Turkish Slaves In Delhi Sultanate

Essay from the year 2017 in the subject History - Asia, grade: 1.2, , language: English, abstract: After the Mu’izz al-Din Ghuris Indian campaign and the consolidation of the conquered territory under his subordinates in the last decade of the twelfth century, the Turkish bandagan occupied many positions of influence and power in North India. Thus, when there emerged a politically paramount sultanate of Delhi under IItutmish, all the strategically important positions were given to the monarch’s senior slaves or the elite bandagan-I khass. By the end of IItutmish rule, the influence of the Turkish slave soldiers on the political structure of the sultanate administration was disproportionate to their social status (Al-Sahli, 2013). Although the Turkish slave soldiers had undergone traumatic alienation and been introduced to the Islamic faith as well as the decorum of the court as part of their training, their Turkish heritage remained unchanged. To a large extent, the early Delhi sultans, who were of Turkish origins created in their slaves the Turkish identity in order to create new bonds and identities through the process of divesting the slaves from their old relations. Scholars have noted that the sultans deliberately gave their slaves Turkish names rather than Arabic ones which would have been in tandem with the Islamic faith which they professed (Kumar, 2009). A shared Turkish ethnicity was used to reinforce the bonds between the slave soldiers and the sultan; however, it did not imply that they alienate the non-Turkish slaves. Thus, the slave soldiers were an integral part of the reproduction and sustenance of the authority of the Delhi sultanate.

"[W]ill be welcomed by students of comparative slavery.... [It] makes us reconsider the significance of slavery in the subcontinent." -- Edward A. Alpers, UCLA Despite its pervasive presence in the South Asian past, slavery is largely overlooked in the region's historiography, in part because the forms of bondage in question did not always fit models based on plantation slavery in the Atlantic world. This important volume will contribute to a rethinking of slavery in world history, and even the category of slavery itself. Most slaves in South Asia were not agricultural laborers, but military or domestic workers, and the latter were overwhelmingly women and children. Individuals might become slaves at birth or through capture, sale by relatives, indenture, or as a result of accusations of criminality or inappropriate sexual behavior. For centuries, trade in slaves linked South Asia with Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The contributors to this collection of original essays describe a wide range of sites and contexts covering more than a thousand years, foregrounding the life stories of individual slaves wherever possible. Contributors are Daud Ali, Indrani Chatterjee, Richard M. Eaton, Michael H. Fisher, Sumit Guha, Peter Jackson, Sunil Kumar, Avril A. Powell, Ramya Sreenivasan, Sylvia Vatuk, and Timothy Walker.

Original essays explore the reality of slavery in the South Asian past

Part 1. Turkish Oorigins, identity and history in India -- Part 2. Art, material culture, literature and transregional connections.

The first section of this volume brings together five studies on the Mongol empire. The accent is on the ideology behind Mongol expansion, on the dissolution of the empire into a number of rival khanates, and on the relations between the Mongol regimes and their Christian subjects within and potential allies outside. Three pieces in the second section relate to the early history of the Delhi Sultanate, with particular reference to the role of its Turkish slave (ghulam) officers and guards, while a fourth examines the collapse in 1206-15 of the Ghurid dynasty, whose conquests in northern India had created the preconditions for the Sultanate's emergence. The final three papers are concerned with Mongol pressure on Muslim India and the capacity of the Delhi Sultanate to withstand it.

The book represents the first comprehensive history of the Delhi Sultanate from 1210-1400.

During the early medieval Islamic expansion in the seventh to eleventh centuries, al-Hind (India and its Indianized hinterland) was characterized by two organizational modes: the long-distance trade and mobile wealth of the peripheral frontier states, and the settled agriculture of the heartland. These two different types of social, economic, and political organization were successfully fused during the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, and India became the hub of world trade. During this period, the Middle East declined in importance, Central Asia was unified under the Mongols, and Islam expanded far into the Indian subcontinent. Instead of being devastated by the Mongols, who were prevented from penetrating beyond the western periphery of al-Hind by the absence of sufficient good pasture land, the agricultural plains of North India were brought under Turko-Islamic rule in a gradual manner in a conquest effected by professional armies and not accompanied by any large-scale nomadic invasions. The result of the conquest was, in short, the revitalization of the economy of settled agriculture through the dynamic impetus of forced monetization and the expansion of political dominion. Islamic conquest and trade laid the foundation for a new type of Indo-Islamic society in which the organizational forms of the frontier and of sedentary agriculture merged in a way that was uniquely successful in the late medieval world at large, setting the Indo-Islamic world apart from the Middle East and China in the same centuries. Please note that The Slave Kings and the Islamic Conquest, 11th-13th Centuries was previously published by Brill in hardback (ISBN 90 04 10236 1, still available).