Life and Conditions of the People of Hindustan (1200–1550 A.D.) c5.s1.43

c5.s1.43

After this digression, let us revert to the Sultan and examine how his powers though absolute and unlimited in theory had to submit to certain well-marked modifications in actual practice. In the circumstances so far dwelt upon, the Sultans (as their Hindu predecessors before them) were faced with an irresistible temptation to confine the main functions of government to what were usually termed the two royal duties of *Jahangiri* and *Jahandari*, or the conquest and consolidation of new territories. Small, prosperous, and well-managed kingdoms were outside the scheme of their political ideas. Hardly a true Sultan but was haunted by the ambition of territorial expansion, until at last the invasions of the Deccan were looked upon as a ‘necessary departmental section of the administration of Empire’.¹ To begin with, before the possessions of Iltutmish were consolidated, dreams of conquest began to overpower the imagination of Sultan Balban who worked out his ideas almost with the precision of mathematical formulae. He was extremely sorry that the state of affairs in his kingdom did not permit him to put them into practice against the distant kingdoms of Hindu rulers.² It was a most miserable situation indeed for a Sultan to find himself occupied with the prosaic problems of every-day administration, when another adventurous and fortunate leader of men was leading his armies into the field or besieging a fortress.³ Distance and physical barriers were no impediment to this ambition for conquest. Bakhtyar Khalji had very early pointed the way in the direction of Tibet.⁴ At a later date Muhammad Tughluq was making plans to conquer Khurasan to the west and other lands beyond. In this respect, however, ‘Ala-ud-din Khalji leads them all, for he dreamt of going about the world as the second Alexander, and ruling the kingdom of Delhi, as so many others, through a deputy.⁵ When the monarch condescended to confine himself to the conquest of the Deccan, for practical reasons, this position was only too mortifying to the ambitious monarch and to his rich imagination. Briefly speaking, the Sultans went on conquering one country after another until the kingdom became too unwieldy for administrative purposes and sank under its own weight. However, the growth of the Sultanat symbolized continuous territorial expansion and warfare. This conspicuous feature of the Sultanate imperceptibly set certain limits to the unbounded powers of the monarch. No foreign conquest was possible without peace within the kingdom. Before making war on the enemy, it was necessary for the Sultan to make peace with his own subjects.¹