Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World, Vol. 2, The Slave Kings and the Islamic Conquest, 11th-13th Centuries

AL-HIND THE MAKING OF THE INDO-ISLAMIC WORLD BY

ANDRE WINK Profesor of History University of Wisconsin, Madison

VOLUME II

THE SLAVE KINGS AND THE ISLAMIC CONQUEST 11th-13th CENTURIES

BRILL LEIDEN . NEW YORK· KOLN 1997

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

CONTENTS

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wink, Andre. Al-Hind, the making of the Indo-Islamic world / by Andre Wink. _ p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: v. 2. The slave kings and the Islamic conquest, lIth-13th centuries ISBN 9004095098 (set). - ISBN 9004102361 (v.2) 1. India-History-1000-1765. 2. Indian Ocean Region-History. 3. Muslims-India-eivilization. I. Title. DS452.w56. 1997 954.02-dc20 91-22179 CIP

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Maps

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VII

Abbreviations

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IX

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XI

Preface Introduction

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1

Chapter I. Nomads, cities and trade

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8

Chapter II. The coming of the Turks

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43

Chapter III. Kings, slaves and elephants

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79

Chapter IV. The opening of the gates of Hind...................... 111 Chapter V. The slave household of Delhi

150

Chapter VI. A world on the move

162

Chapter VII. Garrison, plain and march

212

Chapter VIII. 'Twixt land and sea

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· 265

Chapter IX. The idols of Hind

294

Chapter X. The well of Buddhism defiled

334

Chapter XI. Monks and peasants

358

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Conclusion.................................................................................. 381 Bibliography.......................................................... Index...

PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS

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385 .

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MAPS These maps supplement the ones provided in Al-Hind, 1. Some geographical references which remain uncertain or controversial have been left out. A few could not be located at all. Map 1 Central Asia

48

Map 2 Ghaznavid and Ghurid/Mamluk conquests in Hind

128

Map 3 The Qarlugh kingdom

201

Map 4 Iqta'of Bada'un

222

Map 5 Iqta's of Lahore, Multan and Uch

236

Map 6 Iqta's of Bihar and LakhnauU

258

Map 7 Gujarat

272

Map 8 Malabar, Coromandel, Sri Lanka, Indian Ocean archipelagoes

281

Map 9 Sumatra

286

ABBREVIATIONS AH

FS

KT MD TB TF TFM TFS

TM TMS TN TNL TNM

TNR

TYA TYP ZA

A. Zajaczkowski (ed.), Le Traite Iranien de l'Art Militaire: Adiib al-Harb wa-sh-Shaghii'a du XIIIe SiiJCle (Warszawa, 1969) . A. M. Husain (ed.), FutulJ as-Saliitin oJ'IJiimi (Agra, 1938). C. J. Tornberg (ed.), Ibn al-'Athir, Al-Kiimil fi 'l-Tiirikh, 12 vols (Leiden, 1853-1869). Al-Mas'udl, Muruj adh-Dhahab, 2 vols (Cairo, 1948). W. H. Morley (ed.), Ta'rikh-i-Baihaqi (Calcutta, 1862). Ta'rikh-i-Firishta (Lucknow, 1864). E. Denison Ross (ed.), Ta'rikh-i-Fakhr ad-Din Mubiirakshiih (London, 1927). S. Ahmad Khan (ed.), Ta'rikh-i-Firoz ShiiM of Ziii' ad-Din Barani (Calcutta, 1862). Tiij al-Ma'iithir: BM: Add. 7623. M. Hidayat Hosaini (ed.), Ta'rikh-i-Mubiirakshiihi of YalJya bin AlJmad bin 'Abdulliih as-Sirhindi (Calcutta, 1931). N. Lees et al (eds), Tabaqiit-i-NiiJiri of Abu 'Umar al-juzjiini (Calcutta, 1894). Tabaqiit-i-NiiJiri of Abu' Umar al-juzjiini (Lahore, 1954). Tabaqiit-i-NiiJiri of Abu 'Umar al-juzjiini: IOL: MSS no. 2553. H. G. Raverty (transl.), Tabalj,iit-i-NiiJiri: a General History of the Muhammadan Dynasties of Asia, 2 vols (London, 187281). Al-'Utbl, Tiirikh al-Yamini (Delhi, 1847). Al-'utbl, Ta'rikh-i- Yamini: Persian translation by Jurbiidqiini (1206 AD) (Teheran, 1334 H.). M. Nazim (ed.), Zayn al-Akhbiir of Gardizi (Berlin, 1928).

PREFACE

This book has been long in the making. Inevitably I incurred numerous debts with individuals and institutions across the world. I began my research on the thirteenth century in the Netherlands, as a Huygens fellow of the Nederlandse Stichting voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (N.W.O.) in 1984-1989, and, in 1985, as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge. Most of the book however was 'made in the U.S.A.', in Madison, after I joined the History Department of the University of Wisconsin. To my colleagues and students at the UW I cannot but express my deepest gratitude for the constant interest they have expressed in my work. In addition, lowe a special debt to the Research Committee of the Graduate School for providing research money, travelgrants, summer support over a number of years, as well as a semester's leave of absence. Most helpful was also the award of a Vilas Associateship for the years 1992 and 1993, and a residency fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at Madison in the Fall Semester of 1993. Other institutions where I spent time include the Center of Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, where I am indebted to its director William Graham for an affiliation in the Fall of 1991; the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, where I was able to conduct seminars in Dec. 1992- jan.1993 at the invitation of Marc Gaborieau, Claude Markovits and Alexander Popovic; the Rockefeller Foundation which provided a residency scholarship at the Villa Serbelloni in August 1993; and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C., where the book was completed during a residential fellowship in 1995-96. Most of the chapters of this book were presented in earlier forms at meetings, lectures or conferences: in Paris at the EHESS, at the annual South Asia conferences in Madison, at the history departments of the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University, at ARlT in Istanbul, at the Southern Asia Institute at Columbia University, and at meetings of the Association

PREFACE

XII

for Asian Studies in Chicago and the World History Association in Honolulu, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, as well as at meetings in Washington. To all these audiences I must express my gratitude for their generous comments. The list of individual scholars to whom I am indebted for ideas, intellectual and moral encouragement, correspondence on selected topics, and various forms of aid is even longer. I would like to thank in particular Chris Bayly, Burton Stein, Robert Frykenberg, A. K. Narain, Dick Eaton, Tosun Aricanli, Gavin Hambly, Katherine Bowie, Kingsley de Silva, Sumit Guha, Steve Album, Max Nihom, Mark Kenoyer, Richard Davis, Jan Vansina, George Brooks, Patricia Crone, John Newman, Marie Martin, Uli Schamiloglu, Christopher Beckwith, James Hoover, Mesfin Kebede, Heinz Bechert, Muzaffar Alam, Tom Allsen, Bill Spengler,Jos Gommans, Ticia Rueb, Douglas Mudd, and Victor Lieberman. My thanks are also due to Dick Eaton, Anatoly Khazanov and Jan Heesterman for reading the entire manuscript before it went to the press. For research assistance I am indebted to S. Y. Saikia and E. Palm. Over the past five years, above all, I derived a great deal of fa'ida from discussions with Michael Chamberlain and Anatoly Khazanov, who, like myself, were recent arrivals at Wisconsin and did their best to educate me in the intricacies of Middle Eastern and Central Asian history respectively. Lastly, I cannot fail to mention, once again, my general intellectual debt to Jan Heesterman. It has been a matter of no small satisfaction for me that we could continue to meet regularly, both in the Netherlands and the U.S.A., and that I could continue to benefit from his unrivaled erudition. Washington, May, 1996

D. C.

INTRODUCTION In the preceding volume the argument has been put forward that in the period up to the early eleventh century the impact of the expansion of Islam on the area which the Muslims called ai-Hind, 'India' and the 'Indianized' world of the Southeast-Asian mainland and Indonesian Archipelago, was largely of a commercial nature. Sind, the passage of overland and maritime traffic to and from the Middle East, politically and culturally an unsettled 'frontier of aI-Hind' which generated brigandage and piratical activity as far off as Sri Lanka, was conquered by the Arabs in order to safeguard the Persian Gulf and the feeder routes of the India trade which was to become a great source of wealth in the newly evolving Muslim economy. But the early conquests did not extend beyond Sind. In effect, the commercial ascendancy of the Islamic world in the early medieval period derived from its intel"" mediate position as a conduit of exchange between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean; in other words, from being at the crossroads of world trade, at the junction of Christendom, Africa, Central Asia and China, and India. In monetary terms this resulted in the transition to a unified bi-metallic currency based on the gold dinar and the silver dirham which had a stable exchange rate and was made possible by the systematic exploitation of all known sources of precious metals. The political frontiers of early Islam were, thus, more or less stationary from the early eighth until the early eleventh century, but its commercial hegemony continued to increase far beyond. Secondly, it was also suggested in the same volume that the often complex and protracted political, social and economic developments in those areas of ai-Hind which remained beyond the frontier of Islamic conquest were determined or significantly influenced by interaction with the outside world-that of Islam above all, but also Tibetan power and Tang and Sung China. Political power in India did not arise in isolation from the great panAsian movements of conquest and trade of this age. To the contrary, by tapping into the world of nomadism and commerce outside the settled parts of the subcontinent such power could be all the more effectively asserted. Here the peculiar dynamic of

INTRODUCTION

2

3

INTRODUCTION

early medieval India became manifest in two complementary forces which seemingly pulled in different directions. In the subcontinent generally we noted an increase in town-building and the multiplication of small and middle-sized market-centres, i.e. a densification of regional exchange patterns, and, with it, an overall increase of sedentary agriculture and the formation of new, more vertically organized states-epitomized by monumental stone temple buildingand widespread brahmanization in many areas, including the periphery, which resulted in a more structured social system. In the 'Middle Country', the Indian heartland of madhyadesha, the city of Kanauj remained the pre-eminent and 'exemplary' sacred centre throughout the early medieval period. Here the agricultural state had the longest pedigree, the social hierarchy of caste was relatively rigid, and here too the ritual standard of brahmanical orthodoxy was preserved. Spreading out from this epicentre, the brahmans of Kanauj would reconstitute its ritual infrastructure in the periphery of the Indian subcontinent which sought to overcome its semi-barbarian or mleeeha status by endowing such brahmans with land and other wealth and by replicating the sacred geography of the Ganges-Yamuna region. Kanauj, however, was also a 'dead centre'. Political and military power and mobile wealth (trade goods and precious metals), in general, continued to be found on the frontier of settled societ~. Hence madhyadesha, the agricultural heartland of the North-IndIan plains, during this period continued to be dominated by political formations which arose and maintained themselves in the periphery of the subcontinent, and whose hegemony, in effect, was based on a compromise with 'barbarian' power across the Islamic-Sino-Tibetan frontier: Greater Kashmir, extending into Turkestan, and allied to the Tang Chinese in a scramble for the proceeds along the silk route; Bengal, the ruling dynasty of which was propped up by Tibetan military power; the Rashtrakuta dynasty in the Western Deccan, which was part of the Persian Gulf trading system of the Muslims; and Ma'bar or Southeast India, extending itself (through the famous Cola expeditions) in the late tenth and eleventh century into the burgeoning Southeast-Asian maritime economy which became dominated by the Chinese under the early Sung. It is in these peripheral states of the Indian subcontinent that we can locate the fluid resources, intensive raiding and trading activity, as well as the social and political flu-

idity and openness which produced a dynamic impetus that was absent in the densely settled agricultural (and civilizational) heartland. This second argument, then, sought to show that shifts of power occurred, in combination with massive transfers of wealth, across multiple centres along the periphery of aI-Hind in the seventh to eleventh centuries. It was an attempt to show, in short, how these multiple centres mediated between the world of mobile wealth on the Islamic-Sino-Tibetal) frontier (which extended into Southeast Asia) and the world of sedentary agriculture, epitomized by brahmanical temple Hinduism in and around Kanauj. In a diachronic perspective, this was the familiar dialectic between civilization ('ritual purity') and 'barbarian' power. What happened now, in the subsequent period, the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, can be summarized as the successful fusion of the organizational mode of the frontier (with its patterns of long-distance trade and mobile wealth as well as its raiding capacity) with that of the settled society of the agricultural plains, inland, from the Panjab to the Ganges-Yamuna Doab and to Bihar and Bengal, but also in the coastal areas of Gujarat, Malabar, the Coromandel, and Sumatra. The rhetorical demonization on both sides notwithstanding, it was this fusion that would make India the hub of world trade, while in the Middle East re-nomadization occurred (the fusion of frontier and settled society, in other words, was unsuccessful here) under Mongol rule. The Mongols hardly penetrated into India-for a variety of reasons, most important of which was probably the lack of sufficient good pasture land. Instead of being devastated by the Mongols during one or several major invasions, the agricultural plains of North India were brought under Turko-Islamic rule in a gradual manner. This conquest, which continued throughout the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, was effected by professional armies, built around a core of Turkish slave soldiers, which were relatively small in size and were not accompanied by any large-scale invasions of nomadic elements (complete with flocks and herds), as happened in the Middle East. Unlike the Mongols, too, these Turkish groups had already converted to Islam before they came to India. The military differential between the Turkish invaders on the one hand and the opposing Indian armies on the other was both technical and social in its origin, revolving as it did around the co-ordinated deployment of mounted archers. In India, of course, the

4

INTRODUCTION

horse and horsemanship had a long history. But it seems that archery was largely left to infantry and a relatively small number of elephant-riders. Like in the case of the Byzantines, it was the failure of the Indians to develop mounted archery that was exposed by the Turks from the steppes of Central Asia. And it was, paradoxically, this military differential that made possible the fusion of nomadic and agricultural society in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. Another essential part of the process which is dealt with in this volume was that, as soon as the conquest of ai-Hind was under way, a migration corridor was opened up between the eastern Islamic world, including Central Asia, and the subcontinent. The gradual establishment of a new Muslim ruling elite in India was further enhanced by the immigration of fugitives from the lands which had been overrun by the pagan Mongols. The total number of Muslim immigrants could at no time have been very high, and it was dwarfed by the number of India's native population (which was probably already then over 70 million, while Iran and Central Asia each contained no more than a few million people at most). No massive demographic shifts occurred in India, unlike in Iran. There was no re-nomadization but the imposition of purposeful Islamic rule by invading horse warriors who recruited perhaps tens of thousands of supporters as military retinue. The Turkish conquest uprooted the sacred geography of Indian peasant society, during innumerable campaigns, but it did not result in any significant loss of population. In the Indo-Islamic world, longdistance trade, elite slavery, and monetization (the result of the de-hoarding of Indian temple treasure) went hand in hand with imperial expansion. The result of the conquest was, in short, the revitalization of the economy of settled agriculture through the dynamic impetus of forced monetization and the expansion of political dominion. The argument of this volume, focusing on long-distance trade, agricultural expansion, migration, and nomadic penetration, culminates in the negative conclusion that conversion to Islam among the native population is insignificant in most parts of alHind except the coasts almost throughout the eleventh-thirteenth centuries. More specifically, the conversion of some key groups in Sind and the Panjab, as well as among the coastal communities of Malabar and Northeast Sumatra, does not appear to have

INTRODUCTION

5

gained momentum before the second half of the thirteenth century. Recent work by R. M. Eaton shows that in the Panjab and Sind, and in Bengal, Muslim converts were drawn from indigenous groups which had hardly been integrated in the Hindu social order or caste system (however defined) at all, such as forest tribes and pastoral groups who were in the process of settling down as tax-paying agriculturists.! Elsewhere too, conversion, rather than providing 'liberation' from the allegedly intolerable rigidities of the Hindu caste system, seems to have largely affected previously marginal groups living in frontier areas. Such groups, if they were not forest tribes or pastoralists in the process of becoming peasants, could also be, as in Malabar or Indonesia, part of the newly rising trading communities on the coasts. In Indian terms, the seaside was always a place of extraordinary license. Mu