For Francesca Orsini & Samira Sheikh, After Timur Came, OUP forthcoming

Bandagī and Naukarī: Studying transitions in Political Culture and

Service under the North Indian Sultanates, 13-16th

centuries1

Sunil Kumar

Histories of the Delhi Sultanate are usually organised into rather simple binaries: years of

centralised governance of the Sultans of Delhi are measured against years of

decentralised rule under the ‘regional’ Sultanates. Historians frequently arrange their

narratives to describe the origin-apogee-decline career graph of the Sultanate where

‘stasis and decline’ is usually the chapter before the epilogue on the years after the

Timurid invasion (1398/99) and the fragmentation of the Tughluqid dominion.2 The

inordinate persistence of this representation is surprising, not least of all because it is in

the face of some recent scholarship on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, not least of

all Dirk Kolff and Simon Digby.3 Dirk Kolff’s observations on the culture of service,

1 This paper has profited from the critical interventions of Samira Sheikh and Francesca Orsini. I am

grateful to Francoise ‘Nalini’ Delvoye for the opportunity to first think about the subject in my lectures at

the EPHE in 2006. Anjali Kumar, as always, was a part of its writing. It would have been a lesser paper

without Sikandar Kumar’s perspicacious engagements with its arguments. I am grateful to Ali Anooshahr

and Pankaj Jha for making the texts of Mushtaqi and Vidyapati available to me. 2 Note Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: a Political and Military History, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1999, whose penultimate chapter, ‘Stasis and Decline: Firuz Shah and his successors’, is

followed by ‘Epilogue: c. 1400-1526’. 3 Dirk Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: the ethnohistory of the military labour market in Hindustan, 1450-

1850, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; Simon Digby, War Horse and Elephant in the Delhi

Sultanate: A Study of Military Supplies, Karachi: Orient Monographs, 1971; idem, ‘Anecdotes of a

Provincial Sufi of the Dehli Sultanate: Khwāja Gurk of Kara’, Iran, 32, 1994: 99-109; idem, ‘Before Timur

came: Provincialization of the Delhi Sultanate through the fourteenth century’ Journal of the Economic and

Social History of the Orient, vol. 47, 2004: 298-356; idem, ‘Two Captains of the Jawnpur Sultanate’, in Jos

Gommans and Om Prakash, ed., Circumambulations in South Asian History : Essays in Honour of Dirk

H.A. Kolff, Brill: Leiden, 2003, pp. 159-78; idem, ‘The Indo-Persian Historiography of the Lodi Sultans’,

in F. Grimal (ed.), Les Sources et le temps, Pondichéry: Ēcole Française d’Extrême Orient, 2001, pp. 243-

61; idem, ‘‘Abd al-Quddus Gangohi (1456-1537 A. D.) : the Personality and Attitudes of a Medieval Indian

Sufi Shaykh’, Medieval India : a Miscellany, III, Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1975, pp. 1-66; idem,

‘Dreams and Reminiscences of Dattu Sarvani, a Sixteenth Century Indo-Afghan Soldier’, Indian Economic

and Social Economic and Social History Review, 2, 1965: 52-80, 178-94. Digby’s contributions are

considered slightly later in the paper.

1

naukarī, the search for military employment compensated by a salary and/or other social

and political rewards, was placed as a distinguishing feature of the fifteenth and sixteenth

centuries, setting this period apart from the one prior to Timur’s invasion. In Kolff’s

analysis, neither the decline of the Sultanate nor Timur were primary contributors to the

making of this new political culture. Instead naukari was closely linked to the military

labour market in the subcontinent where the opportunities for, and availability of armed

personnel had grown exponentially through the fifteenth into the sixteenth centuries. It

was this world, rather than that of the Delhi Sultans, that had an abiding impact on the

Mughals.

Despite Kolff’s innovative rereading of the post-Tughluq and pre-Mughal

centuries (1414-1556), his work also begged the question: what was the prehistory of this

culture? From what elements was it constituted? What range of personnel and ties did

political service encompass prior to the fifteenth century? How did this alter and in what

arenas? In other words, even as Kolff elaborated on the quality of naukari, the history of

this culture remained murky. Notably, in his analysis it was never clear why the Khalajis

or the Tughluqs did not tap into the military labour market in the same way as the later

Afghans or the Jaunpur, Malwa and Gujarat regimes. Were the differences merely

conjunctural and contingent, or were they a consequence of larger structural changes in

representation and interpersonal relationships through the fourteenth century, or a

mixture of all these factors?

Inasmuch as conventional historiography considers the fifteenth and sixteenth

centuries as substantive departures from a preceding period, my paper extends the

provocative question posed by the editors in the introduction to this volume and asks

2

‘how well do we know the history of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that we

should consider the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries so different’? There are considerable

similarities in both periods: the armed peasantry were also recruited in huge numbers by

the Delhi Sultans (especially ‘Ala al-Din Khalaji and Muhammad Shah Tughluq),4 and

immigrant personnel, occasionally of very humble origins (including the Afghans) were

integral to Sultanate armies in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, some going on to

become governors of provinces and rulers of Delhi.5 Although Kolff’s understanding of

naukari was further inflected by the notion of ethnogenesis, where groups developed

their identities through shared service, domicile, language, literature and memories, these

processes were, in themselves, not unique to the cultural world of the fifteenth century

warband.6 Many of the similarities and difference between the period before and after

Timur’s invasion have not been systematically explored and the vectors of analysis are

still based on impressionistic evidence concerning scale of military and political

formations. Perhaps most critically, there has been no comparison of the ways in which

regimes and their participants were discussed in the literary materials of the time, or of

the ways in which they constructed ideas of service, loyalty and leadership and their

4 For details on the huge standing army of the two monarchs see Peter Jackson, ‘The problems of a vast

military encampment’, in R.E. Frykenberg (ed.), Delhi through the Ages, Delhi: Oxford University Press,

1986, pp. 18-33 and more tangentially Irfan Habib, ‘The price regulations of ‘Ala al-Din Khalji--a defence

of Zia Barani’ Indian Economic and Social History Review, 21, 1984: 393-414. 5 All of the founding dynasts of the Khalaji, Tughluq, Sayyid and Lodi regimes were immigrants to the

subcontinent and originally frontier commanders. For a more detailed response of the Persian literati to

these groups of people see Sunil Kumar, ‘The Ignored Elites: Turks, Mongols and a Persian Secretarial

Class in the early Delhi Sultanate’, Modern Asian Studies, 43, 2009: 45-77, and idem, ‘Courts, Capitals

and Kingship: Delhi and its Sultans in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries CE’ in Albrecht Fuess and

Jan Peter Hartung (eds), Court Cultures in the Muslim World: Seventh to Nineteenth Centuries, London:

SOAS/Routledge Studies on the Middle East, 2011, pp. 123-148. 6 See for example the early work of B.D. Chattopadhyaya, ‘Origin of the Rajputs: the Political, Economic

and Social Processes in early Medieval Rajasthan’, Indian Historical Review, 3, 1976: 59-82, oddly

missing in Kolff’s bibliography. And from the adjoining region of Transoxiana and Afghanistan, but

considering historical processes that have a bearing on South Asia, see Jean Aubin, ‘L’ethnogénèse des

Qaraunas’, Turcica, 1, 1969: 65-94.

3

material dimensions – what aspects continued, what changed and how are they manifest

through the thirteenth into the fifteenth-sixteenth century?

This is actually quite astonishing because most historians have commented on

shifts in the nature of the literary materials available to the historians from the fifteenth

century. As the editors of the volume have noted, the epoch of the great histories of

Delhi, the tawarikh of Juzjani, Barani, ‘Isami had tapered to an end, there were few

contemporaneous Persian histories on the fifteenth and sixteenth century and far more

that were retrospective accounts produced in the Mughal chanceries or in the courts of

latter day Rajput princes. There were also histories produced in a variety of vernacular

languages following literary conventions borrowed from Sanskrit and an assortment of

Bhakti and Sufi inflected styles. But the sheer difference in the literary materials, the

cognitive worlds that they mapped and their retrospective projections of social and

material conditions into an earlier period, left historians trained in reading the grand

narratives of the Persian tawarikh of the Delhi Sultans or the Mughal period with no

ready-made templates that they could readily follow.7

Since these literary materials were very different from each other in their readings

of history, their literary styles, and authorial intent, their interpretation needed, as Carlo

Ginzburg reminded historians in a different context, a great deal of caution. As Ginzburg

noted, ‘[t]he fashionable injunction to study reality as a text should be supplemented by

the awareness that no text can be understood without a reference to extra-textual

realities’.8 In other words, from the perspective of my argument, since the literary

7 For an important overview on the sources of this period and the historiographical issues they raise for the

historian, see Francesca Orsini, ‘How to do multilingual literary history? Lessons from fifteenth and

sixteenth century north India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 2012: 226-46. 8 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian’, Critical Inquiry, 18, 1991: 84.

4

materials before and after Timur’s invasions are so different, and the evidence they

proffer so incommensurate, any comparative exercise of the cultural and political worlds

of the two periods has to have some degree of structural correspondence. I keep that in

mind as I try to disaggregate the elements that constituted political culture and service at

differing moments of time and investigate three relatively precise subjects: the

recruitment of changing kinds of personnel and what this might tell us regarding

expectations and ambitions of masters and servants; the ways in which political

entitlement related to the social and cultural profiles of individuals and groups and might

serve to alter it; and the manner in which Persian and other writers framed and

commented on departures from idealised norms of political conduct. Because of the

varied modes of literary presentation, I have tried to be as precise as possible in

presenting the contexts in which different personnel constructed a range of service

relationships through the long period of the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries,

paying close attention to the ways in which the literary materials commented on this

subject over time.

In my analysis of political culture and service I use the two terms bandagī and

naukari hermeneutically to analyse the relationships of the different kinds of personnel

recruited by the Delhi Sultans and other patrons between the thirteenth and sixteenth

centuries. The adjective bandagi is derived from the noun banda, the Persian term for

military slave (plural: bandagān), and describes political relationships that were strongly

touched by traditions of servitude present in the practice of military slavery.9 I use the

9 While the term bandagī has not been used by historians [as yet] to unravel aspects of pre-modern political

culture, the term itself is not a neologism. See for example, Ziya’ al-Din Barani, Fatāwā-yi jahāndārī,

edited by A. Salim Khan, Lahore: Idarah-i Tahqiqat-i Pakistan wa Intishgah-i Punjab, 1972, p. 333. The

term seems to have had considerable currency as a title in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. For a

5

term to discuss political relationships amongst personnel who were not always, strictly

speaking, ‘unfree’. While these personnel could have been free, their relationships were

also strongly touched with the paradigms of service associated with bandagi. On the

other hand, the adjective naukari as a means to understand political culture may appear as

more of a neologism. In its Persian usage the noun naukar carried some of the meanings

present in its antecedent Mongol form, nökör (singular) / nököd (plural) – personal

retainer, loyal friend, comrade in arms, bodyguard – and within the limited context of a

dyadic relationship with a master, its meaning was very close to banda-i khāṣṣ. In its

original Mongol sense, the nököd were free and honourable servants, who had voluntarily

accepted service with a great lord; it had none of the pejorative meanings associated with

slavery.10

In the pre-Timurid years of the Sultanate I have found no evidence in the

Persian chronicles of the usage of the term naukar; it was, however, in circulation in the

Afghan records of the sixteenth century, but not, as far as I know, in its adjectival form,

naukari. Even if the term naukari was absent in the pre-Timurid centuries, I am interested

in researching the elements that constituted relationships with naukars (or naukari, as I

refer to it) and here, happily, there is considerable information.

I place naukari in a dialectical relationship with bandagi, with whom it can be

usefully juxtaposed for purposes of elucidating the different kinds of political

notable example consider the title of Khizr Khan, the founder of the Sayyid dynasty (1414-21). See Yahya

Sirhindi, Ta’rīkh- Mubārak Shāhī, edited by M. Hidayat Hosain, Calcutta: Bibliotheca Indica, 1931, p. 181

and the title of the monarch ‘Bandagī rāyāt-i a‘lā’ Khiżr Khān’. This would translate literally as 'In the

Service of the Exalted Banners’. Sirhindi’s anecdotes on the monarch’s Sayyid status would suggest a

reference to ‘service to the banners of the Prophet’. But there is enough ambiguity to allow readers to

consider a possible genuflection towards Timur: see Sirhindi, p. 182, and the title of the monarch stated as

bandagī’i bandagān rāyāt-i a‘lā’ and the conclusion to this paper for a further discussion of post-Sultanate

usages of bandagi. 10

For a useful discussion of the Mongol nökör see V. Vladimirtsov, Le Regime social des Mongols,

translated by M. Carsow, Paris: A. Maisonneuve, 1948, pp. 110-130; Igor de Rachewiltz, The Secret

History of the Mongols: a Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the thirteenth century, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2004,

vol. 1, pp. 256-7; and Gerhard Doerfer, Türkische und Mongolische Elemente im Neupersischen,

Weisbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag Gmbh, 1963, vol. 1, pp. 521-26.

6

relationships and the tensions apparent in their representations. In this context I found the

diachronic mode particularly useful in avoiding what might appear as a bandagi / naukari

binary. While the elite personnel encompassed in these terms were always in flux and

their relationships and identities shaped by a variety of material factors, they were not the

authors of their histories. Moving through time has the advantage of careful

contextualisation to enable an inflected analysis of how Persian and other chroniclers

responded to Sultanate personnel with shared or contrasting backgrounds and conditions

of service. It allows me the opportunity to note continuities and transitions by paying

attention to the ways in which particular characteristics of these personnel and their

contexts were elided or foregrounded. Cohering political relationship around terms such

as bandagi and naukari therefore serves as points of entry through which contingent

relationships and their representations can be further interrogated to finesse particularities

especially over time. Towards that end the following section studies the meaning of

bandagi through the thirteenth-sixteenth century in somewhat greater detail.

The value of déracinés: bandagi in the pre-Mughal period

For the longest time historians suggested that the usage of military slaves was a condition

unique to the thirteenth century ‘Turkish’ Sultanate regime. The evidence contradicts this

conclusion; the deployment of military slaves continued well into the Lodi regime in the

sixteenth century and beyond. Although historians find it easy to recall Qutb al-Din Ai-

Beg, Iltutmish and Balban as examples of important and powerful slaves in the thirteenth

century, we need to add to this list of significant examples of military slaves in the

7

service of Delhi Sultans the eunuch Malik Kafur Hazar Dinari, the Khalaji general who

led ‘Ala al-Din’s armies into the Deccan and managed court politics in Delhi at the end of

his master’s reign;11

Khusraw Khan Barwari (r. 1320), the Khalaji slave commander who

deposed his master, became Sultan of Delhi, and had cordial relations with the sufi

Shaykh Nizam al-Din Auliya;12

the Tughluq slave ‘Imad al-Mulk Bashir Sultani who was

Firuz Tughluq’s commander of armies;13

and Malik Sarwar Khwaja Jahan, a habshi

eunuch and Firuz Tughluq’s commander, who went on to become Sultan of Jaunpur

(1394-99) and founded the Sharqi dynasty (1394-1457).14

We also need to take into

account the cadre of military personnel present during the period of Lodi (1451-1526)

and Sur rule (1540-55), contingents that were described as khaṣṣa khayl. These

contingents were retained by the Sultans and his nobles, amidst which were a significant

number of slaves.15

It is not the persistence of slave retinues through this period that is actually of

such great significance, but its attendant implication: through these centuries there was

also considerable structural stability in the modes of selecting and socialising personnel

into a culture of political service which I refer to as bandagi. This was evident in the

ways in which common slaves were transformed into bandagan-i khass. As in the

11

On Malik Kafur Hazar Dinari see the synopsis of Peter Jackson (1999), pp. 174-7, 206-7. 12

Ibid., pp. 158, 177. 13

Shams-i Siraj ‘Afif, Ta’rīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī, edited by Maulavi Vilayat Husain, Calcutta: Bibliotheca

Indica, 1888-91, pp. 436-445. 14

For his appointment during the reign of the Tughluq monarch Sultan Mahmud Shah II (1393-95) see

Sirhindi, Ta’rīkh-i Mubārak Shāhī, pp. 156-7. 15

For an account of the khaṣṣa khayl see I.H. Siddiqui, Some Aspects of Afghan Despotism in India,

Aligarh: Three Men Publication, 1969, pp. 111-117 and idem, ‘The Army of the Afghan Kings in India’,

Islamic Culture, 39, 1965: 223-227. The khassa khayl contingents seem to have been very similar to the

thirteenth and fourteenth century qalb retinue – the central contingent of the army that surrounded the ruler

at moments of conflict and stayed with her/him in the capital. The qalb contained a significant number of

the ruler’s bandagan as well; see Sunil Kumar, Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate, Delhi: Permanent Black,

2007, pp. 78, 132, 258, 259, 321. For the recruitment of slaves and their sons by Sher Shah see also Kolff

(1990), pp. 66-67.

8

thirteenth century, so too in the fifteenth, masters chose their bandagan-i khass from their

personal slaves that they had usually possessed for a considerable period of time, and

who had responded favourably to the attentive fosterage (parwarish) and training

(tarbiyat) imparted to them. For example, the details of the slave of Shams al-Din

Iltutmish in the early thirteenth century, Taj al-Din Sanjar Kazlak Khan, harmonises very

well with the information on ‘Imad al-Mulk Bashir Sultani, the slave of Firuz Shah

Tughluq from the late fourteenth century. Iltutmish (1210-36) purchased Taj al-Din

before he had seized the throne when the slave was still a youth. He was reared in the

household of the monarch together with his master’s eldest son and was elevated slowly

from domestic responsibilities such as a cup-bearer (chashnīgīr), to become, eventually,

the commander of Uchch, one of the important settlements in the north-west, a position

he continued to occupy till his death.16

A century and a half later, ‘Afif provided a

biography of ‘Imad al-Mulk, a valued slave (ghulām-i khāṣṣ) of Firuz Shah (1351-88), in

the possession of the monarch prior to his accession. He had served the Sultan’s family

earlier, perhaps as a part of his mother or wife’s domestic staff. This probably provided

the setting for his proximity to the monarch; ‘Afif noted that ‘Imad al-Mulk had access to

the Sultan at all times, within and outside the palace. The chronicler was also very precise

in mentioning that the slave was the first person to be honoured with a title on his

master’s accession and he remained as the commander of Firuz Shah’s army (sar-i

lashkar) for the duration of his lifetime.17

The examples of Taj al-Din and ‘Imad al-Mulk

elaborate on the dyadic nature of the relationship established between the master and the

16

Minhaj-i Siraj Juzjani, Ṭabaqāt-i Nāṣirī, edited by Abdul Hay Habibi, Kabul: Anjuman-i Tarikh-i

Afghanistan, 1963-4, vol. 2, p. 4. 17

‘Afif, Ta’rīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī, pp. 435-7.

9

slave, a relationship summarised by Juzjani in the thirteenth century as one where the

slave ‘was extremely close’ (qurbat tamām dāsht) to his master.18

Clearly what changed over time was the ethnic and racial profile of slaves

(Turkish slaves giving way to Ethiopian or slaves from the subcontinent), not the

dependence of the several monarchs on deracinated military personnel. And this

continuation, not the shifts in the ethnicity or the size of slave retinues, marked a critical

structural characteristic of Sultanate regimes.19

The inability to appreciate the full impact

of bandagi in Sultanate regimes is a product of a rather narrow equation of the culture of

service that might be touched with aspects of military slavery with the jural condition of

unfreedom. To begin with, in Islamic law the military slave continued as a dependent of

his erstwhile master as his mawālī even after manumission (and/or conversion). That the

bandagan-i khass were legally free, having been manumitted sometime during their

career did not in itself alter their bandagi relations with their master/patron; their jural

condition was therefore, immaterial in this context.20

What is more germane to note is

18

Juzjani had used this phrase in the context of another slave of Iltutmish, Hindu Khan. See Juzjani,

Ṭabaqāt-i Nāṣirī, vol. 2, p. 19 19

This would contradict much of the historiography on the Delhi Sultanate where the reign of ‘Ala al-Din

Khalaji is posited as a ‘revolution’ because of the transitions in the racial and jural profiles of the

personnel: Turkish slaves giving way to nobles who were free and non-Turks. For the primary exponents of

this view see Mohammad Habib, ‘Introduction to Elliot and Dowson’s History of India vol. II’, in Politics

and Society during the Early Medieval Period, ed. Khaliq A. Nizami, Delhi: People’s Publishing House,

1974, vol. 1, pp. 33-110 (especially pp. 103-110 for the changes that occurred in the ‘Indo-Turkish Slave

Bureaucracy of the thirteenth Century’) and Irfan Habib, ‘Barani’s theory of the History of the Delhi

Sultanate’, Indian Historical Review, 7, 1981: 99-115 (especially pp. 108-115). Peter Jackson (1999), pp.

82-85, 171-77, makes a similar assertion even though he notes the continued deployment of military slaves

by fourteenth century Delhi Sultans. He leaves unexplained how the ‘emergence of a new elite’ (p. 171) in

his work implied any structural transitions in the way authority was dispensed by the Khalaji or the

Tughluq monarchs. 20

For a valuable discussion of the ties between the freed slave and his patron see, Paul G. Forand, ‘The

Relation of the Slave and Client to the Master or Patron in Medieval Islam’, International Journal of

Middle East Studies, 2, (1971): 59-66 and Roy P. Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership in an early Islamic

Society, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980, pp. 84-89. For its manifestation in Egypt see, David

Ayalon, ‘Studies in al-Jabartī I: Notes on the transformation of Mamluk Society in Egypt under the

Ottomans’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 3, 1960: 283-8. For the early Delhi

Sultanate see Kumar (2007), pp. 94-97, 123-124, and 132.

10

that, whether freed or not, the bandagan set a normative standard of an idealised loyal

servant and the Sultans sought other bodies of military personnel who could most closely

approximate their special déraciné qualities.21

They found these personnel amongst other marginal groups who were equally

alienated from the networks of power and hence dependent upon their master in ways

similar to that of the bandagan. Marginality carried with it the same baggage of ostracism

from elite social circles that Delhi Sultans had sought to use to gain the dependence of

their favoured slaves. Their intent was captured by Barani in the middle of the fourteenth

century when he explained that authoritarian monarchs like Balban did not trust

ambitious individuals who believed they had a prior claim to status or authority. Such

individuals, he noted, inevitably wanted to associate in kingship, shurakā-i mulk. Instead,

Barani observed, Balban favoured individuals who were entirely his creatures and relied

on his support and protection, ḥimāyat-i Balbanī to gain status.22

As Persian chroniclers noticed, these concerns led the Delhi Sultans to patronise

some exceptional bodies of people who were unfailingly described as social outcasts.

Thus, when Afghans were recruited by Sultan Balban, Amir Khusraw commented:

In this (?) fortress live the Afghans – nay man-slaying demons, for even

the demons groan in fright at their shouts. Their heads are like big sacks of

straw, their beards like the combs of the weaver, long-legged as the stork

but more ferocious than the eagle, their heads lowered like that of the owl

of the wilderness. Their voices hoarse and shrill like that of a jack-daw,

their mouths open like a shark. Their tongue is blunt like a home-made

arrow, and flings stones like the sling of a battering ram. Well has a wise

21

Here the advice of the Seljuq vizier Nizam al-Mulk (d. 1092) was particularly apposite: ‘A slave who one

has brought up and promoted, must be looked after, for it needs a whole lifetime and good luck to find a

worthy and experienced slave.’ See Nizam al-Mulk, Siyāsat Nāma, translated by H. Darke, The Book of

Government or Rules for Kings, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978 reprint, p. 117 22

Ziya’ al-Din Barani, Ta’rikh-i Fīruz Shahi, edited by S. A. Khan, Calcutta: Bibliotheca Indica, 1860-62,

p. 65, edited by Shaykh Abdur Rashid, Aligarh: Department of History, 1957, p. 77.

11

man said that when speech was sent to men from the sky, the Afghans got

the last and least share of it.23

Similarly, at the end of the thirteenth century Mongol contingents were recruited

by Sultan Kaiqubad (1287-90), Jalal al-Din Khalaji (1290-96) and ‘Ala al-Din Khalaji

(1296-1316). Barani’s snobbery was evident in his sneering reference to them as ‘new-

Muslims’, nau-Musalmān. These were not universally shared opinions – certainly the

favour shown by the Delhi monarchs was in marked contrast to the hideous images of the

Mongols constructed by the Persian litterateurs. ‘Isami noted:

...Their features were repulsive and their language rude and

impolite....Their countenance, their hair and their nature were repugnant

and their sweat smelt foul ...Their hands were ghost-like and their feet

highly ominous... They had flat noses and protruding faces. They bore an

angry and fatal look. Their eyes were so small that they were completely

hidden under their long drawn-out brows. Everyone felt dismayed on

seeing them. Their bodies were scarred by the bites of the lice that they

carried on themselves, each louse feeding itself on their blood.24

Sultanate litterateurs were very harsh in condemning monarchs who recruited

military personnel who were the ‘lowest and basest of the low and base born [siflatarīn

wa razālatarīn-i siflagān wa razalagān]; they brought ruin to the realm.25

But the

marginal status of these newly empowered groups in Sultanate society was exactly what

made recruits like the Afghans, the Mongols and other frontier groups valuable to their

patrons. Like the bandagan these ‘base born’ (bad aslī wa nā kas) were also divorced

23

Amir Khusraw, Tuḥfat al-ṣighār, IOL Persian Ms 412, fol. 50 seq., cited by Wahid Mirza, The Life

and Works of Amir Khusrau, Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delli, 1974 reprint, pp. 51-2. 24

‘Abd al-Malik ‘Isami, Futūḥ al-salāṭīn, edited by A.S. Usha, Madras, University of Madras, 1940, p.

456; translated by A.M. Husain, New York, Asia Publishing House, 1977, vol. 2, pp. 427-8. I have used

Husain’s translation. 25

This was Barani’s description of the kinds of people patronised by Sultan Muhammad Tughluq. See

Barani, Ta’rīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī, edited by Khan, p. 505. Khan’s edition has a misprint: razālatarīn and

razālagān should be read as razālatarīn and razālagān.

12

from their natal contexts, raised to high office in Sultanate society where their political

position, wealth and power was completely incongruent to their social status. The

disjunctions between their political and social positions only served to underline their

dependence on their master’s dispensation of favours. But they were free and sometimes

held high positions in the service of the Delhi monarchs. This mix of qualities elicited

complex responses from the Persian chroniclers and it might be useful to appreciate their

inflected responses by looking at the case of the Bhattis from Firuz Tughluq’s reign

(1351-88) somewhat more carefully.

The Bhattis were a pastoral group settled in the western Punjab, minimally

supervised by the governors of the Delhi Sultans.26

In ‘Ala al-Din Khalaji’s reign (d.

1316) their areas came under the supervision of Ghazi Malik (the future Sultan Ghiyas al-

Din Tughluq) and his brother, Sipahsalar Rajab, who were appointed as commanders to

the territories of the city of Dipalpur. Ghazi Malik wanted to get his brother married to

one of the daughters of the Rais of Dipalpur [az dukhtar-i rā’ī az rāyān Dībālpūr] and

when informed that the daughter of Raja Ranmal Bhatti was particularly eligible, he

made the proposal to her father.27

When Raja Ranmal scorned the offer, Ghazi Malik

intervened in his territories with extortionate demands. Faced with brutal punishment and

economic disaster, Raja Ranmal’s daughter persuaded her father to accept the marriage

and save his subjects. Although the Bhatti princess was honourably received in Ghazi

Malik’s family, she did convert and was renamed Bibi Kadbanu, and her son, Firuz

Tughluq, eventually became the Sultan of Delhi. Other than the episode of

26

Note the critical intervention of S.H. Hodivala, Studies in Indo-Muslim History: A Critical Commentary

on Elliot and Dowson’s History of India, Bombay: Popular Book Depot, 1939, vol. 1, pp. 305-310. On p.

305, Hodivala clarifies that the territory [talwandī] of the Bhattis was fragmented and centred around ‘a

camp made by a ring of ox-wagons set close together’ near a water source. 27

‘Afif, Ta’rīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī, pp. 36-7.

13

renaming/conversion, ‘Afif underlines the princess’s sense of natal alienation when he

reports her request to her father to accept the marriage in the larger good and consider her

abducted by the Mongols in one of their raids.28

‘Afif did not disclose why Ghazi Malik was looking for a bride specifically

amongst the daughters of the chieftains of Dipalpur but it could have been an attempt to

consolidate his position in the region; the social profile of the Bhatti pastoralist followers

of the Raja was similar to the other ‘rustic’ frontiersmen that comprised Ghazi Malik’s

retinue.29

But we have no evidence of any Bhatti recruitment by Ghazi Malik or the later

Tughluqs; instead their resistance to the Sultanate seems to have continued and some

decades afterwards Muhammad Tughluq campaigned against them.30

The marriage with

Malik Rajab, however, must have meant that some members of the bride’s family resided

with her in Delhi. There is a reference to one relative, the proverbial maternal uncle (the

nīyā > māmūn/māmā), Rai Bhiru/Pheru Bhatti, who joined his nephew’s service and, as

his title indicates, had obviously not converted to Islam. In the early years of Firuz

Tughluq’s reign Rai Pheru was instrumental in helping his nephew neutralise a

conspiracy hatched by the late Sultan Muhammad Tughluq’s sister.31

While not much more is known about the role of Rai Pheru in the politics of the

capital, Firuz Tughluq invested considerable resources to insulate Delhi and Haryana

28

Ibid., pp. 37-39. ‘Afif narrates the princess’s remark in the first person but he has clearly not taken the

subject’s point of view, where instead of Mongol, Turk/Turushka would have been more likely the term

used by the princess. By deliberately using the term ‘Mongol’, ‘Afif appropriated the woman within

Sultanate prejudices and could glorify her readiness to sacrifice herself. All of this was important for ‘Afif

because of its rather serious implications for his protagonist, Sultan Firuz Tughluq, the Bhatti princess’ son. 29

For further details see Kumar (2009). 30

Jackson (1999): 128. 31

‘Afif, Ta’rīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī, pp. 103-4

14

from the depredations of frontier pastoral elements like the Bhattis.32

Rai Pheru, however,

was distinct from the larger body of the Bhatti clans; he was a part of Firuz Tughluq’s

personal retinue. While he retained some elements of his old social identity, there was

also the loss of his old social context; he was natally alienated.

Persian chroniclers could be extremely judicious in their criticism of the great

lords of the realm. They may have been regarded as déracinés and social menials, but

these individuals were also very well connected and possessed considerable power. Many

bandagan-i khass were provided with patently false genealogies and were differentiated

from the riff-raff, newly purchased slaves who were summarily dismissed as frivolous

and cheap (harzgān wa diram-i kharīdgān).33

Political success certainly made Amir

Khusraw revise his opinions of his patrons: he was harshly critical of the Qara’una

Mongols, but some years afterwards produced a fulsome eulogy when one of them,

Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq, morphed into a Delhi Sultan.34

So how did transitions in the

fortunes of their deracinated protagonists reflect on the manner in which Persian

chroniclers understand bandagi?

The bandagan certainly tried to alter their déraciné and abject social status by

establishing large households, accumulating sizeable armed retinues, and breaking out of

32

See also Jos Gommans, ‘The Silent Frontier of South Asia, c. A.D. 1100–1800’, Journal of World

History, 9, 1998: 17-23. 33

Barani, Ta’rīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī, edited by S. A. Khan, p. 37 (For Balban as a descendent of Afrasiyab) and

p. 27 for the ‘cheap slaves’; Ibid, edited by S.A. Rashid, pp. 44, 33. 34

Note Amir Khusraw’s description of the Qara’una Mongol who had captured him in 1285: ‘he sat on his

horse like a leopard on a hill. His open mouth smelt like an arm-pit, whiskers fell from his chin like pubic-

hair’. See Amir Khusraw, Wasaṭ al-‘ayāt, cited in ‘Abd al-Qadir Bada’uni, Muntakhab al-Tawārīkh, edited

by Maulavi Ahmad Shah, Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1868, vol. 1, p. 153. Compare with his

Tughluq Nāma, composed circa 1320 where Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq is eulogised as Ghazi Malik and

‘Saviour of Islam’. See Amir Khusraw, Tughluq Nāma, ed. Sayyid Hashmi Faridabadi, Aurangabad: Urdu

Publishing House, 1933.

15

restrictive endogamous relationships by marrying women above their status.35

Describing

these developments in the last quarter of the thirteenth century Barani felt the need to

coin the term maulāzādgān, sons of freed slaves, to note the presence of this new social

group in Sultanate polity. With his aristocratic prejudices, Barani used the term derisively

to remind his readers of the ‘real’ social origins of some Sultanate elites. Their numbers

had increased enormously by Sultan Kaiqubad’s reign (d. 1290) and Barani noted their

search for alliance with Mongol converts (nau-musalman) who had just migrated to the

Sultanate – one body of social menials gravitating into alliance with another, in search of

roots as it were, and leverage against entrenched elites.36

The déracinés were seeking to

alter their condition of natal alienation and social death, moving away from the features

that Orlando Patterson had argued were integral in the constitution of slavery.37

Like most chroniclers, Barani was very judicious in whom he chose to insult: he

never disclosed to his readers, for example, that Amir Khusraw was one such maulāzāda.

As it happens, the great Persian poet and close friend of the Sufi saint Nizam al-Din

Auliya was not only the son of a Shamsi slave, Malik Saif al-Din Lachin, but his mother

was the daughter of a Hindu slave. The son of such a slave couple – and to be fair, they

may have been slaves but they were politically very well connected – chose to give up a

possible career in the army, got an education instead, and became a poet and the

35

For further details on asymmetrical matrimonial relationships by Shamsi slaves see Sunil Kumar, ‘The

Woman in the ḥisāb of men: Sultan Raziyya and early Sultanate Society’, forthcoming-A. 36

On Kamal Mahiyar see Barani, Ta’rīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī, edited by Khan, pp. 36-9, edited by Rashid, pp. 43-

6, and on maulāzādgān in Kaiqubad’s reign and their relations with the nau-musalman, ibid., edited by

Khan, p. 134, edited by Rashid, p. 155. 37

Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 1982. For a useful revision of some of his arguments, see Indrani Chatterjee and Richard Eaton (eds),

Slavery and South Asian History, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.

16

quintessential courtly naukar.38

Nor was Amir Khusraw the exception; through the

thirteenth century families of slave origin increasingly established large homesteads that

Barani describes as khaylkhāna, a term that would remain relatively stable as a

description for an elite military commander’s household well into the sixteenth century.39

The efforts of the bandagan at greater social and political emancipation in Sultanate

society had a decidedly material character. Although I will discuss this in greater detail a

little later in the chapter, in the following section I would like to study a different body of

Sultanate servants – people of high status by virtue of birth or possession of knowledge

and skills that were esteemed and in short supply. Their social profiles were mixed but

still very different from the déracinés that we have just studied. How were they placed in

thirteenth-fourteenth Sultanate society and what conditions of service did they inhabit?

Service with status and honour: negotiating naukari

If naukari has to be distinguished from bandagi, the Sultanate personnel that we would

have to study would be those not considered déraciné. These people would be recent

émigrés and they would also carry with them their genealogies and titles and other modes

of proclaiming their different skills – their signatures of great social worth in their new

homes.

As a prosopographical survey of early Sultanate elites brings out, however,

Ghurid aristocrats served in north India to make quick fortunes, but until the 1220s few

38

For Amir Khusraw’s social background see Wahid Mirza, Life and Works of Amir Khusrau, Delhi:

Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delli, IAD Religio-Philosophy series no. 3, 1974 and the more recent Sunil Sharma,

Amir Khusrau: The Poet of Sultans and Sufis, Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2005. 39

Barani, Ta’rīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī, edited by Khan, p. 134, edited by Rashid, p. 155. Rashid’s reading differs

from Khan’s but is clearer.

17

chose to stay on; life was violent and uncertain in the frontier marches, comforts were

few and greater ambitions could be fulfilled in the courtly politics of the Shansabanid

dominions in Afghanistan.40

Only the humble stayed on in the insecure north Indian

marches to carve their fortunes. This changed in and around the 1220s, after the full-

fledged campaigns of the Mongols in Transoxiana, eastern Iran and Afghanistan when a

larger number of immigrants of elite social backgrounds fled to north India. These

émigrés were received honourably, but as Sultan Iltutmish asserted the authority of Delhi

over north India, he was extremely selective in his dispensation of favours; very few free

Amirs of high birth were favoured with independent command.41

At least as far as

naukari for military commanders were concerned, until the Timurid invasion the careful

discrimination of the Delhi Sultans privileged the social menials, not the aristocrat

émigrés.42

This selective discrimination against immigrant aristocrats was in marked contrast

to the favour shown to the literati: jurists, secretaries, accountants, scholars, poets – those

who were adept in Persian diplomatics and ideally, some level of Arabic scholastics, the

‘people of the pen’ (ahl-i qalam) more generically. These men had a portfolio of skills

that were rare and therefore in very high demand; the management of large households,

leave aside ambitious state formation, could not budge without their support. The Mongol

invasions had left their urban networks in disarray in eastern Iran and with their patrons

40

For further details see Kumar (2007), pp. 65-78. 41

Ibid., pp. 146-51. 42

For details see Kumar (2009): 45-77; idem, ‘Service, Status and Military Slavery in the Delhi Sultanate

of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries”, in Richard Eaton and Indrani Chatterjee (2006), pp. 83-

114, and Kumar (2011), pp. 123-148. The evidence cited here would contradict Irfan Habib’s assumptions

that the early fourteenth century marked a ‘plebianisation of the nobility’ when the ‘sluggish nobility

resting on its hereditary claims’ could not keep pace with the dynamic expansion of the political sphere and

complex economic life of the Sultanate under the great Khalaji and Tughluq monarchs. See Irfan Habib

(1981): 109.

18

either dispersed or killed, the ahl-i qalam migrated to the subcontinent in large numbers.

They were in search of naukari and carried the ambitions of reproducing a Persianate

cultural world in north India that was stable and familiar. Their past service with hostile

regimes notwithstanding, it was their skills that immediately secured their favour with

successive Delhi monarchs and a variety of other warlords.43

Interpreting these bodies of people primarily as collaborators, the much criticised

worldly ‘ulamā’-i duniyā,44

loses sight of their pietistic motivations, the important role

played by the ahl-i qalam in manufacturing the idea of the Muslim community in the

subcontinent, or their huge contribution in its reproduction which won them great respect.

Placing them within ties of naukari restores to them a level of autonomy available to free

individuals, especially those who possessed knowledge that was in great demand.

The social stature and portfolio of skills of these naukars provided them with

greater options which they used to negotiate conditions of service commensurate with

their social status. This was evident in the way members of the Kirmani family plotted

their careers. One of the members of the Kirmani family, Amir Khwurd, was the author

of the biographical encyclopaedia of the Chishti saints, Siyar al-auliya’ (completed ca.

1360s).45

The Kirmanis were one of Delhi’s important and wealthy fourteenth century

Sayyid families – beyond the family’s close association with the sufi saints Baba Farid

and Nizam al-Din Auliya, they participated in a network of relationships with other

43

Notably, all the great litterateurs of the early thirteenth century – Aufi, al-Kufi, Juzjani – were first in the

service of Qubacha, Sultan of Sindh, and on his defeat and death transited seamlessly to the service of

Iltutmish. For details, see Kumar (2009), pp. 212-37. 44

See Kumar (2007): 219 fn. 61, and 223-4, for the historiographical discussion of the terms‘ulamā’-i

ākhirat and ‘ulamā’-i dunyā and their contrasting juxtaposition by Nizam al-Din Auliya and Ziya al-Din

Barani. 45

Amir Khwurd, Siyar al-auliyā’, edited by Sayyid Mahdi Ghuri, Lahore: Markaz-i Tahqiqat-i Farsi Iran

wa Pakistan, no. 23, Mu’assi-yi Intisharat-i Islami, 1978.

19

Sayyids, ‘ulama, Sufis, merchants, the Delhi Sultans and their secretaries.46

One of their

members, Kamal al-Din Ahmad served Sultan Muhammad Tughlaq in his Telengana

army and was later appointed mushīr (counsellor) to the monarch and given the title

malik-i mu‘azzam (the great malik).47

Muhammad Tughluq’s vizier Khwaja Jahan

approached Kamal al-Din’s brother, Sayyid Hussain, to accompany him to Daulatabad.

Sayyid Hussain was agreeable but placed two conditions before the vizier: first, that ‘he

would retain his sayyid and sufi dress (libās-i siyādat wa ahl-i tasawwuf bar man

muqarrar bāshad) and second, ‘they would not require him to take up any employment

(bahech shughl-i mu‘aiyan mashghūl nagardānand)’.48

The association with the Sayyid

was important enough for the vizier and he accepted these stipulations.

Other than networking with the Sultan and his administrators, the Kirmani

Sayyids were also scrupulous in doing all they could to leverage their position within the

Chishti mystical order at a time when the fraternity was expanding through a dispersal of

its primary exponents in north India and the Deccan. Rather than facing anonymity as a

mere Chishti adherent, a member of the Kirmani family, Nur al-Din Mubarak, travelled

twice to Chisht in Afghanistan, home of the great ancestors of the Chishti mystic order

and received the cloak of discipleship from Khwaja Qutb al-Din, the descendant of the

primordial ‘Khwajas of Chisht’.49

This was a rare honour and within the circles of Chishti

disciples raised the status of Nur al-Din Mubarak and the rest of the Kirmani family

46

For a useful analysis of the Kirmani family’s network see Jyoti Gulati, ‘Stature, Social Relations and the

Piety-Minded: Reading Amir Khwurd’s Siyar al-Auliya’, Delhi University, Department of History, M.Phil.

dissertation, 2005, charts 1 and 2. The details on the Kirmanis below come from her unpublished

dissertation, pp. 64-105. 47

Amir Khwurd, Siyar al-auliyā’, pp. 224-5. 48

Ibid., p. 228. 49

Ibid., p. 221

20

above all their contemporaries.50

Even as the Kirmanis accepted naukari, they enhanced

their accomplishments to ensure that they were never completely hegemonised by any

one relationship. The sum of their variegated relationships reflected the great social value

they possessed, a public reputation that allowed them to negotiate favourable terms

providing them unparalleled freedom and initiative.

Not all naukars were so fortunate, and from the mid-thirteenth century we can

also notice the presence of exceptionally skilled but a socially humbler body of Muslims

seeking service in Sultanate administration. Many of them were recent converts to Islam;

some were maulazadas and certainly all were dependents (mawālī) of their patrons.51

Barani provides us with an early picture of the arrival of these people, individuals who,

despite their lowly social status, possessed knowledge of chancery protocol and

secretarial skills that was fetching them naukari. Since they lacked birthright and

standing in Muslim society, however, Barani showered them with abuse, something

which he strategized quite admirably – he stepped around the powerful who could

determine his own prospects, but condemned others.52

In his Ta’rīkh, Barani provided only the most cursory recollection of one of the

most powerful families in Tughluq history: the father and son, who served as viziers of

Firuz Tughluq, both titled Khan-i Jahan.53

Barani’s contemporary, ‘Afif, provided a

biography of the vizier and clarified that the father, Kannu, was from Telingana where he

50

Ibid., pp. 223-4. 51

For the technical position of the freed slave and convert in Islamic law, note the earlier discussion and

see also Joseph Schacht, Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, p. 161;

and in H.A.R.Gibb, et al. (eds), Encyclopaedia of Islam, Leiden: E.J. Brill, second edition, 1956-, s.v.: A.J.

Wensinck, I. Goldziher and P. Crone, ‘Mawla’, R. Brunschvig, ‘‘Abd’, and D. Sourdel, C.E. Bosworth and

Peter Hardy, ‘Ghulam’. 52

For Barani’s harsh criticism of administrators of low status in Muhammad Tughluq’s reign see Barani,

Ta’rīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī, edited by Khan, pp. 504-5. 53

Ibid., pp. 454, 512, 578-9.

21

was a trusted courtier of the local Raja/Rai.54

He was captured during the Tughluq

campaigns in the Deccan, transported to Delhi together with his master and became a

Muslim at the hand of Muhammad Tughluq (and was hence his mawali). Eventually he

was given the title Qiwam al-Mulk and became the deputy vizier of the Sultan. Kannu’s

rise within the Tughluqid chancery was astonishing (and equally Barani’s silence on the

matter), especially if one notes ‘Afif’s remark that the father ‘was not educated and could

not write, yet he was very wise’.

This was probably not strictly true: ‘Afif also mentions that the deputy vizier

signed orders as ‘Maqbul, the slave (banda) of Muhammad [Tughluq]’.55

What ‘Afif

meant was that Kannu’s administrative experience notwithstanding, at the time of his

deployment he lacked the writing skills in Persian required of secretaries serving the

Sultanate. Also, as a new convert (and in all likelihood a manumitted slave) Kannu

lacked the social status or network that could provide him with status and was dependent

upon his master for all favours. But not for long: the new convert went on to become the

vizier of the realm in Firuz Tughluq’s reign and as his career graph would suggest, his

deficiencies in education and social recognition were very quickly remedied: ‘Afif’s

biography draws particular attention of the reader to the vizier’s meticulous record

keeping.56

With power and prestigious secretarial skills it was also not long before the

vizier possessed a huge circle of supplicants; like many of his peers who were military

commanders, this self effacing banda was also no longer natally alienated.

54

For the biography of the two Khan-i Jahans, see ‘Afif, Ta’rīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī, pp. 394-430, and on his

origins see p. 394. 55

Ibid., p. 395. 56

Ibid., p. 397.

22

Nor was Kannu/Khan-i Jahan unique in the fourteenth century; there were other

non-Muslim literati whose suspect Persian skills, not to speak of their infidel

backgrounds, (at least in the eyes of Barani) did not hamper the flow of Sultanate

patronage. There was Ratan the fiscal administrator of Sindh, who was ‘skilled in

calculation and writing’, Bhiran, the auditor (mutasarrif) at Gulbarga, Samara the

governor of Telangana, and Dhara the deputy vizier at Daulatabad in 1344.57

None of

them could have held positions of public responsibility described by Barani unless they

were able to convince masters and subordinates, colleagues and supplicants that they

were adept in diplomatics, accountancy and mathematics (hisab and siyaq).58

Their

weaknesses in Persian must have also been quickly overcome otherwise they would not

have held such high offices in the Tughluq administration. Officers such as Ratan,

Bhiran, Samara or Dhara were not resident in Delhi, nor were they as powerful as

Kannu/Khan-i Jahan (whose influence would have been integral in any possible political

rehabilitation of the disgraced Barani – hence the author’s politic silence), and Barani

was brutal in his summation of their qualities.

Barani introduced the theme of moral corruption in politics, a consequence of

misdirected royal patronage, in the very beginning of his history, in Balban’s reign. In the

narrative of that monarch’s reign, Barani insinuated the story of Kamal Mahiyar, the son

of a Hindu ghulam who was recommended to Balban for appointment as the accountant

(khwaja) of Amroha. 59

Although in his narrative, Balban was not swayed by this

57

See Barani, Ta’rīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī, edited by Khan, pp. 504-5 and Jackson (1999), pp. 185-6. 58

For an extremely valuable summation of the personal, social and educational abilities that secretaries in

the Sultanate might have been expected to possess, see Nizami Aruzi Samarqandi, Chahār Maqālah, edited

by Mohammad Qazvini, revised by Mohammad Moin, Teheran: Zawwar Bookshop, 1955-7, translated by

Edward G. Browne, London, E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Series, 1978 reprint. 59

On Kamal Mahiyar, see Barani, Ta’rīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī, edited by Khan, pp. 36-7, edited by Rashid, pp.

42-3, and more generally for the incident, Khan ed., pp. 36-9, Rashid ed., pp. 43-6.

23

recommendation, Barani wanted his readers to know that this Sultan was the

paradigmatic exception; later Sultans lacked Balban’s acuity and good sense. Kamal

Mahiyar, for example, figured in his successor’s list of grandees.60

The favouritism

shown to personnel of ‘poor lineage and background’ (kam aslī wa kam bizā‘at),

according to Barani, had reached its culmination in Muhammad Tughluq’s reign.

And indeed it had, but this was not because of any deficiency displayed by the

later Delhi Sultans. To the contrary: by the middle of the fourteenth century, despite the

continuing immigration and favour shown to learned émigrés, the portfolio of skills that

set members of the Persianate chancery apart was no longer the exclusive preserve of the

distinguished secretarial families of the traditionally conceived Persianate ecumene.

Although neither Barani nor ‘Afif wanted to get into the question of how these base

Hindus came to possess knowledge of Persian epistolary traditions, mathematics and

accountancy, even a cursory review of Sanskrit land grants from an earlier period will

underline the great technical expertise in land management and general administration

possessed by local administrators.61

What is worth appreciating then is the adroitness

with which the likes of Kannu transported these managerial skills from one cultural

milieu to another.

It is critical to keep in mind that references to these groups of Sultanate

administrators commence from Balban’s reign and increase exponentially in the

fourteenth century as the Sultanate armies cleared larger areas of the jungle tracts in the

60

Ibid., ed. Khan, p. 126, ed. Rashid, p. 147. 61

There is a huge literature on this subject and personal favorites would include Y. Subbarayulu, Political

Geography of the Chola Country, Madras: State Department of Archaeology, Government of Tamilnadu,

1973, and his South India under the Cholas, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012. Closer in time to the

Sultanate see the details in Pushpa Prasad, Sanskrit Inscriptions of Delhi Sultanate, 1191-1526, Delhi:

Oxford University Press, 1990, and Samira Sheikh, Forging a Region: Sultans, Traders and Pilgrims in

Gujarat, 1200-1500, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010.

24

Gangetic plains, pushed into the areas of Rohilkhand, Bundelkhand, and Baghelkhand,

and commenced their march through Rajasthan, towards Gujarat and into the Deccan.

‘Isami and Barani note the presence of local guides, interpreters, and itinerant

provisioners who ferried supplies to the army; shadowy, ubiquitous personnel without

whom the Sultanate could not survive.62

The conjuncture between the settlement of new

agricultural tracts from the decades of the thirteenth century and the appearance of the

ahl-i qalam of a different ilk (the Ratans, Bhirans, Samaras, Dharas and Kannus) in

Sultanate histories is not coincidental. For the Delhi Sultans these scribal groups, familiar

with local conditions and languages. possessing their distinct histories, proved to be

valuable naukars. These were certainly the groups who would have the diglossic skills to

produce the multi-lingual inscriptions and documents discussed in this volume in the

articles by Sheikh and Eaton. The Delhi Sultans, always in search for secretaries, were

delighted to recruit such dependent and able personnel. They were bandagan-like

creatures (according to ‘Afif, a point that Kannu did not mind acknowledging), but they

possessed skills and access to knowledge systems that elicited patronage, altering the

sense of ‘employment’ into something honourable, a recognition that only particularly

qualified individuals achieved for managing the public affairs of the community. And

concurrently, we only need to pay attention to Barani to appreciate the tensions and

hostility that the arrival of these people created within entrenched secretarial circles, a

competition that the Sultans and other war lords used to their advantage.

62

Unfortunately this important subject has not been systematically studied. For very interesting references

to guides and interpreters – turjumān – during Khalaji campaigns into Ma‘bar, see ‘Isami, Futūḥ al-salāt īn,

pp. 296-7. See also Barani, Ta’rīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī, edited by Khan, p. 89, edited by Rashid, p. 104, for

Balban’s campaign against Tughril and the help he solicited from itinerant provenders, the baqqāl, to pin

down the location of the fleeing rebel.

25

Any opportunity to gain advantage over secretarial groups was important for the

military commanders. The ability of these groups to entrench their positions in Sultanate

society meant that changes in political dispensation sometimes also witnessed a great

purge of the administrative staff.63

These were unusual occasions and were usually

carefully reported by chroniclers. But more generally, the ahl-i qalam showed great

social resilience and their families remained important over generations in Sultanate

society. For example, the great thirteenth century chronicler and jurist, Minhaj-i Siraj

Juzjani’s daughter’s son, Qazi Sadr al-Din ‘Arif, was married to the sister of Muhammad

Tughluq. Their son was involved in the aforementioned coup to depose Firuz Tughluq.64

So what was the trajectory/fate of bandagan and other déracinés in Sultanate society in

the processes of reproduction of status and authority in Sultanate society? Did they

remain natally alienated?

Establishing homesteads, alliances and natality: transiting from bandagi

In Sultanate historiography there has been little interest in the study of the social

rooting of Sultanate elites and its possible impact on the regime’s territorial dimensions.65

Instead, it is the impermanent nature of territorial command that has been the subject of

63

See, for example, in the reign of Sultan Rukn al-Din (1236); Juzjani, Ṭabaqāt-i Nāṣirī, vol. 1, p. 456. 64

Hodivala (1939), vol. 1, p. 309. See above and the episode of the Bhattis for a reference to the coup

against Sultan Firuz Tughluq. 65

Interestingly this is in contrast to the historiography of subcontinental ‘regions’ where there is

considerable interest in the establishment of Muslim societies especially around networks established by

sufis and other pietistic figures. See Richard M. Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur, 1300-1700: Social Roles of Sufis in

Medieval India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978, idem, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal

Frontier, 1204-1760, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997 reprint; Carl Ernst, Eternal Garden: Mysticism,

History, and Politics at a South Asian Sufi Center, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992;

Jyoti Gulati Balachandran (2012) and Nile Green, Making Space: Sufis and Settlers in Early Modern India,

Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012.

26

scholastic comment. Sultanate historiography has placed a huge emphasis on the iqta‘ as

a means of introducing centralised governance – taxation, policing, curbing refractory

chieftains – through the temporary ‘posting’ of Sultanate military commanders in various

territories.66

The evidence does not bear out this understanding of early thirteenth century

governance: senior Sultanate military commanders—the bandagan-i khass—were seldom

shifted from their commands, especially from the more important provinces. As soon as

they were adjudged reliable administrators, Iltutmish seemed to have valued their

experience and left them in situ in their various appointments.67

Although originally a strategic decision with special regard to the bandagan-i

khass, by the middle of the thirteenth century this special dispensation had become a

more universal fait accompli – most military commanders used their iqta‘s (or seized the

iqta‘s of others) as safe sanctuaries to challenge not just Delhi but all other competitors.

Note the instances of Kabir Khan Ayaz in Sindh and Ikhtiyar al-Din Yuzbeg in

Lakhnauti, who transformed their commands into independent Sultanates, and Balban

with his headquarters in the Siwalikh region, Rayhan in Bahraich and Qutlugh Khan in

Awadh.68

Juzjani notes that although Balban spent most of his time occupied with the

affairs of Delhi, he never lost sight of his investment in his iqta‘ where every town, qasba

and fort was managed by his administrators and servants [muta‘alliqān wa khuddām].69

Nor was he unique: when Rayhan and Qutlugh Khan evicted Balban from Delhi in 1253,

66

See W.H. Moreland, The Agrarian System of Moslem India, Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation,

1968 reprint, pp. 216-223, Irfan Habib, ‘An Economic History of the Delhi Sultanate–An Essay in

Interpretation’, Indian Historical Review, 4, 1978: 287-303, idem, ‘iqta‘’ in Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan

Habib (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 1, c. 1200-1750, Cambridge: University Press,

1982 reprint, pp. 68-75. 67

Sunil Kumar, ‘When Slaves were Nobles: the Shamsi Bandagan in the Early Delhi Sultanate’, Studies in

History, 10, 1994: 23-52 and Kumar (2007), pp. 167-75. Note also the extensive comment on Sultanate

historiography in these publications. 68

For a detailed discussion see Kumar (2007), pp. 266-86, 295-98. 69

Juzjani, Ṭabaqāt-i Nāṣirī, vol 2, p. 61.

27

the military commander retired to his territory in the Siwalikh. Rayhan and Qutlugh Khan

replaced Balban’s cohort in the capital with their own confederates, one of whom, Shams

al-Din Bahraichi, was appointed the chief jurist of the realm. 70

As the nisba in his name

informs us, Shams al-Din belonged to Bahraich, a town associated with the early career

of the two commanders, and the town to which Rayhan retired when forced to leave

Delhi in the following year. Qutlugh Khan resided in nearby Awadh but shifted to

Bahraich on Rayhan’s death. Already in the late thirteenth century these military

commanders were ‘bi-locational’ in ways that Simon Digby described fifteenth century

Afghans in his essay in this volume. They had multiple residences and investments in

social and political networks in different locales which sustained them during periods of

conflict.

The nature and resilience of these networks becomes clearer in Juzjani’s account

of the conflict between Qutlugh Khan and Balban, where he describes the allies that

supported the Bahraichi regime against Delhi. Qutlugh Khan’s allies had their bases in

the mawās, (plural, mawāsāt), a term that literally means ‘sanctuary’, in this case a refuge

for local chieftains from Sultanate armies – an oddly empathic choice of term from the

usually combative Delhi-centric Sultanate records.71

In the early fourteenth century, Ibn

Battuta described the mawas as places where local chieftains

70

Ibid., p. 487 and for their machinations in the capital, ibid, p. 492 and vol. 2, p. 74. 71

See Juzjani, Ṭabaqāt-i Nāṣirī, vol. 2, p. 71, and the description of the mawas faced by Ulugh

Khan/Balban on his campaign against Qutlugh Khan: ‘…chūn tafarruq bar īshān rāh yāft wa jangalhā-yī

Hindustān gashn wa mazā’īq-i lūrhā wa iltifāq-i ashjār-i bisyār…’ [when as their paths were separated

[because] of the dense forests of Hindustan and the torrential gorges and the extremely dense woods].

Hodivala explained this term to mean ‘a tract or district which was a sort of sanctuary or place of refuge on

account of the physical features which made it a natural fastness...[where]... indigenes had retreated...’. See

Hodivala (1939), vol. 1, pp. 226-9. More recently historians have ignored this meaning and describe the

mawas as ‘rebellious areas’. Irfan Habib, ‘Slavery’ in Raychaudhuri and Habib (1982), vol. 1, p. 90.

28

fortif[ied] themselves in mountains, in rocky, uneven and rugged places as

well as in bamboo groves. In India the bamboo is...big...its several parts so

intertwined that even fire cannot affect them... The infidels live in those

forests which serve them as ramparts, inside which are their cattle and

their crops. There is also water for them within... they cannot be subdued

except by powerful armies, who enter those forests and cut down the

bamboos with specially prepared instruments.72

In his study of the Baghela kingdom of the fifteenth and sixteenth century Simon Digby

had clarified the ‘bi-axial’ nature of these kingdoms and their two relatively distinct

ecological zones.73

The armed, strategic centre of the realm was usually located in hilly

redoubts, protected by a mix of ravines, defiles, jungle tracts and impenetrable thickets.

This was intimately connected to an alternate agrarian and riverine zone that sustained

agriculture and trade, providing these chieftaincies with considerable economic resources

and material resilience.

The Sultanate garrison towns of Awadh and Bahraich were surrounded by these

mawas lands where Qutlugh Khan reportedly had a network of allies spread over a vast

distance along the Himalayan terai and the lower plains, from Tirhut/Mithila in the East

to Sirmur in the West. Juzjani notes that when Qutlugh Khan appeared in Sirmur he ‘had

rights [ḥuqūq-i sābit dāsht] on all these people. Wherever he [Qutlugh Khan] went they

provided assistance because of his past claims [bajihat-i ḥuqūq-i mātaqaddum] and their

hope for the [positive] conclusion of his affairs’.74

With reference to Rana Ribal (or

Ranbal), the ruler of Sirmur, Juzjani reported of this great ruler of the Hindus, that it was

72

Ibn Battuta, Rehla, p. 124. 73

In the last years of his life, Simon Digby went back to study the history of the Afghans. Amongst his

unpublished writings on the subject was a detailed history of the Baghela dynasty of modern day Rewa and

their relations with the Sharqis, Lodis, Surs and the Mughals. He had provisionally titled the paper that I am

referring to here as ‘The Kingdom of Bhatta and Muslim India’ (unpublished manuscript A) and some of

the ideas therein are touched upon in his essay included in this volume, and in Digby (2001) and (2003). 74

Juzjani, Ṭabaqāt-i Nāṣirī, vol. 2, p. 72.

29

‘the custom amongst these people to offer sanctuary [‘ādat-i ān jamā‘at muḥāfażat-i

multāji’ān būdī]’.75

Notably when Balban marched against Qutlugh Khan, he also had to vanquish

that military commander’s allies. As it happened both Qutlugh Khan and the Raja of

Sirmur evaded Delhi’s army and fled into the jungles of the mawas. At that time Delhi’s

retribution was directed against the stockade capitals of the Rajas, their commercial marts

(bazārgāh), and the riverine and agricultural tracts – the economic spine of these

territories had to be broken. The mutually supportive alliances between the local Raja and

his ally and patron, the local Malik, placed the iqta‘ of Awadh within a regional matrix

well outside the orbit of Delhi, giving the banda very, very dangerous roots.

Persian chroniclers chose not to detail these ‘rebellions’, and yet the evidence at

hand reflects remarkable consistency in the description of the imagined dangers to the

Sultanate. In the last decades of the thirteenth century when Barani described Balban’s

efforts to suppress Tughril (ca 1280-81), his recalcitrant slave governor of Lakhnauti, he

used the phrase mutawaṭṭinān ān diyār, local residents or natives, to describe the people

who supported the rebel.76

Certainly from a Delhi-centric perspective it might be worth

querying if the consolidation of the iqta‘ through accommodative alliances with local

chieftains also carried with it the fear that the local Muslim governor had also ‘gone

native’; mutawattin, from the Arabic root watan, homeland, would then have been an

apposite term for the Persian chronicler to describe Tughril in Lakhnauti. Juzjani

certainly described the earlier cited example of Balban’s campaigns against Qutlugh

Khan and his allies as crusades into areas, ‘where no king had ever reached and where no

75

Ibid. On Raja Ribal/Ranbal’s status amongst the local rulers, see ibid., vol. 2, p. 73. 76

Barani, Ta’rīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī, edited by Khan, p. 84, edited by Rashid, p. 98.

30

army of Islam [lashkar-i Islām] had ever gained victory’.77

Juzjani deliberately excised

Qutlugh Khan’s prior presence in these regions since he was no longer a part of the Delhi

Sultanate or the Muslim millat. Like Tughril, he was also at one with the natives.78

That, of course, was the crux of the problem for Persian chroniclers: what kind of

relationships should Sultanate commanders and Sultans have with the mutawattinan, the

‘natives’? The dangerous moment in this world occurred when the banda transited from

natal alienation and established roots that brought him into close proximity with the

infidel. This instance was used by the great Persian tawarikh of the thirteenth and

fourteenth centuries as an opportunity to insert significant didactic warnings in their

narratives.79

As is evident from the way one of the last of these Delhi-centric histories,

the Ta’rīkh-i Mubārak Shāhī of Yahya Sirhindi (completed 1434), embellished Barani’s

narrative of Tughril’s rebellion in Lakhnauti, these insertions could be unexpectedly

multileveled.80

A large part of Sirhindi’s narrative does not depart significantly from Barani’s

plot, but for the insertion of a long story of Balban’s alliance with Raja Dhanuj of an

unnamed region (and not Raja Bhoj of Sonargaon as in Barani). This was an unusual

discursive interpellation for the normally taciturn Sirhindi, and its main focus was the

protocol surrounding the meeting between the two monarchs. Sirhindi has Raja Dhanuj

demand that the Delhi Sultan display appropriate honour by standing up to receive him.

77

Juzjani, Ṭabaqāt-i Nāṣirī, vol. 1, p. 491. 78

This was also Firishta’s sentiment regarding Farhat al-Mulk, the late-fourteenth century Tughluq

governor of Gujarat: he ‘became desirous of establishing his independence…and [promoted] rather…than

suppressed the worship of idols’. See Sheikh (2010), p. 219, fn 1. 79

Barani harangued the Delhi Sultans about compromising with infidels, his authorial voice speaking

through different protagonists. Note for example Jalal al-Din Khalaji’s ruminations in Zia al-Din Barani,

Sahīfa-i na‘t-i Muḥammadī, cited by Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam c. 1200-1800,

Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004, p. 83. 80

On Tughril’s rebellion see Barani, Ta’rīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī, edited by Khan, pp. 81-91, edited by Rashid,

pp. 99-108, and Yahya Sirhindi, Ta’rīkh-i Mubārak Shāhī, p. 42.

31

‘But how’, Sirhindi had Balban anxiously ask to his readers, ‘could a Muslim ruler show

respect to an infidel?’81

The resolution to this problem, Sirhindi reported, was to have

Balban sit on the throne with a falcon on his arm, and to stand to release the bird as Raja

Dhanuj approached the throne. The expectations of the Raja were met with Balban

standing to receive him, and the honour of the Delhi Sultan saved, even if by a

contrivance.

Although we may focus on this act of contrivance and the author’s unusual efforts

at dissimulation, we should not miss Sirhindi’s communication of relief at the staging of

a successful stratagem that saved the dignity of a Muslim monarch. Written in the early

fifteenth century, when the late Tughluqs and Sayyid monarchs were compromising with

a range of military commanders, the story had a didactic message for Sirhindi’s elite

readership regarding appropriate courtly protocol. Sirhindi did not want to alienate his

readers and was therefore very diplomatic in his summation of the political conditions in

the Sultanate. The sixteenth-century author Badauni showed no such reticence in

communicating the circumscribed authority of the Delhi monarch. He noted the

consequences of bad governance on the late fourteenth century Tughluq Sultan(s):

‘ḥukm-i khudawand-i ‘ālam az Dihlī tā Pālam’, The writ of the Ruler of the World

extends [only] from Delhi to Palam.82

We can read the narratives of Persian chroniclers far more skilfully if we can

comprehend the range of subjects that made them reticent to divulge the conditions of

their age. Disaggregating this information to clarify the historical processes through

81

Yahya Sirhindi, Ta’rīkh-i Mubārak Shāhī, p. 42. This is an idiomatic translation of the text: ‘Sulṭān

mutafakkir shud keh ūlū ‘l-amr-ra ta‘żīm kāfirī wajib nabāshad’. 82

Badauni, Muntakhab al-Tawārīkh, vol. 1, p. 266. Badauni was communicating his opinion of conditions

in Delhi in 1394, when the different cities of Delhi hosted two Tughluq Sultans: Sultan Mahmud and Nasir

al-Din Nusrat Shah.

32

which military commanders and their allies strove for autonomy brings out the thick

complexity folded within the narratives of the monolithic state – it serves to recapture the

sublimated ethnographies of different personnel and the contexts in which they

established relationships. While the authoritarian features of bandagi might have

remained very attractive for the purposes of state formation, we have to recognise how its

paradigms also erased the social history of very powerful political actors; the

contradictions in providing political initiative to military commanders while denying

them social rights was unsustainable in the long run. Since most scholars have not

focused on the ways in which thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Sultanate records

distilled these changing political relationships, historians have reproduced their silences

and remained trapped in a rhetoric that makes these centuries appear starkly distinct from

the following years. As we will see in the next section, however, the transitions from the

thirteenth and fourteenth centuries into the fifteenth were a lot more complex than the

formulaic ideas that 'rupture' or 'change and continuity' might suggest.

Contextualising the fifteenth century: bandagi, naukari, and service

As we turn to the north Indian Sultanates in the fifteenth century it is perhaps mundane

but still essential to recognise that these regimes did not emerge out of an inspiration to

create alternate, structurally distinct political formations. The military and civil personnel

that served the Sultanates of Jaunpur, Kalpi, Malwa and Gujarat in particular had learnt

strategies of war, alliance formation, administration and revenue collection as

commanders and governors of the Tughluq Sultans. This circulation of personnel, skills

33

and knowledge systems, not to speak of diglossic skills, had occurred over a long period

of time and had encompassed a diverse body of military commanders, secretaries and

other administrators. The Delhi Sultanate of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had

always been in flux and its iqta‘ holders had periodically turned to neighbouring rulers as

allies to consolidate their individual realms. The support that local commanders had

counted on during their conflict with Delhi in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was

an aspect of statecraft manifest in the fifteenth century, for example, in the relations that

the Jaunpur Sultanate established with the Baghela Rajas of Bhatta (modern Rewa). In

1482 the Baghela Raja Bhaidachandra provided money, horses and elephants to Sultan

Husain Sharqi in his conflict with the Lodis of Delhi; in 1491 Bhaidachandra seized the

Lodi governor of Kara as a part of a larger uprising of local rulers in support of the

Sharqis; and in 1494, in the midst of Lodi aggression, Bhaidachandra’s son

Lakshmichand invited Sultan Husain to Jaunpur when he sensed Lodi weakness.83

How

did these people communicate with each other and in what registers?

If in the thirteenth and fourteenth century the Persian chroniclers of the Delhi

Sultans had railed against the alliances of their Maliks with Ranas, the fifteenth-sixteenth

century chronicles chose to ignore how the kafirān might be befriended by their own

rulers; they criticised instead the alliances of neighbouring monarchs with the infidels.

The Ma’āsir al-Maḥmūd Shāhī, a history of the Malwa Sultans by Mahmud Kirmani,

reports the accusation of the Kalpi monarchs about the conduct of the Sharqi Sultan of

Jaunpur who, during his campaign in 1443-4, had made Muslims ‘captive and had looted

83

For the Baghelas, see Nirodbhusan Roy, Niamutallah’s History of the Afghans, Part 1 – Lodi Period,

translated with variorum notes, Calcutta: Santiniketan Press, 1958, pp. 195-202, Akhtar Husain Nizami,

‘The Baghela Dynasty of Rewa’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 9, 1946: 242-45, S. H.

Askari, ‘Bihar in the time of the last two Lodi Sultans of Delhi’, The Journal of the Bihar Research

Society, 41, 1955: 357-376, and Simon Digby (unpublished manuscript-A).

34

and carried away their property as if it had been an infidel land (dār al-ḥarb). A group of

Hindus were attached to him, like the muqaddams (chieftains) of Gahora and

Bakhesar’.84

In the same vein, the raconteur of the Lodi and Sur dynasty, Rizq Allah

Mushtaqi (d. 1581-2) recorded the support given to the Jaunpur Sultanate by the Bachgoti

rulers/chieftains with great hostility. Mushtaqi noted that when Sultan Sikandar (1489-

1517) heard of the rebellion of Rai Jodha in the Jaunpur region, he explained to Sultan

Ibrahim that his military actions were directed against the kafiran. Sikandar invited his

fellow Muslim monarch to reconsider his foolish alliance with this infidel whom he

regarded as his servant [chākar].85

And this is the same Sultan Sikandar who eventually

won over the Baghelas in 1494 and in 1498 commanded his ally, Raja Salivahan, to send

one of his daughters to him as a bride!86

We can expect selective amnesia from dynastic histories that eulogistically record

the activities of their own Sultans. But since the Persianate world of the fifteenth century

did not produce a general history of the north Indian Sultanates or a normative text on

statecraft, we lack an overarching perspective to assess how strategic Sultanate alliances

with the mutawattinan could have been a product of a different sensibility regarding

political formations, a cumulative result of developments through the thirteenth into the

84

Mahmud Kirmani, Ma’āsir al-Maḥmūd Shāhī, edited by Nurul Hasan Ansari, Delhi: Jamal Printing

Press, 1968, p. 59. The text was completed ca. 872/1467-68 in the court of the Malwa Sultan Mahmud

Khalaji (1436-69). For a contrasting complaint from the Sharqis regarding the Kalpi Sultan’s actions

against Muslims, see Nizam al-Din Ahmad, Ṭabaqāt-i Akbarī, translated by B. De, Calcutta: Asiatic

Society, 1996 reprint, vol. 3, p. 454. For a full discussion of this campaign, see also Simon Digby

(unpublished manuscript-A), pp. 9-10. 85

Rizq Allah Mushtaqi, Wāqi‘āt-i Mushtāqī, edited by Iqtidar Husain Siddiqui and Waqarul Hasan Siddiqi,

Rampur: Reza Library, 2002, p. 28. On Mushtaqi’s contrasting usage of chakar and naukar see the

discussion below. 86

See references to the Baghelas above for details.

35

fifteenth century.87

This lacuna in the Persian archive can be usefully breached if we

turned to a Sanskrit normative text, the Puruṣa Parīkṣā, written in the early fifteenth

century by Vidyapati, a Brahmin litterateur and courtier of the Rajas Kirti and Shiv Singh

of the Oinivar dynasty who ruled over Mithila/Tirhut.88

The rulers of Mithila were close allies of the Sharqis and had been associated for

many centuries with the history of the Delhi, Bengal and the Jaunpur Sultanate – we have

already had an opportunity to notice its ruler as an ally of Qutlugh Khan in his conflict

with Balban. Associations of this nature had not really threatened the autonomy of its

Karnata dynasty in the thirteenth century, or the Oinivars that had supplanted it in the

middle of the fourteenth century. Oinivar rule was briefly interrupted by a military

adventurer, Malik Arsalan, in the late fourteenth century. But with the support of the

Sharqi Sultan Ibrahim (1402-40), its rulers Kirti and Shiv Singh managed to re-establish

Oinivar rule as allies of Jaunpur.89

Vidyapati was personally quite familiar with the

Sharqis of Jaunpur; he had travelled to the city with his patrons, and described it in

another text, the Kīrtilatā.

Vidyapati was a prolific author, and other than his haunting Bhakti songs in

Maithili, his Puruṣa Parīkṣā became an extremely popular text.90

As is often the case

with normative literary materials, the Puruṣa Parīkṣā was also carefully grounded in the

87

Mushtaqi’s Wāqi‘āt had a brief mention on the Malwa Sultanate and the early Mughals, but this was not

a chronicle of the reigns of these dynasts, but anecdotes of curious events that occurred during their rule. 88

Vidyapati, Puruṣa Parīkṣā, edited and translated into Maithili by Surendar Jha ‘Suman’, Patna: Maithili

Academy, 1988, second edition, lists forty-eight stories while the English translation by George A.

Grierson, London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1935, has forty-four. The difference seems to lie in the

subdivisions introduced by Surendar Jha that divided some stories into two. 89

For details on Mithila and Vidyapati, see Pankaj K. Jha, ‘Articulating Power in 15th

Century Mithila:

Conceptions of Gender, Caste and Other Sources of Authority in Vidyapati’s Compositions’, Nehru

Memorial Library, Working Papers, forthcoming-A. 90

Pankaj K. Jha, ‘Reading Vidyapati: Language, Literature and Cultural Values in 15th

Century North

Bihar’, PhD Thesis Department of History, Delhi University, forthcoming-B.

36

history of north India. But this text is particularly significant and unusual for its choice of

actors to illustrate ethical and moral principles. Its protagonists can be broadly

differentiated into two groups, a division that can be illustrated from a consideration of

the first four stories itself, where the fascinating mix of important historical protagonists

(Vikramaditya, Sultan ‘Ala al-Din Khalaji, Raja Jaichandra, and Sultan Muhammad

[Tughluq]) are separated from the rest of the socially and politically subordinate actors in

the story – juxtapositions of status and class, but not of ethnicity or religious

denomination. In an interesting narrative move, Vidyapati endows the second,

subordinate group of characters with a heroic nature and uses them to provide moral

lessons to the more powerful and famous. These distinctions mirror Vidyapati’s

explanation for the writing of the book in the first place: it was arranged as a series of

anecdotes narrated by the Brahmin Subudhi to help King Paravara discover the qualities

of a ‘real man’ who could be an appropriate groom for his daughter. The deciphering of

such ideals of masculinity in the Kaliyuga, as the king/father observed, required wisdom

unique for its age.

Three stories in the Puruṣa Parīkṣā deal directly with the Delhi Sultans. The

fourth story concerns Muhammad Tughluq, who had the two princes Narasimhadeo and

Chachikadeo in his service. The former was a prince of the Karnata lineage (the old rulers

of Mithila), the latter a Chauhan. In this story, the Muslim ruler was attacked by an

unnamed ‘Kāfira’ Raja – a startling use of Islamic terminology in a Sanskrit text to define

a non-Muslim king. Facing certain defeat, Vidyapati has Sultan Muhammad address his

troops, ‘Oh, my Princes, champions of my army, is there none amongst you who by the

might of his arm cannot for a short moment bring to stand my troops, routed as they are

37

by the enemy?’91

On hearing their king’s plea, the two princes immediately rush into

battle. Narasimhadeo kills ‘Kafira Raja’ with an arrow and is himself grievously injured.

Chachikadeo, who was right behind, decapitates 'Kafira Raja' and brings the head to

Sultan Muhammad. While Vidyapati has the Muslim king praise both heroes, the valour

shown by the princes in the service of their ruler appears as a secondary virtue to the

honesty they displayed in not exaggerating their brave accomplishments. Even when they

had the opportunity to gain fame, each sublimated their own achievement and praised the

other’s valour. There is complete normalcy in the narrative of the two kshatriya princes

serving a Muslim ruler in combating a third, non-Muslim antagonist. In deliberately

referring to him as ‘Kafira Raja’, Vidyapati distances this non-believer from the shared

world of Sultan Muhammad and the Princes – this was a stratified community of master

and honoured naukars where membership was not contingent on their being Muslims. In

this shared terrain the Muslim Sultan was the leader of the natives.

The forty-first story in the Puruṣa Parīkṣā is an equally complex story concerning

Sultan Shihab al-Din / Mu‘izz al-Din Ghuri of Delhi and Raja Jaichand of Kanauj.92

It

also includes the latter’s beautiful and fickle wife and two Brahmin ministers, Chaturbhuj

and Vidyadhara, ministers of Mu‘izz al-Din and Jaichand respectively. The story begins

with Sultan Mu‘izz al-Din’s frustrated efforts to conquer Kanauj. Deciding finally to turn

to stratagem rather than to arms, he sends Chaturbhuj to Kanauj to cuckold Jaichand’s

wife. She will influence her love-besotted husband, Raja Jaichand, and alienate him from

his wise minister Vidyadhara. The deceit works and the wise minister is marginalised.

This gives Sultan Mu‘izz al-Din the opportunity to seize Kanauj. The story concludes

91

Vidyapati, Puruṣa Parīkṣā, edited by Jha, p. 30, translated by Grierson, p. 19. I have used Grierson’s

translation with a slight emendation. 92

Ibid., edited by Jha, pp. 218-31, translated by Grierson, pp. 163-70.

38

with Vidyadhara’s valiant sacrifice in the service of his master, and Mu‘izz al-Din’s

execution of Jaichand’s fickle wife. Although intended to serve as a moral about the

dangers of greed and infatuation, the story’s sub-text is about the two loyal Brahmin

ministers who used all their skills in the service of their respective masters. Although this

story, like the others, revolves around historical figures, there is nothing to refer readers

to the historical conflict between Mu‘izz al-Din Ghuri and Jaichand or their differing

religious affinities. Instead, the two rulers appear well-matched, heroic figures largely

because both have ministers who are very similar in social background, intelligence,

sense of honour and single-minded loyalty. The conclusion to the sub-text of this story

was that great disaster befalls a realm when its Brahmin minister, someone like

Vidyadhara (and Vidyapati?), is no longer around to manage its affairs. Since both realms

shared personnel of a similar social profile the reader has little but the greedy queen to

differentiate between them.

The other stories in Puruṣa Parīkṣā also have a fairly precise geographical spread

– from Gaur in the East to Ujjain and into Dwaraka in the West, spanning the Gangetic

plain. Vidyapati deployed his intimate knowledge of the history of north India quite

deliberately to narrativise ethical principles of governance within a spatial and temporal

past that had an obvious resonance to fifteenth-century elite participants. This was a text

written by an extremely erudite, cosmopolitan scholar who was comfortable with his own

Brahminical location and had internalised the knowledge of other cultures and histories to

use them creatively in his own work. His Brahminical and Sanskrit training also included

within its precincts the Sultanate world, and service to a yavana master posed no ethical

39

or caste problems to his protagonists who were presented as exemplars of Kshatriya and

Brahminical virtue.93

But perhaps his second story is the most significant amongst those referring to the

Delhi Sultans. One of its dominant personalities is the Delhi monarch, Sultan ‘Ala al-Din

Khalaji, but there are also others, the real subjects of his story: Raja Hammir Deo, the

ruler of Ranthambhor, his wives and the renegade military commander Malik Mahim,

who had fled from the Delhi Sultan’s wrath and received sanctuary from the Raja.94

The

story details messages between the two monarchs, the bloody battles and the extent to

which Raja Hammir Deo and his wives remained true to the virtues of compassionate

hospitality to their Muslim guest, and eventually gave up their lives valorously in his

defence. This is not a novel story: it shares some features with Nayachandra Suri’s well

known Hammira Mahākāvya (ca. 1401).95

They share a Sanskrit provenance and a

similar set of actors, but differ vastly in their emplotment and their contextual events and

locales. The truncated story in the Puruṣa Parīkṣā is actually far closer to the episode of

‘Ala al-Din’s conquest of Ranthambhor narrated in ‘Isami’s Futūḥ al-salāṭīn, where the

conflict originates because Rai Hammir gave sanctuary to two Mongol Maliks fleeing

from ‘Ala al-Din.96

Despite the different actors, both texts carry similar kinds of

diplomatic exchanges between the rulers, debate the question of honourable hospitality,

93

The classic work of Ronald Inden, Marriage and Rank in Bengali Culture: a History of Caste and Clan

in Middle Period Bengal, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976, is very suggestive on how caste

rankings, service and marriage may have been reconceptualised in the thirteenth century. His study pertains

to the Bengal region whose cultural ambits would spill into Mithila. The Puruṣa Parīkṣā locates several

stories in Gaur and Rarh and has Raja Lakshmana Sena as a protagonist in more than one of them. 94

Ibid., edited by Jha, pp. 14-21, translated by Grierson, pp. 9-18. 95

Nayachandra Suri, Hammira Mahākāvya, English translation by N. J. Kirtane, Bombay: Education

Society’s Press, 1879. 96

‘Isami, Futūḥ al-salāṭīn, edited by Usha, pp. 271-77, translated Husain, vol. 2, pp. 445-51. Note that

Barani’s and Amir Khusraw’s brief accounts of ‘Ala al-Din’s campaign against Ranthambhor do not draw

any attention to Rai Hammir or the episode of sanctuary to Sultanate renegades. See Barani, Ta’rīkh-i Fīrūz

Shāhī, edited by Khan, pp. 272, 276-7, and Amir Khusraw, Khaẓā’in al-futūḥ, edited by Muhammad Wahid

Mirza, Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1953, pp. 50-54

40

and correspond in attributing the bloody conclusion to the siege to Raja Hammir’s

stubbornness (a good or bad trait depending on the author’s position). Unlike the

Hammira Mahākāvya, the Puruṣa Parīkṣā and the Futūḥ al-salāṭīn are not in the least

concerned with Hammir’s wives as trophies of war. Although this is a significant

exclusion and strengthens the Persianate link to the Sanskrit story, it hardly proves the

direction of transmission.

But that is belying the point: the interesting feature of the Puruṣa Parīkṣā is not

its passive reception of information from one text or another, but the choices made by the

author. Vidyapati broke away completely from the Hammira Mahākāvya and the

Pṛthivīrāj Rāso cycle of literature, or that of Kirmani and Mushtaqi. When he created a

fictional world it seemed to carry selective ideas from ‘Isami’s narrative, but also

departed significantly in details and completely in what the reader should imbibe from it.

For Vidyapati’s didacticism to be effective – which it was, judging from the wide

circulation of its manuscripts – his messages had to be located in an imaginary world, but

one that was socially and culturally cognisable to its readers. We can appreciate,

however, how novel this textualised world might have appeared to readers of thirteenth-

or fourteenth-century literary materials. Although very much a part of the thirteenth-

century political experience, people like the Rajas of Sirmur or Sonargaon were never

models of naukars, or paradigms of hospitality in the literary records of that time. And

had we only read Barani’s invective towards low-born administrators and were unaware

of Kannu’s service with Firuz Tughluq, the presence of Brahmin viziers serving Sultans

in the fifteenth century would appear absurd. For Vidyapati, however, these details were

utterly commonplace; his focus was not on the actors but on the morals the readers could

41

derive from their activities. As an insight into the cultural sphere of a greater Jaunpur

region, the Puruṣa Parīkṣā provides us with an unparalleled insight into how a range of

interpersonal relationships could be hypothesised for elites as if they were not just

normal, but ‘rules for [heroic] men’.97

While Vidyapati was relatively unique in his historical insights on the ecumene of

the north Indian fifteenth century, the narrower perspectives of the Persian narratives

produced for the Afghans also contained a commentary on the changes that their world

was experiencing, particularly on their understanding of bandagi and naukari in the

context of Lodi and Sur state formations. All of this literature is retrospective; it was

produced during the rule of the Mughals and carries an important assertion of Afghan

history and ethnicity when there was considerable fear of its loss. Their narratives often

telescope changes that occurred in their clan organisations – even in their sense of a

composite Afghan identity – and have to be carefully disaggregated.

Afghans between bandagi and naukari

At their time of migration and establishment of power under the Lodis (1451-1526), the

Afghans were organised in kindred groups which were relatively nucleated but usually

presented as agnatic bloodlines.98

These were centred on the family of a chieftain, and

included assorted fictive kinsmen and were described as khayls or birādarīs. Political

97

Space forbids a consideration of Vidyapati’s Likhanāvalī, translated by Pankaj K. Jha, forthcoming-C.

This is a writing manual of model letters and documents that administrators of different ranks could follow.

The closest parallel to this text would be within the insha tradition but it differs from this genre in that it

contains only model letters and no original documents. 98

For an early history of kindred groups in the Delhi Sultanate see Sunil Kumar, ‘Mooring the household:

problems in writing a history of early Sultanate elites,’ in Kumkum Roy and Nandita Sahai (eds) Looking

Within / Looking Without: Pre-colonial Households (forthcoming-B).

42

fortunes expanded and contracted this group and there was always the possibility of

confederates striking off on their own and seeking neo-eponymous identities. Authority

was quite diffuse within the early warband, especially during the reign of Bahlul Lodi

(1451-89), but sharpened considerably in the following decades and especially in the

years of Ibrahim Lodi (1517-26) and Sher Shah’s rule (1540-45). Despite the gradual

intrusion of a variety of institutional checks on clan autonomy and privilege, authority

was often mediated through sophisticated cultural codes where individual rights,

traditions of honour, and prestige were subjects of great concern. These rights had

material dimensions – cattle, home, land, women, family – as well as more abstract,

subjective terms of references as well, such as protocols of social interaction, language,

humour and so on. The processes of kin /clan formations and establishment of durable

regimes placed Afghan practices and their traditions within a larger Persianate and north

Indian domain that created, as one historian put it, new ‘cosmopolitan contradictions’.99

Persian litterateurs who reported on the Afghans were cognisant of both, i.e. of the

history of the Sultanate prior to the Lodi Sultans and of the ways in which the new rulers

sought to insinuate themselves within these domains without the loss of their own

identities.

These transitions are rather usefully captured in the sixteenth-century account of

the Lodi seizure of power in the Wāqi‘āt-i Mushtāqī. Here the author narrates how Bahlul

Lodi’s Afghan contingent strategized living up to their by now well enshrined humble

reputations and assuaged the concerns of their patron by a display of rustic innocence.

Mushtaqi narrates how the Afghans decided to ‘appear like simpletons [tajāhul

99

Green (2012), p. 70. There is considerable recent work on the Lodis and the Surs and much of it is now

conveniently referenced in Green (2012).

43

numāyand] and behave foolishly so that [the vizier of the Sayyid monarch] may consider

us sympathetically as simple people, with no ambitions of greatness’. Indeed the

behaviour of Bahlul’s soldiers shocked the vizier and he asked ‘What kind of people

[chih qisam mardum] are these?’ And Bahlul replied, ‘They are savages [waḥshīyān-

and]. They know how to eat and die; nothing more.’100

The Afghans gained proximity to their patron by recourse to exactly those

unflattering qualities ascribed to them by the early Persian litterateurs whom we have

already studied. In this narrative, the author has both his Afghan protagonists and the

vizier of the Sayyids recognise that these were the qualities that Sultanate prejudices

associated with bandagi. But the two protagonists in this tale were seizing on these

unflattering characteristics to achieve dissimilar goals. Mushtaqi explains the intentions

of the Afghans quite lucidly. Rather than accept the ties of bandagi and the processes of

gradual bonding and acculturation that would deracinate them but provide political

privilege, Mushtaqi has the Afghans protest at their exclusion from the private meeting

between the vizier and Bahlul Lodi. ‘We are not the domestic servants [chākar]’ of Ballu,

they protested, we are as much naukars of the Sayyid vizier, and should therefore receive

equal preference from the vizier. In the face of this logic (and their rambunctious

behaviour) the vizier capitulated, the Afghans were allowed into his private quarters

where, as the conclusion to the grand strategy, he was imprisoned.

The term chakar literally means servant, but note the author’s distinguishing it

from naukar and, as we will see later, from birādar (brother, and by extension, a member

of the kindred biradari). Nor was it ever confused with banda, the ordinary slave. The

100

Rizq Allah Mushtaqi, Wāqi‘āt-i Mushtāqī, pp. 5-6.

44

distinction was one of hierarchy based upon levels of social entitlement, where brothers

and naukars weighed in with more influence than respectively the chakar or the banda.101

Since these terms were never randomly used, attention to their systematic usage is very

useful in order to access and contextualise underlying social and political hierarchies.

Mushtaqi’s text was produced in the sixteenth century in the Mughal court, and its

retrospective gaze at the early history of the Afghans communicated a complex mix of

history (sometimes from multiple perspectives) and a nostalgic didacticism of a courtier

romanticising the good old days.102

He had Bahlul caricature his Afghan contingents as

savages, an assessment that coincided with that of the Sayyids’ vizier. In this Mushtaqi

also had Bahlul suggest to the vizier that, though an Afghan himself, he was quite

different in status and cultural upbringing. The lingering echo of what this difference

might imply was lost in the unravelling conspiracy to depose the vizier, but not before

Mushtaqi managed to communicate his nostalgia for a time when state formation had not

yet introduced elements of stratification in Afghan society, when the Afghans could still

refer endearingly to their chieftain as ‘Ballu’.

The logic that animated naukari was voiced again by the Farmuli chieftain Khan-i

Khanan at the death of Bahlul and the accession of Sikandar Lodi in 1489.103

At that time

101

Ibid., p. 6. The term certainly had a long history of usage in Rajasthani history, where its meanings in

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries differed from those implied by Mushtaqi and other Afghan

chroniclers. For the Rajput Marwari usage of the term see Norman Ziegler, ‘Action, power and Service in

Rajasthani Culture: Social History of the Rajputs of Middle Period Rajasthan’, unpublished Ph.D.,

University of Chicago, 1973, and idem, ‘Rajput Loyalties during the Mughal Period’ in J.F. Richards (ed.),

Kingship and Loyalty in South Asia, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998 reprint, pp. 256-58, 268. 102

For an extremely useful reading of Mushtaqi see Ali Anooshahr, ‘Author of One’s Fate: Fatalism and

Agency in Indo-Persian Histories”, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 2012: 197-224. And

for a general review of sources on the Lodis see Digby (2001). 103

While most Afghan sources gloss over the details of the succession they do mention the support that

Sikandar received from the Farmulis at his accession. The details of the dispute over the succession are

however carried in the seventeenth century text of Muhammad Qasim Firishta, Gulshan-i Ibrāhīmī,

translated by John Briggs, Delhi: Low Price Publications, 1990 reprint, vol. 1, pp. 328-9. I could not access

45

‘Isa Khan Lodi and some members of the Sahu Khayl clan were manoeuvring to keep

Sikandar Lodi out of succession to the throne. Sikandar’s mother intervened to plead her

son’s case. She was insulted: her humble social origins (she was, reportedly, a

goldsmith’s daughter) were invoked to discredit her son, and quoting from the

Panchatantra, ‘Isa Khan reminded his audience that ‘An ape can’t do the work of a

carpenter’. Khan-i Khanan Farmuli protested against this insult and was chastened by ‘Isa

Khan to remember his station, since ‘he was no more than a naukar, he should not

interfere in the affairs of the royal family.’ ‘Isa Khan may as well have substituted the

phrase banda-i khass or chakar for naukar here, and for a member of as important a

family as the Farmulis this was a clear put down. Khan-i Khanan was not one to let such

an insult pass and his retort clarified his right to intervene because ‘I am the [exclusive]

naukar of Padshah Sikandar and not the naukar of anyone else.’ He was participating in

the deliberations as a servant and friend of the [future] king.

The subjective assessment of social entitlement meant that naukari was always

susceptible to lapsing into bandagi in this world, which is why I think it impossible to

gather its meanings in as ahistorical and culturally neutered a term as ‘service’. When

Khan-i Khanan Farmuli and Bahlul’s Afghan retinue described themselves as naukars

and not chakar or, hypothetically speaking, bandagan, they were sensitive to the

meanings of honour and status present in one set of relationships but absent in the latter.

But equally, we need to remember that those dispensing patronage – the vizier of the

Sayyids (in the case of Bahlul’s Afghan retinue) and ‘Isa Khan Lodi (in the case of Khan-

a Persian edition of the text and rather than use Briggs have relied on the more precise narrative of the

incident present in Digby (2001), pp. 255-8.

46

i Khanan Farmuli) – were trying to diminish the sense of naukari by ascribing to it

qualities that were perilously close to bandagi.

Afghan personnel were present in large numbers in the Sharqi Sultanate as well,

and sixteenth-century Afghan chroniclers privileged Afghan ethnicity between these

dispersed groups serving rival regimes. People of the same ethnic background, it was

suggested, had a common matrix through which they comprehended ties of service.

When an embassy from the besieged residents of Delhi tried to get the great Sharqi

military commander, the Afghan Mubarak Khan Lodi, to defect or at least to relent his

siege, Mushtaqi described how the Delhi envoy nonchalantly probed the military

commander about the nature of his relationships [nisbat] with the two monarchs: his

Sharqi master and Bahlul Lodi. This was a leading question, and Mushtaqi used it as an

opportunity to distinguish between ‘service as employment’ (as Dirk Kolff, might

understand it), and ‘service with honour and social entitlement’. Mushtaqi had Mubarak

Khan’s reply admit his difference in status in the two realms: he was a mere servant of

the Sharqi Sultan [chakar] but the brother [biradar] of Bahlul Lodi.104

There are also clear references to very influential bandagan and maulazadas

within Sher Shah’s dispensation. Malik Sukha was one of his old slaves, and his two sons

were both titled Khawass Khan – the ‘Special Khans’, a title which in its absence of a

nisba was appropriately indicative of their natal alienation. The younger performed the

tasks of the older on his death – a seamless continuity that fused the personae of the

individual slaves.105

But other than at the point of his appointment by Sher Shah, an

author like Sarwani never mentions the slave status of the junior Khawass Khan ever

104

Mushtaqi, Waqi‘āt-i Mushtāqī, p. 8. 105

For details see Abbas Khan Sarwani, Ta’rīkh-i Sher Shāhī, edited by S.M. Imam al-Din, Dacca:

University of Dacca, 1964, vol. 1, pp. 51, 103, 107.

47

again. Khawass Khan rose to great heights of trust and favour in Sher Shah’s reign and

was involved in campaigns into Bengal, Rajasthan and against the Mughals.106

His

obvious importance in Sher Shah’s dispensation cannot be disputed and Mushtaqi, in fact,

devotes a long section to this courtier in his text. Here he discourses on the military

commander’s great authority in Sher Shah’s reign, his courtliness, his hospitality and his

alienation from Islam Shah, one of his master’s sons.107

Mushtaqi provides absolutely no

information that would divulge that Khawass Khan was a maulazada, nor would it have

served his narrative in any way because Mushtaqi’s protagonist carried no vestiges of

bandagi anymore.

This curious inhibition to identify those who were the special slaves of their

masters [bandagan-i khass] persists in one of Mushtaqi’s rare account of a banda, Malik

Suman Zabardin, an important commander of the Jaunpur Sultan Mahmud Sharqi (1440-

57).108

There is actually very little in Mushtaqi’s text that reveals that he was a slave. The

first hint we get of his jural status is when Mushtaqi ambiguously mentioned that earlier

Malik Suman ‘lived’ (literally, ‘was with [mībūdī]’) Malik Fath Khan Harevi, who

apparently cared very deeply for him. He goes on to add, but with no greater clarity, that

on one occasion Mahmud Sharqi wilfully demanded Malik Suman from Fath Khan as a

gift. Fath Khan was devastated at the imminent loss of his prized servant, when the slave

asked, ‘who am I that for my sake you should so grieve?’109

Malik Suman went on to

reassure Fath Khan that while serving the monarch he would still remain ‘sincere and

106

Ibid., pp. 51, 107, 215-16. 107

Mushtaqi, Waqi‘āt-i Mushtāqī, pp. 146-53. 108

Ibid., p. 13. 109

Ibid., p. 14. The ambiguity in the sentence should not be missed. In a text that is laced with miraculous

happenings and a proximate mystical sense of God’s presence, this sentiment stands as a recognition of the

worthlessness of transient human life. Read more prosaically and materially, it reaffirmed the worthlessness

of a slave who was but a commodity.

48

loyal [muḥibb o mukhliṣ]’ to him because his ‘friendship and dependence [ittiḥād o

i‘tiqād]’ was to such an extent that his corpse would be first brought to Fath Khan’s

house.110

Mushtaqi narrated the story to underline Malik Suman’s exceptional sentiments of

love for his first master. This was not unusual in itself for military slaves; Juzjani had

provided several instances where the Shamsi slaves fondly remembered the care that their

first masters had lavished upon them. In Mushtaqi’s story, however, the deep sentimental

attachment between the slave and the master rooted him. Apparently the slave was not

moved by the status of the Sultan, his new master and, in a rare instance where the unfree

were given a voice, Mushtaqi has Malik Suman declare that his home was with Fath

Khan, his first master. As in the case of Khawass Khan, Mushtaqi’s dispersed

information on Malik Suman’s life congeals into an account of an individual of great

personal honour and integrity, an attribute that both protagonists carried into their public

service.111

In this account, Malik Suman and Khawass Khan could have been Afghan

naukars; they could not be biradar (brother, clansmen) since they were not members of

the Afghan khayls. Nor would Mushtaqi have described them as bandagan (not even

bandagan-i khass), or chakar, for the former terms’ associations with natal alienation and

the latter’s with a humiliating service without honour could not communicate the exalted

position that he felt the two Maliks occupied in their separate regimes. If we recall the

historical dialectic between the two terms bandagi and naukari, we can appreciate

Mushtaqi’s efforts at ambiguity; it actually served the purpose of communicating their

status quite precisely.

110

Ibid. 111

For references to Malik Suman see ibid.,

49

In the mercurial politics of the sixteenth century, there were several occasions

when Afghans of high status and ancient lineages felt that their social contexts and sense

of prestige was under stress. It made people like Abbas Khan Sarwani’s venerated

grandfather, Shaikh Bayazid, very ‘anxious for his honour [tā‘żīm-i khud] because...Sher

Khan had changed the custom [qā‘ida] of honouring the Afghan nobles.’ But Sher Khan

showed discrimination in the display of his authority, and when Shaikh Bayazid had an

audience with the monarch, he ‘was extremely happy that the king observed the old

traditions of my ancestors that prevailed in the Afghan community [qā‘ida-i qadīm

buzurgān-i man ki dar qaum-i Afghān būd nigāh dāsht].112

More than at any other time it

made a difference to participants if their interpersonal relationships, and hence the terms

of their service, were considered akin to bandagi or naukari.

Conclusion

When historians struggle to represent continuity and change over any length of time, their

sense of historical time leads them to organise their narratives into time periods that carry

shared qualities, variously interpreted. In the context of the pre-Mughal past, a uniquely

statist reading has led to the circulation of terms such as ‘Regional Sultanates’ in the

historiography of the subcontinent’s medieval period to contrast the fifteenth and

sixteenth centuries from the centuries of dominance by the [great] Delhi Sultans. This

difference was then extended into other areas where the fifteenth century was interpreted

as a period of diminutive cultural production – in the areas of arts, literature, architecture,

and so on. The articles in this book challenge these assumptions as they also foreground

112

Abbas Khan Sarwani, Ta’rīkh-i Sher Shāhī, edited by Imam al-Din vol. 1, pp. 166-7.

50

the ability of local political formations to emerge as centres of patronage and cultural

efflorescence with a transregional impact. These arguments, however, still leave the

thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries divided into the worlds of the Delhi Sultanate

and the Regional monarchs, confirmed in the argument that these centuries also witness a

shift from the dominance of the Persianate to vernacular cultural realms.

My essay has taken a slightly different approach to periodisation. It deliberately

conflates the pre-Timurid and the post-Timurid centuries in its analysis of political

culture and relationships, linking these with processes of state formation and resistance

that were not dramatically different over the passage of these centuries. There was

considerable continuity in the composition of political elites and their subordinates, and

the kind of political relations that they structured to entrench their respective positions. I

found it useful to use the terms bandagi and naukari to bring out the politics of this time

period and the great deal of tension within this world, as different participants competed

with each other and defied the relations of service imposed on them. The terms bandagi

and naukari were etic categories that allowed me access to emic understandings of status

and autonomy as they were (or equally important, were not) discussed in the literary

materials of the time. ‘Honourable service’ was inflected by a variety of factors that were

structural—class, generational location, knowledge, skills—and a variety of

contingencies: the question of whose servant/slave, for example, could throw an

individual’s status up for debate. These etic categories were not very distant from emic

ones regarding social entitlement and political status and remained extremely subjective

and rhetorical in their modes of presentation in the Persian records of the thirteenth

through the sixteenth century – one man’s naukar appeared like another one’s

51

chakar/banda over and over again. Equally, understanding the contingencies that might

frame the representation of elites gives us an insight into why Kannu/Khan-i Jahan, the

vizier of Firuz Tughluq, was not tarred with the same brush as a whole host of other

Sultanate administrators with a similar social profile.

While my analysis was context-specific and diachronic, I juxtaposed bandagi and

naukari as the extreme book ends of a sliding scale, within which the qualities of service

and social entitlements could vary. The usage of these terms could therefore be assessed

over time and from multiple points of view. Rather than an abrupt transition, my work

argues for an increasing sense of social entitlement amongst political and social elites

through this period. The bandagan or other social menials and émigrés did not remain

deracinated forever. As they established roots they made claims in the political realm that

were commensurate to their sense of social status. And as the domain of bandagi shrank,

some of its ideas shifted to the sense of chakari. But it is the boundaries of naukari that

expanded, and even as it enfolded ideas of selfless loyalty from bandagi it was also

touched by the new sensibilities of biradari and qaum. From this perspective, rather than

a study of abrupt departures, I consider the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries as a

period of assimilation of new experiences without the germination of new political

structures.

For the interim, the idea of naukari expanded to include new associations, and so

too did the idea of bandagi. The latter occurred largely under the influence of mystical

pietistic movements that gained ground from Nizam al-Din Auliya’s death (1325), where

the idea of bandagi came to circulate within a new, larger subcontinental environment

52

and within a more disciplined set of signifiers.113

In his Fawā’id al-fu’ād, Nizam al-Din’s

disciple Amir Hasan Sijzi already uses banda in a novel, distinct mode. He describes

himself in the introduction as ‘banda’i gunāhgār, the abject sinner’ who had the benefit

of kissing the feet of the monarch of the world.114

When Barani used the term in his

Fatāwā-yi jahāndārī he was picking up another discrete context in which bandagi could

be used. He reminded his readers that Adam and his descendents were created for the

service of God [barāy bandagī-yi ḥaẓrat-i ṣamadiyat], an abject condition that kings may

not readily accept.115

This was in contrast to other pietistic individuals: roughly

contemporaneous with Barani we notice banda used creatively in the title ascribed to the

Chishti sufi pir, Sayyid Gesu Daraz Banda Nawaz (d. 1422). By the time of his death,

however, bandagi no longer had just a Sufi provenance, and Mushtaqi notes its transition

as a title attached to two ‘alims from the period of the early Lodis: Bandagi Mi’an Qadan

Danishmand and Bandagi Malik al-‘Ulama Mi’an ‘Abd Allah Ajudhani.116

In the

sixteenth century, when it was no longer honourable to follow bandagi in the service of

another mortal, its virtues of self abnegation and selfless service were ideal in the

khidmat of God. Its possibilities, of course, were explored by Akbar, and by Sarwani

writing in that monarch’s reign (ca. 1570s-80s):

As the subjects of God (bandagān-i ḥaqq) are all under your command

You also submit (bandagī kun) to God and carry out His order;

For every king who girded his loins for the obedience of God

113

This is well brought out in Amir Khwurd’s Siyar al-auliyā’. The foundational work for a careful

historicisation of the spread of Sufis hospices, ideas and institutional organization in the fourteenth and

fifteenth centuries has been done by Simon Digby, ‘The Sufi Shaikh as a source of authority in medieval

India’ Puruṣārtha (Islam and Society in South Asia) 9, 1986: 57-77, idem (2004), idem (1965), idem

(1975). 114

Amir Hasan Sijzi, Fawā’id al-fu’ād, edited by Khwaja Hasan Thani Nizami Dihlawi, Delhi: Urdu

Academy, 1990, p. 1. 115

Barani, Fatāwā-yi jahāndārī, p. 333. 116

Mushtaqi, Waqi‘āt-i Mushtāqī, pp. 10, 20.

53

People also girded readily their loins for his service (khidmatash).117

In our search for conjunctures we can sometimes underappreciate the cumulative

impact of experience. We need to keep in mind that the struggle to expand the domain of

naukari was carried out over four centuries in the face of entrenched opposition that

would wish to incarcerate autonomy and the search for social entitlement within the

circuits of bandagi. As Ali Anooshahr has recently pointed out, Mushtaqi’s text stands at

a cusp in historiographical representation: it discusses the agency for historical change

available to individuals in a manner quite distinct from the fatalism present in the great

Sultanate tawarikh of an earlier generation of authors like ‘Isami.118

In contrast to taqdīr,

predestination, which dominates in ‘Isami, Mushtaqi speaks of tadbīr, individual strategy

and human agency. The combination of implications present in one instance when

Mushtaqi uses this term is particularly striking. While on campaign Mushtaqi has

Khawass Khan explain to his wonder-struck comrades that his efficient management of

supplies was ‘not [because of any] karāmat but my tadbīr’.119

If we recall, Khawass

Khan was the maulazada of Sher Shah who by dint of his service had become such a

powerful, important commander that Mushtaqi did not think it essential to mention his

slave origins. There was nothing fortuitous or accidental in slaves transiting from

bandagi to naukari; it was, as in Khawass Khan’s case, by personal volition, tadbir. And

the distance travelled between the litterateurs of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries

and Mushtaqi lay in the latter’s ability to make that philosophic distinction and credit an

individual such as Khawass Khan with that human agency. Again, the glimpses of these

117

Abbas Khan Sarwani, Ta’rīkh-i Sher Shāhī, edited by Imam al-Din vol. 1, p. 205, translated by Imam al-

Din, vol 2, p. 158. I have followed Imam al-Din’s translation. 118

Ali Anooshahr (2012). 119

Ibid, p. 214, Mushtaqi, Waqi‘āt-i Mushtāqī, p. 147.

54

shifts visible in Mushtaqi were more carefully enunciated in Akbar’s reign in the writings

of his chronicler Nizam al-Din. In this sense, Mushtaqi’s observations on the changes that

were emerging towards the end of the Delhi Sultanate were the beginnings of a new

world, enough for us to make out in it the outlines of an early modernity. But to be able

to comprehend how this was possible and their complex interlinkages, we will have to

recognise the need to connect the thirteenth with the sixteenth century more

systematically and meaningfully than we have done so far.

55

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