The Administration of the Sultanate of Dehli c7.4

c7.4

styled themselves sultans and did not assume the Mughul title of Pādishāh; they looked upon the Timurids as intruders whose rule was to be treated as an unpleasant episode. It is true that the restored Mughuls regarded the Sūrs as usurpers, whose memory was to be obliterated; yet from an impartial point of view, Sher Shāh’s achievement was too brilliant and too abiding to be treated as a mere interlude. In reality, there is hardly any choice left for a writer on the history of institutions. Sher Shāh did not borrow his administration from Bābur and Humāyūn; he had a hearty contempt for their ill-organized government.¹ His system was the natural development of a long tradition; his institutions had their roots in the experiments of the sultanate. The essentials of the Mughul administration, even after the highly-eulogized reforms of ‘the world-illuminating wisdom’ of Abū-l-Faḍl’s hero, were but an adaptation of the older system, sometimes not even thinly disguised. Yet, there are some remarkable changes under Akbar, and the end of the Sūr empire is a convenient date to stop and take stock of the ground won by the progress and evolution of institutions. It was Sher Shāh who started anew the administrative machinery of the sultanate; Akbar’s officials had only to add a wheel here and adjust a lever there. Chronologically the sultanate does not possess continuity; geographically it lacks territorial definition, for its boundaries constantly changed; it is only in the smooth evolution of institutions that the sultanate is revealed as a political entity. For this reason this treatise covers the period from 1206 to 1555.