Delhi Sultanate Society and Culture: Nobles, Towns, Women, Sufis and Saints

Social Structure of the Delhi Sultanate

The Sultan and the Nobles: Court Life and the Karkhanas

The Sultan and his chief nobles lived at a standard comparable to the highest in the world at the time, that of the ruling classes of West and Central Asia. Balban kept a dazzling court designed to strike awe into visitors. Muhammad Tughlaq gave each noble two robes of honour a year, an estimated 200,000 robes in all, and gifts flowed on the Sultan's birthday, the nauroz or Persian new year, and the coronation day.

The royal karkhanas, the Sultan's workshops and stores, made silk, gold and silver ware for the court; one pair of the Sultan's shoes is said to have cost 70,000 tankas. Almost every Sultan kept a haram of queens and slave girls, with many servants to guard and serve them.

The nobles copied the Sultans, living in fine palaces amid servants, slaves and retainers and holding lavish feasts, though some patronised writers and artists. Alauddin repressed them, but they came into their own under the Tughlaqs. Muhammad Tughlaq's wazir had an income as large as the province of Iraq, Firuz's wazir Khan-i-Jahan received 15 lakh tankas, and Bashir, Firuz's ariz-i-mamalik, left 13 crores. Nobles bought land for gardens and orchards, and a new landed gentry began to form until the Sultanate broke up.

Merchants and Towns: Multanis, Khurasanis and Gujarati Traders

Better communications and a sound currency based on the silver tanka brought a definite growth of trade, and with it of towns. Ibn Battuta called Delhi the largest city in the eastern part of the Islamic world, and found Daulatabad its equal. Lahore and Multan, Kara and Lakhnauti, and Anhilwara and Cambay were the other great cities.

• Overland trade: Trade with Central and West Asia was in the hands of the Multanis, mostly Hindus, and the Khurasanis, who were Afghans, Iranians and others.
• Coastal trade: Marwaris and Gujaratis, many of them Jains, and Muslim Bohra merchants carried the trade between the ports and north India.
• Crafts: Bengal and Gujarat were famous for fine cloth, Sonargaon for raw silk and fine cotton, and the Turks brought the making of paper.

The merchants were rich. In Delhi Hindu merchants rode horses with costly trappings and celebrated their festivals with pomp, and Jain merchants paid for temples. Barani says the Multanis were so rich that the nobles ran to their houses to borrow whenever they wanted to hold a feast.

Town Life under the Delhi Sultanate: Slaves, Artisans and the Poor

The Turkish ruling class was urban, with a taste for town life, and many towns grew around military garrisons before becoming cultural centres. Their people were mixed, from lesser nobles and clerks for the government offices to shopkeepers, artisans and beggars. Teaching was largely in the hands of the ulama, the Muslim theologians, and most historians came from this class, so their writings reflect its opinions.

Slaves and domestic servants formed another large section. Slavery was old in India, West Asia and Europe; the usual way to get a slave was capture in war, and some were imported from Abyssinia. Skilled slaves could rise high, as Aibak's did, and Firuz Tughlaq collected about 180,000 slaves, many working in handicrafts. Slaves could marry and own some property, and freeing a slave was thought meritorious by Hindus and Muslims alike.

Food was cheap. Under Firuz a family of a man, his wife, a servant and one or two children could live on five tankas a month, so life was easy for a clerk or a soldier, but artisans and labourers lived hard. Medieval society was one of great inequalities, sharpest in the towns, though festivals and fairs relieved the lives of the poor.

Caste, Women and Community in Delhi Sultanate Society

Caste and Social Customs in Hindu Society

Hindu society changed little in its structure during this period. The smriti writers, the authors of the law-books, kept a high place for the brahmanas while denouncing unworthy ones, and some allowed brahmanas to take up agriculture even in normal times, since priestly work no longer gave a living.

The kshatriya alone held the right to bear arms to protect the people. The shudra's highest duty remained the service of others, though he could follow any occupation except dealing in liquor and meat; he was still barred from studying the Vedas, but not from hearing the Puranas. The severest restrictions fell on mixing with the chandalas and other outcastes.

Outside the towns, the old rural elite kept its place. Many Hindu rais, autonomous rajas, held their old estates and lived in style, and they stayed powerful even in areas under the Sultans' direct control.

Position of Women: Purdah, Sati and Property Rights

The position of women in Hindu society changed little. Early marriage for girls and the wife's duty of service to her husband continued; widow remarriage was counted among practices forbidden in the Kali Age, though this applied only to the three upper castes.

The spread of purdah has been explained by the fear of women being captured in an age of violence, but its most important cause was social. It became a mark of the higher classes, which everyone who wished to seem respectable copied. Whatever the reason, it harmed women and made them even more dependent on men.

Muslim Society and Hindu-Muslim Relations under the Sultanate

Muslim society was itself divided into ethnic groups, the Turks, Iranians, Afghans and Indian Muslims, who rarely married one another and developed something of the caste exclusiveness of the Hindus. Converts from the lower Hindu castes were also discriminated against.

The Hindu and Muslim upper classes had little social contact, partly from the superiority of the rulers and partly from Hindu rules on marriage and dining, which treated Muslims as they treated shudras. Yet the two met constantly. Hindu soldiers served in the Sultans' armies, most nobles had Hindu managers, and local administration stayed almost entirely in Hindu hands.

The picture of two communities shut off from each other is therefore neither real nor borne out by the evidence. Clashes of interest and differences of belief did create tension and slowed mutual understanding, but the exchange of ideas that the Sufis and the Bhakti saints carried further had already begun.

Religion and the State under the Delhi Sultanate

Nature of the State: Ulama, Zawabit and the Jizya

The Turkish state in India was militaristic and aristocratic. Noble birth remained a key qualification for high office, so most Muslims and Hindus had little chance of it, while Hindus dominated trade, formed the rural aristocracy and staffed the lower administration. A tacit sharing of power between the rural Hindu aristocracy and the city-based administrators held the Sultanate together.

In form the state was Islamic, but the Sultans did not let the theologians dictate policy. When divines asked Iltutmish to give the Hindus the choice of Islam or death, his wazir answered that Muslims were as few as salt in a dish of food. The Sultans added their own regulations, the zawabit, to the Muslim law, as explained in Alauddin Khalji's kingship.

Hindus were treated as zimmis, protected people who paid the jizya, a tax in lieu of military service graded by what each person could pay. Women, children and the poor were exempt, and so were the brahmanas until Firuz Tughlaq made the jizya a separate tax and levied it on them too. The jizya by itself could not force conversion; the state rested not on equality but on privilege, held now by the Turks and their allies instead of the Rajputs.

Religious Policy: Temples, Toleration and Conversion

In the first phase of conquest many cities were sacked and temples were a special target, to justify conquest and seize their treasure; some, as at the Quwwat-ul‑Islam mosque in Delhi, were turned into mosques. Once the Turks settled they built their own. The Muslim law they followed forbade new places of worship built in opposition to Islam but allowed old temples to be repaired, and placed no ban on temples in villages.

In time of war the enemy's temples were destroyed, but in peace, within Turkish territory and in the lands of rajas who had submitted, Hindus practised their religion openly. Barani records Jalaluddin Khalji complaining that idols were worshipped publicly even in the capital, and this broad toleration was kept up, with occasional lapses, through the Sultanate.

Conversion to Islam was not spread by the sword; if it had been, the people around Delhi would have been the first to convert. People converted for political gain, economic advantage or social standing, or followed a chief who converted. The Sufis welcomed Hindus and Muslims alike and were mostly unconcerned with conversion, though their saintly character made Islam more welcome.

Culture of the Delhi Sultanate: Sufis, Bhakti Saints and Amir Khusrau

Sufism under the Sultanate: The Chishti Khanqah

The Sufis organised their communities around the khanqah, a hospice led by a teaching master, the shaikh or pir, who enrolled disciples and named a successor. Each order or silsila, a word meaning chain, traced an unbroken line of master and disciple. Of the Sufis who came to India in the late twelfth century, the Chishtis were the most influential, because they adapted to Indian surroundings and adopted features of Indian devotion. The Suhrawardis, also active under the Delhi Sultans, were closer to the state.

Shaikh Nizamuddin Auliya's khanqah at Ghiyaspur on the Yamuna shows how it worked. Its big hall housed his family and disciples, its open kitchen, the langar, ran on unasked-for charity, and from morning to night soldiers, slaves, merchants, poets, rich and poor, and Hindu jogis came for blessings and help. The Chishtis in Delhi spoke Hindavi, the language of the people. Their full story is told in the Sufi silsilas in India.

Bhakti Saints of the Sultanate Age: Kabir, Ravidas and Namdev

Alongside the Sufis, the Bhakti saints carried a devotion that ignored caste and ritual. Kabir, who lived in the fifteenth century in today's Uttar Pradesh and was probably raised by a weaver couple, sang of one god and mocked the rituals of both Hinduism and Islam. Ravidas, born early in the sixteenth century into a family of leather-workers, preached the equality and oneness of all.

In Maharashtra Namdev and Dnyaneshwar, and later Tukaram, and saints in every region, composed in the languages of the people, so that devotion spread through song rather than learned texts. Sufi and Bhakti verse met: Baba Farid's verses entered the Guru Granth Sahib. The saints are treated in full in Nirguna Bhakti: Kabir, Guru Nanak and the Sants and the Bhakti movement.

Amir Khusrau, Hindavi and the Languages of the Sultanate

Amir Khusrau (1253 to 1325), poet, musician and disciple of Shaikh Nizamuddin Auliya, gave a new form to the Chishti sama, the gathering for music, by introducing the qaul, a hymn sung at the opening or close of a qawwali. Qawwals at Nizamuddin's shrine still begin with it.

Khusrau wrote mainly in Hindavi, an early form of Hindi-Urdu with the grammar and vocabulary of Indian languages, and is called the father of Urdu literature. The Turks used the word Hindavi for the language of the people east of the Indus. In this age Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Odia, Hindavi, Bengali and Marathi all flourished in daily speech and in poetry.

Khusrau is called Tuti-e-Hind, the parrot of India, and in his Nuh-Sipihr he praised Hindustan above other lands. His legacy is still celebrated. Jahan-e-Khusrau, an international festival of Sufi music, poetry and dance begun in 2001, marked its twenty-fifth year in 2025.

Sources

• NCERT: Themes in Indian History Part II (Class XII), Bhakti-Sufi Traditions
• NCERT: Exploring Society, India and Beyond (Class VIII)
• NCERT: Medieval India (Satish Chandra, Class XI, earlier edition), Economic and Social Life under the Delhi Sultanat
• Delhi Tourism (Govt of NCT of Delhi): History of Delhi
• Reserve Bank of India: Medieval Coinage
• Press Information Bureau: Jahan-e-Khusrau 2025
• Press Information Bureau: Address at Jahan-e-Khusrau 2025
• Wikipedia: Delhi Sultanate
• Wikipedia: Amir Khusrau
• Wikipedia: Ibn Battuta
• Wikipedia: Karkhana
• Wikipedia: Jizya
• UPSC: Civil Services Examination question papers