The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c20.398

v3.c20.398

After the retirement of the Mughuls the king remained for some time at Delhi, where he had an account to settle with his people. The citizens were enraged against their sovereign, whose removal of the court to Daulatābād had gone far towards ruining Delhi and depriving those who had preferred to remain of their livelihood. Open resistance to a bloodthirsty tyrant who could count on the fidelity of his troops was not to be thought of, and the citizens vented their spleen by the characteristically oriental means of anonymous letters, filled with reproaches, invective, and abuse, which were thrown at night into the hall of audience. The tyrant avenged himself by issuing the monstrous decree that every soul should leave Delhi and migrate to Daulatābād, more than six hundred miles distant to the south. Some attempt was made to provide funds for the journey and accommodation on the way, but the decree was rigorously enforced and these measures were utterly inadequate to relieve the sufferings of the inhabitants of a whole city. ‘The king ordered all the inhabitants to migrate from Delhi to Daulatābād, and, on their hesitating to obey, issued a proclamation that nobody should remain in the city for more than three days longer, and the greater part of them moved out, but some of them hid themselves in their houses, and he ordered a search to be made for those who had remained, and his slaves found in the narrow streets of the city two men, one of whom was a cripple and the other blind, and they brought them before him, and he ordered that the lame man should be cast from a *balista* and that the blind man should be dragged from Delhi to Daulatābād, which is forty days’ journey, and he was rubbed to pieces on the way, so that nothing but his foot reached Daulatābād. When he did this all the people departed from Delhi and left their goods and their wealth, and the city was left without inhabitants and deserted¹.’ Large numbers perished by the way and the greater part of those who reached their journey’s end never ceased to mourn for their old homes. It was nothing to them that they dwelt in a city of which the courtly poet sang that the heavens were the anvil of the knocker of its door, that its gates were the eight gates of paradise, and much more in the same strain of exaggeration. To them the city was a foreign land, and the magnificence of its buildings, the fertility of the soil, and the beauty and majesty of the landscape could not appease their longings for the imperial city of the Jumna. After the wretched citizens had been driven forth on their perilous and toilsome journey the king, standing by night on the roof of his palace and looking over the city which he had made desolate rejoiced to see that no smoke rose and that neither lamp nor fire shone in its deserted dwellings. ‘Now,’ said he, ‘is my heart content and my soul appeased.’