The past is not dead in India
Iqtidar Alam Khan’s books highlight that a majority of India in the last millennium, for great lengths of time, was ruled by Hindus, not Muslims
For over 60 years Iqtidar Alam Khan has been at the forefront of Mughal historiography. Alongside friend Irfan Habib, and others, he has put Aligarh Muslim University’s History department’s Centre for Advanced Study on the world map for the way it has shaped our understanding of medieval and Mughal Indian history. During this time he has published two biographies of Mughal nobles, a groundbreaking monograph on the role of gunpowder and firearms in medieval India, a historical dictionary of medieval India, and innumerable studies on Akbar, his polity and his religious policy. His foray into the pre-Mughal world therefore comes with deep engagement and takes some of the key political questions head on.
India was the first place, outside Spain, where the Tukish conquerors faced a predominantly non-Muslim populace, who did not belong to the Judeo-Christian tradition, and who, unlike, say, Iran, did not convert en masse. How was Islamic rule to be established in a pagan land? This is the first conundrum Professor Khan unravels for us. The Arabs who conquered and ruled over large swathes of Sindh and Punjab had resolved this problem by according Hindus, even though they were idolaters, the status of Zimmis, protected people. Land, its produce and revenue, was the chief source of income but it was not possible to directly access it, as there were entrenched intermediaries, the zamindars, variously known as Chaudhuris, Muqaddams, Khots. In order to rule therefore, the Turkish Sultanates perforce had to depend on locals for military and administrative purposes and out of these processes of adjustments evolved the peculiar nature of the Indo-Islamic ecumene. In time to come, this ecumene would become the toast of the Islamic world for its riches and its intellectual achievements.
As he shows in the chapter entitled ‘Hindu Chiefs in Sultanate Policy’, it was not possible for the Sultanate to exist without local support. But right from the beginning there were tensions between those who wished to be more accommodating to Hinconquests dus, and those who were more puritanical. The early historian Ziauddin Barani describes many such debates. In the northwest parts of India there had already been several centuries of Muslim rule and both Indian Hindus and Muslims vied for a share in power. Barani was sometimes disgusted by the pre-eminence of the ‘Julahas’, his pejorative for low-caste origins of Indian Muslims. The word julaha which simply means weavers, as Kabir was, is still used to denigrate low-caste Muslims. But Hindus were powerful enough to be kingmakers. Local alliances also dictated intermarriage. Ghazi Malik, later the founder of the Tughlaq dynasty, was keen for his nephew to marry the daughter of a powerful Hindu Bhatti chief but his initial proposal was met with sneers and ‘unutterable’ insults. He then goaded the local tax collectors to harass the clansmen of the family and eventually they succumbed. The marriage produced Firoze Shah Tughlaq, who had the longest reign among the Delhi sultans. But even before the establishment of the Sultanate, as Professor Khan shows, Muslims had settled in the Gangetic doab and even in the south. The Vijaynagar rulers, as Richard Eaton has also shown recently, styled themselves as ‘Suratrans’ or Sultans and employed a Muslim cavalry contingent. Several Sanskrit inscriptions mentioning Turks or Muslims have also been found which indicate an early acceptance of the Muslim presence in the subcontinent.
Professor Khan points out that some precedents had been laid even before the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in the last decade of the 12th century, after Prithviraj’s final defeat by the Ghurid forces. The Chachnama, a chronicle of the Arabic conquest of Sindh, mentions the deployment of Brahmans as tax collectors for the new regime. Qutubuddin Aibak, the founder of the Sultanate, had a contingent of Hindu troops supplied by the local ‘Takaran’ ie the Thakurs. The notorious Mahmud Ghazni also employed many Indian mercenaries from as far away as Kanara, or present day Andhra, and one of his generals was a Brahmin called Tilak who commanded a large contingent of Hindu soldiers for the Ghaznavids. He acted as the Governor of Lahore after Mahmud’s death. It is difficult, therefore, to treat these
as civilisational conflicts, let alone simple Muslim versus Hindu affairs.
Professor Khan’s book on medieval archaeology was done over a period of a little more than a decade. He covered over 10,000 km to produce a survey of many kinds of public buildings. These include dams, barrages, canals, step wells, aqueducts, irrigation tanks, sarais, bridges, manufacturing units like indigo vats, abandoned mines, roads, kos minars, mortars, civilian housing complexes and fortifications. His surveys throw up interesting side stories, such as itinerant Hindu scholars who carry recommendation letters to stay in mosques in order to finish their studies; or tombs which transmogrify into samadhis, in one instance, the deceased Sheikh Phool becoming Baba Phool Singh. But his most important survey here is of the Mughal sarais ,of which he has closely surveyed two dozen.
His drawings, photographs and physical description of the sarais reveal the public-spirited nature of the enterprises, which provided separately for Hindus and Muslims.
These books present us with wisdom gained over a lifetime of mastery. Professor Khan’s careful formulations illuminate for us the layered world of medieval kingdoms where religious identities and political loyalties did not always overlap, and where the state had to adjust to given realities of power, producing accommodation and coexistence, what another historian has called ‘living together separately’. But they also highlight for us the counter-intuitive but empirically sound formulation that a vast majority of India in the last millennium, for great lengths of time, was actually ruled by Hindus, not Muslims. However, there can be no simple divisions of Hindu and Muslim rule. One can even say that the British conquered India as much from Muslim potentates as from Hindu ones. The past may be past, but it is certainly not dead in India since contentious issues of medieval history continue to have explosive effects on our contemporary politics. Therefore, there can hardly be a more important book for our times.