The Delhi Sultanate: A Slave Society or A Society with Slaves?

The article aims to assess the contribution of slavery in the socio-economic structure of the Delhi Sultanate. It delineates the socio-economic life of the slaves and attempts to address a fundamental question pertaining to nature of the Sultanate society. It takes into account the classical debate about the distinction between ‘slave society’ and a ‘society with slaves’ and applies it on the Delhi Sultanate. It is maintained that while slaves were omnipresent in the villages and towns of the Delhi Sultanate, yet their numerical strength cannot credit the Delhi Sultanate as a slave society. The contribution of slave labour in the urban life of the Delhi Sultanate was very significant, however, the evidence to confirm notable peasant-slave population is not available. Agriculture was the primary means of production in the Sultanate economy and the peasantry was largely composed of free elements. This peasantry was taxed and the instances of non-payment of taxes resulted in its mass enslavement and their subsequent conversion into urban labour. Therefore, despite the fact that the slave populations in the Sultanate towns were clearly significant, even then their role in the Sultanate economy was secondary to the peasantry. Thus, the Delhi Sultanate may be explained as a society with slaves rather than a slave society. The extension of Ghaurī Empire in Northern India and the consequent establishment of the Delhi Sultanate brought a visible ∗ Lecturer, Department of History, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad. 2 Pakistan Journal of History and Culture, Vol.XXX, No.1, 2009 change in the Indian economic structure. The Indian economy had been reliant upon the self sufficient village societies for centuries. However, the Turkish and Afghan invaders generally settled in cities and promoted an urban culture. Many new cities emerged in this era and various old towns expanded as cities. Being a classic conquest state, the economy of the Delhi Sultanate was dependent upon the success of the military expeditions in the petty Hindu kingdoms and their agrarian lands. The population, vocations, means of revenue generation and much of the economic policies of the Sultans were connected with the phenomenon of war in one way or another. Similarly, the very character of the urban societies that constituted the Delhi Sultanate was demarcated with the phenomenon of war, as it had deep imprints over the social institutions, social stratification, value systems and social relations of the Sultanate society. The demography of Northern India in this era had some unique characteristics. It was not only heterogeneity of the racial stock that made the Sultanate society distinct, but the demographic division of slave and free people seems the most salient feature of the Sultanate society. The contribution of slaves in the establishment and consolidation of the Delhi Sultanate is undeniable. There is a plethora of literature that features elite slavery within the Delhi Sultanate. Therefore, the scope of the present work is not political or military aspects of the Sultanate slavery. The article embarks upon a singular question that whether the Delhi Sultanate was a society with slaves or a slave society, by elaborating upon the economic roles of the slaves. Therefore, the present article aims to problemitize the data regarding the Sultanate economy and society in accordance to one of the most 1 Irfan Habib, Essays in Indian History: Towards a Marxist Perception (New Delhi: Pauls Press, 1995), p.172. 2 The population of the Delhi Sultanate was racially diverse which included Indians, Turks, Arabs, Persians, Afghans, Europeans, Mongols and Chinese. 3 For instance see, Peter Jackson, “The Mamluk Institution in Early Muslim India,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1990); Khurram Qadir, “The Amiran-iChihalgan of Northern India,” Journal of Central Asia 4 (December 1981); Gavin Hambly, “Who were the Chihilgani: The Forty Slaves of the Sultan Shams al-Din Iltutmish of Delhi,” Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies 10 (1972); Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton, eds. Slavery and South Asian History (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2006). The Delhi Sultanate: A Slave Society 3 popular theoretic contrast of ‘slave societies’ and ‘societies with slaves’ extended by M.I. Finley. Who Were Slaves in the Delhi Sultanate Slave is a term of closest approximation in order to explain the nature of bondage in the Delhi Sultanate. Slaves are generally referred to as, bandagān (sing. bandah), ghilmān (sing. ghūlām), burdāh, kanīz, laundī and mamlūk, in the sources of the Delhi Sultanate. The terms bandah and ghūlām were also used metaphorically in order to depict loyalty and association of both free and unfree persons, towards a particular person or God. Burdāh is the word exclusively used for captives of war whereas, laundī and kanīz were the terms applied to female slaves and, at times, free maids too. In the Delhi Sultanate, the traditional Muslim institution of walā existed as well. Mawlā was a freed slave who became a lesser family member of his manometer. Owing to this institution the master slave association was conserved even after the manumission. This phenomenon must have preserved the distinct slave social identity throughout bondsman’s life. Mamlūk is the term that is rarely mentioned in the Sultanate primary sources, nevertheless in secondary sources the military elite slaves were generally mentioned as mamlūk. Thus, all slave soldiers who participated in wars cannot be labelled 4 M.I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology in Historical Context, Brent D. Shaw ed. (New York: Marcus Wiener, 1998), p.67. 5 Khurram Qadir, “The Political Theory and Practice of the Sultanate of Delhi” (PhD. Diss., B.Z.U. Multan, 1992), pp.239-41. 6 For discussion on wala see Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). 7 Sunil Kumar, “When Slaves were Nobles: The Shmasi Bandagan in the Early Delhi Sultanate,” Studies in History 10 (1994), p.48. 8 Although the military slaves were the key figures in the armies of the Sultans yet in the sources on Delhi Sultanate they are not exclusively discussed under the term of mamlūk; unlike the historical sources of other near contemporary Muslim societies. For the emergence and role of mamlūk armies in medieval Muslim societies see Osman Sayyid Ahmad Ismail Al-Bili, Prelude to the Generals: A Study of Some Aspects of the Reign of the Eighth Abbasid Caliph, Al-Mutasim Bi-Allah (218-277 AH/ 833-842 AD)[sic] (Reading: Ithaca Press, 2001); Denial Pipes, Slave Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System, (London: Yale University Press, 1981); Ayalon, David, “The Mamluk of the Seljuks: Islam’s Military Might at the Crossroads,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 4 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 4 Pakistan Journal of History and Culture, Vol.XXX, No.1, 2009 as mamlūk. In the present article therefore, instead of using multiple terms such as bandah, burdāh, kanīz, ghūlām, laundī, mawlā and mamlūk, a single English term ‘slave’ is uniformly applied, regardless of the subsequent status of the bondsman, in order to keep the explanation simple. In Delhi Sultanate slavery ranged from elite military slavery to menial slavery. It had neither economic, racial, linguistic, cultural connotations nor was it an emblem of powerlessness or dependency always. While elite slaves were financially more powerful than the free common people, they had no specific ethnicity as well, although it is a well established fact by now that the word ‘Turk’ was taken as a synonym for elite slaves who usually were political administrators and military commanders. The slaves were aliens in the Sultanate environment yet not everyone who was an alien was a slave. Majority of the free ruling class were émigrés who belonged to the crumbling Abbasid Empire and the Muslim Sultanates of Central Asia and Persia. Thus, alienation was not a distinguishing feature of this institution in the Sultanate. Slavery did not necessarily mean destitution as some slaves were not financially dependent upon their masters rather they became the bread earners of the families they served. Slavery in the Delhi Sultanate was a legal status that converted one human being into the property of another and thus distinguished the slaves from other socio-economic groups. Slave Societies and Societies with Slaves The concept of distinction between slave societies and societies with slaves was first extended by M.I. Finley which is as follows: 9 For discussion on term ‘Turk’ as a synonym of ‘slave’ see Appendix I in Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Sunil Kumar, “ Service, Status, and Military Slavery in Delhi Sultanate: The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century” in Chatterji and Eaton, eds. Slavery in South Asian History, p.89. 10 Irfan Habib, “Formation of the Sultanate Ruling Class of the Thirteenth Century.” Medieval India 1: Researches in History of India (1200-1750), ed. Irfan Habib, (1992): pp.1-21. Iqtidar Husain Siddiqui, “Social Mobility in the Delhi Sultanate,” in Ibid. 11 Muhammad Aslam, Malfūzātī Adab kī Tārīkhī Ahmīyat (Lahore: n.p., 1995), p.29. The Delhi Sultanate: A Slave Society 5 Theoretically a distinction can be drawn between societies in which slavery was a marginal or incidental aspect of the economy and those in which slavery was a central feature. In the latter case, a slave mode of production can be said to have existed; methods of enslavement, slave production and slave regeneration were integrated into the very socio-economic structure of the society. Thus, a slave society essentially has a slave mode of production. A society could have been credited as having slave mode of production when slavery was responsible for more amounts of the exploited surplus products than any other means or force of production. However, in this situation slavery is not always the largest type of labour. There might be situations where the free labour force is more than the slaves yet the economic roles of the slave minority are more significant than the labours. The slaves in these cases provide the economy with the surplus product that was transferred to the urban centres and distant markets. Thus, slave exploitation in such society would be the defining character of the society and not the services rendered by the free labour majority. In his much celebrated categorization M.I. Finley credits five societies, i.e., ancient Greek and Roman societies and three American plantation societies as genuine slave societies. While he argues that the Medieval Muslim societies, despite their extensive use of slaves, were merely ‘societies with slaves’ or ‘slave-holding societies’ rather than ‘slave societies’; since the economic roles of slaves were not very significant. The question arises here is that if Finley’s categorization be applied, would it be pertinent to call the Delhi Sultanate a ‘slave society’ while the slaves had a major contribution in the establishment and sustenance of the Sultanate? Moreover it can be argued that the wealth that pumped into the 12 This is the classical distinction between ‘slave society and ‘society with slaves’ as provided by Moses I. Finley in, International Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2003 ed., s.v. “Slavery.” And Moses I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (California: University of California Press, American Council of Learned Societies, 1999), p.71. See also, Enrico Dal Lago and Constantina Katsari, Slave Systems: Ancient and Modern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p.5. 13 James W. Russell, Modes of Production in World History (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1989), pp.62-63. 14 Lago and Katsari, Slave Systems, p.70.