The Delhi Sultanate: Why It Matters for Understanding Our Past and the Consequences of Its Erasure

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

For the past several days, since the news emerged that the University of Delhi had removed the long-standing postgraduate paper on the Delhi Sultanate from its revised History syllabus, journalists, academics, and concerned citizens have been asking two pressing questions. First, what is the actual importance and significance of the Delhi Sultanate for understanding Indian history? Second, what would be the negative consequences of removing this period from the curriculum? These are not merely academic queries; they go to the heart of how we understand our past and how we educate future generations. These questions were put to me too. I will try to address them in my own way here.

The decision by Delhi University to drop the elective paper, titled “The Delhi Sultanate: Structures of Authority in Medieval North India (13th-14th Centuries)“, from the postgraduate syllabus is not an isolated incident. It is part of a broader pattern of invisibilising the so-called “Muslim Period” of Indian history. Some of the other omissions in the third semester include papers on “History of North India, c. 1400-1550”, “Gender and Women in Early India: 1500 BCE to 1000 CE”, “Political Processes and Structure of Polities in Ancient India” and “Religion and Society in Ancient Indian Literature”. This began with the “rationalisation” of NCERT school textbooks, which removed all references to the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal rulers from Class 7 textbooks and reduced chapters on the Mughal Empire in Class 12. Influential women icons like Raziyya Sultan and Nur Jahan were also omitted from new Class 8 NCERT textbooks. In the past I wrote and spoke on these at a number of places. Let me also state at the very beginning that I started my teaching career by teaching Delhi Sultanate to undergraduate level, before shifting to the Mughals, whom I generally taught to post graduate students.

The latest restructuring at Delhi University is part of the ongoing curriculum restructuring under the defective National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. The revised postgraduate programme has been prepared under the Postgraduate Curriculum Framework (PGCF) 2024 in accordance with NEP 2020. The university’s syllabus document confirms that the revised postgraduate programme is based on PGCF 2024 under NEP 2020 and is effective from July 2026. Of the 38 Discipline Specific Elective papers proposed by the History Department, only 16 were included in the final notification, leaving 22 proposed courses outside the final syllabus. Professor Maya John, a member of DU’s Academic Council, criticised the decision and described it as an “infringement of the autonomy of the History Department”. According to her, the reasons for the decision “appear political and not academic in nature”. CPI(M) general secretary M A Baby questioned whether excluding a major period of the capital’s history amounted to an attempt to erase Delhi’s own past. “Being in Delhi and attempting to erase Delhi’s own history requires some serious chutzpah,” he said. To me it is just anostep to replace history with mithya, the make believe which has no basis.

This essay argues that the Delhi Sultanate is of profound significance for comprehending Indian history and that its erasure, even as an elective paper, from educational curricula produces grave intellectual and cultural consequences.

The Sultanate as a Historical Bridge

The period from the establishment of Ghurid power in the late twelfth century to the advent of the Mughals in 1526 was not an inert interval between “ancient India” and the Mughal Empire. As Aniruddha Ray argues in his integrated history of the Sultanate, this was a period in which political authority, agrarian relations, urbanisation, military organisation, technologies, social groups, languages, religious traditions, and cultural practices underwent transformations whose consequences extended far beyond the Sultanate itself. The Sultanate serves as a crucial historical bridge, and to remove it is to remove one of the principal links between early medieval and early modern India, thereby making much of what came afterwards unintelligible.

This methodological point is central to Ray’s organisation of The Sultanate of Delhi (1206–1526): Polity, Economy, Society and Culture, where he deliberately divides his account between political history and a second part dealing with the structure of government, land, trade, commerce, urbanisation, architecture, science and technology, social life, and religious movements. His purpose is to move beyond narratives that merely recount political events and to offer an integrated understanding of the Sultanate as a formative phase in Indian civilisation. What disappears when the Sultanate disappears from a curriculum is therefore not simply the Khaljis and Tughluqs, but an entire phase in the development of the Indian economy, society, cities, technologies, and culture.

Challenging the “Dark Age” Paradigm

There is a revealing historiographical history behind attempts to marginalise medieval India. Ray recalls that colonial officials from the late eighteenth century onwards characterised India’s medieval centuries as a “Dark Age”, partly to contrast supposedly disordered pre-colonial conditions with the benefits claimed for British government. Some Indian writers subsequently reproduced this terminology. Ray consciously wrote his integrated history of the Sultanate partly to challenge precisely this representation.

To omit several centuries in which cities expanded, commercial networks intensified, coinage spread, new technologies appeared, architecture flourished, vernacular and Persian literary cultures developed, and major religious movements transformed Indian society risks reproducing in another form the old colonial assumption that medieval India was somehow an interruption in Indian civilisation. The Sultanate was certainly an age of warfare, conquest, exploitation, and social hierarchy. But so were many other periods of Indian and world history. None of these characteristics converts three centuries into an historical void. The task of the historian is to explain change, not to designate convenient centuries as darkness.

Mohammad Habib’s “Twin Revolutions”

A major historiographical contribution that must be considered is the pioneering work of Mohammad Habib, particularly his landmark introduction to the 1952 reprint of Elliot and Dowson’s History of India as Told by Its Own Historians. Rejecting both the colonial narrative of a “Dark Age” and the mere chronicling of dynasties, Habib employed a framework of historical materialism to reinterpret the Sultanate’s advent. He argued that the Ghurian conquest was not simply a foreign invasion but should be viewed as “a revolution of Indian city-labour led by the Ghurian Turks”.

This bold thesis rested on his concept of an “Urban Revolution“. He contended that the conquest catalysed the creation of new cities, making them “the sole repositories of the country’s civic sense”. These urban centres became engines of change, concentrating the surplus of the working classes and giving the Sultans a powerful new base. This urban dynamism was followed by a “Rural Revolution“, a transformation of the agrarian administration that was fundamental to the stability and power of subsequent empires. As Habib argued, without this prior revolution in the administrative machine, Alauddin Khalji’s far-reaching agrarian policies would have been impossible. By proposing this “twin revolution” thesis, Habib placed the Sultanate at the very heart of a profound socio-economic transformation, making its study indispensable for understanding the emergence of a new India.

State Formation, Urbanisation, and Economic Transformation

The Sultanate period is indispensable for understanding how states are made. Older histories often described Sultanate institutions as though they were stable from the beginning: Sultan, wazir, iqtaʿ, provincial governor, army, and bureaucracy. But these institutions changed substantially over time. Sunil Kumar demonstrates that political relationships were intensely personal, with free military commanders, slaves, princes, jurists, and local chiefs operating through overlapping networks of service, patronage, and allegiance. The bandagān, or military slaves, could rise to the highest military and political positions, yet their authority remained rooted in personal dependence upon rulers. This tension between a slave elite produced through service and dynastic monarchy seeking to transmit sovereignty through hereditary succession is a central lesson in how political power was actually negotiated and exercised.

The economic history of the Sultanate is equally transformative. The Cambridge Economic History of India identifies the emergence and domination of the Delhi Sultanate as marking “a very clear break with the region’s political past” and introducing “innovations of profound importance”. These include the successful creation of a military power sustained by the regular extraction of resources from an extensive territory, the emergence of a new ruling class with direct claims over shares of the produce, a proliferation of urban centres, and the growth of new manufactures such as paper and lime mortar. Ray shows that maritime commerce between India and western Asia long predated the Sultanate but intensified and changed direction as larger Indian Ocean networks developed. Within the Sultanate, cash circulation expanded substantially, with the rapid increase in currency from the early fourteenth century linked with cash revenue payments, the movement of agricultural produce to towns, and the expansion of commercial exchange. A society in which agricultural surplus increasingly moves through markets, taxes are increasingly expressed in money, roads sustain caravans, and towns absorb rural produce is undergoing significant structural change.

Opening India to the Wider World

The Sultanate dramatically intensified India’s connections with the wider world. This was not a period of isolation but of unprecedented integration. The establishment of the Sultanate opened up India to a multitude of external economic, social, and religious influences, weaving the subcontinent more tightly into the fabric of the medieval world.

This external interaction is visible in the very structure of the state. As Sunil Kumar and Peter Jackson have shown, the Sultanate’s political and military elite was composed of a continuous flow of immigrants, slaves, and adventurers from Central Asia, Persia, and Afghanistan, who were then integrated into the Indian political order. Ray demonstrates how these immigrants, such as the Afghans, settled, acquired landed interests, and became key elements of the ruling class. Simultaneously, the Indian Ocean trade networks that Ray highlighted link India to West Asia, Southeast Asia, and China, making the subcontinent a vital node in a globalised medieval economy. To remove the Sultanate is to erase this crucial period of re-integration, making it seem as though India was a passive recipient of global forces rather than an active participant.

Delhi as a Political Idea

One of the most consequential developments of these centuries was the emergence of Delhi as a major centre of political authority. This did not occur instantaneously. Sunil Kumar demonstrates that north India during the thirteenth century contained numerous competing centres of power, with the rulers of Delhi not continuously dominant. Peter Jackson’s detailed political history reinforces this: governors rebelled, Bengal might remain beyond effective control for years, and the central government sometimes granted the same iqtaʿ to rival commanders, allowing political competition to resolve the issue. That makes Delhi’s eventual durability more historically significant, not less. The Sultanate period is the period during which Delhi became not simply another north Indian city but a political idea. Remove the Sultanate and the subsequent importance of Delhi under the Mughals and even in 1857 becomes historically inexplicable.

The Mongol Challenge and India’s Eurasian Connections

Peter Jackson brings another aspect of the Sultanate into particularly sharp focus: its confrontation with the Mongols. The Mongol invasions formed part of one of the greatest transformations in Eurasian history. States across Central Asia and Iran vastly more established than the Delhi Sultanate were overwhelmed. Yet the Mongols repeatedly failed to conquer the central territories of the Sultanate. Jackson shows that pressure became particularly intense during Alauddin Khalji’s reign, when invasions of unprecedented scale threatened Delhi itself. This danger reshaped military organisation, with Balban developing forces specifically intended to guard the frontier and Alauddin maintaining substantial armies both against the Mongols and for campaigns within India. Had the Sultanate collapsed under Mongol pressure, the subsequent history of the subcontinent might have developed very differently. The Sultanate consequently forms part of the history not merely of India but of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Eurasia.

Social Mobility and Complex Hindu-Muslim Relations

Perhaps one of Ray’s most useful contributions is his emphasis upon social mobility. The Sultanate’s political establishment initially favoured Central Asian immigrant elites, but such monopolies could not be sustained indefinitely. As the state expanded, it required administrators, soldiers, accountants, and educated personnel on a scale that established aristocratic families alone could not supply. Ray notes the increasing entry of Indian Muslims, converts, persons of comparatively humble background, Hindus, and other groups into state service. This is precisely where the chronicler Barani becomes especially revealing: his anxiety about “low-born” persons entering education and public service tells us that social barriers were in fact being breached.

Ray’s evidence is especially useful in challenging simplistic narratives of Hindu-Muslim confrontation. He notes that Hindu soldiers served in Sultanate armies, Hindu commanders could hold significant military positions, Muslim nobles employed Hindu managers and accountants, and Hindus participated in local administration. This does not mean that medieval society was free of religious discrimination, exclusion, or violence. It was not. But it does demonstrate that social and political life cannot be reduced to “Hindu rulers versus Muslim rulers”. People interacted through administration, commerce, warfare, employment, craft production, and neighbourhood life even when religious and social boundaries remained strong. The historian’s task is precisely to explain how cooperation, inequality, conflict, and accommodation existed simultaneously.

The Sufi-Bhakti Crucible

The Sultanate era was not defined by monolithic religious confrontation but by a dynamic and complex process of cultural and spiritual exchange. Mohammad Habib persistently emphasised the historical role of the Sufis in creating a “culture of tolerance, accommodation and appreciation of difference”. Figures like the Chishti saint Nizamuddin Auliya, who maintained a deliberate independence from the court, were instrumental in this process. This was also the age of Amir Khusrau, who embodied the cultural synthesis of the period, seamlessly blending Persian and Indian traditions.

Simultaneously, the Bhakti movement was gaining momentum, with saints and poets across the subcontinent challenging orthodoxies and fostering personal devotion. The interaction between these two powerful currents created a fertile ground for new religious expressions and social ideas. Ray draws attention to another dimension: Sufi criticism of social inequality could attract members of disadvantaged social groups, including Hindus, and create spaces of interaction below the level of court politics. He even raises the suggestive question of whether such social experiences formed part of the much longer background against which Akbar’s sulh-i kul later emerged. One need not accept a simple linear progression from Sufism to sulh-i kul to recognise the larger importance of the point. The religious history of Mughal India did not begin with Akbar. Nor did Bhakti or Sufi interaction suddenly emerge in the sixteenth century. Their historical worlds had been taking shape for centuries. To excise the Sultanate is to remove the very crucible in which so much of India’s subsequent religious and cultural identity was forged.

Amir Khusrau and the Cultural Transformation of India

The Sultanate period is equally indispensable to linguistic and literary history. Amir Khusrau alone makes this evident. A major Persian poet, court intellectual, musician, and disciple of Nizamuddin Auliya, he inhabited simultaneously the Persianate literary world and the social world of India. Ray stresses the extraordinary evidentiary value of his writings. Khaza’in al-Futuh, Tughluqnama, Qiran al-Sa’dain, his letters and literary writings provide information not only on campaigns but on education, court culture, social life, and the religious world of Delhi. Persian became deeply rooted as a language of administration, historical writing, and high culture while interacting with Indian vernaculars. The linguistic environment from which Hindavi and ultimately the Hindi-Urdu continuum developed cannot be explained if the Sultanate is omitted. Cultures do not appear suddenly when dynasties change.

Science and Technology: A Society That Was Not Stagnant

Ray’s discussion of science and technology makes the case even stronger. Among the developments associated with these centuries were the spinning wheel, improved irrigation devices, distillation techniques, advances in military technology, architectural engineering, and the expanding use of paper and specialised craft knowledge. Ray explicitly rejects the idea that Indian society in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was technologically stagnant. He argues that peasants and artisans adopted new technologies when these increased production or market opportunities, and that technological change interacted with commercialisation and social relations. The spinning wheel is a particularly striking example. Ray, following earlier economic historians, notes that its adoption enormously increased the production of yarn, thereby influencing textile manufacture and commerce. He similarly links irrigation developments and the canals of Firoz Shah Tughluq with agricultural production. Even where historians disagree over precise origins and chronology, these debates demonstrate something fundamental: medieval India was technologically dynamic. To remove the Sultanate from education reinforces precisely the false image of technological immobility that historical scholarship has spent generations challenging.

Architecture as Historical Evidence

The built environment provides the most visible demonstration of the formative character of these centuries. Mosques, tombs, minarets, forts, reservoirs, madrasas, and urban complexes developed through interaction among imported architectural traditions, Indian craftsmen, regional building materials, and existing techniques. The Qutb complex, Siri, Tughluqabad, Jahanpanah, Firozabad, Hauz Khas, and the Lodi monuments are not merely picturesque remains. They are historical documents. They reveal changing engineering, patronage, labour organisation, urban development, and aesthetic interaction. Ray’s decision to devote a separate chapter to architecture and sculpture is therefore important. His overall structure places architecture alongside economy, technology, and social history rather than treating monuments as decorative appendages to political narrative. To preserve Sultanate buildings as “heritage” while removing the history that produced them would be profoundly contradictory. Heritage without historical context becomes spectacle.

Different Historians, Different Sultanates

The significance of the period becomes still clearer when one examines the very different ways historians have interpreted it. A. L. Srivastava, Mohammad Habib, Peter Jackson, Sunil Kumar, and Aniruddha Ray do not present the same Delhi Sultanate. Their disagreements concern fundamental historical questions. Was the Sultanate essentially foreign, or did it become rooted in India? Was it a theocracy, a military state, an exploiting ruling order, or a political formation whose religious ideology had constantly to negotiate with social reality? Did centralisation originate with rulers in Delhi or emerge through negotiations among rulers, military commanders, and local chiefs? How important were cities and commercialisation? Did conquest produce social transformation? What was the relationship between migration and indigenous developments? How far did technology reshape production?

Such disagreements are not reasons for excluding the Sultanate. They are reasons for teaching it. History becomes meaningful when students see that interpretations are arguments grounded in evidence rather than truths handed down for memorisation. Students would lose an opportunity to understand historical disagreement itself if the Sultanate were removed. No single interpretation should be converted into an authorised narrative. They should be read against one another. That is what studying history means.

The Costs of Erasure

The damage caused by removing the Delhi Sultanate from historical study is not that students will forget the dates of Iltutmish, Razia, Balban, Alauddin Khalji, or Muhammad bin Tughluq. The real loss is conceptual. Students will lose the ability to understand:

· how Delhi became a major political centre;
· how conquest evolved into state formation;
· how personal military networks developed into changing administrative structures;
· how military slaves became nobles and rulers;
· how the Sultanate survived the Mongol transformation of Eurasia;
· how revenue, military necessity, and political centralisation became interconnected;
· how local chiefs negotiated with imperial authority;
· how northern India and the Deccan became more closely connected;
· how towns expanded and craft production developed;
· how monetary circulation and commercial exchange intensified;
· how India participated in Indian Ocean and Eurasian trade;
· how technological change affected textiles, irrigation, warfare, and production;
· how migrants, converts, slaves, artisans, and local elites experienced differing forms of social mobility;
· how Persian became an Indian language of administration and high culture;
· how Sufi and Bhakti worlds developed;
· how architecture emerged through interaction rather than civilisational isolation;
· how the foundations of much that characterised Mughal India had been laid centuries earlier.

As historian Mridula Mukherjee observed, “Continuity is essential to any historical narrative. Big gaps distort understanding. That’s not how history is written or taught”. She warned that excluding such formative periods disrupts the chronological flow and prevents students from grasping the evolution of Indian society. The removal of the Sultanate from educational curricula reinforces precisely the false image of technological and social immobility that historical scholarship has spent generations challenging.

The Sources Teach Historical Method

The Sultanate deserves a substantial place in education for another reason: its sources teach students how historical knowledge is produced. Minhaj-i Siraj, Amir Khusrau, Ziyauddin Barani, Shams-i Siraj Afif, Ibn Battuta, malfuzat, inscriptions, coins, and architecture do not tell identical stories. Ray himself begins with a chapter on sources and insists upon combining Persian and Arabic chronicles with inscriptions, coins, regional-language materials, and travellers’ accounts. He notes that political history provided the traditional framework, but after Independence historians increasingly investigated agrarian history, urbanisation, social conditions, and regional histories through a wider body of evidence. His treatment of Barani is particularly instructive. Ray regards Barani as indispensable, especially for economic and social information, yet simultaneously warns of inaccuracies, memory, personal circumstances, and authorial motivation. Sunil Kumar carries this methodological critique still further, asking not only whether chronicles are factually reliable but how their categories and narratives themselves construct political meaning. Students therefore learn one of the most important lessons of historical education: sources must be interrogated, not merely believed.

Why the Sultanate Is Essential for Understanding the Mughals

The most obvious consequence of removing the Sultanate is the enormous explanatory gap created before Mughal India. Babur did not enter an India without a political history. By 1526, Delhi had acquired centuries of political prestige. Persian was deeply rooted in government and literature. A monetised economy and extensive minting traditions already existed. The iqtaʿ had undergone centuries of experimentation. Revenue extraction had increasingly connected villages with the state. Long-distance trade linked northern India to the coasts and Indian Ocean. Urban centres supported large populations of artisans, merchants, officials, and scholars. North India and the Deccan had been brought into sustained political interaction. Sufi institutions were deeply established. Military elites had long incorporated Turks, Afghans, Indian Muslims, Rajputs, and others. State workshops, or karkhanas, were already established institutions. Ray explicitly observes that the karkhana was among the Sultanate institutions that continued into Mughal times and that its basic structure displayed substantial continuity. The Mughal Empire therefore transformed an already transformed India. To jump from an earlier period directly to Akbar is to make Mughal state formation look almost miraculous.

History Cannot Be Understood by Removing Difficult Centuries

There is a larger principle at stake. The purpose of historical education is not to manufacture a comforting genealogy for the present. Nor is it to divide the past into centuries that supposedly belong to one religious community and centuries belonging to another. Historical periods do not become dispensable because they are politically uncomfortable.

The Delhi Sultanate was born from conquest, but it became rooted in India. Its rulers invoked Islamic legitimacy, but political necessity repeatedly constrained religious prescription. Its armies fought Hindu rulers and also employed Hindu soldiers. Its nobility contained Turks, Khaljis, Afghans, Indian Muslims, converts, and men of slave origin. Its cities drew migrants while creating opportunities for Indian artisans. Its Persian literary culture interacted with Indian languages. Its economy became increasingly monetised. Its merchants participated in commercial networks extending across Asia. Its Sufis could challenge both social hierarchy and political authority. Its architects created forms that could not have emerged without the labour and skills of Indian craftsmen. Its institutions became part of the inheritance received and transformed by the Mughals.

To conclude, Aniruddha Ray’s integrated treatment is especially important here. His entire book is, in effect, an argument against defining the Sultanate by its dynasties alone. By including trade, cities, technology, architecture, society, and religion, he demonstrates that these three centuries belonged to the continuing history of Indian civilisation rather than constituting a blank space between two supposedly more legitimate periods.

To erase the Sultanate would therefore do more than shorten a syllabus. It would break historical connections. It would leave the Mughal period without its institutional and cultural prehistory, urbanisation without part of its development, economic history without crucial stages of monetisation and commerce, religious history without the formative centuries of Sufi-Bhakti interaction, and architectural history without some of India’s most important experiments in form and technology.

The past is not an inheritance from which inconvenient centuries may be deleted. It is a connected process of continuity, rupture, conflict, adaptation, and change. The Delhi Sultanate belongs in the curriculum not because it must be celebrated, defended, or condemned, but because without understanding these three centuries we cannot adequately understand the making of medieval India, the emergence of early modern India, or the historical processes through which the society we inhabit eventually came into being.

Select Reading List

1. Elliot, H. M., and John Dowson. The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians. Vol. II. With an Introduction by Mohammad Habib. Cosmopolitan Publishers, 1952.
2. Habib, Mohammad. Studies in Medieval Indian Polity and Culture: The Delhi Sultanate and Its Times. Edited by Irfan Habib. Oxford University Press, 2015.
3. Habib, Mohammad, and Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, eds. A Comprehensive History of India: The Delhi Sultanate (A.D. 1206-1526). Vol. V. People’s Publishing House, 1970.
4. Jackson, Peter. The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
5. Kumar, Sunil. The Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate, 1192-1286. Permanent Black, 2007.
6. Kumar, Sunil. “When Slaves Were Nobles: The Shamsi Bandagan in the Early Delhi Sultanate.” Studies in History 10 (1994): 23-52.
7. Ray, Aniruddha. The Sultanate of Delhi (1206–1526): Polity, Economy, Society and Culture. Routledge, 2019.
8. Raychaudhuri, Tapan, and Irfan Habib, eds. The Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume 1: c. 1200-c. 1750. Cambridge University Press, 1982.
9. Srivastava, A. L. The Sultanate of Delhi. Shiva Lal Agarwala, 1950.