The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c20.241

v3.c20.241

The early Muhammadan kingdom of Delhi was not a homogeneous political entity. The great fiefs, of which the principal were, on the east, Mandāwar, Amroha, Sambhal, Budaun, Baran (Bulandshahr), Koil and Oudh; on the south-east Kara-Mānikpur; on the south Bayāna and Gwalior; on the west Nāgaur, recently abandoned; and on the north-west and north, Hānsī, Multān, Uch, Lahore, Sāmāna, Sunām, Guhrām, Bhātinda and Sirhind, were nuclei of Muhammadan influence, the holders of which discharged some of the functions of provincial governors, but the trans-Gangetic fiefs of Mandāwar, Amroha, Sambhal, and Budaun were mere outposts of dominion against the territory of Katehr, where the independence of the Hindus was only occasionally disturbed by punitive expeditions which usually engaged the sovereign with the greater part of his available military strength; and similarly the fiefs to the south, south-west, and west were outposts against Rājput chieftains who might have been strong enough, had union been possible to them, to expel the foreigners. Gwalior had been taken by Aibak, but lost during the reign of his son and with difficulty recovered by Iltutmish; the fortress of Ranthambhor had been dismantled and abandoned by Raziyya and occupied and restored by the Rājputs; and Nāgaur, at one time held by Balban as his fief, was also in their hands. On the north-west Lahore, Uch and Multān were exposed to the constant inroads of the Mughuls of Ghaznī, and the ties which bound them to Delhi were now relaxed. The fiefs or districts in the heart of the kingdom were interspersed with tracts of country in the hands of powerful Hindu chieftains or confederacies. Immediately to the south of Delhi Mewāt, which included parts of the modern districts of Muttra and Gurgāon, most of Alwar, and part of the Bharatpur State, had never been permanently conquered, and the depredations of its inhabitants, the Meos, extended at times to the walls of Delhi and beyond the Jumna into the Doāb. The rich fiefs of the latter region supported strong Muslim garrisons but the disaffection of the Hindu inhabitants was, for long after the period of which we are writing, a menace to domestic peace, and the ferocious punishment inflicted on them by Muhammad Tughluq exasperated without taming them. After his time Etāwah became a stronghold of Rājput chieftains who gathered round themselves the most turbulent elements in the indigenous population, were frequently in revolt, and seldom recognised the authority of Delhi otherwise than by a precarious tribute.