The Age of Wrath: A History of the Delhi Sultanate Read Online Free PDF Page A

visitation of famine which ravaged the land periodically. Agricultural production at this time was almost wholly dependent on the monsoon, so when the rains failed, famine felled thousands and thousands of people in one sweep. And those who survived did so by eating whatever they could find, however filthy or rotten, even putrefied carrion, and by taking to cannibalism. ‘One day I went out of the city, and I saw three women … cutting into pieces and eating the skin of a horse which had been dead some months,’ reports Battuta. ‘Skins were cooked and sold in the markets. When bullocks were slaughtered, crowds rushed forward to catch the blood, and consumed it for their sustenance.’ Adds Barani: ‘Famine was very severe, and man was devouring man.’
    THE SOCIO-CULTURAL AND political profile of India changed radically with the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate. Never before in its millenniums-long history had India faced a challenge as potent and irreconcilable as that ofTurco-Afghans, and never before had it failed to absorb invaders and migrants smoothly into its society and culture.
    India at the time of the Turkish invasion had been in a dormant state for several centuries, remaining hermetically sealed within the subcontinent, with virtually no contact with the outside world. One would have expected that the Turkish invasion would awaken India from its slumber and stimulate it to transform itself to meet the Turkish challenge. But what happened was the opposite of this: instead of responding to the challenge of Islam, Hindu society curled up tighter into itself.
    The aggressive presence of Turks in India made virtually no difference in the life and culture of most Indians. Nor did the contact with Hindus make any notable difference in the life and culture of most Muslims. Their civilisations were totally unlike each other in every respect to have any major influence on each other.
    Hindus were treated as second class citizens in Muslim states, but as citizens nevertheless. They had their own rights. In any case, the discriminatory treatment that Hindus received at the hands of Muslim rulers would not have troubled them much, for most Indian communities were subject to worse discrimination in their own sharply stratified caste society. True, Hindus and Muslims did live separately and did not mix socially; but then so did the different Hindu castes live separately and did not mix socially. Even in the matter of jizya, not many Hindus would have felt it as a particularly discriminative tax, for Muslims too had to pay a community tax, zakat. Besides, jizya was usually imposed on individuals only in towns, while in villages, where most Hindus lived, it was assessed as a collective tax. Muslim rulers did slaughter a large number of Hindus, and demolish many of their temples and shrines, but Hindus seem to have taken all that fatalistically, as they normally did with nearly everything else in their lives.
    There was hardly any display of resentment by Hindus against Turks. Nor were there any notable communal clashes during the many-centuries-long Muslim rule in India. This was largely because the establishment of Muslim rule in India made no notable difference in the lives of most Hindus, as most of them lived in villages, where there were scarcely any Muslims, and the lives of the people there were largely unaffected by the establishment of Muslim rule.
    The only Hindu class that suffered any great material or social deprivation under Muslim rule was the ruling class, particularly the rajas, most of whom lost of their wealth and power. But several of the rajas saved some of their status and wealth by serving the sultans in subordinate positions. Similarly, most Hindu zamindars and chieftains served the sultans in various administrative capacities. And so did Brahmins, presumably in large numbers, and they were therefore rewarded by the sultans (except Firuz Tughluq) by exempting them,as a community, from the payment