The Delhi Sultanate: Map & History

History

Like other agrarian societies in history, those in the Indian subcontinent have been attacked by nomadic tribes throughout its long history. The northwestern subcontinent was a frequent target of tribes raiding from Central Asia in the pre-Islamic era, and the Muslim intrusions and later Muslim invasions were not dissimilar to those of the earlier invasions during the 1st millennium.

The rise of the Delhi Sultanate in India was part of a wider trend affecting much of the Asian continent, including the whole of southern and western Asia: the influx of nomadic Turkic peoples from the Central Asian steppes that traces back to the 9th century when the Islamic caliphate began fragmenting in the Middle East.

Government and politics

The historian Peter Jackson explains in The New Cambridge History of Islam: "The elite of the early Delhi sultanate comprised overwhelmingly first-generation immigrants from Iran and Central Asia: Persians, Turks, Ghūrīs, Khalaj from the hot regions (garmsīr) of modern Afghanistan".

Medieval scholars such as Abdul Malik Isami and Ziauddin Barani suggested that the prehistory of the Delhi Sultanate lay in the Ghaznavid state and that its ruler, Mahmud Ghaznavi, provided the foundation and inspiration integral to the making of the Delhi regime.

Economy

Some historians argue that the Delhi Sultanate was responsible for making India more multicultural and cosmopolitan. The establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in India has been compared to the expansion of the Mongol Empire and called "part of a larger trend occurring throughout much of Eurasia, in which nomadic people migrated from the steppes of Inner Asia and became politically dominant".

According to Angus Maddison, between the years 1000 and 1500, India's GDP, of which the sultanates represented a significant part, grew nearly 8% to $60.5 billion in 1500. Though the overall the percentage of the GDP share reduced from 33% to 22% According to Maddison's estimates, India's population grew from 85 million in 1200 to 101 million in 1500.

Culture and Architecture

While the Indian subcontinent has had invaders from Central Asia since ancient times, what made the Muslim invasions different is that unlike the preceding invaders who assimilated into the prevalent social system, the successful Muslim conquerors retained their Islamic identity and created new legal and administrative systems that challenged and usually in many cases superseded the existing systems of social conduct and ethics, even influencing the non-Muslim rivals and common masses to a large extent, though the non-Muslim population was left to their laws and customs. They also introduced new cultural codes that in some ways were very different from the existing cultural codes.