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If institutional indeterminacy pervaded the post-nomadic empires of Hind, the peripatetic exercise of power was another feature which they all seem t… - André Wink
" "If institutional indeterminacy pervaded the post-nomadic empires of Hind, the peripatetic exercise of power was another feature which they all seem to have shared. Muhammad bin Tughluq spent the greater part of his life in military camps. Most other rulers were often on campaign, sometimes for one or two years, or more, particularly in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when com munications could be broken off with the capital for months or a whole year. Firuz Shah Tughluq stayed away on a campaign to Bengal and Orissa for two years and seven months, losing his way on the return journey through jungles and mountains, when for six months there was no news from him and the viceregent had great difficulty keeping things under control. The same Sultan got lost in the Rann of Cutch, and was again cut off from Delhi for six months, altogether spending two-and-a-half years on the trip, while the viceregent pretended he had good news.
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About André Wink
André Wink is an emeritus professor of history at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is known for his studies on India and the Indian Ocean area, particularly over the medieval and early modern age (700 to 1800 CE).
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Additional quotes by André Wink
It is a fact of immense significance that whereas in the making of Europe the conquests of Islam played the role of a powerfully effective but mostly external factor, in the East the expansion of Islam went on for more than a millennium and here, in South and large parts of Southeast Asia the association with Islam became so intimate that, as a result, we find an Indo-Islamic pattern of society and culture. (Introduction)
The first conclusion to be drawn from the foregoing analysis is that ecology was a major factor determining the progress and character of the Islamic conquest of al-Hind. For one thing, the subcontinent was unsuitable for Mongol-style nomadism on account of the absence of sufficient good pasture land. With the Mongols failing to penetrate beyond its western periphery, the Indian subcontinent cannot really be said to have experienced a 'nomadic conquest' at all. In this respect the thirteenth-century situation in the north was unlike the Iranian plateau, where Mongol conquest was followed by extensive nomadization and destruction of agriculture.
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We have argued that, in contrast to Iran and China, in al-Hind such a merger of the frontier world of nomadic mobility and long- distance trade on the one hand and settled agriculture on the other did occur in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. Secondly, that this merger brought about a new productive and mercantile dynamism (without any serious deleterious impact on population density), the effects of which deepened and broadened in the subsequent centuries. This is not to deny that the Muslim- Turkish conquest of Hind was quite violent at times, and could be disruptive in some areas as well. It has not been our intention to 'sanitize' the narrative of Hindu-Muslim encounter in these centuries of invasion and extensive raiding. Nor has it been our intention to deny that in many respects the Muslim conquest was a major challenge to the integrity of Indian culture. But the Turkish-led Muslim armies that conquered North India in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries were generally small compared to those of the Mongols operating elsewhere in Eurasia; nor did a vast influx of nomads follow in their wake, unlike in Iran or parts of China.
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