Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India c8.s3.13

c8.s3.13

In short, a substantial portion of the produce was taken away by the government as taxes and the people were left with the bare minimum for sustenance. For the Sultan had "directed that only so much should be left to his subjects (*raiyyat*) as would maintain them from year to year... without admitting of their storing up or having articles in excess". It is from this point of time that the Indian peasant was made to maintain himself and his family from one harvest to the next. In the coming years and centuries, there is repeated mention in the chronicles about the rulers' directives to protect the peasant from undue exactions which seems to have become the common practice. Sultan Alauddin's rigorous measures were taken note of by contemporary writers both in India and abroad. In India contemporary writers like Barani, Isami and Amir Khusrau were inclined to believe him to be a persecutor of the Hindus. Foreigners also gathered the same impression. Maulana Shamsuddin Turk, a divine from Egypt, was happy to learn that Alauddin had made the wretchedness and misery of the Hindus so great and had reduced them to such a despicable condition "that the Hindu women and children went out begging at the doors of the Musalmans."¹¹³ The same impression is betrayed in the writings of Isami and Wassaf.¹¹⁴ While summing up the achievements of Alauddin Khalji, the contemporary chronicler Barani mentions, with due emphasis, that by the last decade of his reign the submission and obedience of the Hindus had become an established fact. Such a submission on the part of the Hindus "has neither been seen before nor will be witnessed hereafter". In brief, not only the Hindu Zamindars, who had been accustomed to a life of comfort and dignity, were reduced to a deplorable position, but the Hindus in general were impoverished to such an extent that there was no sign of gold or silver left in their houses, and the wives of Khuts and Muqaddams (Zamindars) used to seek sundry jobs in the houses of the Musalmans, work there and receive wages.¹¹⁵ The poor peasants (*balahars*) suffered the most. The fundamentalist Maulana Ziyauddin Barani feels jubilant at the suppression of the Hindus, and writes at length about the utter helplessness to which the peasantry had been reduced because the Sultan had left to them bare sustenance and had taken away every thing else in Kharaj (land revenue) and other taxes.¹¹⁶