Ziyauddin Barani is an eye-witness historian, but his figures and data are not always precise. When sometimes he means to convey‘a very large number’… - K. S. Lal

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Ziyauddin Barani is an eye-witness historian, but his figures and data are not always precise. When sometimes he means to convey‘a very large number’, he gives the figure of 100,000.... Let us take another fourteenth century historian, Shams Siraj Afif. If Barani has a weakness for 100,000, Afif is very fond of 180,000, so that the slaves of Firoz Tughlaq numbered 180,000, the revenue from his 1200 gardens was 180,000 tankahs, and in his war with Shamsuddin Ilyas Shah (A.D. 1353), he killed 180,000 men in Bengal. The immensity and coincidence of the numbers create misgivings. ... The chronicler has left no stone unturned to convince us of his veracity. Still the figure seems to be unduly. large for Firoz Tughlaq ; it could have fitted in with the narrative of massacres of Chingiz or Timur. And then there is the authority of the Sirac-i-Firoz Shahi , which says that only 60,000 were killed.