The State in Ancient India: A Study in the Structure and Practical Working of Political Institutions in North India in Ancient Times c18.71

c18.71

conquered Sindh in 712 A.D. about the same time that their arms were crowned with victory in the far distant Spain. The Arab writers give a full account of the expeditions of the young hero Muhammad-bin-Qâsim and, incidentally, throw some light on the political condition of Sindh and the neighbouring regions. They are not accurate in all their details but in fundamentals they corroborate the conclusions which are reached on the basis of indigenous evidence. The dominant fact which emerges from the Arab accounts is that a feudalised confederation was the type of Hindu polity. The merchant Sulaimân’s Salsilatu-t Tawârikh, written in the middle of the ninth century and added to by Abû Zaidul Hasan of Sirâf in the following century, has it that the Balharâ was the most eminent of the princes of India, that all Indians acknowledged his superiority, that while every prince in India was master in his own state, all paid homage to the supremacy of the Balharâ. The latter’s representatives were everywhere received with the profoundest respect. A few pages later, the Arab writer slightly modifies his statement and says that the princes of India did not recognise the supremacy of any one sovereign, each one was his own master, still the Balharâ had the title ‘king of kings.’¹ Ibn Khurdabâ’s Kitâb-l Masâlik Wa-l Mamâlik, composed towards the close of the ninth or the beginning of the tenth century A.D. also calls the Balharâ king of kings.² In the tenth century two other writers, Al Masûdî, author of Murûjul Zahab and Al Idrisî, author of Nuzhatu-l Mushtak also speak of Balharâ as king of kings and the greatest king in India.³ Who this Balharâ was is not an easy question to answer. Probably he represented the dynasty at Ballabhî-pura but the difficulty of the identification does not affect the conclusion that India, so far as known to the Arabs, was split up into a large number of principalities which faintly recognised the suzerainty of an overlord. Another statement of the merchant Sulaimân confirms this view. "When a king subdues a neighbouring state, he places over it a man belonging to the family of the fallen prince, who carries on the government in the name of the conqueror. The inhabitants would not suffer it to be otherwise."¹ This feature of "conquest" which is also well brought out in Hindu literature and epigraphy, would serve to accentuate the federal-feudal character of Hindu political organisation. An idea of the usual size of a Hindu state is given by the Chach Nâmâ or Târîkh-i-Hind wa Sind, which, though composed in the 13th century, is based on older, authentic documents which go back to the eighth century A.D. There were no less than seventy chiefs ruling in Sindh.² The lines of some of these feudatories survived for long, bearing to the new Muslim power the relation in which they had stood to the Hindu suzerain. About the beginning of the 17th century A.D., the chronicler Mir Muhammad Mâsûm of Bhakkar, author of the Târîkh-u-s Sind, applied the term zemîndâr to all such feudatories.³ That expression today only means a landholder, but the sense in which the Muslim historians from the 13th to the 17th century A.D. used it to denote the nearly independent or semi-independent Hindu chieftains of the deserts, mountains, Râjpûtânâ, and Central India conveys the idea of the usual relationship of suzerain and vassal in Ancient India.