India: A History. Revised and Updated (54 page)

Both Dilawar Khan of Malwa (or Amid Shah Daud, as he had become) and Ahmad Shah of Gujarat (who succeeded as sultan in 1411) signified their new status by establishing new capitals. Islam had provided a powerful stimulus to urbanisation. Muslims in India, as an elite minority largely dependent on royal patronage and united by the communal duties of prayer and mosque-attendance, were naturally drawn to city life. From Allahabad and Faizabad to Hyderabad and Aurangabad the map of India still betrays hundreds of Islamic urban foundations. In Gujarat Ahmad Shah’s choice fell on a site beside the Sabarmati river. There he founded and heavily fortified the city of Ahmadabad which, rapidly populated by Gujarat’s skilled craftsmen and commercially favoured by its location close to the Gulf of Cambay, had by the end of the sixteenth century become one of the largest and wealthiest cities in India, indeed in the world according to European visitors. It is still the capital of Gujarat, and in the midst of chaotic innercity overcrowding there remain the many mosques, tombs and gateways of the Gujarati sultans and their usually rajput queens.

Were any proof needed of the eclectic Gujarati milieu, it is self-evident in the distinctive architectural style. Here elements and motifs from both Jain and Hindu tradition are incorporated not, as in the Delhi Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque, because dismembered temples were reassembled as mosques, but by gloriously intentional design. Gujarat’s strong tradition of temple-building, together with its skilled masons, simply transferred to the Islamic architectural canon and thereby transformed
mihrab
and minaret into splendidly ornate features. Clichés of the Mughal style like the perforated screen (
jali
) and the cupolaed pavilion (
chattri
) are anticipated. The Jami masjid of Ahmad Shah himself has been hailed as ‘perhaps the most aesthetically satisfying [mosque] in the whole of India.’
²⁰

Very different was the new capital of Malwa. As if to challenge the lushly-sited and commercially-favoured city of Gujarat’s sultans, Dilawar Khan and his successors of Malwa lit upon the rugged heights of Mandu. From nearby Dhar, the one-time capital of the good King Bhoj, a prodigious effort was directed to encircling with fortifications the already nigh-impregnable heights above the Narmada valley. At the same time they smothered the upland meadows not merely with the mosques and tombs
of Islam but also with the airy palaces, the echoing courtyards and the lotus lakes so beloved of the rajputs and later of the Mughals. If one may judge by what neglect has so obligingly preserved, it was here at Mandu, and in the contemporary Man Singh palace at Gwalior, that India’s secular architecture began to stake its claim as a serious rival to the religious tradition of temple, tomb and mosque.

No metropolis has succeeded to the site of Mandu. Deserted in the seventeenth century, it has remained so ever since, one of India’s – or anywhere’s – most wildly romantic sites. Malwa being landlocked with no very certain frontiers and a host of covetous neighbours, its sultans had frequent cause to congratulate themselves on the effort expended on their capital. Although repeatedly besieged by the Gujarati army and occasionally by expeditions from the Bahmanid sultanate and the rajputs of Mewar, Mandu stood firm throughout the fifteenth century. Under Sultan Mahmud Khalji (reigned 1431–69) Malwa took the offensive, with its forces penetrating deep into Gujarat, the Deccan and Rajasthan and briefly marching on Delhi. Mandu consequently basked in the splendours of lavish patronage. According to Ferishta, Mahmud’s successor was able to assemble a harem of ten thousand maidens. To accommodate them, a self-contained ‘city of women’ was constituted whose inmates formed their own administration and militia, ran their own markets and set up their own manufactures.

What became of this feminist republic is not known. But in the early sixteenth century the Muslim–rajput balance on which the foundations of the Malwa state rested was overthrown. To offset the preponderance achieved by the rajputs, the incumbent sultan called in the forces of Gujarat, while the rajputs looked to their co-religionists in Mewar. In 1518 and then again in 1531 the Gujarati army would indeed take Mandu by storm, and its fall would presage that of the sultanate itself.

But if Malwa proved to be something of a failure in state-formation, Gujarat continued from strength to strength. In Mahmud Shah it enjoyed the services of an exceptionally able and long-reigning sultan (1459–1511) who completed the consolidation of the kingdom. Mercifully, given the innumerable other Mahmuds and Muhammads, he is usually remembered as Mahmud ‘Begarha’, a nickname which is variously explained. It may refer to his whiskers: according to European accounts his beard reached to below his waist, while his moustaches, long and grey like the horns of a buffalo (
begara
), were swept back to cross in a tie on the crown of his head. Alternatively it may refer to his capture of two vital fortresses (
garh
). One was Champaner near Baroda in eastern Gujarat, which became a subsidiary capital; the other was Girnar in Saurashtra, the great massif
where Ashoka had left that famous rock inscription and where Rudradaman the satrap had once championed both irrigation and Sanskrit. ‘Mahmud Two-Forts’ in effect united mainland Gujarat with the Saurashtra peninsula to create a powerful maritime state enjoying a monopoly of those west coast ports which served upper India. It would prosper well into the seventeenth century and be finally overwhelmed only by a combination of Mughal might on land and Portuguese firepower at sea.

In the absence of obvious frontiers, fortifications were also the key to territorial aggrandisement in Rajasthan. The great plateau of Chitor, Mewar’s equivalent of the heights of Mandu, had been refortified by the Sesodia rajputs following its partial destruction by Ala-ud-din Khalji. Under Rana, or Maharana (variants of Raja and Maharaja) Kumbha, who reigned from 1433 to 1468, another towering stronghold was ringed with battlemented walls at Kumbhalgarh. From these twin eyries the Sesodias extended their sway over the lesser rajput houses of Rajasthan and adventured deep into Gujarat and Malwa. ‘Mewar was now in the middle path of her glory, and enjoying the legitimate triumph of seeing the foes of her religion captives on the rock of her power,’ pronounces Colonel Tod.

At the other extremity of Rajasthan, Raja Jodha (reigned 1438–89), a rajput of the Rathor clan who had been instrumental in securing Rana Kumbha’s throne, established his own hilltop stronghold at what became Jodhpur. ‘Never capable of uniting, even for their own preservation,’ as Colonel Tod put it, the rajputs scarcely constituted a state. They were, though, again about to give a good account of themselves. Famously if fortuitously it would be the boast of the Sesodias of Mewar that they alone never succumbed to the might of the Mughals.

In Orissa, Bengal and Awadh the same process of territorial definition and political consolidation might be traced. In Awadh (Oudh) the sultans of Jaunpur built Tughluq-esque mosques and fought with the Delhi sultans; in Orissa the Suryavamsha rajas built temples and warred with the rajas of Andhra and Vijayanagar. The success and liberality of the ruler, and the culture and language of the locality, created bonds which often transcended those of religion. In Bengal in 1418 a Hindu actually became sultan. This was too much for the Bengali
ulema
, who sought assistance from Jaunpur. Sultan Raja Ganesh was duly toppled, but only in favour of his son who, adopting Islam, changed his name from Jadusen to Jalal-ud-din and ruled under his father’s direction until 1431. A successor, Ala-ud-din Husain Shah (reigned 1493–1519), is revered as an outstanding patron of Bengali scholarship and, though a Muslim, indeed an Arab, is said to have honoured Chaitanya, the leader of the Vaishnavite
bhakti
movement in Bengal. In
return the Hindus ‘went so far as to honour [the sultan] as an incarnation of Lord Krishna’.
²¹

Husain’s tolerance had its limitations. Like the sultans of Gujarat and Malwa he stands accused of destroying temples in time of war, most notably during an attack on Orissa. But temples were seldom exclusively places of worship. They were also depositories of treasure, political statements which embodied the ambitions of their royal patrons and, on occasion, even military strongholds. Desecration was not necessarily prompted by bigotry.

In Kashmir, where Muslim immigration and conversion had resulted in the installation of a Muslim dynasty in 1339, the normally cordial pattern of Hindu–Muslim relations was interrupted in the early fifteenth century. The great Sun temple of Martand was destroyed and heavy penalties imposed on the mainly brahman Hindus. But the persecution proved short-lived. In a fifty-year reign (1420–70) Sultan Zayn-ul-Abidin reversed such discriminatory policies and, fostering both scholarship and a variety of new crafts, transformed his Himalayan kingdom into a stable and thriving state. Canals and irrigation works were also undertaken and, with a reassertion of its authority over Ladakh and Baltistan, Kashmir aspired to the sovereign status which its distinct history had long promised and which the finest natural frontiers in India seemingly guaranteed.

It was a different story in the neighbouring Panjab. Here evidence of nation-state-building is notably lacking. Timur’s Mongol descendants continued to nurse claims to the lands which he had traversed and conquered
en route
to Delhi in 1398. Meanwhile Afghan adventurers continued to migrate to and through the Panjab in large numbers. By the late fifteenth century the Afghan Lodis exercised desultory control from Delhi. But so heavily engaged was the Lodi sultan with rivals elsewhere that his governor in the Panjab enjoyed near independence. No obdurate dynasty like the Shahis stood between the undefended north-west frontier and the temptations of India. No champion like the later Ranjit Singh rose to rally Panjabi loyalty. The gates of Hind were swinging in the wind.

13
The Making of the Mughal Empire
1500–1605

BABUR GOES TO INDIA

O
N 5
J
ULY IN THE YEAR 1505
a violent earthquake hit the city of Agra. According to Ferishta, ‘so severe an earthquake was never experienced in India either before or since … Lofty buildings were levelled with the ground [and] several thousand inhabitants were buried under the ruins.’
¹
To the survivors it seemed like an omen. Sikander, the second and greatest of the three Lodi sultans of Delhi, had in the preceding year celebrated his recovery of some of the sultanate’s erstwhile territories by designating Agra as his alternative capital. A small town of no previous importance, its elevation also signified Lodi ambitions to subdue rivals to the south of Jamuna. The town had been replanned round a grand fort and ‘the foundations of the modern Agra were laid.’
²

Their almost immediate destruction by the earthquake made no impression on Sikander Lodi. Heedless, he resumed the creation of his new capital and continued to hammer away at his nearest rajput rival. This was Raja Man Singh of Gwalior whose subsidiary fortress of Narwar was indeed taken. But before the beetling cliffs of the superbly fortified palace-citadel at Gwalior itself, the Lodi forces, lacking artillery, proved powerless. At enormous cost the siege dragged on for several years. Worse still, word of the Lodi’s discomfiture reached the ear of a young and ambitious new Mongol ruler in Kabul.

Zahir-ud-din Muhammad, otherwise known as Babur or ‘the Tiger’, was already showing an unhealthy interest in the disturbed affairs of the Panjab, which province bordered his Afghan kingdom and was nominally under Lodi rule. In 1505, the year of the earthquake, he made his first foray across the north-west frontier. It was another omen which the Lodi sultan chose to ignore. Babur drew his own conclusion. As the Lodis’ biographer
puts it, ‘Sikander Lodi, while fighting against the Tomars [i.e. the rajputs of Gwalior], was criminally neglecting the north-west frontier and the Panjab.’
³

This state of affairs, if anything, worsened as the strife-torn Lodis squabbled amongst themselves. Twenty years and five exploratory incursions later, Babur would invade in earnest, topple Sikander’s successor and, taking both Delhi and Agra, would inaugurate in India a Mongol, or Mughal, empire. Conventionally known in English as that of the Great Mughals, it would wax supreme for two centuries and engross most of the subcontinent. Through the agency of Babur, first of the Great Mughals, the multilateral history of the Indian subcontinent begins to jell into the monolithic history of India.

In his
Babur-nama
, a personal memoir-cum-diary of such disarming frankness that it was once reckoned ‘amongst the most enthralling and romantic works in the literature of all time’,
⁴
Babur leaps from the page with the zestful energy of a
sowar
(trooper) bounding into the saddle. Restless to the point of nomadism, he was a born adventurer to whom success was an ultimate certainty and failure but a temporary inconvenience. Publicly he never hesitated. Deliberation inspired decision; decision guaranteed action. Convivial and charismatic, he rejoiced in the adulation of his comrades much as did his adored English contemporary, the young Prince Hal. Yet while ambition and obesity would stifle all scruple in Henry VIII, Babur continued to nurse both a sensitive spirit and the rawest of consciences. In a career that speaks volumes for his courage and genius, it is this emotional frailty which is so remarkable. A succinct piece of versification seemingly gave him as much satisfaction as a well-worked cavalry manoeuvre. Ill health he often reckoned a penalty for past vanities and, though a mighty toper, long and often did he groan over the sinfulness of intoxicants. For his greatest battle he would prepare by finally forswearing alcohol and promoting prohibition. No less typically would the aroma of a musk melon, dewily redolent of his central Asian home, reduce him to a moist-eyed reverie of nostalgic abandon.