Invaders and Infidels: The Khalji Devastation of Infidel Devagiri (Book- 2)

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

When Qutub-ud-din Aibak died in a polo game 1210, he had left behind a rickety, fledgling Muslim Kingdom in Delhi. For the next 80 odd years, its fortunes swayed wildly, witnessing a record 12 kings. It was a period of incessant palace coups and serial political murders. The death of Balban extinguishes the so-called Muslim Slave Dynasty, and with it ends the short-lived Turkic-Muslim imperialism. It also heralds the ascent of the Afghanistan-based Khaljis, classed as 'low-born.' A straight line connects the origin of the Khaljis with the military airport built by the US in Zabul in 2006.

By this time, Hindu political power in Northern India is in total disarray with no unifying leader who has the vision to combat and expel the alien oppressor lodged in Delhi. No Hindu ruler exploits the repeated openings and vulnerabilities provided by internecine sultanate warfare.

Book 2 of Invaders and Infidels traces the unlikely rise of Jalal-ud-din Khalji as an ill-suited monarch and ends with the maiden Islamic raid of Devagiri, the gateway to Southern India. The incident will have far-reaching consequences for the history of India for the next 600 years.

It is a heady tale of a period rife with bloody intrigues, aggressive campaigns of Islamic expansionism, heroic wars of Hindu resistance and squandered chances for civilizational reclamation.

The narrative in this book is marked by a flair of vivid historical storytelling, juxtaposing the oscillating fortunes of both Islamic conquests and the ensuing Hindu responses. It unearths a slew of eye-opening and forgotten details about the sociopolitical and economic life of the era whose impact is visible even today. Written in a fast-paced and engaging style, Book 2 of Invaders and Infidels is a riveting read of a critical juncture in the history of early Muslim rule of India.

Sandeep Balakrishna is a veteran writer, author, editor, speaker and independent researcher with about 20 years of writing on Indian history, culture and literature. He has authored over 900 articles, essays, critiques, academic papers, and delivered lectures related to these themes at institutions like the Indian Council of Philosophical Research, IIM Bangalore, Sri Aurobindo Society, Shree Somanath Sanskrit University, Bangalore University and Amrita University, to name a few. He writes in both English and Kannada.

Sandeep is the author of bestselling books, such as Tipu Sultan: The Tyrant of Mysore; Madurai Sultanate: A Concise History, 70 Years of Secularism: Unpopular Essays on the Unofficial Political Religion of India and Stories from Inscriptions.

He has also translated the legendary Kannada novelist Dr S.L. Bhyrappa's critically acclaimed work Aavarana into English, as Aavarana: The Veil, which is now in its 20th reprint.

Sandeep is the founder and editor of The Dharma Dispatch, an online journal dedicated to Indian civilization, culture and history, and serves on the advisory board at Prekshaa Journal.

This is the second book in his Invaders and Infidels series.

The benevolent face of the Turk was always and exclusively turned towards his Muslim Ummah, and never towards the accursed Hindus. Jalal-ud-din Khalji was second to none among the Muslim kings when it came to heaping atrocities on Hindus.

Then Qutub-ud-din Aibak died in a polo game in 1210, he W had left behind a rickety, fledgling Muslim kingdom in Delhi. For the next eighty-odd years, its fortunes swayed wildly, witnessing a record twelve short-lived sultans. Barring the blood-soaked regimes of Iltutmish and Balban, it was a period of incessant palace coups, fratricides and serial political murders. Sita Ram Goel provides a pithy analysis of the tumultuous era in his The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India.

The popular notion that after the conquest of Muhammad Ghori, India formed a Muslim Empire under various dynasties, is hardly borne out by facts.... Muslim power in India suffered a serious setback after Iltutmish. Balban had to battle against a revival of Hindu power. The Katehar Rajputs of what came to be known as Rohilkhand in later history, had so far refused to submit to Islamic imperialism. Balban led an expedition across the Ganges in 1254. According to Badauni, in two days after leaving Delhi, he arrived in the midst of the territory of Katehar and put to death every male, even those of eight years of age, and bound the women. But in spite of such wanton cruelty, Muslim power continued to decline till the Khaljis revived it after 1290.

Book 1 of Invaders and Infidels ends with Balban's wasted and degenerate grandson Kaiqubad elevating a septuagenerian governor named Jalal-ud-din Khalji to the post of war minister. However, Balban's death had already extinguished the so-called Muslim Slave dynasty and snuffed out the short-lived Turkic Muslim rule in Delhi.

Book 2 traces the political ascent of the Afghanistan-based Khalji tribe. From the earliest times, the historical memory of Central Asia had classed the Khaljis as a 'low-born' tribe, a story that is narrated in some detail in this volume.

The most notable and the most notorious early Khalji who ravaged large parts of Eastern India was the semi-barbarian Bakhtiyar Khalji. Although he predates the Khalji Sultanate in Delhi, the complete story of his grisly career is told in this volume. He does find a brief mention in Book 1 of Invaders and Infidels but in the interests of providing a semi-comprehensive history of the Khalji tribe in India in one place, Book 2 reserves substantial space to him.

The unlikely rise of Jalal-ud-din Khalji, who became an ill-suited monarch and an unworthy successor to Balban, is one of those freak accidents of history that permanently altered the fortunes of Bharatavarsha for the worse. Purely in the realm of speculation, had Jalal-ud-din lost the battle for the throne of Delhi, southern India would perhaps have remained untouched by Islamic invasions for much longer. And, perhaps, there would be no occasion for the birth of the grand Vijayanagara Empire, which safeguarded and saved Hindus in the South from this clear and present Islamic danger. But history can be written only in hindsight, and therein lies the surest repository of wisdom.

Like the Muslim kingdoms that preceded it, the Khalji Empire was ephemeral. It too, imploded due to the same weaknesses intrinsic to every Islamic empire in India. That story will be fully narrated in Book 3.

At the time of Jalal-ud-din Khalji's coronation, Hindu political power in Northern India was in total disarray. There was no unifying Hindu leader who had the vision to combat and permanently expel the alien oppressor lodged in Delhi. Hindu political power was now concentrated mainly in the region of today's Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, but it was scattered power. Hindu kings had an abundance of grit, determination, strength and valour, but they were hopelessly disunited and scudded along the suicidal path of internecine wars. With predictable results. The other face of this coin was defaced with myopia: for the better part of these 80 years of internal warring among various Muslim dynasties, no Hindu ruler had the vision to exploit the repeated juicy openings and vulnerabilities they provided. The opposite is actually true. We have the shocking example of a powerful Hindu ruler of Ranastambhapura who falls for Iltutmish's guile and loses his life to foul murder at his hands.

Like Balban, even Jalal-ud-din Khalji's fleeting Sultanate was not entirely stable. His whole career was punctuated with recurrent bouts of doughty resistance from Hindus, and frequent plots against his own life by people in his inner circle and outside it. On more than one occasion, Jalal-ud-din proved unsuccessful and even cowardly in the face of Hindu resurgence. Peter Jackson, the scholar of medieval Muslim history of India, correctly observes' how, it is important...to recognize the limits of Muslim success. Victory did not necessarily entail the displacement of Hindu rulers'.

The surest proof for Jalal-ud-din Khalji as an inept and implausible monarch is the macabre manner of his murder. The book narrates how he walked into the web of vile treachery with open eyes.

Book 2 of Invaders and Infidels is woven around three major themes.

The first is a continuation of the historical narrative that began in Book 1-that is, the trajectory of alien Islamic invasions and subsequent Muslim regimes established in Delhi.