The Foundation of Muslim Rule in India: A History of the Establishment and Progress of the Turkish Sultanate of Delhi, 1206–1290 A.D. c14.2

c14.2

The foregoing pages will have shown the extent to which the organisers of the Delhi Sultanate had to busy themselves with problems of expansion and defence. These military problems, in fact, lasted nearly the whole of the century. The state, under such circumstances, was bound to resemble the organization of an army in occupation and hence had to be, in the main, military. Its civil functions emerged only gradually and at a converse ratio to the disappearance of security problems. In its original structure, the Sultanate exhibited little planning. The conquerors imported certain institutions from their homeland and from Persia, most of which they found already in use in the Ghaznawide Punjab and which, but for the designations, were not unfamiliar to Indian practice. The Memelukes started with the minimum of interference with governmental notions and habits; the change, impelled by the conquest, was not so much administrative as political. In the details of local government and revenue practice, in which, it should be noted, the new regime initially affected the conquered people, the Memelukes are not known to have attempted any noticeable alteration at all. In matters which were more or less exclusive to the conquerors themselves, like the central administration, army and the judicial organization, the reproduction of their own familier methods was only natural.