RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES AND MILITARY FEUDALISM
Rajput country, Sikander built a new capital at Agra; this also served the
Mughals well at a later stage. Sikandara near Agra, where Akbar’s tomb is
situated, is named after Sikander Lodi. In the Lodi Gardens in New Delhi
the stern, heavy-edificed tombs of the Lodi sultans are the last monuments
of the sultanate; they are in striking contrast to Humayun’s tomb nearby:
built only a few decades later, the latter shows the influence of the new
Persian style which characterised Mughal art and architecture.
The problems of administrative penetration
The sultans of Delhi never managed to consolidate an empire comprising a
large part of India. Although they certainly had the military means to
subdue India, they were unable to establish an adequate administration
through which they could have penetrated the country and strengthened
their rule. We have discussed similar problems with regard to the regional
Hindu kingdoms. The personal and patrimonial organisation prevailing in
these medieval realms could never serve the purpose of controlling distant
provinces. Occasional military intervention or a reshuffle of Hindu rajas or
Muslim governors did not make much difference in this respect. The new
feature of the sultanate was that the sultans based their power on, or even
shared this power with, an alien military elite bound together by Islam and
certain tribal affinities.
In the mid-thirteenth century Sultan Balban established this network of
Turkish foreign rule over India with special vigour. But it was a system that
could not last long: it was very brittle, for the sultans were unable to
penetrate the Hindu rural sector in this way. Ala-ud-din tried his best to
solve the problem by introducing a direct revenue assessment and curbing
the power of rural middlemen. However, he could do this with some
success only in the core region of his empire, where the continuous military
presence of his standing army would silence all attempts at resistance. The
reproduction of this system in the provinces would have been possible, but
would have raised the danger of powerful governors turning against the
sultan—something they were often prone to do in any case. Muhammad
Tughluq’s move to locate his capital in a more central place to facilitate
control of the distant provinces was quite logical in this context, but it was
doomed to remain an isolated measure unless the administrative
penetration was also improved. His experiment with copper currency so
that he could transfer the provincial revenues in cash to his capital likewise
made sense, but it proved to be an even more dismal failure for the reasons
discussed above. Actually, these two arbitrary measures—the relocation of
the capital and the introduction of a new currency—show in an exemplary
manner how isolated responses to the challenge of the administrative
penetration of a vast empire are bound to make matters worse and do not
help to solve the basic problem of an inadequate system of government.