(s):
SUSHIL MALIK
Vol - 5, Issue- 1 ,
Page(s) : 418 - 422
(2014 )
DOI : https://doi.org/10.32804/CASIRJ
Abstract
Sultanate litterateurs were very harsh in condemning monarchs who recruited military personnel who were the ‘lowest and basest of the low and base born [siflatarīn wa razālatarīn-i siflagān wa razalagān]; they brought ruin to the realm. But the marginal status of these newly empowered groups in Sultanate society was exactly what made recruits like the Afghans, the Mongols and other frontier groups valuable to their patrons. Like the bandagan these ‘base born’ (bad aslī wa nā kas) were also divorced from their natal contexts, raised to high office in Sultanate society where their political position, wealth and power was completely incongruent to their social status. The disjunctions between their political and social positions only served to underline their dependence on their master’s dispensation of favours.
- This was Barani’s description of the kinds of people patronised by Sultan Muhammad Tughluq. See Barani, Ta’rikh-i Firuz Shahi, edited by Khan, p. 505. Khan’s edition has a misprint: razalatarin and razalagan should be read as razalatarin and razalagan.
- ‘Abd al-Malik ‘Isami, Futu? al-sala?in, edited by A.S. Usha, Madras, University of Madras, 1940, p. 456; translated by A.M. Husain, New York, Asia Publishing House, 1977, vol. 2, pp. 427-8. I have used Husain’s translation.
- Note the critical intervention of S.H. Hodivala, Studies in Indo-Muslim History: A Critical Commentary on Elliot and Dowson’s History of India, Bombay: Popular Book Depot, 1939, vol. 1, pp. 305-310. On p. 305, Hodivala clarifies that the territory [talwandi] of the Bhattis was fragmented and centred around ‘a camp made by a ring of ox-wagons set close together’ near a water source.
- ‘Afif, Ta’rikh-i Firuz Shahi, pp. 36-7.
- Ibid., pp. 37-39. ‘Afif narrates the princess’s remark in the first person but he has clearly not taken the subject’s point of view, where instead of Mongol, Turk/Turushka would have been more likely the term used by the princess. By deliberately using the term ‘Mongol’, ‘Afif appropriated the woman within Sultanate prejudices and could glorify her readiness to sacrifice herself. All of this was important for ‘Afif because of its rather serious implications for his protagonist, Sultan Firuz Tughluq, the Bhatti princess’ son.
- For further details see Kumar (2009).
- Jackson (1999): 128.
- ‘Afif, Ta’rikh-i Firuz Shahi, pp. 103-4
- See also Jos Gommans, ‘The Silent Frontier of South Asia, c. A.D. 1100–1800’, Journal of World History, 9, 1998: 17-23.
- Barani, Ta’rikh-i Firuz Shahi, edited by S. A. Khan, p. 37 (For Balban as a descendent of Afrasiyab) and p. 27 for the ‘cheap slaves’; Ibid, edited by S.A. Rashid, pp. 44, 33.
- Note Amir Khusraw’s description of the Qara’una Mongol who had captured him in 1285: ‘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’. See Amir Khusraw, Wasa? al-‘ayat, cited in ‘Abd al-Qadir Bada’uni, Muntakhab al-Tawarikh, edited by Maulavi Ahmad Shah, Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1868, vol. 1, p. 153. Compare with his Tughluq Nama, composed circa 1320 where Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq is eulogised as Ghazi Malik and ‘Saviour of Islam’. See Amir Khusraw, Tughluq Nama, ed. Sayyid Hashmi Faridabadi, Aurangabad: Urdu Publishing House, 1933.
- For further details on asymmetrical matrimonial relationships by Shamsi slaves see Sunil Kumar, ‘The Woman in the ?isab of men: Sultan Raziyya and early Sultanate Society’, forthcoming-A.
- On Kamal Mahiyar see Barani, Ta’rikh-i Firuz Shahi, edited by Khan, pp. 36-9, edited by Rashid, pp. 43-6, and on maulazadgan in Kaiqubad’s reign and their relations with the nau-musalman, ibid., edited by Khan, p. 134, edited by Rashid, p. 155.
- Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. For a useful revision of some of his arguments, see Indrani Chatterjee and Richard Eaton (eds), Slavery and South Asian History, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
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