Give a good conclusion for the nature of ruling elites in Delhi sultanate in 13th century?
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aper presented at a conference on ‘State Formation and Social Integration in Pre-modern South and Southeast Asia: A Comparative Study of Asian Society’, Toyo Bunko, Tokyo, Japan, March 8–9, 2014
In the literature on the making of Muslim societies in India, its rulers and military elites are always distinguished from the mystics. It is taken as axiomatic that they represent relatively distinct features of Muslim presence in India: the Sultans were the leaders of the political establishment, and their military forces were the intrusive, sometimes violent and usually coercive element that appeared in South Asian history with the establishment of the Sultanate (c. 1200+). Conversely, as proponents of a mystical Islam, Sufis have been regarded as the ecumenical face of Islam, preaching to the commoners, often using the vernacular, and communicating complex aspects of Islam and Sufi philosophy through pithy maxims derived from the quotidian experiences of the common people and not just the elites. As an extension of this idea, since Sufis were not involved in the mundane temporal world but with abstract, spiritual praxis, historiographical narratives often placed them outside the realm of history and the vicissitudes of change (see Section 1 below for references to the historiography on which this summary assessment is based).
Although not surprising, it is somewhat of a paradox that Sultanate historiography has so frequently binarised the relationship between Sufis and Delhi Sultans and obliterated their larger, shared social contexts. In my reexamination of the subject, rather than treating these as two monolithic agencies, I have organized my study diachronically to bring out both the transitions that occurred within the several strands that constituted the worlds of the mystics and the Sultanate, and the ways in which the historian can braid these worlds. Counter to much of the historiography on the subject, I do not ascribe changes within the Sultanate or Sufism to the individual personalities and ambitions of assorted temporal and spiritual protagonists, their material ambitions or spiritual predilections. I would like to shift the analysis to larger contexts within which their histories need to be inscribed—to the history of Muslim immigration and settlements in the 13th and 14th centuries and the production of knowledge and pedagogy that provided form and meaning to congregational Islam in both its temporal and spiritual forms. My paper plots these developments as contexts to comprehend the establishment of Sultanate power and Sufi fraternities. It studies the unique ways in which their histories were situated in Persian literary materials, and how their representations responded, sometimes with great creativity and influence, to the politics of which they were very much a part. How can one penetrate these representations to discover modes of social and political mobilisation of people and ideas within the Sultanate, and its temporal and spiritual courts and congregations in the 13th and 14th centuries? For greater cogency in communicating historical transitions through these centuries, my paper is divided into five sections that form distinguishable thematic and chronological units. And to provide a more cogent context for my interventions, I have provided a brief historiographical introduction in the first section.
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