Introduction
The Delhi Sultanate ruled wide realms in India between 1206 and 1555, but the aspiration of Sultan Mohammad bin Tughluq (r. 1325-1351, a contemporary of England’s Edward III) to be Alexander and Solomon rolled into one brought only bankruptcy and revolt. Especially disastrous was his snap decision in 1327 to walk the entire population of Delhi to a new capital over six hundred miles away.
THE second project of Sultan Muhammad, which was ruinous to the capital of the empire, and distressing to the chief men of the country, was that of making Deogir his capital, under the title of Daulatabad.* This place held a central situation, being about equidistant from Delhi, Gujarat, Lakhnauti, Saptagram, Sonargaon, Telangana, Ma‘bar, Dwarasamudra, and Kampili.*
Without any consultation, and without carefully looking into the advantages and disadvantages on every side, he brought ruin upon Delhi, that city which, for 170 or 180 years, had grown in prosperity, and rivalled Baghdad and Cairo. The city, which, with its buildings and its suburbs and villages, spread over four or five leagues,* was utterly destroyed. So complete was the ruin, that not a cat or a dog was left among the buildings of the city, in its palaces, or in its suburbs.* Troops of the natives, with their families and dependents, wives and children, men-servants and maid-servants, were forced to remove.*
* Deogir(i) or Devagiri, renamed Daulatabad by Mohammad bin Tughluq, is a now ruinous citadel and town in the Deccan, near modern-day Aurangabad in the State of Maharashtra. Whereas Barani saw the move as strategic, another eyewitness, Ibn Battuta (1304-1369), believed the immediate cause was crudely emotional.
“His motive for this act was that the people of Delhi wrote letters full of insults and invectives against the Sultan. They sealed them up, and writing upon them these words, ‘By the head of the king of the world, no one but himself must read this writing,’ they threw them at night into the hall of audience. When the Sultan opened them he found that they contained insults and invectives against himself. He decided to ruin Delhi, so he purchased all the houses and inns from the inhabitants, paid them the price, and then ordered them to remove to Daulatabad. At first they were unwilling to obey, but the crier of the monarch proclaimed that no one must be found in Delhi after three days.”
* Barani has listed some of the kingdoms annexed by the Delhi Sultanate, in roughly clockwise order: Gujarat in northwest India (annexed in 1297); Lakhnauti or Gauda or Gour in West Bengal (1204) and neighbouring Saptagram or Satgaon; Sonargaon in central Bangladesh (1324); Telangana, based in Warangal near Hyderabad (1323); the Ma‘bar Sultanate at Madurai in Tamil Nadu (1323); Dwarasamudra near Halebeedu in Karnataka (1311); and the Kampili kingdom at Kampli in northeastern Karnataka (1327-28). Barani’s claim that they are equidistant from Daulatabad is a little fanciful: distances range from just under three hundred miles to over a thousand.
* For this 1906 edition of Sir Henry Elliot’s translation, the word ‘league’ replaced that of ‘kos’ used in earlier editions. The kos is a unit of length, supposedly the distance the human voice can carry. According to Sir Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, the kos varied from time to time and place to place, even under the Raj — though the British standardised it to 5000 guz, where a guz is 33 inches, making the kos 2 miles 4 furlongs and 183½ yards. An English league is equivalent to three miles. The capital territory of Delhi today covers 573 square miles.
* “A person in whom I felt confidence” said Ibn Battuta “assured me that the Sultan mounted one evening upon the roof of his palace, and, casting his eyes over the city of Dehli, in which there was neither fire, smoke, nor light, he said, ‘Now my heart is satisfied, and my feelings are appeased’.”
* “The Sultan ordered a rigorous search to be made for any that remained” recorded Ibn Battuta. “His slaves found two men in the streets: one was paralyzed, the other blind. They were brought before the sovereign, who ordered the paralytic to be shot away from a manjanik [a catapult-like siege engine], and the blind man to be dragged from Dehli to Daulatabad, a journey of forty days’ distance. The poor wretch fell in pieces during the journey, and only one of his legs reached Daulatabad.”
Précis
In 1327, the Sultan of Delhi, Mohammad bin Tughluq, suddenly announced that every man, woman and child in the capital must pack up and walk more than six hundred miles to Daulatabad, a location nearer the centre of his hoped-for empire. In a matter of hours, the city was utterly deserted, but the decision brought ruin on the Sultanate. (59 / 60 words)
In 1327, the Sultan of Delhi, Mohammad bin Tughluq, suddenly announced that every man, woman and child in the capital must pack up and walk more than six hundred miles to Daulatabad, a location nearer the centre of his hoped-for empire. In a matter of hours, the city was utterly deserted, but the decision brought ruin on the Sultanate.
Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 65 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 55 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: about, despite, just, or, otherwise, until, whereas, who.
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