Muslim Slave System in Medieval India c10.11

c10.11

In the early period some angry rulers like Balban and Muhammad bin Tughlaq hunted down these escapists in the jungles like wild beasts. Muhammad Tughlaq was very keen on enslaving people and converting them to Islam. The flight of peasants sent him into paroxyms of rage. Many other rulers captured and clamped them in jails, but by and large the peasants did succeed in fighting the enslavement policy of the Muslim regime and did survive in the process.⁶ Nature, climate and determination were on their side. Amir Khusrau, Ziyauddin Barani and Vidyapati and many chroniclers of the fifteenth century described how the Muslims dominated the infidels through powerful armies.⁷ But the latter fortify themselves in mountains (and uneven and rugged places) as well in bamboo groves which serve them as ramparts, writes Ibn Battutah.⁸ Two hundred years later Babur also noted that in many parts of the plains thorny jungles grow, behind the good defence of which the people become stubbornly rebellious Timur, when he invaded India, describes the defences provided by forests. The defence of the people, writes he, consists of woods and forests and trees, which interweaving with stem and branch, render it very difficult to penetrate the country (where) landlords and princes who inhabit fastnesses in those forests live there like wild beasts.⁹ This was in response to the policy of enslavement and proselytization practised by the sultans and their governors in all the centuries of Muslim rule. Even a weak Sultan like Khizr Khan, and indeed all Saiyyad rulers (1414-51) put the countryside of the Doab-Katehar region to indiscriminate plunder w e the Rajas an Zamindars retaliated with scorched earth policy. Like Ikhtiyaruddin Bakhtiyar Khalji before him, Bahlul Lodi also turned a freebooter in his exertions to attain to power and with his gains from plunder built up a strong force. This policy of totally destroying villages and towns continued even when he became the Sultan. According to Abdullah, the Sultan plundered Nimsar Misrik in Hardoi district and depopulated it of all riff-raff and undesirable elements.¹⁰ In the fifteenth century important Afghan governors like those of Bihar, Ghazipur, Avadh and Lakhnau had thirty to forty thousand retainers each. What havoc they must have created can only be imagined.