Khilij Dynasty
The
Khiljis (or
Khaljis; -
Sulṭanat-e
Khilji Hindi: सलतनत ख़िलजी) were a dynasty of
Afghan Khilji (Ghilzai)]] origin who ruled large parts of South Asia from 1290 - 1320. They were
the second Muslim dynasty to rule the
Delhi Sultanate of India.
History
This dynasty, like the previous Slave dynasty, was of Turkic
origin, though the Khalji tribe had long been found in modern
Afghanistan along with the Ghaznavids, who were originally of
Qarluq origin. The three kings of the Khaljis
were noted for their faithlessness, their ferocity, and their
penetration of the Indian south. Although the kings were members of
the Khalji tribes and therefore of Turkic origin, the court was of
multi-ethnical background, filled with ministers, vezirs, poets,
writers, teachers etc. of Persian, Indian, Arab, Turkic origin. The
most elemental influence came from central Asia's Iranian
population (
Tajiks) and Iranized
slaves, mostly
Turks, brought by
famous intellectuals,
Sufis, scientists,
physicians and noble families and noble warrior tribes (Daylamites,
Assassines and Ayyars from
Khorasan).
The term
Khilji was their self-designation,
(see also Ibn Batuta's and Ibn Khaldun's excessive quantity)
meaning in Turkic languages "swordsman" or in Ottoman-Turkish "long
arm" or "long fingers" and in
Pashtu "thief".
Originated from upper central Asia, they came in contact with the
Iranian population of
Khorasan and
thus with the native ruling class, the
Ghaznavids and later
Ghurids, who islamized them in slavery and taught
them the Khorasanian's urbane culture, language and civilization.
During the Ghaznavid periode, the Khalji Turks were ruled for a
short time by the Turkoman
Seljuqs, who
expanded their empire from anatolian
Rum to
Baluchistan, until they were
droven out by the alliance of Ghurids. Under the Ghurids, the
Khaljis had still the slave-statue as before under the Ghaznavids
and played a role in Ghurid's slave army,
Bardagân-e
Nezâmi, also called
Ghilman.
Ikhtiar Uddin Muhammad bin Bakhtiar Khilji,
one of the servants of Qutb-ud-din
Aybak who was himself an ex-slave of the Ghurids and of Turkic
background and an Indo-Ghurid Shah (king) and
founder of the Delhi Sultanat, conquered Bihar
and Bengal
regions of
India in the late 12th century. From this time, the Khiljis
became servants and vassals of the
Mamluk dynasty of Delhi. From 1266
to his death in 1290, the Sultan of Delhi was officially
Ghiyas ud din Balban, another servant
of Qutab-ud-din Aybak. Balban’s immediate successors, however, were
unable to manage either the administration or the factional
conflicts between the old Turkic nobility and the new forces, led
by the Khaljis. After a struggle between the two factions,
Jalal ud din Firuz Khilji was
established by a noble faction of Turkic, Persian, Arabic and
Indian-Muslim aristocrates on the collapse of the last feeble Slave
king, Kay-Qubadh. Their rise to power was aided by impatient
outsiders, some of them Indian-born Muslims, who might expect to
enhance their positions if the hold of the followers of Balban and
the Forty (members of the royal
Loya
Jirga) were broken. Jalal-ud-din was already elderly, and for a
time he was so unpopular, because his tribe was thought to be close
to the nomadic Afghans, that he dared not to enter the capital.
During his
short reign (1290-96), some of Balban's officers revolted due to
this assumption but Jalal-ud-din suppressed them, led an
unsuccessful expedition against Ranthambhor
, and defeated a substantial Mongol force on the
banks of the Sind River in central
India.
Juna Khan,
his nephew and son-in-law was ordered by his father to lead an
expedition with ca. 4000-7000 men into the Hindu Deccan
where the
conquered countries had refused obedience and to capture Ellichpur
and it's treasure and possibly it was also his
father's order to murder his uncle after his return in 1296.
However, the prince is considered to be the greatest among the
Khiljis, due to successfully repelling of two invasions from the
Mongols.
With the title of
Ala ud din
Khilji, Juna Khan reigned for 20 years. He captured
Ranthambhor (1301) and Chitor (1303), conquered Māndu (1305), and
captured and annexed the wealthy Hindu kingdom of Devagiri. He also
repelled Mongol raids. Ala-ud-din’s lieutenant, Malik Kafur, a
native Muslim Indian, was sent on a plundering expedition to the
south in 1308, which led to the capture of Warangal, the overthrow
of the
Hoysala Dynasty south of the
Krishna River, and the occupation of Madura in the extreme south.
Malik Kafur returned to Delhi in 1311, laden with spoils.
Thereafter, the empire felt into a deep political and family
decadence. The sultan died in early 1316. Malik Kafur’s attempted
usurpation ended with his own death. The last Khalji,
Qutb ud din Mubarak Shah, was
murdered in 1320 by former Indian slave who was also chief minister
and his friend,
Khusraw Khan, who was in
turn replaced by
Ghiyath al-Din
Tughluq, the first ruler of the Turkic
Tughluq dynasty.
A remnant of the
ruling house of the Khaljis ruled in Malwa
from 1436 to 1530/31 until the Sultan of Gujarat
cleansed
their entire nobility.
To some extent then, the Khalji usurpation was a move toward the
recognition of a shifting balance of power, attributable both to
the developments outside the territory of the Delhi sultanate, in
Central Asia and Iran, and to the changes that followed the
establishment of Turkic rule in northern India.
In large measure, the dislocation in the regions beyond the
northwest assured the establishment of an independent
Delhi-Sultanate and its subsequent consolidation. The eastern
steppe tribes’ movements to the west not only ended the threat to
Delhi from the rival Turks and Iranians in Ghazna and
Ghur but also forced a number of the Central Asian
Muslims to migrate to northern India, a land that came to be known
as
Hindustan. Almost all the high nobles,
including the famous Forty in the 13th century, were of Central
Asian origin (mostly Iranians and Turks). Many of them were slaves
purchased from the Central Asian bazaars. The same phenomenon also
led to the destabilization of the core of the Turkic
Mamluks.
With the Mongol plunder of Central Asia and
eastern Iran
(modern
Afghanistan
, Samarkand
, Bukhara
, Gorgon, Khwarezm, Merv
, Peshawar
, Swat, Quetta
... and
borderlands), many more members of the political and religious
elite of these regions were thrown into north India, where they
were admitted into various levels of the military and
administrative cadre by the early Delhi sultans.
The position of the Khaljis within the Turkic society of
India
The Khalji Turks were not recognized by the older nobility as
coming from a pure Turkic stock (although they were ethnic Turks),
since they were (unlike the Turks and their Turkic nobility who
tried to intermerry only into Turkic families) assimilated into
Non-Turks, mostly by Muslims of Indian,
Afghan
(
Pashtun) and Arab (bedouines) origine, who populated the
entire North-West India and near locations which cause that they
were in terms of customs and manners different from the Turks.
Although they had played a conspicuous role in the success of the
Turkic armies in India, they had always been looked down upon by
the leading Turks, the dominant group during the Slave dynasty.
Sometimes, they were called as
bastards,
fake
Turks or
doll-witted by the Turkic noble families.
This tension between the Khaljis and other Turks, kept in check by
Balban, came to the surface in the succeeding reign, and ended in
the displacement of the Ilbari Turks.
Origin of the Khalji people
It seems, that the larger Khalji tribe was once member of the
semi-nomadic
Hephthalites of central
Asia who also conquered -invaded- India. Originally, the Khaljis
were mainly dwelling in
Turkestan, except
in some cases or members of ancient
Gökturks.
In older scripts of Al-Biruni, Al-Khwarezmi, Masudi, in
Juzjani's Hudud ul-'alam min
al-mashriq ila al-maghrib and of Arab and Indian historians
(Ibn Batuta, Ibn
Khaldun or Vahara Mihira etc.)
they are considered as one of the original (in the sense of
real) members of the Hephtalite's confederation and of
Turkic origin who are also found as nomads near Bactria, in Turfan (Turkestan) and east-ward of
modern Ghazna
in
Afghanistan. Possibly, they have split themselves from
these large area up and moved to Iran, Armenia, Iraq, Anatolia,
Turkmenistan, India (particularly to Punjab
) and modern
Pakistan and Afghanistan, around the Sulaiman Mountains
under the Ghaznavids (see also on Ghalzais). In Iran they moved to
Pars where they settled an isolated region which is
called today as
Khaljistan -
Land of Khaljis.
However, Persians of Iran use the term
Khalji also to
describe nomads of Turkic background in their country.
Also in in the
Kohistan
destrict
of Pakistan, there is a place called after the
Khaljis. The Khalji people of Iran and Afghanistan, the
Ghalzai (also called Khaldjish) fraction of the Pashtuns, the
Khaldji people of Bengal and Sindh are considered as descendants of
ancient and middle-age Khalji (sub-)tribes. However, modern
Khalji people are not more comparable to the past Khalji
tribes who were of
pure Turkic stock. For example in the
case of India, modern Khalji people became ethnic Indians and lost
their east-Asian features and their Turkic identity. In Iran,
Afghanistan and Iraq, they are either of hybrid origin or in the
case of Turkmen Khalji tribe they kept
Turks but became
cultural Iranians and Indians. Because of this fact, most of modern
Khalji people and tribes have no more ties or any kind of an
identity that trace them intentional to the Turks, except for the
Khaljis of Iran and Afghanistan, who speak a Khalaj dialect of the
Khalaj language group. One aspect of
their life is still alive among the Khalji people around Asia. They
all are still mostly of nomadic background.
Cultural achievements
The main court language of Khaljis became
Persian, followed by
Arabic and their own native Turkoman language and
some of north-Indian dialects. Even if it was not related with
their nature as original nomads and had no ties with urbane
cultures and civilizations, the Khalji of Delhi promoted Persian
language to a high degree. Such a co-existence of different
languages gave birth to the earliest and archaic version of
Urdu.
Khalji Sultans of Delhi (1290-1320)
Khilji Sultans of Malwa (1436-1531)
- Mahmud Khilji (1436-1469)
- Ghiyas ud din Khilji (1469-1500)
See also
References and footnotes
- M.J. Hanifi, ḠILZĪ, in Encyclopædia Iranica, online
ed., 2009: "[...] Some Indian and Western historians and
several nationalistically inspired Afghan writers have proposed
that the Turkish Ḵaljī and the Lodī dynasties that ruled northern
India during 689-720/1290-1320 and 855-932/1451-1526 respectively
were Ḡalzī Pashtuns. However, the Ḡalzī Pahstuns speak Pashtu, a
member of the Iranian branch of Indo-European languages, and
exhibit specific socio-cultural and linguistic features that do not
resemble those of the Ḵalaj or any other Turkish groups (see
Morgenstierne, in EIr. I, pp. 516-22; Doerfer; Minorsky)
[...]"
- Encyclopedia Britannica, Khalji Dynasty..."This dynasty, like the
previous Slave dynasty, was of Turkish origin, though the Khaljī
tribe had long been settled in Afghanistan."
- Dynastic Chart The Imperial Gazetteer of
India, v. 2, p. 368.
- Khalji Dynasty
-
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/316162/Khalji-dynasty
- Glossary of the Tribes and Castes of the Punjab and North West
Frontier Province By H.A. Rose, pg. 241
- http://www.khawaran.com/Engl_Nazary_OriginsOfPashtuns.htm
- http://www.khyber.org/places/2005/LakkiMarwat.shtml
- The History of India, by Mountstuart Elphinstone
- http://www.voi.org/books/mssmi/ch9.htm
- http://www.thenagain.info/webChron/India/SlaveDelhi.html
- http://www.storyofpakistan.com/person.asp?perid=P048
-
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/285248/India/46899/The-early-Muslim-period#ref=ref485615
- Sastri (1955), pp206–208
- Sastri (1955), pp206–208
-
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/ikram/part1_05.html
- The Turks in India, 2001, by Henry George Keene
- Sharaf Al-Zamān Ṭāhir Marvazī on China, the Turks, and India,
Delhi 1942, by Marwazī, Sharaf al-Zamān Ṭāhir Marwazī, Vladimir
Minorsky
- E.J. Brill's First Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1913-1936, p.
326
- Eran, Land zwischen Tigris und Indus, 1879, p. 268
- The Pathans: 550 B.C.-A.D. 1957,by Olaf Kirkpatrick Caroe
- The Cambridge History of Iran, 1968, p.217 by William Bayne
Fisher, Ehsan Yarshater, Ilya Gershevitch and Richard Nelson
- http://asi.nic.in/asi_epigraphical_arabicpersian.asp
- The Oxford History of India, Clarendon Press,
1958.
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