Every so often India’s secular credentials are tested and are found wanting. The latest case in point -the Bollywood movie Padmavat. Padmavat is ostensibly based on a medieval Rajput legend, about a heroic Hindu prince of Chitor, Maharana Ratan Singh, and his Queen Padmavat. Padmavat’s beauty attracts the unwelcome attentions of the devious and ravening Muslim Sultan of Delhi, Alauddin Khalji. His advances are rebuffed by the modest Hindu maiden, his demands that the Hindu upstart prince hand over the girl met with the laughing of proud Rajput braves. Frustrated, Alauddin Khalji sacks the fort of Chitor with his vast horde, and kills the heroic prince so that he may all the better claim Mewar’s most precious jewel, the Queen Padmavat. Rather than face dishonour at the hands of the Muslim conqueror, she commits the horrific rite of jauhar, ritual suicide by self-immolation. Death before dishonour – emblematic of that fierce Rajput martial pride which would enchant Orientalist Europeans for centuries.
Of course, it didn’t happen. Though Khalji and the Rana existed, there are no contemporary accounts of any queen of Mewar named Padmavat. She is first mentioned hundreds of years after her supposed death in the 13th century in the poem of a 16th Muslim Sufi poet, Malik Muhammad Jayasi, and is widely accepted by historians to be his creation. In time honoured Indian fashion, Ustad Malik Muhammad simply spiced up his epic poem about the sack of Chitor, ancient history even in his day, with a love story.
None of which prevented Padmavat from becoming one of the most controversial movies in Indian cinema. Even while filming , word spread around about a movie depicting the dishonour of a proud Hindu princess at the hand of an invading Muslim King. Some even whispered that the movie showed the relationship to be consensual.
The Hindu right predictably took the bait, cast as it was by the films liberal elite Bollywood director Sanjay Leela Bhansali into that great seething river of cultural anxiety that is Modi’s right wing Hindu India, where the Muslim Invader looms large as the architect of an an ancient ‘subjugation’ which predates even the conquest of the British.
Protests broke out all over the country about the movie. The film sets were regularly vandalised and even set fire to. A Rajput caste organisation, the Rajput Karni Sena, attacked the director on set, whilst the cast members got death threats. . And none more so than the actress Deepika Padukone, who dared to plays the mythical Padmavat as a wanton harlot. No sooner did one high ranking politician of the ruling Hindu right wing BJP party announced a cash bounty for her murder did another double it, saying her nose should be struck off, like the Hindu God Ram did to the demoness Suparnakha in the ancient Hindu epic the Ramayana.
And so a fictional Hindu queen invented by a Muslim Poet found herself reborn as desh-maata – the mother of India. The irony of seeking to protect the ‘honour’ of a fictional queen by sending death threats to an actual young woman was one of the many contradictions those defenders of the desh maata were willing to accept.
The move was banned in several parts of India, criticised by the ruling party and attempts were made even to ban it in the UK. When the Supreme Court of India overturned the ban it was hailed as a victory for free speech.
So what a turn of events it was, that when the movie was released its politics turned out to be every bit as reactionary as the people protesting it. Aluaddin Khalji is not portrayed the urban sophisticate from Delhi that he actually as was but as a barbaric raider and savage, an outsider from Afghanistan rather than someone who had been born and spent all his life in the country now called India . The Hindu princes are almost cartoonishly upright and honourable, delivering endless sermons on Rajput valour. The Hindu right, pacified, backtracked on their criticism and nationalist journalists called it a great tribute to Rajput honour.
Much of the liberal criticism of the movie has rightly focussed on the regressive and patriarchal portrayal of its titular heroine. I would like to however write about the subject of the movies intensely political character assassination – someone who I believe is one of the most fascinating kings in Indian history – Sultan Alauddin Khalji.
Alauddin Khalji
Like any successful ruler in medieval India, Hindu or Muslim, or indeed in any medieval society, Khalji was a ruthless and ambitious man, and indeed came to power with the murder of his uncle, in a bloody familial struggle which was nonetheless typical of the time. However what is interesting about him is what he did with the power.
At the outset it is important to note that Aluaddin Khalji’s reputation as a bloodthirsty king comes not from the contemporary writings of Hindu kings of his time but from the writings of the orthodox Muslim clerics or ulema of his court.
The ultra orthodox views of Barani, who lived through Alauddin’s reign and chronicled his life, was typical of the literate elite of the time. He writes of Alauddin that he ‘shed more innocent blood’ than ‘the Pharaoh ever did’. However from reading him it becomes clear that his chief complaint is Alauddin’s increasing encroachment into realms previously thought to be the prerogative of the ulema. The ulema wielded great power in the Delhi Sultanate, and for all the worldly power of the sultan it was they who gave his laws Divine Sanction, in addition to dominating the sultanates judiciary and administration.
The problem with Alauddin was that he was not particularly religious and greatly resented the power of the clerics, whose power he constrained at every turn, removing them from positions in the administration and replacing them with his men. In the shocked words of Barani, ‘the sultan holds that matters of administration have nothing to do with religious laws.’ Elsewhere Barani censures Alauddin saying ‘the sultan said no prayers and did not attend Friday prayer in the mosque..he was not at all careful at all about prayer and religious fasting.’
Indeed, if Barani is to be believed, then Alauddin Khalji is probably the first sultan to have come up with the idea of beginning an entirely new religion, centuries before Akbar came up with the idea.. Barani reports Alauddin as actively threatening the clerics and Islam itself, boasting that ‘If I am inclined I can establish a new religion and creed ; and by my sword and the swords of my friends force all men to adopt it.’
When Barani finally compiled his chronicle of the life of Alauddin Khalji, wisely waiting until the subject of his history was many years in the grave, nowhere amongst his list of ‘the ten achievements of Alauddin Khaliji’ is ‘converting the infidel’ or ‘destroying the worshipping places of pagans’ as would be expected in the history of the time of a good Muslim King . ‘Repairing mosques and minars’ (along with water-tanks) is the closest Alauddin gets, but this is a distant eighth on Barani’s list. According to Barani, first amongst the Sultan’s achievements was the ‘cheapness of the necessities of life’. The economic nature of the Sultan’s achievements are a theme in this list – down the list are ‘honest dealings of the bazaar people’ , ‘safety of the roads’ and ‘flourishing of many learned men even without the patronage of the sultan’.
Though these bureaucratic achievements would have seemed less noble to readers of the time than being a holy warrior or a devout man of a God, to our modern eyes these are truer marks of a good ruler. When the great Moroccan traveller Ibn Batutta compiled the accounts of his travel to India many years later in Tangiers, where neither fear nor favour could have affected him, he also attests to Alauddin’s popularity, saying he is regarded as the ‘best of sultans, and the people of India eulogise him highly’. Similar eulogies can be found in the gushing praise of the Persian poet Amir Khusrau who said that law and order were so relentlessly enforced in Delhi during his reign that ‘none dared to even pick up a fallen jewel in the street’. But it is the fact that Barani, who elsewhere depicts the king as a godless violent fiend, has to begrudgingly concede these achievements is what I think is most telling about the man himself.
End of Part 1
Want to read about godless and violent Alauddin’s life? Look no further
Part 2
The man himself
Though of Afghan descent, the Delhi Sultanate into which Alauddin was born had been home to his family for about a hundred years. His family were not originally kings – the sultan of Delhi when he was born was Ghiyasuddin Balban, whom his uncle and predecessor as sultan Jalaluddin Khalji served as a general.
Balban had spent the entire twenty five years of his reign dedicated to repelling the regular Mongol invasions which had been a constant threat since the time of Genghis Khan. That thirteenth century northern India did not have to suffer the desolation that the Great Horde of the Steppe visited upon Russia, Khwarazem, Baghdad, Syria or China, or anything like the brutal massacres by Temur or Nader Shah in later centuries, is to the great credit of the Delhi Sultanate during this time, who held the northern ‘gate’ to India almost single-handedly. Alauddin’s uncle Jalaluddin distinguished himself in these battles against the Mongols, and was named Protector of the Western Marches by the Sultan and was quickly seen as second man in the kingdom.
When Balban died without an heir, Jalaluddin was well into his seventies and showed little inclination to do anything but spend his old age in peace. But the Sultanate quickly descended into civil war and inter-fighting between the members of a group called The Forty, aristocrats of Turkish descent that had dominated the reign of Balban, and Jalaluddin was finally persuaded to intervene to bring peace to the kingdom by taking over as sultan.
Jalaluddin enjoys a reputation amongst the commentators of his time as an unusually gentle, pious and peace loving king – at his age more preoccupied with thoughts of the afterlife than temporal fortune. In the warrior societies of the medieval world though, these were not always seen as virtues, but on the contrary viewed as signs of weakness that positively invited civil war or invasion. The story goes that when he was crowned sultan, he refused to ride through the gates of the palace as expected of a sultan, but dismounted and went humbly into the threshold. He refused to take up residence at palace, and is reported to have wept publicly to see the empty throne of his dear friend Balban, bemoaning the fickleness of temporal fortune. And when Balban’s nephew, who rebelled against him and marched on Delhi with a great army was defeated and brought before him in chains, he is said to have broken down in tears and pardoned him at once, entertaining him in his private halls , reminding him how he had once sat him on his knee and praising his fidelity to his uncle. When he was reminded by his vizier that exacting awful, bloody vengeance on traitors and rebels was one of the duties of a king, Jalaluddin is famously supposed to have said that if he needed to shed the blood of Muslims to rule, then he would rather give up the throne.
Which was all very well, but potentially calamitous for the Khalji clan, who were already viewed as usurpers by the nobility, and as Afghans, of a lower, more boorish race than the primarily Turkish descended supporters of the Forty families, who still wielded great power in Delhi. To protect their clan against overthrow and destruction they needed a king who wanted to be king. And none fitted the bill better than his young nephew, Alauddin, around whom all the more ruthless, ambitious men of all the Khalji clan began to gather.
Sikandar Sani
‘I myself will go out into the world like Alexander, and subdue the whole habitable world…who is there that will stand against me?’
Amongst Alauddin’s many idiosyncratic passions was his lifelong obsession with the pagan Macedonian king Alexander the Great, who in his day brought all the known world under his rule, uniting the Greeks and then conquering the Persian empire, moving onto Central Asia and then penetrating deep into India. Alexander was still well remembered throughout Central Asia and Northern India, where he has always been known as Sikander. When he became king, Alauddin took the title Sikander Sani, or Alexander the Second, going so far as to print the title on his coins. He dreamt of uniting not just the subcontinent but all the known world under his rule, even faraway Europe, saying that he would one day leave Delhi to pursue this quest – leaving India to a vice-regent just as Alexander had left Greece, and accomplish in reverse the fabled campaign of his hero.
As a result of trying to achieve the first part of this dream, the sultan became the first king in centuries to attempt to build a truly pan-Indian empire. The idea itself of uniting all India under one king was not unfamiliar in medieval India, and periodically various dynasties, Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim, all attempted this. In Hindu kingdoms of the time, the concept of trying to become a chakravartin, or world ruler, was well established as part of the dharma or divine mandate of the warrior caste, supported as it was by the writings of that ancient Hindu Machiavelli Chanakya, the Brahmin adviser to the famed Maurya dynasty of the 2nd century BC. However in Alauddin’s day no dynasty had seriously attempted an all Indian kingdom since the time of the Hindu Gupta Kings, seven centuries before. To find a truly Pan-Indian empire, one had to go back even further, to the days of Chanakya and the Maurya Kings, nearly twenty centuries before.
Alauddin chafed therefore at the restriction against expansion of the Delhi Sultanate that was the policy of his uncle Jalaluddin – like the Mauryas and the Guptas before him he would need to conquer to realise his world -spanning dream. And so one day Alauddin gathered his followers, and disobeying a direct order from his uncle rode into the Deccan to try and sack the kingdom of Devagiri, ruled by the Hindu Yadava dynasty.
This choice displayed Alauddin’s characteristic pragmatism. He had chosen Devagiri precisely because at the time its ruling dynasty the Yadavas were locked in a life and death struggle with the Hindu Hoysala dynasty of Karnataka, and he knew the flower of the Devanagiri army was abroad, laying siege to the Hoysala cities.
He had thought that in the absence of the army, it would be a simple business to sack the capital with a handful of men. With the loot he would get from the sack of Devagiri, he would be able to finance his true objective – taking the throne of Delhi from his uncle.
What he had not reckoned on was the sheer impregnability of the Devagiri citadel, nestled high in the Deccan mountains above the river Godavari. The Yadava raja Ramachandra could simply sit and wait out the invaders until the army returned.
For a week, both sides were at a stalemate, with Alauddin unable to storm the fortress and the raja Ramachandra unable to mount any sorties to drive them off. And so Alauddin reached an arrangement. He sent envoys to the raja, saying that he would withdraw his army in return for an alliance with the raja against his uncle the sultan of Delhi. In return for this he would in turn assist Ramachandra in his struggles against his enemies, the Hoysalas of Karnataka and Warangals of Tamil Nadu. The alliance would be sealed by the marriage of Alauddin himself to one of the king’s daughters. These interfaith marriages were common despite being, at least on orthodox readings, technically proscribed by both faiths. Like every successful ruler in India, Hindu or Muslim, Alauddin could not afford the luxury of being a bigot in matters of religion. Ramachandra ,readily accepted, for here was a chance for grandsons of his bloodline to one day sit on the throne of Delhi, and so it was the nephew of the Sultan of Delhi married a Hindu princess. For all the rhetoric, Indians have always been above all a pragmatic people.
Alauddin and the raja kept the alliance secret, and Alauddin sent word to Delhi that the pagans of Devagiri had fallen to his sword, whilst marching his own armies with his new bride and his dowry to his private mansions in the town of Kara. The sultan summoned Alauddin to return to Delhi immediately to answer for his disobedience. With astonishing impudence, Alauddin asked the sultan instead to come visit him in Kara. Against the wishes of his advisors, the sultan agreed – and in the words of Barani, Jalaluddin ‘blinded by his destiny’, went willingly to what would be his death.
Biased against Alauddin as Barani was, one must take his account of Jalaluddin last moments with a grain of salt, especially as he could not have witnessed it, but the portrayal is nonetheless heartbreaking
‘When [Alauddin] reached the Sultan, he fell at his feet, and the Sultan, treating him as a son, lifted him up and kissed his eyes, stroked his beard and gave him two loving taps upon the cheek and said ‘My son, I have bought you up from infancy, so then why are you scared of me?’ ..At that moment, the stony hearted traitor gave the fatal sign…and [his officer] struck the sultan with his sword’
His Macbethian coup completed, Sikander Sani then rushed to Delhi, where he quickly won over the people by liberally distributing his gold and spoils, at one point having gold thrown to cheering crowds in the marketplace from the backs of elephants, whilst having all of Jalaluddin’s supporters ‘exterminated root and branch’, to use Baranis words. Sikander Sani had none of his uncle’s qualms about sitting on the throne of Balban and readily took up residence at the palace.
But it was no sooner than he had ascended the throne that he received grave news – a fresh Mongol invasion force under Duwa Khan had landed in Punjab, and it was a horde the like of which had never been seen,numbering hundreds of thousands.
The feared Mongol horse archers had stormed through Punjab, leaving in their wake those gruesome towers of severed heads for which they were infamous. Soon, the messengers said, the Mongol horde would soon be in the environs of Delhi itself.
And so Alauddin began the the first of many Mongol campaigns in which he began creating his legend. He rode out and crushed the Mongol invasion, and then set about an constructing a great ring of forts around the entire northen frontier, one of the largest such construction projects of the time. These forts he garrisoned with powerful commanders to see off further invasions from the hordes of the steppe.
One who would distinguish himself greatly in the Mongol wars was the Hindu general Malik Nayar, who quickly rose as one of Aluaddin’s chief lieutenants, to become his Master of Horse, leader of Alauddin’s calvalry, and who defeated the Mongols decisively at the battle of Amroha
Aluaddin himself left Delhi and moved into the frontier fortress of Siwa, where he could be at the front line of the Mongol invasions. Barani grants Aluaddin that he was not a coward, recounting a story where he is supposed to have told his kotwal who begged him to remain in Delhi and not go to the front lines:
If I were to follow your advice, then to whom can I show my face? How can I then go to my harem?Of what account will my turbulent people hold me? Come what may, tomorrow I shall march into the plain of Kili
Whether the above is apocryphal or not, Aluaddin did win crushing victories over the Mongols, preferring to lead at the forefront of his armies. He devised terrible punishments to serve as a deterrent against further invasions, from having Mongol prisoners of war crushed under the feet of elephants and playing their game by building his own tower of 6,000 Mongol skulls.
The Mongols returned a few times, but it was Aluaddin who finally returned in triumph to Delhi. He had done the unthinkable task of bring a halt during his lifetime to Mongol incursions into India, outshining already Jalaluddin and Balban.
Having secured the north, Aluaddin turned his attention toward his grand dream. The first kingdoms he annexed was the kingdom of Gujarat, after which he marched into Cambay. And it was here that Alexander the Second would meet his very own Hephastion.
Malik Kafur
In Cambay, the greatest treasure Alauddin would find was the famed courtesan and eunuch Malik Kafur. A Hindu noble by birth who was sold into a brothel in his childhood, he was known far and wide for his beauty. His nickname was Kafir Hazaar dinaari, which meant the thousand dinar pagan, thousand gold dinars being the reputed cost of purchasing the famed catamite.
Though conservative Muslims commentators today baulk at the suggestion that Alauddin and Maluk Kafur were in a sexual relationship, it is very likely, considering the considerbale influence Kafur gained in Alauddin’s administration after starting his career as a courtesan. Much to the annoyance of the Turkish nobles, this Indian convert and eunuch became Alauddin’s Malik Naib or chief lietenant– the highest position in Alauddin’s army.
The Muslims of Central and South Asia during medieval times shared none of modern Islam’s reservations about bisexuality, and indeed any self-respecting rich man would boast a few beautiful serving boys in addition to the willowy dancers of the harem. This era is incidentally a golden age for homoerotic Sufi love poetry. Whatever the truth of the matter, whether Maluk Kafur rose through his wiles and charms or his intelligence, he was soon second man in the realm, and like the first Alexander’s famed general and lover Hephastion, the two would be intimate and inseparable for the remainder of the Second Alexander’s life.
Surprisingly, the movie Padmaavat hints at the relationship between Kafur and Alauddin, though given the regressive politics of the film, it is safe to say that this is not intended as a compliment.
From Cambay, Alauddin’s attentions turned to the states of Rajasthan, then the Deccan, and finally tall thw way down to Tamil Nadu, Telingana and Karnataka. Increasingly, he left these campaigns to Kafur, who turned out to be formidable general. These campaigns would certainly be bloody by today’s standards – with Barani regularly cataloguing the tens of thousands put to the sword – in war, he was utterly a man of his time.
Though through his efforts Delhi became the dominant power in India, Alauddin did however not engage in pointless bloodshed and there is no evidence of the brutal massacres carried out by say a Muhammad Tughluq or a Nader Shah. Indeed, Alauddin managed to keep conquered territories loyal by, according to the historian Eraly, a judicious use of mercy and ‘taking care to treat the conquered rajas honorably’
‘He cautioned his officers setting out on conquests that they should avoid unecessary strictness towards the rajas, so as to turn enemies into allies.’
Rather than enforcing rule directly, he was content to leave ruling families as they were on the condition that they paid him tribute and acknowledged his supremacy – he did not want to rule more than he could efficiently. It was not generousness of spirit which motivated this, but the pragmatism which was his singular quality.
The King of the Four Directions
I issue such orders as I consider to be for the good of the state and of the people.
It was not his succession of military conquests that truly distinguishes Alauddin but his genuinely revolutionary attempts to build a fledgling administrative state. No where is the Hindu idea that we live in the kal yuga – the age of darkness where justice and goodness are replaced by mastya nyaya- the law of the jungle (or technically, the law of the sea) – more apparent than this warring states period of medieval India. Here the local lord was God and Law, and peasants and cultivators were oppressed at every level, from village headman to whoever happened to be calling themselves king. The primary goal of every raja and sultan was self preservation and the enrichment of their own dynasties.
But Khalji, ironically perhaps because of his megalomaniac desire to be remembered like a law giver like Alexander – spent his reign enacting administrative reforms which would make his years of government by far the most stable and comfortable of perhaps the entire early medieval period. At some point during his bloody rise to power he had concluded that one of the primary reasons for insurrection was ‘the sultan’s neglect of public affairs and his inattention to the activities of his subjects’
His reforms targetted primarily the nobles. The motivation was undoubtedly pragmatic – the greatest threats to his reign had come not from any Padmavat style Hindu nemesis but from his own nobles, and he endured many attempts on his life by cousins and relatives. One nephew almost succeeded in killing him, shooting him in the back with arrows whilst they were hunting together, leaving him for dead. Aluaddin somehow survived but cleverly contrived it to lead everyone to believe he was still dead, so that when the nephew tried to seize the throne, Alauddin was able to round up all of his co conspirators as soon as they declared themselves for him.
So he set about curbing their power, by not only abolishing their traditional rights to levy tax in their own name and to own land, but by replacing them with men like Kafur, chosen on ability rather than birth. To override the nobility’s power, he presented himself as a champion of the poor.
‘I have dicovered that the muqadams (village headmen) ride upon fine horses, wear fine clothes, shoot with Persian bows and make war upon each other…but of tribute and tax, they pay not one coin…they levy the khuts share of taxes from the villagers, which they use to give parties and drink wine’
The result of reducing the power of headmen and tax collectors was that peasants no longer paid extortionate taxes based on the whims of the local lords – most of which would never reach the king- but directly to the sultan himself. Alauddin took the unprecedented step of categorising lands and implementing a central tax code in his kingdom – one of the first attempts to build a ‘state’ in terms we would recognise today.
He also set about curbing the endemic problem of corruption ‘Government servants’ – the sultan noted – ‘were in the habit of taking bribes and committing embezzlements …they falsify accounts and defraud the state of revenue.’ His solution to this was to not only devise brutal bloodthirsty punishments for officials convicted of bribery but also increase their salaries.
His next reforms would be even more radical – he set about regulating the markets. One of the biggest problems in medieval India was the constant threat of famine which would inevitably lead to hoarding, inflation, and extortion by merchants who could simply flee to the adjoining kingdom if they were caught out.The idea of regulating markets was inconceivable because there was no concept of an administrative state and no state powerful enough to enforce this before Alexander the Second.
He set fixed prices by a series of seven market regulations so that ‘as long as Alauddin lived’, to qoute Barani ‘the scale of prices were maintained whether the rains were abundant or scanty’. Where there was a shortfall, the royal food stores were opened and grain solf at the tariff rate. In other words, Second Alexander’s greatest achievement was being the first Indian ruler to institute the concept of the ‘Maximum Retail Price’.
Finally – again for perhaps purely pragmatic reasons – he set about reducing the power of the ulema, banishing the learned men (Islamic scholars) from his inner circle and drawing a line between secular and religious authority.
According to the history of this period by Abraham Eraly, to whom I am indebted for this blog, the remarkable aspect of Aluaddin reign was that despite ‘his authoritarianism and ruthlessness, he also showed genuine concern for the welfare of the common people.’
The degree of success he achieved in the final tally is a matter of debate. Certainly, his reforms did not survive him, and the Delhi sultanate passed to a succession of unremarkable kings who may have had his ruthlessness but none of his vision. In the next few hundred years the sultanate degenerated to the point that his successor Shah Alam’s reach extended only as far as Palam, the site of today’s Indira Gandhi international airport.
However, the fact that he even talks about corruption, market reform and caring for the poor is remarkable. Neither his predecessors not successors would share these concerns, and their histories fall back to the predicable boasting of great victories and championing the faith.
If I have quoted Barani a lot in this blog series, it is because of two things – that he was alive during Khalji’s reign, but unlike, say the poet Amir Khusrau, he actively disliked the Sultan. When Barani says of Alauddin that when making laws, he only considers the public good, it was intended as an insult – that Alauddin did not obey the precepts of sharia and follow Islamic law but ruled based on secular concepts of the common good. However, to us this is high praise
Alauddin did not in the end succeed in his dream of a pan-indian empire – his sultanate collapsed into civil war and that old familiar orgy of stabbings and poisonings immediately after his death. That would come centuries later – ironically, by the soon to be Islamised descendants of those very same Mongols, fighting against whom he and his family had won their fame. Or, to use the Persian term for them, the Mughals