Delhi Sultanate

Mm-hmm.

It was run by the Mughals, and before the Mughals, they were run by the Delhi Sultanate.

I am massively oversimplifying, but over the last 1,000 years, India has effectively had no truly united or stable period of self-rule.

Wow.

And even before the Delhi Sultanate, self-rule was mixed, often with foreign-

Oh, no

... invaders taking out huge swaths of the land.

It's a massive geographical nuance that completely changes how we view the era.

Sussman analyzed the primary sources from the Delhi Sultanate, which ruled much of India during the fourteenth century.

And what did he find?

He found absolutely zero evidence of any serious epidemic matching the plague.

For now, Ibn Battuta rides east across the last of the frozen grass, the ordu's tents shrinking behind him into the flat white distance, the memory of bells and domes and mosques of felt still fresh in his mind, and somewhere ahead of him, though he cannot yet see it, the shape of Delhi is already forming on the horizon of his life, waiting for the day his footsteps finally arrive to meet it.

Chapter six, Judge of the Delhi Sultanate, thirteen thirty-three to thirteen forty-one.

The road east from Khorasan does not announce itself as a road at all.

It is a suggestion, a rumor of passage worn into the earth by ten thousand years of caravans, armies, pilgrims, and refugees, and Ibn Battuta follows it now with a company that has grown larger than any he has led before.

A ruler who gives away fortunes to foreign scholars with one hand, and who is rumored in the same breath to have executed men for offenses that seem, from a safe distance, entirely arbitrary.

He crosses.

The customs officials of the Delhi Sultanate, alert to the arrival of any party of consequence, take an inventory of his goods, his companions, his animals, for the frontier of the Sultanate is administered with a bureaucratic thoroughness that surprises him even after the courts of Cairo, and he understands very quickly that he has entered a state that governs itself through paperwork and record as much as through the sword.

And it is here, on the far bank of the Indus, that Ibn Battuta makes a decision that will define the shape of the next eight years of his life.

Okay.

Naan spread to the Indian subcontinent during the Islamic Delhi Sultanate period, which-

Okay

...

Like, like how I made it this morning.

That's exactly right.

Figure, you know, like, in the period of the Delhi Sultanate, so 1200 to 1500-ish, uh, it was primarily nobles and royal families-

Mm

It also means that there is undermining of the contribution of the Mughals and, in many ways, ignoring or underplaying the shared past of India.

Is it all that is to the book or do we have more? Is there something right about such approach to history or maybe we are reading too much into it? This process has been going on since 2023 with successive editions of history books underplaying the contribution of, first of Delhi Sultanate, later the Mughals.

We get to know the rights and wrongs of this book and indeed the facts of history with Professor Hassan.

Welcome, Professor Hassan.