the war of goldsmith's daughter

8/13/2019 The War of Goldsmith's Daughter

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THE WAR OFTHE GOLDSMITH SDAUGHTER

ByADAM WATSON

1964CHATTO & WINDUS

LONDON


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Published byChatto and Windus Ltd40-42 William IV StreetLondon W.C.2*Clarke, Irwin and Co. LtdToronto

ANGRAU954N64

Acc No. 13671

HE KED

Adam Watson, 1964Printed in Great Britain byT. & A. Constable LtdHopetoun StreetEdinburgh


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IntroductionChronological TableGenealogical Tables:

CONTENTS

First Vijayanagar DynastyBahmani DynastyPart One: The Coming of Islam

I The Setting of the Stage2 Ala-ad-Din Khilji3 The Wonder of the Age'4 The Brilliant Failure

Part Two: The New Order

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I The Pattern after Tughluq 612 The Origins of an Empire 643 The Expansion of Vijayanagar 684 The Establishment of a Sultanate 745 Mohammed Bahmani and the Velama Alliance 83

Part Three: Consolidation and ConflictI The Seeds of Rivalry 9 I2 The First Bahmani-Vijayanagar War 973 The Conquest of Madura 1024 The Second War and a Disputed Succession 1055 Harihara II I I 06 Mohammed II Bahmani 1157 The Year of Violence 1 198 Firuz 1249 The Third War 131

10 The Bahmanis and theNorth 138Deva Raya I 143


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6 CONTENTSPart Four: The War of ire Goldsmith s Daughter

I The Goldsmith's Daughter 1532 The War 1603 Its Significance 171

Part Five: Expansion and DeclineI Conflict over Warangal2 The Removal of Firuz and Deva Raya I3 The Swing of the Balance4- Ahmad and Deva Raya II5 The Northern Threat Materializes6 An Attractive Emperor

" 7 The Decline of Two DynastiesConclusionBibliographical NoteIndex

179188193197202207214-220


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ILLUSTRATIONS1 a) The ruins of Daulatabad fort facing page 64

by courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum(h) Vijayanagar. The 'Elephant Stables', an early buildingin the palace area 64

by courtesy of the India Office2 (a) Individual combat - about 1393 65

taken from Persian Miniature Painting by j.,. Binyon,published by the Oxford University Pressh) Armies fighting - about 1420 65

taken from Persian Miniature Painting by :L. Binyon,published by the Oxford University Press3 h ga'tewa),1n"'Na1anga\, -snDW1ng\\1nuu anu t 5 ' J r e n l ~ . t ~ U i ~ %v

by courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum4 (a) The great Mosque at Gulbarga 81by courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum

(h) The tomb of Firuz at Gulbarga 81by courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum

5 Gauri, the goddess of impersonal beauty. Idealized femalefigure, Vijayanagar Empire, about reign of Bukka I 144by courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum

6 (a) Court scene, about 1420 145by courtesy of the Bodleian Library(h) A Prince entertaining a lady 145

taken from Persian Miniature Painting by L. Binyon,published by the Oxford University Press7 (a) A ruler pulled off his white elephant 160

taken from Persian Miniature Painting by L. Binyon,published by the Oxford University Press(h) A battle scene with elephants, about 1420 160by courtesy of the Fitzwilliam Museum

8 Vijayanagar. Interior of a temple showing the profuselyrich carving 16 1by courtesy of the India Office


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8 ILL USTRATIONSMAPSI

I The Empire of Mohammed Tlj.ghluq in 1335 after therebellion of Madura page 47

2 South India at the time of the War of the Goldsmith'sDaughter 993 The Kistna River System and the Central Deccan 155


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INTRODUCTIONE C H age must rewrite its own history. That is to say, eachage must come to its own terms with the past. The mainreason for this is not that new facts come to light, thoughthese often prove to be of major importance. It is essentiallybecause each age, looking at the past, is impressed bydifferent things.Fifty years ago, in the calmer days of Prosperity andProgress, most serious history tended to concern itselfespecially with the 'great periods' of former civilizationsthe Glory that was Greece and its counterparts. Theseperiods of achievement stood out in historical writing somuch that the rest of the story always seemed only to beleading up to or down from some apogee: and this was noless true when certain areas, like Italy and China, had morethan one flowering. The tendency was reinforced by thefashion for history in the form of biography, whether of aman or a nation or even an abstraction such as Liberty. Forthe biographical technique led to distorting the actual courseand interplay of events by throwing them into artificialrelief according to their relevance to the biographer'ssubject. A great deal of popular historical literature stillcontinues in this tradition, especially where cultural achievements are being described, until the panorama of Man sattainments seems almost like a conducted tour by the Museof History herself, pointing out what her sisters were able toinspire in this capital at one moment and in that one the next.I f oday this approach seems less and less satisfying, thereare many reasons for our shift in interest. To begin with, theappetite for great periods and golden ages has been surfeited.At the same time, more detailed research has emphasizedhow much the periods chosen, like the Renaissance, were


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10 THE WAR OF THE GOLDSMITH'S DAUGHTERthemselves periods of exceptional flux and transition.Another influence has also come to broaden the field ofhistorical interest. This is the impact of the scientificdisciplines, which teach us to avoid the single shiningexample and to look for a pattern that emerges from anumber of similar occurrences. But behind reasons of thissort is the basic sense that the time we ourselves live in isconfused and changing. We seem to be in a period with fewfixed values and many cross-currents, of the disintegrationof old systems and the emergence of new ones. We feel thatwe are involved in something more fundamental and longdrawn out than we had realized. Events that gave our fathersa sense of climax and apocalypse, like the First World Warand the Russian R e v o l ~ t i o n , are now perceived only asincidents in a greater convulsion. It is natural that we shouldask ourselves whether times of flux and refashioning, suchas the one in which we have to live, do not have an atmosphere and indeed a purpose and meaning of their own. Andso, from thinking about our own time in this way, we havecome to feel more curiosity about similar periods in the past,and to take an interest in them for their own sake,. instead ofmerely watching in them only the end or the beginning ofsomething else. For the same reason we bring more sympathyto such periods, so that perhaps we understand them betterthan our fathers could.Periods of flux and confusion, then, seem to us nowadaysworth studying for their own sakes. I f the proper study ofmankind is man, then we are interested in all the evidence.Each moment of the past will have its own litht to throw onthe subject of our enquiry, so long as we try to see in theirown context the problems which the men and women of thattime had to face, and the way in which they solved them.And here we must be sure that in avoiding the minordistortion of studying a moment of history with reference tosome climax in the past or the future, we do not commit thegrand distortion of all-that of treating the whole of the pastwith reference to the present, as if it were a series of dress


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INTRODUCTION 11rehearsals for our own times. History can teach us about thestage, and about the craft of the playwright or the actor, andperhaps even, as Machiavelli claimed, the tricks of the trade;but the play in which we must act is new. This danger isgreatest when the setting most resembles ours. I t is all tooeasy, for instance, to write about what purports to be the ageof Andrew Jackson but is really the age of FranklinRoosevelt in disguise. That is why it is sometimes valuableto look at some period far away and long ago, with predicaments which we shall not confuse with our own, and seewhether we can grasp the atmosphere and even the meaningof those times.

One such far off period, and indeed one of the great displacements of world history, is the expansion of Islam. Thelands into which this dynamic system flowed all had longand refined traditions of culture; and as a result the civilization which emerged from the flux of conquest was aninfinitely complex and subtle blend of new discoveries andthe most ancient customs. By the time that Islam hadreached the threshold of India it was already a recognizablealloy fused from Semitic, Hellenic, Persian and otherelements. Until then the various components of this newcivilization were already long familiar to one another, andhad interacted on each other through millennia of trade andconquest. The Caliph of Baghdad was the heir of Alexanderand Xerxes, of Nebuchadnezzar and Solomon. But when thestill molten society of Islam embarked on the invasion andgradual conquest of India, it found itself in increasinglyintimate contact with something very largely alien, theextremely differentiated and immemorial Brahminicalcivilization of the Hindu world. This was itself an amalgam,but one which had long since crystallized out into staticforms. In Southern India especially the element most foreignto the invader, the pre-Aryan Dravidian culture, was stillvirile and active. The period of adjustment which followedthe Saracen conquest of Southern India is one of confusionand change; and therefore one which historians have been


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12 THE WAR OF THE GOLDSMITH'S DAUGHTERready to pass over lightly. Yet in so doing they have missedthe essential significance of the story, as well as the particularly dramatic confrontation 'of two so very unlike civilizations. And they have taken little note of the high level ofculture and refinement attained in that period, comparableto much in other civilizations that has been extolled andstudied in far greater detail.

An attempt to explain a major event in human affairs,such as the Moslem irruption into the Hindu world, callsfor two things. On the one hand a general picture, with itsbroad perspectives and its conclusions; and on the other anaccount of some characteristic incident detailed enough togive the general picture a life-sized reality. This bookbegins with a panoramic view of all India at the opening ofthe fourteenth century, when the new Moslem society of thenorth was embarking on its conquest of the south. Then thestory limits itself to Southern India, restricting the territorialrange and the time span until it closes in to the details of theWar of the Goldsmith's Daughter. I have chosen thisepisode, not because it is essentially different from whathappened before and afterwards, though every event has itsunique quality; but because it is characteristic of the societythat had established itself in Southern India by the end ofthe fourteenth century, and of the relations between theMoslem and Hindu states that s t a b l i s h e d themselves in thewakeof the invasion from the north, and because it illustratesmost of the elements that went up to make the pattern of thetimes.

This period of history is one which has le,ft behind littlehard evidence, and much of the story lias to. lie deduced fromconflicting chronicles, travellers' accounts, ruins and coins.On points where scholars differ, I have chosen the interpretations which my own studies indicated as most probable,and set them down as facts. While no expert on the periodwill endorse all the controversial points in the narrative, Ihave postulated nothing for which there is not a reasonablecase. This is in fact the borderline between archaeology and


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INTRODUCTION 13history. But the general pattern of the picture, and theconspicuous details, stand out clearly enough for us to seewhat happened, and why, and to understand something ofthe predicaments which men faced in those times and theways in which they tried to deal with them.


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ICHRONOLOGICAL .TABLE1296 Accession of Ala-ad-Din Khilji to the throne of Delhi.1297-8 Ala-ad-Din's armies conquer the Kingdom of Gujarat.1299-1308 Mongol invasions.1305 Ala-ad-Din appoints Ghiyas-ad-Din Tughluq Governor of

the Punjab and Warden of the Marches.1306 Ala-ad-Din sends Kafur on expedition against the Kingdomof Devagiri.

1308 Kafur's expedition against the Kingdom of Warangal.1310 Kafur's march to the Tamil country.1316 Ala-ad-Din's death.Kafur ascends the throne of Delhi for 35 days, succeeded by

Mubarak. / '1320 Usurpation of the throne by Khusrav.August 23rd: Ghiyas-ad-Din Tughluq proclaimed Sultan.1321 Prince Mohammed Tughluq subdues Mahratta,country andlays siege to Warangal.1323 Mohammed Tughluq subdues the Telegu country(Warangal).1325 Ghiyas-ad-Din Tughluq killed.Mohammed Tughluq accedes to the throne of Delhi.1326 Rebellion of Gurshasp.1327 Destruction of Kampila in Anegundi. /Transfer of the Imperial Capital from Delhi to Daulatabad.1328 Mongol invasion led by Tamashirin halted near Delhi.1329 Issue of copper by Mohammed Tughluq.133+ Moslems in the Tamil country form the independentSultanate of Malabar (Madura).133+ Rebellion in Anegundi put down by Harihara.Hoysala Kingdom subdued.


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CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE1335 Mohammed Tughluq leaves the Deccan.1336 Foundation of f7ijayanagar.

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1337 Krishna Nayaka re-establishes the Hindu Kingdom ofWarangal.1340 Harihara Raya establishes a Hindu Confederacy in the Deccan.1342 The Sultan of Madura defeats the Hoysala Kingdom. ViraBallala III killed.1343 Virupaksha Ballala IV accedes to the Hoysala throne and joinsthe Vijayanagar Confederacy.1347 Mohammed Tugluq suppresses rebellion in Gujarat.1347 Ismail the Afghan proclaimed independent King of the Deccanat Daulatabad.August 3rd: Hassan accedes to the Bahmani Throne.Alliance with Warangal.1351 Mohammed Tughluq dies.Firuz Tughluq accedes to the throne of Delhi.1354 Anapota Velama seizes the Telugu throne.1357 Harihara I dies.Bukka I accedes to the throne of Vijayanagar.1358 Hassan Bahmani dies.Mohammed I Bahmani accedes to the throne. (Capital inGulbarga.)1365 Anapota Velama restores the Bahmani alliance.1366 First war between the Bahmanis and f7ijayanagar (MohammedI v. Bukka I).1365 -70 Vijayanagar conquest of Madura.1376 Mohammed I Bahmani dies.M ujahid accedes to the Bahmani throne.1376 -7 Second war hetween the Bahmanis and f7ijayanagar(Mujahid v. Bukka I).1377 February: Bukka dies. Accession of Harihara II of Vijayanagar.1378 April- May: Accession and assassination of Daud Bahmani.May: Accession of Mohammed II Bahmani.1382 - 97 Vijayanagar campaigns against the Velamas and Reddis.1397 Death of Mohammed II Bahmani. Accession of Ghiyas-adDin.


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CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 1714.36 Seventh war between Bahman; Sultanate and f7ijayanagar(Ala-ad-Din v. Deva Raya II).1+37 Ala-ad-Din's campaign against coastal rulers: marriage toPerichehra. Invasion by Khandeish repulsed.1++3 Plot against Deva Raya II.Eighth war between Bahaman; Sultanate and f7ijayanagar

(Ala-ad-Din v. Deva Raya II).1++6 Death of Deva Raya II.1+58 Death of Ala-ad-D.in Bahmani. Humayun the Cruel accedes.1+80's Breakup of Bahmani Kingdom.1+86 Narasinha seizes power in Vijayanagar.

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PART ONEThe Coming ofIslam


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ITHE SETTING OF THE STAGE

TH E War of the Goldsmith's Daughter took place inSouthern India, in the years I406 and I407, between theHindu Empire of Vijayanagar (Veeja-nugger) and theMoslem and Hindu kingdoms to the north of it. It wasostensibly caused by the desire of the new Emperor ofVijayanagar to carry off and marry the beautiful daughter ofa goldsmith who lived in the country of his most powerfulneighbour, the Moslem Bahmani Sultan. The underlyingcauses of the conflict, and the course of the war, involvemost of the threads of the time. To understand them, andthe two countries which at that time had both reached aremarkable period of brilliance and were ruled over byoutstanding men, it is necessary to go back a hundred years,and begin with a panoramic view of the whole Indian scenea century earlier, at the time when the Saracen world of thenorth of India first broke into the south.

The huge sub-continent of India is divided into two bythe belt of broken, mountainous country known as theVindhya Mountains, that stretches more or less horizontallyacross the middle of the peninsula. The area to the south,with which this book is essentially concerned, can loosely becalled the Deccan. It is considerably smaller than the greatextent of Northern India; but is itself none the less a verylarge triangle of land, nearly a thousand miles as the crowflies along the Vindhya Mountains, and about the samedistance from there down to the southermost point of India.Roughly speaking, the Deccan is the same area as fromBrittany across to Poland and down to Sicily; or fromMassachusetts to Illinois and down to Georgia. All down thewest coast runs a chain of steep mountains, the Western -Ghats, which intercept the monsoon rains so that the


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24 THE WAR OF THE GOLDSMITH'S DAUGHTERcountry to the east is dry. Across the middle of the Deccanruns the River Kistna with its tributary the Tungabhadra,which rise in the mountains of the west and flow across thecountry to the eastern sea. T h ~ Tungabhadra-Kistna line hastended repeatedly in South Indian history to becomeestablished as the political dividing-line between the statesof the area. The War of the Goldsmith's Daughter wasfought to maintain this line.

In this area, remote from the tides of landward invasion,has survived one of the ancient civilizations of the world: thefamily of races, languages and customs known as Dravidian.In the dawn of history it seems probable that people likethe Dravidians were spread out over the whole of India.

Their civilization seems to have had remarkable affinitieswith those of the ancient Middle East. There are strikingparallels both with Mesopotamia and Syria, and with Egyptto which early India ~ a s linked by sea. There was the samenature-religion, with the mother goddess and serpents andthe sun, a society centred round the temple and organizedon matriarchal lines.Then, during the second millennium before Christ, camethe first great landward penetration of Northern India ofwhich we have any record. This was the eastern current ofthe great Aryan flood which also slowly conquered andfiltered its way into the older civilizations of Europe andWestern Asia. The Aryans were simple, uncivilized, warliketribes. Their coming must have been like the barbarianpenetration of the Roman Empire, but on a much wider andlonger scale. How this slow and. diffuse P/ocess occurred,and why, and what technical advantages .fuade it possible,are fascinating and still unresolved -questions. For thepurpose of this book it is enough to note the general. pattern.As the Aryans settled down in their new homes, their ownculture became tinctured and blended with the older andmaturer cultures which they found to the south of them.These bIen dings produced the great flowerings of thehuman spirit which we call the Greek and Persian and


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THE SETTING OF THE STAGE 25Sanskrit civilizations. And it is important for the understanding of Indian history to remember that these threecivilizations were all related in this way.

The Aryans in time settled and colonized all NorthernIndia and the northern fringes of the Deccan. But theDravidians still survived almost uninfluenced further south,and most of that area is still Dravidian to this day. As t imewent by, the ancient culture of India asserted itself evermore strongly, so that although the new Sanskrit civilizationwas Aryan in form, it became more and more pre-Aryan inspirit and content, though raised to a higher level by theAryan genius. And as this happened, it became easier forthe new Sanskrit civilization to penetrate the Dravidiansouth, until all India was embraced in the fold of what wenow call Hinduism. But the civilization of the Dravidiansouth was naturally even more completely pre-Aryan infeeling than that of the north; and since Hinduism is atolerant, comprehensive way of life, more of the ancientways, like matriarchy and fertility rites, have survived inSouthern India than in any other highly civilized part of theworld.

The essence of this immemorial civilization was itscorporate nature. Society was an organic whole, and eachgroup had its function within that whole; and in turn eachhuman being functioned not as an individual but as part of agroup. This corporate social life was elaborately organizedin what is known as the caste system, together with theinstitution of the joint family and the self-administeringvillage community. It was the traditionalism of the castesystem, with its emphasis on specialization and inheritedcontinuity of place in a rigid framework, that gave theproliferating variety of southern Hinduism its cohesion andstrength. The different castes included such varied racialstrains and ways of life, and married so strictly amongthemselves, that they almost seemed like different peoplesliving together in the same community. Even corporateloyalty hardly existed, and 'national feeling' in the modern


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26 THE WAR OF THE GOLDSMITH1S DAUGHTERsense was of course an unknown concept. Caste at that timeinvolved the division of the population not merely into thefour main groups of Brahmirts or priests, warrior nobles,merchants, and cultivators, and a range of untouchablesexcluded from the hierarchy, but into a large number ofsubdivisions. There was an occupation appropriate to eachcaste, though all could farm. Normally, members of eachsub-caste could only marry one another, Each sub-caste hadits own elaborate code both for preparing and eating foodand also for almost every kind of social intercourse. Thesethree factors of a common closed profession, a commonancestry and a common closed social life tended to isolateeach sub-caste in its interests and outlook. But economicallyall were dependent on each other, and each group played itspart in the government of the village, and in the all-pervading

~ \ ) h . e . t e . (\f t d ~ ~ i . . _ ( \ u . ~ ( \ Q ~ e . t ' ( a . t \ C . e . e.a.c.h. snh-cast.e Qtmed a.brotherhood with a special part to play.Society, with its almost independent village life' and itsbazaars and princely courts, was largely held together byancient and unquestioned custom. Its real rulers were thegods, who formed the invisible side of the community butwhose presence was everywhere seen and felt. The great,caste of the Brahmins were not only the ministers of thesegods and the holy men, but also the lawyers, teachers,doctors, the bankers and clerks, occasionally the generals.They held the threads of administration in their experiencedpriestly hands. The Brahmins of the south, with their sometimes paler skin and their scriptural learning (both derivedfrom the more Aryan north), were e v e r e d e ~ e n by those whodisliked them; and they led the magical sid'e of the sacrificesand rituals which controlled the favours of the gods.

The King in a Hindu society was originally also a magicaland semi-divine figure, a 'great deity in human form'. Hisrole was not to rule according to his own judgement in mostmatters, but to carry out the Dharma or Sacred Law. Hismain political duties were to protect his subjects and toreceive the revenue. This revenue must not all be expended


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THE SETTING OF THE STAGE 27on administration: tradition required each King to preserveintact the treasure accumulated by his predecessors and toadd to it fresh treasure of his own. In the same way thetemple priesthoods hoarded the bulk of the valuables theyreceived as offerings. The other business of the King waswar. Particularly important in the Hindu world was the factthat warfare was largely left to a single caste, the royalty andnobility; for it meant that the bulk of the population was notonly unable to bear arms but largely indifferent to theresults of military engagements. In the big unwieldy Hinduarmies the infantry was often an unorganized rabble and theissue was decided by the knights and the often unmanageable royal elephants. Warfare was constant. For HinduIndia was divided politically into a number of warringkingdoms. The Hindu world was like medieval Christendomor classical Greece, in that its very real sense of unity did not,in men's minds, include the government of the whole areafrom one centre.

The northern part of India was not so sheltered from thetides of world history as the Deccan. The protecting circleof the Himalayas had not kept out the Aryan flood. Then inthe next millennium, which we call the first before Christ,during the great classical period of Sanskrit civilization, thesister Aryan civilization of the Persians developed into apowerful Empire, which in its turn crossed the Hindu Kushand descended into the rich lands of Northern India. By thereign of Darius the Great, all north-western India, roughlythe area of modern West Pakistan, had been incorporated inthe Persian Empire. So began that long and fateful penetration of India by the Persian world, of which the War ofthe Goldsmith's Daughter was one episode. Two centuriesafter Darius, Alexander the Great, master of the GreekPersian Empire, established himself in the same area, and sointroduced into India through Persia the culture of classicalGreece. This third brilliant civilization produced by theAryan penetration of the ancient cultures had a stimulatingeffect on the Sanskrit civilization. But these and the sub-


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28 THE WAR OF THE GOLDSMITH'S DAUGHTERsequent incursions from Per.sia down the centuries rarelypenetrated as far south as the Vindhya Mountains; and theywere all gradually absorbed Iand digested into the newamalgam of emerging Hind\lism as the native elementreasserted itself.Then in the eleventh century began a Persian invasion ofa new and more powerful kind. Persia was swept by theexpanding, militant Arab religion of Islam. As well as muchof the Greek civilization, the Moslems had brought withthem into Persia new techniques of war and government,with the tremendous Semitic vision of the Divine not as thedistillation of man or nature or even the Universe, but asmoral law.

In the eleventh century A.D. - that is, at the beginning ofour own millennium - the first Moslem Persian invasionsthrough the Hindu Kpsh down into India began. Duringthe following two centuries most of the vast area of NorthernIndia was overrun by the e x p a n d ~ n g forces of Islam. Theorganizers of these conquests, and the kingdoms theyfounded, formed part of the new Islamic Persian civilization.But not all the invaders were Persians. The men who pouredover the ranges of the Himalayas down into the rich newEmpire they called Hindustan, in search of fame and fortune,included many Turkish, Mongol and Arab adventurers,from all over the Islamic world. These men resembled theSaracens who opposed the Crusaders, though they were evenmore racially mixed. So close was the connexion between theMoslem frontier lands of India and the Eastern Mediterranean that we still find ' I ~ d o - S a r a s : e ~ n ' a useful a:chitecturaland cultural term. The IndIan Moslemswer{hardler, toughermen than the Rajput nobility and the other Hindus whoopposed them, more used to the saddle and the open air, andbetter versed in the arts of war. Above all, they were unitedand impelled forward by their cleansing, .fighting religion.The conversion of extermination of the infidels, and thedestruction of idols, were sacred duties. Islam was a greatbrotherhood, that took little account of what a man might


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30 THE WAR OF THE GOLDSMITH'S DAUGHTEReleventh century, was thus a land in which fortune smiled onadventurers. Though it may be said with justice thatconditions in India have a l w ~ y s been such as to favour thebold and resolute man who kri.ew how to seize his chance, yetin the period of the Moslem conquest this was especiallytrue. Both men and states required to be unusually adaptable.They needed special qualities of originality and acceptance,of toughness and elasticity, to meet the sudden wild shiftsand turns of fate. It was as if the wind was blowing in favourof change, and the forces of conservatism and tradition couldonly make headway by trimming their sails to that wind.Nowhere can this better be seen than in the rather separatelargely Dravidian world of Southern India between theVindhya Mountains and the sea, as it adapted itself to theshock of invasion by the Moslem Empire of Delhi.


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2ALA-AD-DIN KHILJI

P E R H A P s the most representative figure in the MoslemEmpire of Northern India at the opening of the fourteenthcentury was its ruler, Ala-ad-Din Khilji, the Sultan of Delhi.He was characteristic enough of his time to form a goodintroduction to it. And, moreover, it was he who set inmotion the expansion southwards of Moslem power acrossthe Vindhya Mountains and into the Deccan, whichrevolutionized that long inviolate world.Ala-ad-Din was a man of hard and tireless energy, a boldbut realistic adventurer whose caprices never outran hiscompetence. He observed no conventions and relied on notraditions; for such things carried little weight either withhim or with most of the restless society that he was determined to dominate. He was unscrupulous, cruel andtreacherous, coolly calculating his own self-interest andrelying only on the self-interest of others. His policies werean almost unfailing success, remarkably realistic for all theirboldness. His reign was not merely a tale of terror andtriumph: he managed to master the turbulent Empire ofDelhi and organize it more systematically than before.Already while his uncle was still on the throne he carriedout an unauthorized raid with a small force of 8 ,000 horsemen beyond the limits of the Empire into the Deccan, andreturned with a fabulous booty of gold, jewels and silver towhet the imagination and the greed of his fellow-Moslems.In 1296 he saw and seized the chance to acquire the throneby treacherously arranging the murder of the Sultan hisuncle, and then taking the usual precaution of blinding hisCOUSinS.As soon as he ascended the throne he began to work outschemes for increasing his authority within the Kingdom and


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32 THE WAR OF THE GOLDSMITH'S DAUGHTERextending its boundaries. But before he could put theseschemes into operation he had to deal with a danger that longthreatened the Moslems Of Northern India, and a centurylater nearly destroyed them: the Mongol invasions. Theseferocious and militarily almost irresistible tribesmen were aseager as anyone else for the. spoils of Hindustan. Small bandsof them could be accepted as immigrants, but when organizedarmies of them crossed the Hindu Kush and descended onIndia the whole fate of the Kingdom of Delhi trembled in thebalance. Ala-ad-Din realized both how serious and howsustained the Mongol threat was. He therefore appointedhis ablest soldier to be Warden of the Marches. This wasanother typical figure, the half-Indian Ghiyas-ad-DinTughluq, the son of a Turki slave of the Royal Householdand a Hindu Jat girl from the Punjab. Tughluq later rose byability and honourable merit to be Sultan himself, and wasthe father of the great Mohammed Tughluq, the conquerorof all India, and one of the most remarkable kings in herlong history. After Tughluq took charge, the Mongols onlybroke through once. Both Moslems and Hindus weregrateful to him.Meanwhile Ala-ad-Din devoted his ,immense andadventurous energies to the twin tasks of consolidating andstrengthening his own power within his Empire, andexpanding its confines to bring under his control as much ofIndia and beyond as he could. This was indeed the centralproblem of Indian i ~ p e r i a l politics. How far could a stateexpand territorially into a great empire and yet retain enoughcoherence and unity, and a sufficient degree of centralizedcontrol, to continue as a functioning .ub.it without breakingup when the power of the centre ,became too diffused orotherwise weakened? For in periods of weakness at thecentre of any large state there was a tendency not only for theprovincial governors and feudal chiefs to assert suchindependence as they dared but also for the degree of royalcontrol to be loosened even in the areas which still owedallegiance to the ruler directly.


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ALA-AD-DIN KRILJI 33Ala-ad-Din was one of the few imperial rulers who seemedto master this problem, at least in his own lifetime; and his.success in extending both the confines of his Empire and hisauthority within it is a significant indication of the nature

of Indian politics at that time. The next important ruler ofthe Delhi Empire, the great Mohammed Tughluq, wasable to conquer all Southern India; but his failure toestablish there the centralized system organized byAla-ad-Din in the north meant that political power in thesouth devolved on a number of succession states, someMoslem and some Hindu. As a result, the impact ofMoslem civilization on Southern India was not transmittedthrough the agency of a single Moslem en1pire, but permeated in differing degrees the various states that latergrew out of the ruins of the Tughluq Empire there. All ofthese states owed something to the innovations which itintroduced.

Ala-ad-Din's main purpose internally, then, was toincrease the power of the throne, and to extend his owncontrol over all the activities of the loosely organized andlargely feudal empire whose ruler he had made himself.Ala-ad-Din steadily and firmly subjected to his ownauthority the semi-feudal nobility and gentry. Theseconsisted partly of native Hindu princes who had acceptedthe overlordship of the Delhi Sultans, and partly of Moslemchiefs, either Indian converts or immigrant adventurers. Helargely abolished the grants of land and the money stipendswhich previous Kings of Delhi had paid to Turkish andother military leaders for the purpose of maintaining troops.These troops seemed to him to confer dangerous power onthe people who recruited and paid them, since they had noparticular bonds of loyalty to him. In the place of thishazardous system he reorganized a royal army directlysubordinate to himself, and paid from the royal treasury.He also increased his direct control of the civil administration of the Empire through the Royal Household.

For this army and Royal Household Ala-ad-Din neededc


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34 THE WAR OF THE GOLDSMITH'S DAUGHTERmoney; but he had in them .the means of obtaining it. Hepushed the taxation of traders fnd the tithes on the peasantryup to the astonishing figure of 50 per cent. He fixed theprices of many staple goods, and kept them down in spite ofgreat inflationary pressure by means of Draconian punishments of all economic offenders. Though extortionate andsevere, his economic policy and his direct rule were notunwelcome to the population, since the purpose of thesemeasures was clearly to consolidate and finance the royalabsolutism, and this left more for both the villagers and forthe artisans and traders in the towns than the disturbances,fighting, and local oppression that went with a weak king.Ala-ad-Din was proud of his army, and of the organizingability and military flair that enabled him to use it successfully. His hero was the most famous of all the conquerorswho ever descended out of Persia into India, Alexander theGreat. This was the heritage to which he looked back. Heseriously considered the idea of reconquering Alexander'sEmpire, and even went so far as to have coins struck in thename of Alexander II. But his older advisers pointed out thedifficulties which Tughluq was meeting in merely trying tohold the frontier, and prevailed on him to tutn his armsagainst the weaker and richer kingdoms of India. SincereMoslems also urged him not to make war against otherMoslem states, but to concentrate on the heathen areaswhich it was his duty to conquer and bring under the Will ofAllah.

The practical arguments carried weight with Ala-ad-Din,who had already seen the rich l a n d ~ b e y ~ n d the VindhyaMountains. But the religious reasons appealed to him less.He had little use for established Moslem law or for themullahs who expounded it. High Islam bored him. Hepreferred his own judgements to the precepts of the Koran.He liked the society of Hindus. His favourite Queen,Kamala Devi, was a lovely and intelligent Hindu, a Rajputprincess. She had been the wife of the Rajah of Gujarat andhad been conquered when Ala-ad-Din plundered that rich


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ALA-AD-DIN KHILJI 35mercantile kingdom in his first southward campaign in 1297;and her long tradition of Rajput royalty impressed him incontrast with the manners of his own rather parvenu court.He even talked of inventing a new religion altogether. Bothhis lay counsellors and the mullahs were relieved, therefore,when he agreed to turn his attention southwards and spendhis energies in war against the heathen.

His first operations were against the remaining Hindustates of Northern India. By 1306 all these had beenconquered; and Ala-ad-Din was ready to begin operations inthe rich but militarily backward Deccan.There had been little raids before: but his was the firstserious expedition. Its main purpose was to acquire thehoarded wealth of the royal treasuries and temples ofSouthern India. Ala-ad-Din also planned to establish a sortof suzerainty over the whole area, by making its rulers swearallegiance to him. But he did not intend, at least at this stage,to bring the Deccan within his own centralized administrative system, or to settle it with Moslems, much lessconvert the inhabitants to Islam. To command the royalarmy he characteristically chose, not some distinguishednoble, but the man he considered most capable. This was aeunuch named Kafur, a slave of the Royal Household whohad been captured in Gujarat and had risen by sheer abilityto the rank of Lord Lieutenant (Malik Naib).

The conservative Hindu kingdoms of the Deccan,wrapped in their all-embracing tradition, presented astriking contrast to the expanding Moslem Empire in thenorth and the aggressive innovator who ruled it. South of theVindhya Mountains one may distinguish four main peoples,or language areas, then as today. In the north-west were theMarathas, hardy hill people who spoke an Aryan language,the only large non-Dravidian element in Southern India. Tothe east of them lived the Telugus, the northern outpost ofthe Dravidian world. South of the Marathas lived the gayand carefree Kanarese. And in the far south was the countryof the Tamils: a black-skinned, seafaring, commercial


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36 THE WAR OF THE GOLDSMITH S DAUGHTERpeople, who were in many ways the most remarkable in allIndia, and had traditionally traded from Rome to China.

Through the whole area the limits of Hindu kingdomsebbed and flowed across the map as this or that dynastyrose and fell. For some 'denturies before the Mosleminvasions began in I 306 t h e r ~ had been continuous dynasticwars, of much the same knightly and intermittent kindas the contemporary Hundred Years War between thePlantagenets, the Valois and the Burgundians. For a longtime there had been three large kingdoms or empires, andthen two.* But for a century or so before the invasions apattern of four main states had established itself; these werethe four kingdoms that Professor Shastri says 'rose on theruins of the vanished empires and filled the annals of thecentury with their mutual antagonisms'. Broadly speaking,and exceptionally, these four kingdoms corresponded to thefour main peoples of the area. There was a Marathi Kingdomwith its capital at Devagiri. This was the country thatbecame most effectively occupied by the Moslems in SouthIndia, as it had been by the Aryans. A century later, at thetime of the War of the Goldsmith's Daughter, it had becomethe basis of the Moslem Bahmani Sultanate. Tq the east lay'a well-organized Telugu Kingdom. Its system of government, and some of its leading families were to contributemuch, both to the new Hindu Empire of Vijayanagar andalso to the Telugu allies of the Bahmani Sultans. South of* For several centuries, from about A,D, 850 to 1200 Southern India wasdominated by two imperial states, whose frontier ran along the TungabhadraRiver (later to be the dividing line between the Bahmani Sultanate and theEmpire of Vijayanagar), Warfare between them was fairly continuous. Themore impressive of the two was the Chola Empile in the south. Tamilcivilization flourished, as did the arts: this was the .great age of South Indianarchitecture. Administratively the Cholas were able to combine firm centralcontrol with something close to local and even village self-government in a waythat has not been matched since. The Cholas were also a considerable seapower. To the north of them the Rashtrakutas and then the Chalukyas maintained a similar imperial system. Though this was less impressive than theChola, both stand out in contrast to the confusion of ineffective but quarrelsome little Hindu states and Islamic invasions north of the VindhyaMountains.


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ALA-AD-DIN KHILJI 37these two states, and in the centre of Southern India, was thepowerful Hoysala Kingdom, which later formed the basis ofthe Vijayanagar Empire.* In the Tamil country to the farsouth flourished the Pandya dynasty. Marco Polo's vividand well-known description of that kingdom and other smallprincipalities in the far south gives us a picture of societyva1id. for the whole area on the very eve of the Mosleminvasions.

The Deccan was thus not an area lacking in martialtraditions or experience. Indeed it was by war that theruling dynasties established and maintained themselves.The dramatic and overwhelming success of the Moslemarmies must be set down largely to new and superior militarytechniques. The Deccanis had been sheltered from thegreat waves of war and invasion that had brought the Arabsfrom the south and the Turks from the north flooding intothe crossroads ofAsia between Persia and the Mediterranean.They were unfamiliar with the new military strategy basedon the mobility of cavalry that had made the Moslems soformidable. There was no weapon in Southern India thatcould stand up to Moslem horsemen when at all ably led.Only the great defensive fortresses of India were able toface a Moslem siege with some hope of success. Even if thekingdoms of the Deccan had been prepared to combineagainst the new invader, and had realized the necessity ofdoing so, they would scarcely have been able to resistAla-ad-Din's armies. But they did not. Indeed many rulers,* The Hoysalas were originally feudal vassals of the Chalukyas, who madethemselves independent north of the Tungabhadra about I 130 and thengradually expanded at the expense of the Cholas until they had absorbed allthe Kanarese country. A hundred years later they were powerful enough toadopt the policy of protecting the weakened Cholas against their otherenemies; and gradually inherited the northern part of their Empire togetherwith much of its excellent administrative system. Mter a damaging civil warbetween two brothers, the kingdom was reunited about the time of MalikKafur's raid by King Vira Ball_ala III, ruling from the accepted capital city ofDorasamudra. By the end o(his long reign the Hoysala Kingdom had in itsturn become the basis of the new Vijayanagar Confederacy, as described inPart Two) Chapter 3.


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38 THE WAR OF THE GOLDSMITH'S DAUGHTERhaving once made terms with the Delhi Empire and agreedto accept its suzerainty, actually assisted the invaders againsttheir traditional rivals. I

So it was that in the space of five years the eunuch Kafurwas able to conduct a series of expeditions all over SouthernIndia. During that period he established Ala-ad-Din'snominal suzerainty over the whole area: even south of theKistna over the fabulously rich Hoysala Kingdom, and overthe wealthy mercantile cities and ancient shrines of the blackTamils at the furthest end of India. He sent most of theHindu Rayas, or rulers, on visits of submission to his masterat Delhi, and plundered the temples and royal treasuries asinstructed. His complete military superiority is wellillustrated by his famous march back from Madura in theTamil country to Delhi, through the entire length of India,which took him from ,April to October of 131 I , with a trainof elephants, horses :and camels laden with an altogetherfantastic quantity onooted treasu,re.One episode in / particular of Kafur's Deccan campaignsbecame celebrated in court poetry and popular story, andaffected the actions of later princes. When Ala-ad-Din'sarmy had captured Kamala Devi, the gracious and practicalQueen of Gujarat, her husband had fled with their four-yearold daughter, Devala Devi, across the Vindhya Mountainsinto the Mahratta country and made his way to the Court ofthe Rajah of Devagiri, Rama Chandra. Nine years later,when the preparations were being made to invade theDeccan, the princess, Devala Devi, had reached the mostmarriageable age of thirteen. So t)1e Queef told Ala-ad-Dinthat while she was not interested in the .(ate of her formerhusband, she would dearly like to have her daughter back.Ala-ad-Din agreed and accordingly instructed Kafur, whenhe reached the Deccan, to ask the Rajah of Devagiri todeliver up the girl. The Rajah, bound by the laws of asylum,could not be brought to consent to this demand; and fightingbroke out. Devala Devi's father belonged to one of thenoblest of Northern India's princely families, and had


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ALA-AD-DIN KHILJIhitherto refused to marry her to a dark Deccani prince,whom he considered not purely Aryan. But the Rajah ofDevagiri reasoned that Ala-ad-Din would give up hisdemand for the princess if she were already married; andtherefore decided to marry her at once to his son, who hadbeen pressing for her hand. The Moslem leaders, when theylearnt of Devala Devi's impending marriage, knew that theirferocious ruler would not accept this kind of excuse.Accordingly, Ala-ad-Din's brother, who was a member ofthe expedition, called his officers together, and told themthat all their lives now depended on securing Devala Devibefore she was married. They unanimously promised himtheir support in a daring plan, typical of the new warfarebased on mobility and surprise. They split up and crossedthe mountains by several trails, which enabled them to getbehind the enemy and totally defeat his army. Then beganthe search for the young princess who was the cause of thewar. Finally, she was discovered, after having been nearlykilled In a cavalry skirmish when she was riding to meet herbridegroom. Ala-ad-Din's brother at once abandoned allmilitary operations and hurried back to Delhi to turn overDevala Devi to her mother. The Queen, who was moreconcerned with dynastic than sentimental considerations,at once made her graceful daughter understand that herbusiness at Court was to marry Ala-ad-Din's son and heir,when she would become Queen herself in due course. Andso, in the words of the Chroniclers, 'in a few days after herarrival, her beauty inflamed the heart of the prince, to whomshe was eventually given in marriage'. But she also inflamedthe hearts of others.

Ala-ad-Din's obvious ability and success justified him inthe eyes of Tughluq, the austere and devout Governor of thePunjab, who owed to the King's discernment and sense ofrealities both his original appointments and the steadysupport he received thereafter. Both Tughluq and otherpersons of influence were therefore prepared to overlookAla-ad-Din's excesses, though some of these surprised even


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40 THE WAR OF THE GOLDSMITH'S DAUGHTERhis contemporaries. There were moments of unreasonablesavagery, such as the massacre of tens of thousands of newMoslem immigrants who w6re suspected of disloyalty andof collusion with the Mongols. And there were bouts ofirresponsibility, such as his boast to a tributary Rajah thatanyone, if in command of the royal army, could take theRajah's celebrated hill fort. This actually led to Ala-a


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ALA-AD-DIN KHILJI 41them exhibit themselves before the nobles of the court. Heinvaded Devagiri, flayed the Rajah alive, and abolished theKingdom, reducing the Mahratta country to a province ofthe Delhi Empire. After'just four years on the throne he toowas murdered, in April 1320 , at the instigation of hisfavourite Minister, Khusrav.Khusrav was a Hindu Untouchable by origin, yetanother adventurer who rose by his ability in the newMoslem society where caste was disregarded. It is aninteresting comment on the revolutionary nature of MoslemHindustan that when an Indian convert rose to be its master,he should be an outcaste from Hindu society, and that herelied for his power largely on an armed force of U ntouchabIes who were only nominally Islamized. But he was onlyable to hold power for four uneasy months. His origins andhis treachery made him hated both by Moslems and bycaste Hindus. He particularly offended many at court bymarrying Devala Devi, whose beauty and ancient royallineage were already a legend. He therefore squandered theresources of the treasury trying to buy himself adherents.In pursuit of this policy he offered the post of Master ofthe Horse and other honours to Tughluq s ablest son,Mohammed Tughluq, already famous both for his militaryabilities and his learning. Khusrav hoped in this way tobenefit by the great prestige of the Tughluq family.

When the young Mohammed arrived in Delhi in answerto Khusrav's invitation, he found the situation even worsethan he and his father had supposed. After a few days spentin consultation with the leading nobles, the new Master ofthe Horse returned to his father and persuaded him that thetime was ripe to march on the capital and restore order - anidea that had already formed in the old man's mind. Theusurper Khusrav was unable to withstand the Tughluqs,round whom most of the nobles and provincial governorspromptly rallied. Within a few months of seizing power heand his armed force of outcasts were destroyed. After an easyvictory, Tughluq proclaimed that since none of Ala-ad-Din's


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42 THE WAR OF THE GOLDSMITH'S DAUGHTERfamily remained, he would swear allegiance to whomever thepeople chose to be King. Inev;tably the choice fell on the oldman himself. He was proclaimed Sultan on August 23rd,13 20 IThe cases of Khusrav and Devala Devi are significantcomment on the fluid nature of society in the Delhi Sultanate.The Untouchable and the Rajput Princess came fromopposite ends of the Hindu caste system. They were bothsucked into the swirling currents of Moslem Hindustan, likemillions of others. They found themselves in a new societywhere their individual fate would depend, not on ancienttradition, but on their personal gifts and abilities and on alarge element of luck. Khusrav's personal charm andorganizing ability enabled him to win and hold the affectionand confidence of the unpredictable Mubarak. This heachieved in spite of i l l that court intrigue and righteousindignation could do to hinder an upstart who was hostileboth to Islam and to the Hindu .system and who was evenwilling to conspire against the Sultan to whom he owed hisposition. Similarly, Devala Devi, after her father had lost hisKingdom and had been driven into exile, managed by hermother's shrewdness and her own captivatil;lg ways tomarry the heir to the conqueror's Empire. At the Sultan'scourt she made herself such a by-word for royal grace thatshe not only became the Queen of the next Sultan, Mubarak,but also in turn of his successor, the Untouchable Khusrav.Perhaps nothing illustrates better the unpredetermined,chance-laden nature of this adventurer's world than thebrief moment when these two ut,terly d i f f ~ r e n t products ofHindu society found themselves sharing/the marriage bedof the Moslem Sultan of Hindustan. Khusrav's luck did nothold - perhaps a state of affairs so preposterous could not beexpected to last even in Delhi.

Tughluq was enough of an Indian to understand thegeneral sense of outrage at Devala Devi's marriage to anUntouchable. He punished severely all who had helped todefile her in this way, and then found her a distinguished


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ALA-AD-DIN KRILJI 43Moslem fourth husband. When Devala Devi, her honouravenged and her pride assuaged, looked back on heradventures from the peaceful domesticity of her respectablefourth marriage, she may well have reflected that in a Hindusociety she would have been expected to burn herself on herfirst husband's funeral pyre. And perhaps she recognized,with some of her mother's realism, that there were certainadvantages in this crazy, chaotic Moslem life for those whowere lucky enough or good enough at the game.


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13ITHE WONDER OF THE AGE

THE man who brought Southern India properly into thesystem of the Delhi Empire was Mohammed Tughluq. Hisreign is a decisive point in the history of the Deccan. Itcovers the effective opening of the great southern peninsulato the Islamic world, and the planting there of a civilizationthat lasted down to our own day and which permanentlyaffected the new Hindu states that later arose there alongsideMoslem ones after the collapse of the Tughluq dynasty.Ala-ad-Din Khilji's p ~ n e t r a t i o n of the Deccan had amountedto little more than ,glorified raids, and nominal Moslemsuzerainty over a world that still remained Hindu.Mohammed esta >lished both the Imperial authority andthe Indo-Persian tradition. But his importance lies notonly in his achievements but in his really astonishingpersonality.Mohammed Tughluq, who acted as his father's principalDeputy (largely in Southern India) from the old man'saccession to the throne of Delhi in 1320 to his death in 1325,and who was himself King of India from I 325 to 1 35 I , wasone of the most remarkable monarchs who ever lived. Evenin his lifetime he was known as Badi-az-Zaman, the Wonderof the Age; and the legends told of him grew after his deathuntil two hundred years later Jhe Portuguese chroniclerNuniz, writing back to Lisbon from -6oa in the remotesouth, began his narrative: In the year 1230 (a mistake for1330) these parts of India were ruled by a greatev. monarchthan had ever reigned. This was the King of Dili.... ThisKing of Dili they say was, a Moor who was called TogaoMamede. He is held among the Hindus as a saint'.

The Kings of Delhi wielded such personal power that thedimensions of their every act were magnified, like a huge


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THE WONDER OF THE AGE' 45shadow thrown by a light against a wall. And MohammedTughluq s c h a : a c t e ~ and achievements w e r ~ so r e ~ a r k a b l ethat, projected in thls way, he managed to glve a tWlSt to thewhole Indian concept of Kingship, so that it is difficult toimagine what would have been expected of a King had henot reigned. That is why any account of the new kingdomsof the Deccan, that grew out of the ruins of his Empire,must begin with him. And if in one sense his reign was abrilliant failure, so in the same sense was that of NapoleonBonaparte, or Frederick II Hohenstaufen.

Mohammed Tughluq was an intellectual. He was themost gifted and accomplished prince of his age. His lettersand orders showed such a happy turn of phrase, and so muchgood taste and good sense, that the most able secretaries inlater times studied them with admiration. He wrote Persianpoetry of some merit. He had a prodigious memory and aninquisitive mind, which resulted in his amassing an enormousstore of facts. As well as his major interest in history, he wasexpert in logic, physics, astronomy and mathematics. Hedid not restrict himself to the conventional Aristotle, butstudied the philosophy of such other Greek schools as wereknown. But he was of a more practical turn of mind than theGreeks. His medical studies for instance led him to attendin person on patients affiicted with any remarkable disease.He tried to implement his economic theories in practice,with terrifying results. The standard of his scholarship isattested by some of the most learned men of the Islamicworld, whom he attracted to his court; and such was hisdialectical skill and his memory that these scholars hesitatedto engage in argument with him on subjects in which he wasan expert.These intellectual gifts are particularly striking in theruler of an unstable military empire. For Mohammed,brought up in the defence of the North-West Frontier, wasalso a brilliant soldier, and spent a large part of his lifecampaigning. He was a shrewd and successful general: bothin planning, conducting and following up a battle, in which


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46 THE WAR OF THE GOLDSMI1'H'S DAUGHTERhe exploited to the full the Moslem advantage of mobilityand energy; and in broad strategic issues, for which headapted the more Indian arts of fortification and defencelearned from his father on thelFrontier. He was also famousfor his personal gallantry and ienergy on the battlefield. Hewon many striking victories, land seldom lost a campaign.As a result, he was able to achieve the rare and fabulous featof uniting under his rule or suzerainty the whole continent ofIndia. This dominion was shadowy at the fringes, and shortlived. But the astonishing thing is that Mohammed shouldhave established it at all, when it is remembered that in allIndia's long history it has only been done on two otheroccasions by Indians, in the times of Asoka in the thirdcentury B.C., and in those of Aurungzeb, the last greatMogul in the eighteenth century A.D.Mohammed was a serious man, abstemious and methodical: despising l a z i n e ~ s , fornication, gluttony, drunkennessand even light amusements. But _in his general conduct hewas unrestrained and sometimes irresponsible to an astonishing degree. In affairs of state he often showed little judgement. He was without compassion or understanding, and inhis rages the ferocity of his punishments horrified even thehardened nobles of the Court of Delhi. His punishmentswere cruel and often unjust, as his rewards were prodigal;so that generosity and cruelty were described as his twomost striking attributes. He was impatient and easily movedto anger. He antagonized or forfeited the loyalty of almostall the important elements in the Kingdom. Even for hisunreasonable times, he was an unTeasonabl,e man.

The Tughluqs were Indian by birth ancfupbringing. Theold man himself was half Indian by blood, and youngMohammed three-quarters. They belonged to t h ~ Moslemway of life and their language and culture were Persian; andthis did not conflict with their feeling that Hindustan wastheir home and their responsibility. It is always difficult tosay when immigrants cease as people to look back to thecountry of their origin and become aware of roots of their


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HINDU KUS~ ~ . \~ 4/i.

THE EM1 lRE OFOHAMMED TU HWgINBJA.fte the rebeluonifMadura


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48 THE WAR OF THE GOLDSMITH'S DAUGHTERown - the Normans in England, the Arabs in Spain, theMongols in China, the English in America. But there is nodoubt that by the time of the\ Tughluqs the Saracen-Indiancivilization was something different from that of Persia andthe rest of Islam, and was g r ~ w i n g healthily on Indian soil.

* *Old Tughluq s first care on his succession in 1320 hadbeen to re-establish the administration of the Kingdom.This was made easier by the relief of the provincial governorsand the army and Royal Household at having a responsiblecentral government again. He increased the loyalty of hisHindu vassals and subjects by ordering that the administration should respect customary Hindu law w ~ e r e Hinduswere concerned, and should keep affairs of state separatefrom religion. Then, after making sure of the North-WestFrontier, he despatcWed his son Mohammed to 'restore theallegiance' of the Deccan.When Prince Mohammed turned his attention to theDeccan in the second year of his father's reign, he found thatsince Ala-ad-Din's death the Hindu kingdoms had repudiated the shadowy sovereignty of the Sultans of Ddhi and hadreverted to their former independent condition. TheMahratta country, on the other hand, had relapsed intoconfusion following the destruction of the Kingdom ofDevagiri by Mubarak. Mohammed saw that if the Hindukingdoms of the south were left to run their own affairs,their 'allegiance' would mean little and always needenforcing, but if these states were destr9yed, a Moslemprovincial administration based' on ~ 1 ) ~ l h i would not bestrong enough to hold and govern t h ~ s e great territoriesunless there was also a settled population of Moslems asthere was in the old Kingdom of Delhi in the north. -Hetherefore decided on a more radical solution: to settleresident colonies of Moslems, at any rate in strategic areas.This decision, as it formed itself in his mind, had farreaching implications. It involved turning the whole great


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50 THE WAR OF THE GOLDSMITH'S DAUGHTERsilver coins were scattered amqng the crowds from elephants.Mohammed gave his generosity free rein. He distributednot only the usual offices to His relatives and to the nobles,as well as extra pay to the army, but also astonishing sums ofmoney from the Treasury to ~ i s friends. Learned men fromall over Asia who had heard of his intellectual turn of mind,and his generosity while heir to the throne, now flocked toDelhi. The Court soon became a centre whose standards oflearning were equal to any in the Moslem world. Great sumsof money were spent on buildings of all kinds, includingmosques and extensive systems of hospitals and almshousesfor the poor.Mohammed was used to turbulence and disorder. Indeed,he met little else during the whole of his lifetime; thoughtowards the end of his reign he became increasingly exasperated at the dissidence and rebellion of wilful men whohampered his plans 'tor an organized and efficiently runempire. He was not therefore particularly surprised to learn,shortly after his succession, that a ephew of his (GurshaspTughluq) whom he had left in charge of the frontier districtin the south of the Mahratta country, down on the KistnaRiver, had rebelled and was reported as planning to seize thethrone for himself. Indeed, this nephew won over many ofthe new, unreliable, immigrant chiefs in the Mahrattacountry, and actually seized Devagiri. Mohammed sentan army against him, which drove him south across theKistna with his family and a large fortune which he hadamassed.

The Hindu ruler with whom ~ h e fugitiye took sanctuarywas a petty Raya of the old schoolcalle.drKampila. He hadtaken advantage of the confusion which prevailed in theDeccan after Kafur's invasions to carve himself out aconsiderable kingdom between the Mahratta country andthe great Hoysala Kingdom. This chivalrous Raya waswilling to brave even the wrath of the Sultan of Delhi inorder to uphold the traditions of asylum. Mohammed thereupon decided to make the thousand-mile journey down to

ANGRAUG.ntra Library;:. R.alendranagar~ l ~


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THE WONDER OF THE AGE' 51the southern frontier in person and carry a stage further hisplan for the incorporating of the whole Deccan in hisEmpire. He advanced with his main army as far as Devagiri,and then took a striking force on against Kampila.When news of Mohammed's approach reached Kampila,he sent the Sultan's nephew on to the Hoysala King furthersouth; and then, since resistance was hopeless, he carried outthe terrible traditional rite of Jauhar, or general selfdestruction. First, a huge pyre was lit on which all his wivesand the wives of his nobles and ministers and principal menburnt themselves. And when their ashes had been consumedhe and his followers sallied forth to meet the invaders andwere all slain. But, as was usually the practice when theatricalgestures like Jauhar were ordered, many members of theroyal family and other nobles refused to take part. On thisoccasion no less than eleven of the Raya's sons surrenderedto the Sultan. Mohammed gladly welcomed them, alongwith other members of Kampila's family, feeling that thiswould establish his local authority more securely. He treatedthem with exceptional honours, both for this reason ofpolicy and because of his genuine admiration for the conductof their father. They embraced Islam and remained manyyears at his court.

Mohammed then advanced against the Hoysala King.Vira Ballala III, unlike Kampila, surrendered the Sultan'snephew to him without fighting. Mohammed respected hislegitimate enemies, but disloyalty always roused him to fury.He ordered his nephew to be taken to the women's quarters,where his relatives insulted him and spat upon him; and thenhe sentenced him to the traditional supreme penalty fortraitors, to be flayed alive. His skinned body was paradedthrough Delhi with a notice announcing that so would alltraitors perish. His skin was stuffed and exhibited publiclywith that of a general who had also rebelled.

Rumour always embroidered in the minds of the publicthe doings of this cold, brilliant, enigmatic King. It was saidthat the nephew'S flesh was cooked with rice, and that


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52 THE WAR OF THE GOLDSMITH'S DAUGHTERMohammed gave some of this to the dead man's wives toeat, and some to the elephants.,The stuffed skins lived longin memory, and centuries after his death one of Mohammed'stitles among Hindu story-teller,s was Lord of the Skins ofKings'. I


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4THE BRILLIANT FAILURE

MOHAMMED had always been impressed by the unsuitability of Delhi as the capital of all India. It was much too farto the north. It was in flat country, difficult to defend. It wasexposed to Mongol invasions. Mohammed wanted a newcapital, more central, more defensible from the danger in thenorth-west. In fact he wanted a capital on the south side ofthe Vindhya Mountains - and there the obvious choice wasDevagiri.Devagiri is indeed an astonishing place. It is an outcropof rock in flat country to the south of the hills, standing uplike a beehive. The sides of this hill had been cut away inprevious times so that theywere perpendicular. The hill itselfafforded plenty of room for fortifications and was crowned bya citadel into which the only access was through a longtunnel. So impregnable did this fortress remain even in thedays of heavy artillery that the Mogul Emperors werecareful to retain as hostages the family of any governorappointed to it.When Mohammed proposed to his ministers to move thecapital there, they all advised against it. But his mind wasmade up. He rechristened the place Daulatabad, whichmeans City of State - for Daula in Arabic, like State inEnglish, means both government and riches. He builtseveral fine buildings, as well as extra dwelling-places, in anew town outside the old walls, and excavated a deep ditcharound the fort. On top of the hill by the citadel he openedlarge new reservoirs for water and laid out a beautifulgarden, as well as important military works. Other prominent men of the Empire were also made to build palaces.He then ordered the population of Delhi to move toDaulatabad. Each family willing to come was assigned a


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54 THE WAR OF THE GOLDSMITH'S DAUGHTERhouse. Large trees were planted, along the 500 miles of roadto give shelter to the population as it moved, and everybodywho could not otherwise a f f o ~ d the journey was fed atkitchens along the way. Not bnly was the cost of theseoperations considera.ble, but they were also unpopular.Rumour said that the King wanted Delhi to be entirelyevacuated. And with time the story came to be that it wasentirely evacuated, and that Mohammed, standing in hispalace looking out over the deserted city, from which not onesingle thread of smoke rose, declared that now at last his soulwas at peace. In fact Daulatabad, though it suddenly founditself a large city,. never became more than the nominalcapital of the Empire, the centre of administration. The realgovernment was the King; and he was almost always on themove with his army. Nor of course did Delhi cease to be animportant centre. ' I

Mohammed in a series of brilliant campaigns establishedorder throughout his enormous Empire. He systematicallyannexed or reduced to an integrated system of vassalage allthe remaining provinces of India. For the second time inhistory the whole sub-continent was brought under theeffective rule of one man. The Deccan between the VindhyaMountains and the Kistna, which was the region containinghis new capital, he treated as integral provinces of the Empire,administered in some respects direct from the centre and inothers by Moslem Governors responsible to himself. He alsoturned the Tamil country in the far south into a similardirectly administered province, and established specialsettlements of Moslems there; .a? usual,these consistedmainly of newly immigrated fortum;-nurtters and militaryleaders with little loyalty to the Tughluq d y ~ a s t y or the newimperial system. The Hoysala Kingdom alone preservedits individuality and its Hindu identity, though not itsindependence.But Mohammed's Empire was bought at too large aprice. One of its main difficulties was financial overstrain.The cost of continual warfare, of large numbers of mosques,


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THE BRILLIANT FAILURE 55schools, hospitals, roads and other social services, and ofDaulatabad, as well as the King's private generosity,weighed heavily on the Treasury. Mohammed, alwaysfascinated by the theory of economics (then a veryimperfectly understood affair), decided early in his reign tointroduce a token currency. He had discussed with hislearned guests Kubla Khan's paper currency in China,which had borne the Royal Seal, and a similar experimentwhich had been tried out in Persia in Ala-ad-Din's time.Mohammed issued copper token coins in 1329; and these hedeclared must pass as legal tender for the gold and silverones in use, which he had already carefully re-minted andrevalued to meet the increase in the value of silver in terms ofgold. Though the scheme was carefully organized it led todisastrous results. For one thing the copper tokens, unlikeKubla Khan's paper money with the Royal Seal, could easilybe copied. Every Hindu banking-house became a mint. Themercantile Hindus, who had been much pressed in previousreigns, grew rich and bought horses, arms and land. So didthose Moslems shrewd enough to see what was happening.Some simply made copper tokens whenever they requiredmoney. This led to severe inflation, with its inevitable consequences of enriching the commercially and financiallyactive classes. But the population and the State were impoverished. Things were made worse by famine. In theDeccan too, where the rule of the Kings of Delhi wassomething new and uncertain, there was great scepticismabout how long this strange ruler would be willing or able toenforce a law which made copper worth as much as silver orgold. After four years or so, realizing the failure of thescheme, and not wishing to penalize those who had acceptedthe copper tokens loyally, Mohammed took the even moreimpractical step of offering to redeem all the copper tokensat their face value. Since there were far more of these than hehad ever issued, the Treasury was soon completely empty andMohammed was obliged to cancel the rest of the debt. Thisled not only to drastic deflation but to widespread ruin and..--

13 nl 1tJ ...


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56 THE WAR OF THE GOLBSMITH'S DAUGHTERdiscontent among just those .dements who had been mostloyal. I

There were also other serious causes of discontent, whichincreased as Mohammed s rfign continued. The newMoslem nobility who had b e n e ~ t e d by the conquest wantedto enjoy the fruits of their success; and the common people,weary of warfare, wanted peace. Mohammed was obliged toimplement his schemes with ever-increasing severity.Mohammed also assigned much land in feudal tenure toMoslem noblemen and adventurers, or left it in the handsof Hindu chiefs, instead of using more direct forms ofadministration: which increased the danger of revolt. And inaddition, the foreign nobles who had flocked into India werejealous of the Hindus and converts whom Mohammedconspicuously favoured.

The discontented Moslems found allies in the mullahsand orthodox teachers of Islam. The attraction of Hinducivilization for Mohammed had always been obvious, and hedid not attempt to conceal the fact, any more than Ala-ad-Dinhad done. But whereas Ala-ad-Din's desire to found a newreligion had remained an abortive project, Mohammedturned more and more from orthodox Islam to Sufi. mysticismand by this means to Hindu religious speculation. He was anardent disciple of the Sufi. teacher Nizam-ad-Din Auliya,whose mystic teaching led Mohammed on to the Hindupractices of Yoga. He began spending large periods of timein the company of yogis. The orthodox chroniclers have leftrecords of the horror felt by the devout, and professed by thediscontented, at this turn of affairs. Many feared that hemight openly adopt Hinduism, or some n ~ w religion of hisown devising. 'Disregarding the Laws of Islam he kept thecompany of infidels, prohibited the Muezzin, and 'stoppedthe Friday congregations.' Religious teachers went roundjustifying rebellion by good Moslems against this corruptand wicked ruler, saying that Islamic law approved theslaying of an apostate King.

Meanwhile, the Hindus marvelled at this man, and above


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THE BRILLIANT FAILURE 57all at his success. Had he not brought the whole of Indiaunder a single umbrella? The Sultan's personal gallantry inthe field, his military successes, his intellectual and almosteccentric interests, his wild fits of generosity and rage, hisdisdain for most of the ordinary pleasures of men, made himseem to the Hindu mind like some elemental force of nature.People came to think of him as one of the Hindu gods, whohad taken human form but whose actions were beyond thehuman. And so he acquired his place in the Hindu Pantheon,and was for centuries regarded as a demigod. Story-tellerscombined him with other gods and heroes, and attributed tohim adventures like Rama's legendary exploit down in theTamil country of building a bridge across to Ceylon with thehelp of Hanuman, the Monkey God.

In fact the remote Tamil country was one of the leastfirmly controlled provinces of Mohammed's enormousdominions, and one of the first to rebel. In the year 1335,when Mohammed had been ten years on the throne, helearned that the Governor who he had installed in thatterritory (Jalal-ad-Din Ahsan) had proclaimed himselfindependent and had assumed the royal rights of mosque andmint: that is, he had ordered prayers to be said and coins tobe struck in his own name. Mohammed marched in personagainst him; but when he got as far as Warangal an outbreakof cholera forced him to retreat to Daulatabad; he himself wascarried back to his new capital seriously ill on a litter. On theway back he was afflicted with violent toothache and lost oneof his teeth. This tooth he had buried with much ceremonyand caused a beautiful little tomb to be built over it: an actwhich increased his reputation for capricious and enigmaticbehaviour.Mohammed did not at this stage intend to abandon theDeccan, or even to let the rebel Governor of the Tamilcountry go unpunished. But the news from north of theVindhya Mountains made him realize the need to returnurgently; and he set out, still in his litter, for Delhi, drivenforward by a tireless singleness of purpose. At the same time,


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58 THE WAR OF THE GOLDSMITH'S DAUGHTERhe granted those inhabitants of paulatabad, who still wantedto return to their former h o m ~ , permission to accompanyhim. Many thousands set out. But several of them perishedon the way; for a famine was deSolating the country betweenthe two cities. When the hungty procession reached Delhithey found famine raging with such fury that only thewealthy could buy enough to eat. The King, who hadwitnessed the miseries of his subjects at dose range, wasseriously distressed. He took every action which seemed tohim practicable in order to encourage farming and commerce.For this purpose he distributed large sums of money fromthe Treasury to anyone wishing to buy implements or rawmaterials; but as the people were in such need of food theyspent the money on ordinary necessities - a practice whichMohammed punished most severely.

These desperate conditions enabled the smoulderingresentment of the various dissatisfied factions in the Empireto revolt. Mohammed had failed to put down the rebellionin the far south. It was clear that only if he successfullystamped out the rebellions north of the Vindhya Mountains,and then returned to re-establish his authority in the Tamilcountry, would he be able to count on the allegiance of therest of the Deccan. For most of the Moslems there were newimmigrants, led by adventurers with no particular traditionof loyalty to the Tughluqs, or else recently and oftennominally converted Hindus; while the Hindu rulers ofthe many local principalities that still survived underMohammed s control (notably the large Hoysala Kingdom)accepted unwillingly their feudal allegiance to the MoslemSutlan. In fact, Mohammed was not able tt)"nlaster the north.And so, after crossing the Vindhya "Mountains on his returnto Delhi in 1335, his only further venture into the Deccanwas an unsuccessful attempt to rescue his capital of Daulatabad from Moslem rebel troops in 1347. Imperial authoritysouth of the Mountains did not long or effectively surviveMohammed s absence; and by the time of his death in 135 Ithe whole of Southern India had seceded.


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PART TWOThe New Order


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ITHE PATTERN AFTER TUGHLUQ

THE disappearance of Mohammed Tughluq s authority inSouthern India did not of course mean the end of Islamthere, or of the 'Persian-Saracen' civilization which carriedit. On the contrary, the striking thing is the way in whichthis civilization not only took roots of its own and adapteditself and flourished in the soil of Southern India down to ourown day, but the way in which it influenced even the newHindu states that rose to prominence there. For the old,traditional ways of Southern India could not surviveunaffected by the new, uninhibited challenge to them whichevery aspect of Moslem life represented. The age-old,accepted pattern had been broken up by the forces of violentchange.

The men who established themselves as independentrulers throughout the Deccan in the dozen years followingthe successful military rebellion in the Tamil country werealert and enterprising figures who seized their opportunityas the Imperial power weakened. Many of them had beenentrusted with posts of responsibility by MohammedTughluq: as military commanders, as administrators, or asHindu vassals. Such men owed to the Tughluq Empire thepositions of power they held. But once the authority of thatEmpire in Southern India began to weaken, they did notfeel any strong allegiance to it. Their aim was rather toconsolidate and extend their own power.This lack of basic loyalty to the Tughluq Empire wascharacteristic of the Moslem immigrants and occupyingarmies that Mohammed had introduced into the Deccan.And naturally it was even more true of those Deccanis whohad been able to rise since the Tughluq conquest, whetherconverts to Islam or not. The way was open for a new type of


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62 THE WAR OF THE GOLDSMITH'S DAUGHTERHindu ruler, the adventurer who rose to power much as hemight in a Moslem state, and who adapted the new arts ofwar and government to hold his own both internally andagainst his enemies, Moslem at1d Hindu. At first, while thecrescent moon of Islam still seemed clearly in the ascendant,these adventurers tended to declare themselves Moslems,at any rate for a period. The new techniques and the newreligion seemed part of each other. In numbers of littlestates all over Southern India, and especially the tradingtowns of the west coast which were already familiar withIslam, discontented members of the local princely family, orambitious men of lower estate 'shark'd up a list of lawlessresolutes', including a fair proportion of Moslem adventurers, and seized the throne in the name of Islam. After afew years these new rulers, if they managed to remain on thethrone, often reverted to the orthodox Hinduism which theyhad never really abandoned; but they retained many of theMoslem techniques and the Moslem elasticity of mind.The most powerful and enduring state to emerge from theconfusion of independent principalities that grew out ofMohammed Tughluq s Empire in Southern India was thenew and militant Hindu Empire of Vijayanagar. It began asa Confederacy, organized by Hindus who had for a timebeen Moslems and had learnt the new arts of war andadministration i.n Mohammed Tughluq s service, supportedby the Brahmin priesthood and by refugees from MoslemIndia. In time this Confederacy was cemented into a rich,effective and centralized Empire which controlled the wholesouthern half of the Deccan. It was a new style of Hindustate, which had learnt the lessons ot Moslem invasion.

The other major state that arose in the Deccan wasVijayanagar's great rival, the Moslem Bahmani Sultanate. Itwas founded by the Moslem military settlers in the Mahrattacountry north of Vijayanagar. Though it was an orthodoxand even zealous Moslem state, it adopted from the outset apolicy of military alliance and active trade with any Hindupower that would co-operate with it. It seems to have


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THE PATTERN AFTER TUGHLUQ 63enjoyed the acceptance and even the support of importantsections of the local Hindu population, notably the merchantsand artisans. This understanding of Hindu affairs enabledthe small population of Moslem settlers to hold their own inthe Deccan. I t was the counterpart of that understanding ofMoslem abilities in war and statecraft which the earlyrulers of Vijayanagar enjoyed.


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21THE ORIGINS OF AN EMPIRE

MOSLEM innovations, and the Hindu reaction to them, areclearly visible in the founding of the Vijayanagar Empire,the great bulwark of Hinduism in all India. This newimperial state started from the territory that had beenKampila's kingdom, and spread rapidly to incorporate thelarger Hoysala kingdom and the Tamil country, and indeedto dominate all the south. The history of its origins longremained obscure and has only been pieced together inrecent times by painstaking research. The story begins withtwo brothers, Harihara and Bukka, who were in some waysthe most striking adventurers of all the large number whomade their name in fourteenth-century India, both onaccount of their pe'rsonal histories and because of thepermanence of what they achieved. Harihara and Bukkawere TeIugu noblemen from Warangal, and they begantheir careers in the treasury of the last Raya of that country.When Mohammed Tughluq abolished the Kingdom andturned Warangal into the Moslem capital of a province ofhis Empire, Harihara and Bukka fled south of the Kistnaand took service with Kampila. Kampila welcomed them,as he did all refugees, and promoted them rapidly ontheir merits as able administrators and soldiers. Beforelong they both married daughters of his, and so formallybound their fortunes to his house: But, the awful riteof Jauhar, and even the prospect of another flight southwards, were too much for these astute and realistic youngmen. They decided to attach themselves to the conqueror. They therefore made their submission to Mohammed along with the eleven sons of Kampila who alsosurrendered.Mohammed was able to induce the two young brothers


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THE ORIGINS OF AN EMPIRE 65to embrace Islam, and to enlist them in his service. Findingthem apparently both competent and reliable, he toopromoted them rapidly during the two years in which hestayed in Daulatabad. So much so, indeed, that when he nextleft the Deccan he put Harihara in charge of Kampila'sformer kingdom as Lord Lieutenant.By 1334, when discontent was flaring into revolt inseveral places, a rebellion broke out in Kampila's oldkingdom fostered by the Hoysala King Vira Ballala III, whodid not like a directly administered province of the TughluqEmpire on his own borders. Mohammed always had adistinct partiality towards Hindu converts, and he hadrecognized the outstanding ability of Harihara. When heheard the news he entrusted Harihara and his brother with aMoslem army. With this force they not only suppressed therebellion in the territories entrusted to them, but wereactually able to invade and subdue the Hoysala country inthe name of Mohammed Tughluq.

In spite of the advantages which it had brought them, theconversion of the two brothers to Islam was purely opportunist and not very sincere. They were well aware thatMohammed's government was alien and unpopular. Mostof the devout Hindus, and especially the Brahmins, bitterlyresented the Moslem occupation. Many laments describethe hatefulness of these foreign immigrants. The foul smellof roasted flesh and the fierce noise of the ruffianly Turkishsoldiers has replaced the sweet sacrificial smoke, and therivers run red with the blood of slaughtered cows', says one.Though the invaders were usually called Turks, the Hindus,who had little curiosity about other civilizations, sometimesalso called them Mongols or Moguls, or Arabs, or Persians,or even Yavanas (Ionians) which is the Indian word forGreeks. And in a sense the very mixed Saracen civilizationincluded

the war of goldsmith's daughter

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