The Delhi Sultanate

For more than three centuries, from 1206 to 1526, much of northern India was ruled from Delhi by a series of Muslim dynasties. Together they are known as the Delhi Sultanate. The Sultanate expanded Delhi's power deep into the south and built new institutions of government. It left a lasting mark on India's architecture, language and culture. It is a key bridge between ancient and Mughal India.

The Delhi Sultanate was not one family but five dynasties that ruled one after another:

• The Slave (Mamluk) dynasty (from 1206), founded by Qutbuddin Aibak, a former slave of Muhammad Ghori.
• The Khalji dynasty, whose greatest ruler was Alauddin Khalji.
• The Tughlaq dynasty, including Muhammad bin Tughlaq and Firuz Shah Tughlaq. Its last sultan was Nasiruddin Mahmud, in whose reign the dynasty collapsed.
• The Sayyid dynasty.
• The Lodi dynasty, the last, ended by Babur in 1526.

The early sultans were not always secure, and power often passed by force. Qutbuddin Aibak himself ruled only briefly. He died in 1210 after falling from his horse while playing chaugan, an early form of polo.

Within the Slave dynasty, the strongest ruler after Iltutmish was Balban. He crushed rebellious nobles and raised the prestige of the crown. He took the grand title Zil-i-Ilahi, meaning Shadow of God, to project the sultan as God's deputy on earth.

The three Lodi rulers came in a fixed order, which exams test directly:

• Bahlol Khan Lodi: founder of the dynasty, ruled 1451–1489.
• Sikandar Lodi: his son, ruled 1489–1517.
• Ibrahim Lodi: the last sultan, ruled 1517–1526, killed by Babur at Panipat.

In its early days the Sultanate controlled only the area around Delhi. Strong rulers pushed its frontiers far outward:

• Alauddin Khalji defended India against Mongol invasions and sent his armies deep into the Deccan and the far south, extracting tribute.
• Muhammad bin Tughlaq extended control even further and famously tried to shift his capital from Delhi to Daulatabad in the Deccan, a plan that failed.

At its height the Sultanate was the largest state India had seen since the Mauryas.

Expansion happened under constant pressure from the north-west. The chronology of these invasions is heavily tested.

• Chengiz Khan, 1221: the Mongol conqueror reached the banks of the Indus during the reign of Iltutmish. He was pursuing the fugitive prince of Khwarezm (Jalal-ud-din), who had fled towards India. Iltutmish wisely refused the prince shelter, and Chengiz Khan turned back.
• Iltutmish and Balban: the early Mongol invasions fell in their reigns, not in that of Jalal-ud-din Khalji. Balban spent much of his rule guarding the frontier.
• Alauddin Khalji: Mongol raids grew bolder. One assault marched all the way to Delhi and besieged the city. Alauddin repulsed it and strengthened the frontier defences.
• Muhammad bin Tughlaq: despite his other failures, he did not lose the north-west to the Mongols. The territory remained with the Sultanate.
• Timur, 1398: the Central Asian conqueror invaded during the reign of Nasiruddin Mahmud, the last Tughluq sultan, not during Muhammad bin Tughlaq's. Timur sacked Delhi with great slaughter and his forces occupied Multan. The blow shattered the Tughluq dynasty.

The sultans built a system to govern their wide lands. They ruled through appointed nobles and governors rather than hereditary chiefs. This kept power in the sultan's hands.

A key institution was the iqta. This was a grant of land or its revenue given to a noble (an iqtadar or muqti). In return, the noble maintained troops and kept order. The iqta was not an Indian invention. The sultans borrowed it from Central Asia and West Asia, where it was already in use. The whole country was parcelled out as iqtas among military leaders. The state drew its income mainly from land revenue. It also collected taxes on trade and a tax on non-Muslims. Alauddin Khalji even fixed market prices to keep his large army affordable.

Some historians describe this arrangement as a form of feudalism. Authority was decentralised, administration rested on land grants, and lord-vassal ties bound the iqtadars to the sultan.

A cluster of technical terms recurs in questions:

• Amil: the officer who collected the revenue.
• Fawazil: the surplus revenue an iqtadar paid to the central exchequer after meeting his expenses.
• Mahattara and Pattakila: designations of village officers, the lowest rung of administration.

Note one common trap: the Mir Bakshi, the head of military pay and accounts, was a Mughal office. It did not exist under the Khaljis. Land-assignment systems also make a favourite matching question. The jagir belonged to the Mughals, the amaram to Vijayanagara, and the mokasa to the Marathas; the Sultanate's own unit was the iqta.

Firuz Shah Tughlaq added two distinctive institutions. He created a separate department of slaves, the Diwan-i-Bandagan, which managed the huge number of slaves he collected and trained. He also dug the largest network of canals of the Sultanate period to extend irrigation.

The chronicler Ziauddin Barani argued that the Sultanate was not a truly Islamic state. His reason was practical: the sultans could not run India on Muslim law (the Shariat) alone, so they supplemented it with their own state regulations, called zawabit. Government, in other words, rested on the sultan's decrees as much as on religious law.

Society under the Sultanate was layered. At the top stood the sultan and his nobles. Below them were religious scholars, officials, merchants, artisans and peasants. Within the Muslim elite, descent and dress marked rank.

• Sayyids: claimed descent from the Prophet and enjoyed a distinguished, respected status in medieval society. They were known as Kulah-Daran, meaning wearers of the tall cap, after their characteristic headgear.
• Ulema: religious scholars who advised rulers on law and ran schools and mosques.

Trade kept the economy moving across long distances. The Banjaras were itinerant traders and grain carriers. They moved in large caravans with pack oxen, transporting bulk goods such as grain and salt from village markets to towns and to armies on the march. Sultans depended on them: Alauddin Khalji's price control in Delhi worked only because Banjara caravans kept the city's grain supply steady. Towns grew around courts and garrisons, and artisans such as weavers and metalworkers supplied both local markets and export trade.

The Sultanate era blended Persian, Indian and Central Asian traditions into a new composite culture. This mixing is most visible in music, literature and building styles, including in regional kingdoms beyond Delhi.

• Amir Khusrau: the celebrated poet and musician of the Delhi court and a disciple of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya. He was the originator in India of the early form of qawwali, the style of Sufi devotional singing. He wrote in Persian and in the early Hindavi speech of the Delhi region.
• Kitab-i-Nauras: a collection of songs in praise of both Hindu deities and Muslim saints, written by Ibrahim Adil Shah II, the Sultan of Bijapur. It shows how rulers patronised a shared devotional culture across religious lines.
• Zain-ul-Abidin: the famed Sultan of Kashmir, remembered as a tolerant patron of learning and crafts. He completed the Jama Masjid in Kashmir. The mosque combines three striking features: turrets, wooden towers that resemble Buddhist pagodas, and Persian style decoration. It is a clear example of regional fusion architecture.

Together these examples show that Sultanate culture was not imported wholesale. Court poets, Sufi singers and regional sultans reworked foreign forms with Indian themes and local building traditions.

The Sultanate produced some striking figures:

• Razia Sultana, daughter of Iltutmish, became the only woman to rule the Delhi Sultanate. She was an able ruler. The nobles, however, resented being led by a woman and overthrew her.
• Muhammad bin Tughlaq is remembered for his bold but failed experiments: the shift of the capital to Daulatabad, and the introduction of a token currency of cheap metal coins. This currency quickly led to forgery and chaos. He had earlier issued a fine gold coin, which the traveller Ibn Battuta called the dinar; the cheap-metal tokens were meant to substitute for such precious coinage and failed.

Two anecdotes about Muhammad bin Tughlaq are exam favourites. When plague and famine ravaged Delhi, he left the capital for about two years and lived in a camp on the banks of the Ganga called Swarga-dwari. And when he died in 1351, the chronicler Badauni wrote sardonically that "the king was freed from his people and they from their king."

Despite its turbulence, the Sultanate gave India new styles of building, such as the Qutb Minar. It brought the Persian language to court. It also planted the roots of later Indo-Islamic culture.