Life and Conditions of the People of Hindustan (1200–1550 A.D.) c4.s1.t1: The Territory--Hindustan
Life and Conditions of the People of Hindustan (1200–1550 A.D.) c4.s1.t1
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The Territory--Hindustan
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In spite of their fairly good knowledge of the Indian and the Chinese sea coast, the Arab geographers of the eighth century were very vague in dealing with the lands of India and China (Hind and Chin). The land beyond the Indus (or the Sind of the Arabs) was little explored and China was believed to be situated in an undefined region to the north and the north-east of Sind, without, however, calculating the impenetrable walls of the Himalayas. In fact, many centuries afterwards, the attack of Sultan Muhammad Tughluq on the hills of Kamaon (called Qarajal) was supposed to encroach upon some region of the Chinese Peninsula. Similarly, when Muhammad Bakhtyar Khalji invaded northern Bengal or Assam, he actually imagined he was leading an invasion into Turkistan. The western world roughly divided India into three regions : one up to the Indus, second between the Indus and the Ganges, and the third beyond these two regions. Even so late as the reign of Queen Elizabeth, John Frampton had no better idea of the country beyond the west coast of India and to the north of Deccan than that this ‘third India’ which is the hygh India is surnamed Malabar and dothe extend unto Cauch, which is the river Gange’,¹ that there grew plenty of ‘sinamon and pearle’, and that the king and the people of this country worshipped the ‘oxe’. ² The one clear fact, however, which one gathers even from these observations is that the Indo-Gangetic plains were believed to form a separate geographical unit, distinguishable from the rest of the peninsula by a distinct type of culture.
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¹ Compare Frampton, 136.
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² Frampton, 7.
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Strong physical barriers have divided the north of India from the south; and the points of contact between the two regions have been very few in history and too feeble to effect a cultural fusion between the two peoples. Now and then, ambitious monarchs have attempted to unite the whole of India under one crown to immortalise themselves as a ‘chakravartin’; but the difficulties of communication and administrative control have uniformly thwarted their cherished desires. The well-known experiment of Sultan Muhammad Tughluq, namely the attempt to establish a centrally situated capital for the whole of the Indian Empire, met with complete failure. A few centuries later, the Mughal emperor Aurangzib again attempted to hold the Deccan and spent half his life in camp fighting in a vain attempt to achieve the impossible. In the end his successors, as those of Muhammad Tughluq, wisely contented themselves with their northern possessions. For the Hindu and the Muslim period it may be laid down almost as a historical law that the establishment of a kingdom within the confines of Hindustan signified its vigour and compactness, and an extension into the Deccan its dismemberment and ruin. This moral, of course, does not apply to the modern conditions of administration. Of these two divisions, the neighbouring parts resemble one another to a slight degree, but as one moves towards the extremities one notices the growing contrast, until at last the language, the religious sects, the architecture, the dress, the appearance, the diet—in fact, every aspect of social life appears to differ completely from the other.¹ It is not to be wondered at then, if these two regions (which Vincent Smith aptly describes as ‘geographical compartments’) developed a distinct and a highly complex story of their own.² In the light of these considerations, therefore, it is more convenient to study the social developments of Hindustan as a separate cultural region of the Indian peninsula.
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¹ Compare Elphinstone, 187.
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² Compare Smith iii; compare also Slater, Chap. I, 13—41 for the origin of the Dravidian Culture of the Deccan.
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However, when we come to fix the territorial and cultural limits of Hindustan we are faced with many difficulties. The central administration, usually established at Delhi, was practically the only unifying force in the country, and its territorial area differed from dynasty to dynasty, even from sovereign to sovereign. To put it negatively, we might say that strictly speaking, the land to the west of the Indus was not included in Hindustan, for the Sultans of Delhi had no effective political control over it, although isolated attempts may have been made to reduce some parts to subjection.¹ Kashmir was similarly shut off from the rest of India, and thus closed to the operation of direct influences from outside.² Again, inaccessibility kept the regions of Rajputana, Gondwana, and Assam more or less immune from effective interference of the Sultans of Delhi. It has been remarked that the kingdom of Delhi varied in its territorial extent from time to time. For example, when Bahlul Lodi was invited to take the throne some time after the invasion of Timur, almost every town had its own ruler, and the titular Sayyid monarch ruled only over the city of Delhi and a few neighbouring villages. So that the humorous people of Delhi used to remark that the dominions of the ‘Lord of the World’ extend from Delhi to Palam (a neighbouring village).³ On the other hand the kingdom of Sultan Muhammad Tughluq penetrated far into the Deccan, and a more central capital was found in Deogir in south. Between these two extremes lay varying types of monarchies, the extent of whose dominions was determined according to the rule of despotism, by the length of their swords. Roughly speaking, we may say that the territory of Hindustan, which was subject to more or less uniform political influences, comprised the Punjab, the valleys of the Indus, the Jumna and the Ganges as far as Gaur or Lakhnauti, and the fertile province of Oudh, with various strongholds such as Ajmer, Bayana, Ranthambhor, Gwalior, and Kalinjar to the West. It did not include the Himalayas, where Hindu princes ruled undisturbed; and a wide tract at the foot of the mountains, including the greater part of Katehr, the modern Rohilkhand, and the sub-montane tracts of Oudh were left unexplored.¹ The political territory, however, is hardly an adequate measure of the spheres of cultural influences, for in the course of time, even the inaccessible regions of Rajputana assimilated the culture of their neighbours so well that it became difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between a Rajput and a Mughal.
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¹ Compare T. F. I. 125 for the capture of Ghazni by a general of Sultan Nasir-ud-din Mahmud.
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² Compare A. N. I., 169 for the interesting observations of the Mughals on Kashmir as a place of refuge against the advance of Sher Shah.
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³ Compare T. D., 6.
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¹ Compare Sir Wolseley Haig in H. U. H. 3168; compare T. S. S. 74-75 for a hundred and thirteen thousand parganas (an administrative unit) of Sher Shah.