Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography (17 page)

Ibn Batuta is one of the greatest travel
writers of all time. Originally from Tangier in Morocco, he was a near-contemporary
of Marco Polo, and travelled across the known world through North Africa, the Middle
East, Central Asia and India, and eventually to China. He then made his way back to
Morocco before orally recording the story of an adventure that had lasted almost
three decades. When he arrived in Delhi, Muhammad Tughlaq ruled from his new palace
in Jahanpanah. This was a time when the erratic despot was trying to build up the
prestige of his court by importing learned Muslim scholars. Ibn Batuta soon found
himself a lucrative position and spent several years in the city.

He has left us a very vivid description
of the Tughlaq court. He tells us that one had to pass through three gates to enter
the Sultan’s audience hall. There was a platform in front of the first
gate where the executioners sat. When a man was sentenced to death, he would be
executed outside this gate and his body would be left there for three days as a
warning to others. The first gate also had a number of trumpeters and pipe-players.
Whenever a notable arrived, they would blow the trumpets and loudly announce the
person’s name. Between the first and second gates, Ibn Batuta tells us,
were platforms occupied by large numbers of palace guards.

At the second gate sat the royal ushers
in gilded caps, the chief usher wielding a golden mace. Inside this gate was a large
reception hall where people could sit as they awaited their turn. The visitor would
then walk up to the third and final gate where scribes entered the
person’s name, time of arrival and other details. A nobleman who had
failed to attend the court for more than three days without a valid excuse was
not allowed beyond this point except by the Sultan’s
explicit permission. Beyond this gate was the main audience hall, a large wooden
structure of ‘a thousand pillars’.
²⁰

The Sultan sat on a raised throne
supported by cushions. An attendant stood behind the king and flicked a flywhisk to
chase away the flies. (Well, you cannot leave dead bodies lying around on the front
porch for days and not expect flies.) In front of the Sultan would be members of the
royal family, the nobility, the religious establishment, the judiciary and so on.
Each person was accorded a position according to his status. We are told that when
the Sultan arrived and sat down, the whole court rose and shouted
‘Bismillah!’. A hundred of his armed personal guards stood on
either side of the throne. Clearly the Sultan was taking no chances.

Most of the nobility and senior
officials would have been foreigners—Turks but also Khurasanis, Egyptians,
Syrians and so on. Ibn Batuta tells us that Muhammad Tughlaq systematically gave
high positions to foreigners. He was not unusually biased. The Turks would have
considered themselves as an army of occupation and Indians—both Hindus and
local Muslims—would have been treated with contempt. Indeed, there were
periods when Indians would have been tolerated within the walls of medieval Delhi
only as slaves, menial workers and other service providers. This attitude only
changed under the Afghan Suris in the mid-1500s and was institutionalized under
Mughal Emperor Akbar. It was a slow transformation. As Percival Spear points out,
even under Akbar, most of the nobility was foreign-born.
²¹

Ibn Batuta tells us that from time to
time, the Tughlaq Sultan held banquets. All the guests would be seated by rank.
Each person was first given a cup of
‘candy-water’ that they were expected to drink before they ate.
Then, the food would be brought from the kitchen in a procession headed by the Chief
Usher holding a golden mace and his deputy holding a silver mace. As they walked by,
they would cry out ‘Bismillah!’. The food consisted of rounds of
unleavened bread, roast meats, chicken, rice, sweets and, interestingly, samosas.
After the meal, each person was given a tin cup of barley water to settle the
stomach. Finally, everyone was served paan (betel leaves and areca-nuts). When the
meal was finished, the chamberlains cried ‘Bismillah!’ and
everyone stood up.

We are not sure exactly where Muhammad
Tughlaq’s palace stood but the most likely site is the enigmatic ruins of
Bijay Mandal, very close to IIT Gate. Very few tourists visit the site and it
appears to be used mostly by the teenage boys of nearby Begumpur village to steal a
forbidden drink—there are empty beer bottles everywhere. Just behind the
Bijay Mandal complex is the impressive Begumpur Mosque which may have once served as
the imperial mosque but, again, is rarely visited by tourists. I found the place
entirely to myself on a sunny winter afternoon and sat there thinking about Ibn
Batuta and the unpredictable Sultan.

Ibn Batuta grew to fear the volatile
Sultan over time. He would eventually get himself assigned to an embassy to China
and flee. We are told that, as the embassy made its way south, it was repeatedly
attacked by bandits. Ibn Batuta tells us that he was captured and nearly killed
before being set free. The fact that even an imperial embassy could not safely
travel on a major highway shows us the degree to which the interiors of the country
had been plunged into chaos by the Turkic invasions.

After many more adventures, Ibn Batuta
did eventually make his way to China. Despite his fame in the Arab world, his
adventures are barely remembered in India outside of the world of specialist
historians and scholars. His memory is now limited to a mention in a somewhat inane
but popular Hindi song about his shoe!

One would have thought that after having
built three capitals—Tughlaqabad, Daulatabad and Jahanpanah—the
Tughlaq dynasty would have grown tired of building. Not so. Muhammad’s
successor Feroze Shah Tughlaq was an even more enthusiastic builder. He built many
new structures as well as repaired many old ones. He also extended the city
northwards by building a fortified palace-complex along the Yamuna called Feroze
Shah Kotla. We know that the older Delhis were still inhabited, so it is possible
that this was just a royal suburb like Versailles.

The enigmatic ruins of Feroze Shah Kotla
are near the busy ITO crossing and just behind the offices of India’s
leading newspapers. They were repeatedly cannibalized for building material by
builders of later Delhis. Nonetheless, the site contains a three-storeyed pavilion
topped by the Ashokan pillar that had been carefully brought there by the Sultan.
The complex is said to be inhabited by djinns and people, mostly Sufi Muslims, visit
the site to light lamps to assuage and petition them. One will see small offerings
and walls blackened by the smoke from the lamps. Some of the faithful tie colourful
strings to the grill put up by the Archaeological Survey to protect the Ashokan
pillar. Thus we have the impossible combination of modern Indians paying their
respects to an ancient imperial pillar in order to petition medieval spirits.

Feroze Shah ascended the throne in
middle-age and ruled till he died after several years of illness at the age of
eighty-one. As with Ashoka, his empire was already weakening while he was alive and,
after his death, there was a quick succession of ineffective rulers. The
Turko–Mongol marauder Taimur the Lame (also known as Tamerlane) saw his
opportunity and swept into the country from Central Asia in 1398. He defeated the
Sultan’s army with ease and entered Delhi. Exclusively Muslim enclaves
were spared, everything else was pillaged and the entire Hindu population was either
massacred or taken away as slaves.
²²
Taimur later wrote in his diary, ‘I was desirous of sparing them but
could not succeed as it is the will of God that this calamity should befall this
city’. Somehow, I am not convinced.

Not surprisingly, after this episode,
Delhi went into a period of decline. For the next one and a half centuries, the most
important city in India would be Vijaynagar in the far south. We will return to it
later. Meanwhile, the Tughlaqs were replaced by a succession of minor dynasties.
Although the empire was much diminished, Delhi’s patchwork of urban
habitations continued to be a political and economic hub of some importance. Like
all dynasties that have ruled this city before and after, the rulers of this period
also built grand memorials to themselves. One can visit some of them at Lodhi
Gardens in the heart of New Delhi, one of the most beautiful city parks in the
world. The rich and powerful of modern India come here for their walks and to
discuss the affairs of the world. It is also a good place to watch the extraordinary
variety of birds that inhabit Delhi.

In 1526, a Turko–Mongol
adventurer called Babur defeated
the Sultan of Delhi in what is
known as the First Battle of Panipat. We know a great deal about Babur because he
has left us a fascinating account of his life in the form of a diary written in
Turkish, the
Tuzuk-i-Baburi
. He was a shameless opportunist, but comes
across as a loveable rogue. His enemies may not have seen him as loveable
though—I suppose there are some advantages to writing your own
history.

Babur had impeccable lineage. He was a
direct descendant of Ghengis Khan from his mother’s side and from Taimur
the Lame on his father’s side. However, Taimur’s empire had
disintegrated by the time Babur was born. At the age of twelve, he inherited a tiny
kingdom in the beautiful Ferghana valley in Central Asia. Babur tells us that it
could barely support an army of three to four thousand men.
²³
This did not deter him from repeatedly trying to capture Taimur’s
capital of Samarkand. He even succeeded briefly, but could not hold on to it.
Eventually, the Uzbeks chased him out and he made his way south with a tiny band of
followers. Ever the adventurer, he won and lost many battles along the way till he
gained control of Kabul. It was then that he saw the opportunity of making a raid
into India.

It was an audacious plan because his
army was much smaller than the Sultan’s, but Babur had a secret
weapon—matchlock guns. This was the first time that guns would be used in
North India. (South India had already tasted Portuguese artillery a few decades
earlier.) Babur decisively defeated the Sultan and quickly went on to beat off all
other rivals, including the Rajputs. Thus was born the Mughal (i.e. Mongol) empire
in India. Note that the dynasty did not use this term to describe itself. Rather,
the Mughals preferred to call themselves
‘Gurkhani’. This is after the title of
‘Gurkhan’ meaning ‘son-in-law’ that Taimur
liked to use after he was married to a princess from Ghengiz Khan’s
dynasty.

Although Babur had finally conquered a
significant kingdom, he always hankered for Samarkand. His opinion of India is
rather unflattering: ‘Hindustan is a place of little charm. There is no
beauty in its people, no graceful social intercourse, no poetic talent or
understanding, no etiquette, nobility or manliness. The arts and crafts have no
harmony or symmetry. There are no good horses, meat, grapes, melons, or other fruit.
There is no ice, cold water, good food or bread in the markets’. At least,
Babur was very candid about why he was in India: ‘The one nice aspect of
Hindustan is that it is a large country with lots of gold and money’.
²⁴

Babur died less than five years after he
came to India. His empire was inherited by his son Humayun, who started construction
on the next Delhi—Dinpanah. Built just south of Feroze Shah Kotla, along
the river Yamuna, it included a citadel that we now know as Purana Qila (or Old
Fort). As we have already discussed, it was said to be the site of ancient
Indraprastha. There is nothing to suggest that this historical association had
anything to do with the choice of location. In addition to the citadel, there was a
fortified city. Unfortunately, very little has survived of the city of Dinpanah
except one of its impressive gates—the Lal Darwaza (or Red Gate). One can
see this imposing structure across the road from Purana Qila and Delhi Zoo.

Humayun did not complete either Dinpanah
or Purana Qila. He was chased out by a group of Afghan rebels led by Sher Shah Suri
and escaped with his family to Persia. It was
Sher Shah who
completed Purana Qila. He was also a remarkable administrator who carried out many
key reforms during his short reign. He re-organized tax collection, minted the first
silver Rupiya (precursor to the modern Rupee), and revived the ancient city of
Pataliputra (Patna). He also rebuilt the ancient Uttara Path highway from Punjab to
Bengal. Known as ‘Sadak-e-Azam’ (or Great Road), it would be a
major artery of the Mughal period; the British would know it as the Grand Trunk Road
and it is now part of the Golden Quadrilateral highway network.

If Sher Shah Suri had lived longer, it
is possible that we would not remember Mughal rule as anything more than one more
Central Asian raid. However, he died in a gun powder-related accident after just
five years on the throne and Humayun was able to come back and re-occupy Delhi.
Humayun too did not enjoy the Purana Qila for long, dying in a curious incident. He
had gone to watch the rise of Venus from the roof of his library. One his way down
the steep stairs, he tripped on his robe and died from the fall. Humayun’s
library building survives in Purana Qila. The stairway, however, is not open to the
public and visitors trying to re-enact Humayun’s last moments will be
disappointed.

A thirteen-year-old Akbar now became the
new ruler. He is usually called the third Mughal Emperor but, in reality, it was he
who created the foundations of a stable empire. He not only continued Sher
Shah’s reforms but also institutionalized a more liberal relationship with
the country’s Hindu majority.
²⁵
This was a major step in the evolution of Indian civilization. Although it is
today considered politically incorrect to see it in these terms, it is difficult to
deny that, before Akbar, there was
a ‘clash of
civilizations’ element to Hindu–Muslim interaction in North
India. This is evident from both the writings of Muslim authors of that time as well
as from the Hindu response to the Turkish invaders.