History with a Difference
Sunil Kumar
THE EMERGENCE OF THE DELHI SULTANATE, 1192-1286 by Meena Bhargava Permanent Black, 2008, 422 pp., 795
February 2008, volume 32, No 2

The Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate is a voluminous work, considering that it covers only a phase i.e. 1192-1286 ad. It is a refreshing intervention and convincingly breaks the long-held opinion that the Delhi Sultanate was a monolithic, authoritarian, centralized state. Sunil Kumar draws on several evidences to argue that there were many centres of social and political power—politically ambitious military commanders, urban elites, religious ideologies and personal commitments—in early Delhi Sultanate that challenged almost all processes towards the creation of authoritarian centralization. So, if despite the varied challenges, the Delhi Sultanate survived, it was not because of the military and political abilities of the Sultans but the ideologies that considered and reinforced the Delhi Sultanate as a shelter for the Muslims especially during Mongol incursions.

Kumar has written the history of early Sultanate with a difference, investigating the existing historical interpretations and raising questions for instance on the ethnic and racial origins of the Sultans or can slaves be nobles or did the Sultanate have a bureaucracy or why do economic historians of the Delhi Sultanate hurriedly skip the thirteenth century and move into the fourteenth century? What makes his book more concrete is his study of the way the Persian chronicles and later historiography remember the past.

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