Delhi Sultanate

• 1. Introduction

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  The Delhi Sultanate ruled large parts of the Indian subcontinent for more than three centuries, from 1206 to 1526. Its story begins not with a king on a throne, but with a slave. Qutb ud-Din Aibak, a Turkic former slave of the conqueror Muhammad of Ghor, seized power in 1206 after his master was assassinated, becoming the first Sultan of Delhi. What followed was not a single empire under a single family, but five successive dynasties, each fighting to hold together a vast territory stretching across what is today India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and parts of Nepal.

  How does a former slave become the founder of an empire? How did this Sultanate resist the Mongols when China, Persia, and much of Europe fell before them? And what trace did three hundred years of this empire leave on language, architecture, and the economic life of the subcontinent? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. A Slave Who Became Sultan

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  Qutb ud-Din Aibak reigned as Sultan of Delhi from 1206 to 1210, just four years. He was of Turkic Cuman-Kipchak origin, and his dynasty took its name, the Mamluk dynasty, directly from that slave lineage. Contemporary and later writers praised him for his generosity, earning him the sobriquet Lakhbaksh, meaning provider of lakhs.

  Aibak died before he could finish what he started. The great Qutb Minar in Delhi, one of the most recognizable structures on the subcontinent, was his project, and it fell to his son-in-law Iltutmish to see it through to completion. Iltutmish also had to fight for his own throne. After a rival, Aram Shah, assumed power in 1210, Iltutmish had him assassinated in 1211 and then spent years crushing opposition, conquering Multan and Bengal from rival Muslim rulers and wresting Ranthambore and Sivalik from Hindu rulers.

  During the Mamluk period, a council of forty Turkic slaves known as the Corps of Forty functioned as kingmakers, operating independently of the Sultan. It was Ghiyas ud-Din Balban, who ruled from 1266 to 1287, who finally broke their power. Balban was succeeded by a seventeen-year-old, Muiz ud-Din Qaiqabad, who appointed a man named Jalal ud-Din Firuz Khalji as his army commander. Khalji assassinated the young sultan and took the throne himself, ending the Mamluk era and opening the Khalji dynasty in what contemporaries called the Khalji Revolution.

• 3. The Khalji Expansion

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  Jalal ud-Din Firuz Khalji was around seventy years old when he became sultan, and by the accounts of his time he was mild-mannered, humble, and kind to the general public. He ruled for six years before being murdered in 1296 on the orders of his nephew and son-in-law Juna Muhammad Khalji, who took the throne under the name Ala ud-Din Khalji.

  Ala ud-Din had first proven himself as governor of Kara province, raiding the Kingdom of Malwa in 1292 and Devagiri in 1294 for plunder. Once sultan, he pushed further, using generals such as Malik Kafur and Khusro Khan to drive deep into southern India, collecting what the sources call anwatan, war booty, from defeated kingdoms. Among the spoils collected at Warangal was the Koh-i-Noor diamond.

  To fund his armies, Ala ud-Din reorganised the entire economy. Agricultural taxes rose from 20% to 50%, payable in grain. He banned socialising among officials and inter-marriage between noble families to prevent opposition networks from forming. He cut salaries of officials, poets, and scholars. He replaced private markets with four centralised government-run markets, called shahana-i-mandi, assigned Muslim merchants exclusive permits to buy and resell at official prices, and introduced a network of spies to enforce compliance. Violations were punished by mutilation. When famines struck, the grain stored in state granaries kept his armies fed, even as the broader population suffered.

  In 1298, between fifteen thousand and thirty thousand Mongols near Delhi who had recently converted to Islam were slaughtered in a single day, following a mutiny during an invasion of Gujarat. Ala ud-Din died by assassination in 1316. The last ruler of the Khalji line, his eighteen-year-old son Qutb ud-Din Mubarak Shah Khalji, ruled four years before a general of Hindu origins named Khusrau Khan killed him and took power. Khusrau Khan's reign lasted only months before Ghazi Malik defeated and killed him in 1320, establishing the Tughlaq dynasty.

• 4. Muhammad bin Tughluq's Ambitions

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  Juna Khan, who renamed himself Muhammad bin Tughluq, ruled for twenty-six years and during that time the Delhi Sultanate reached its greatest geographical extent, covering most of the Indian subcontinent. The sources describe him as an intellectual with extensive knowledge of the Quran, Fiqh, and poetry. They also describe a man deeply suspicious of his own family and ministers, and prone to decisions that brought economic ruin.

  His most discussed experiment was ordering the minting of coins from base metals at the face value of silver coins, between 1329 and 1332. It failed because ordinary people minted counterfeit coins from whatever base metal they had at home and used them to pay taxes. State revenues collapsed. The historian Walford recorded that Delhi and most of India suffered severe famines in the years following the coin experiment.

  Muhammad bin Tughluq also chose Deogiri, in present-day Maharashtra, renaming it Daulatabad, as a second administrative capital. He ordered the forced migration of the entire Muslim elite of Delhi to settle there, including his royal family, nobles, Sayyids, Sheikhs, and the Ulama. The historian Ferishta recorded that when the Mongols arrived in Punjab, the Sultan reversed course and returned the elite to Delhi. The Sultanate never recovered politically from the damage this caused to his nobles' loyalty. One lasting consequence, however, was the growth of a stable Muslim population at Daulatabad that, according to the source, made possible the later rise of the Bahmanid kingdom.

  Revolts began in 1327 and multiplied. In 1335, Jalaluddin Ahsan Khan, a Sayyid native of Kaithal in North India, broke away to found the Madurai Sultanate. By 1347, Ismail Mukh's rebellion had produced the independent Bahmani Sultanate. Muhammad bin Tughluq died in 1351 chasing rebels in Gujarat, leaving behind a shrunken empire on the edge of fragmentation.

• 5. Timur and the Reckoning

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  Firuz Shah Tughlaq succeeded to the throne in 1351 and ruled for thirty-seven years. His reign is marked in the sources as a period of relative prosperity, much of it attributed to his Grand Vizier, Khan-i-Jahan Maqbul, described as a South Indian Telugu Muslim. Firuz Shah commissioned an irrigation canal from the Yamuna river to stabilise the food supply, and he left a memoir in which he wrote that he banned extreme forms of torture, listing amputations, tearing out eyes, setting people on fire, and driving nails into hands and feet, among others.

  But prosperity did not outlast him. After Firuz Shah died, his great-grandson Ghiyath-ud-Din Shah II gave himself over to wine and pleasure. Nobles killed him and his vizier and installed another member of the family. The slave corps Firuz Shah had built, the Ghulaman-i-Firuz Shahi, became a destabilising force, turning against successive rulers. By the 1390s there were two men simultaneously calling themselves Sultan: Nasir-ud-Din Mahmud Shah Tughluq, ruling from Delhi, and his relative Nasir-ud-din Nusrat Shah Tughluq, ruling from Firozabad, a few miles away.

  Timur, also known as Tamerlane, the Turkicized Mongol ruler of the Timurid Empire, learned of this quarrel and marched on Delhi in 1398. Estimates in the source place the number killed in his massacre at between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand people. Timur had no intention of ruling India. He plundered and burned Delhi over fifteen days, enslaved skilled artisans, and returned to Samarkand with his loot. The surviving sultan, Mahmud Shah Tughlaq, had fled to Gujarat during the invasion and returned to rule as a nominal figure, a puppet of court factions, until the Tughlaq dynasty dissolved entirely.

• 6. Architecture and Stone

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  The Qutb Minar complex in Delhi was begun under Muhammad of Ghor by 1199, before the Sultanate was formally established, and continued under successive rulers. The Quwwat-ul-Islam Mosque, now a ruin and a UNESCO world heritage site, was the first structure. It reused columns from demolished Hindu and Jain temples, including one on the same site whose platform was repurposed. The style was Iranian, but the arches were still corbelled in the traditional Indian way.

  The Qutb Minar itself stands in four original stages reaching 73 meters, with a final stage added later. Its nearest comparator, the source notes, is the 62-metre all-brick Minaret of Jam in Afghanistan, built around 1190. Both surfaces are elaborately decorated with inscriptions and geometric patterns; at the Delhi tower, the shaft is fluted with stalactite bracketing under each balcony.

  By around 1300, builders began constructing true domes and arches with voussoirs. The Alai Darwaza gatehouse at the Qutb complex, completed in 1311, shows a cautious approach: very thick walls and a shallow dome. It introduced bold contrasting colours, red sandstone against white marble, a feature that would define Indo-Islamic architecture going forward, substituting for the polychrome tiles common in Persia and Central Asia. Stone openwork screens called jali, long used in Hindu temples, appear here for the first time in an Islamic building.

  The tomb of Shah Rukn-e-Alam in Multan, built between 1320 and 1324, is an octagonal brick mausoleum with polychrome glazed decoration still closely tied to Iranian and Afghan styles, built for a Sufi saint rather than a sultan. The Tughlaq tombs were generally more austere; the dynasty employed a corps of government architects and builders that included many Hindus. Firuz Shah Tughlaq, who reigned from 1351 to 1388, is said to have designed buildings himself and left more structures than any other Tughlaq ruler. He was buried in the Hauz Khas Complex in Delhi, which also preserves small domed pavilions supported only by columns.

• 7. Technology, Language, and Economy

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  The spinning wheel reached India from Iran during the Delhi Sultanate period, according to historians Arnold Pacey and Irfan Habib. The earliest unambiguous reference to a spinning wheel in India is dated to 1350. The worm gear roller cotton gin was invented in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, with Habib suggesting the development may have occurred first in peninsular India before spreading more widely during the Mughal era.

  The Sultanate period also saw the transfer from the Islamic world of geared water-raising wheels and other machines employing gears, pulleys, cams, and cranks. Paper had reached parts of India as early as the sixth or seventh century through Chinese travellers and the ancient silk road, but the fifteenth-century Chinese traveller Ma Huan noted that Bengali paper was white and made from tree bark in the manner of Chinese papermaking, suggesting Bengal had its own direct route from China.

  According to figures cited from historian Angus Maddison, India's GDP grew nearly 8% between the years 1000 and 1500, reaching $60.5 billion in 1500, though the country's share of world GDP fell from 33% to 22% over the same span. Population grew from around 85 million in 1200 to 101 million in 1500.

  The Hindustani language, known as Hindavi, began to emerge during this period, developing from the Middle Indo-Aryan apabhramsha vernaculars of North India. Amir Khusrau, a writer who lived in the thirteenth century during the Sultanate period, used Hindustani as the lingua franca of the day and referred to it in his writings as Hindavi. That language, shaped in part by the centuries of cultural mixing the Sultanate produced, would eventually become one of the most widely spoken in the world.

• 8. The Final Dynasty and Mughal Succession

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  The Sayyid dynasty, founded by Khizr Khan, ruled from 1415 to 1451. Members claimed descent from the prophet Muhammad through his daughter Fatima, though historians Richard M. Eaton and Simon Digby describe Khizr Khan as a Punjabi chieftain from the Khokhar clan. His successor Mubarak Khan, who renamed himself Mubarak Shah, dropped his father's nominal loyalty to the Timurid Empire and tried unsuccessfully to reclaim lost territories in Punjab from Khokhar warlords. By the time of the last Sayyid ruler, Alam Shah, whose name translated to "king of the world", the Sultanate's reach had shrunk to what a northern Indian saying described as "from Delhi to Palam", a distance the source gives as merely 13 km.

  The Lodi dynasty displaced the Sayyids in 1451, bringing a brief resurgence. Bahlul Khan Lodi, a Khalji of the Lodi tribe, pushed the Sultanate's influence back east toward Varanasi by attacking the Muslim Jaunpur Sultanate. His son Sikandar Lodi, who ruled from 1489 to 1517, moved the capital from Delhi to Agra, where he built structures in the Indo-Islamic style whose growth continued well into the Mughal period. Sikandar died a natural death in 1517, one of the few relatively peaceful exits in the Sultanate's history.

  His second son Ibrahim Lodi could not hold the Afghan and Persian noble factions together. After killing his elder brother Jalal Khan to eliminate a rival, Ibrahim lost the governor of Punjab, Daulat Khan Lodi, who reached out to the Timurid ruler Babur and invited him south. Babur defeated and killed Ibrahim Lodi at the Battle of Panipat in 1526. The Delhi Sultanate, which had begun with one Turkic slave seizing power from the ruins of the Ghurid empire, ended with another Central Asian dynasty replacing it, and the architecture that Sikandar Lodi had built in Agra served as the foundation on which the Mughal Empire would raise its own monuments.