Now let us shift our focus towards the reasons behind the success of the Turkish incursions into India which began in the early 11th century.
The 3 basic advantages that the Islamized Turks had over the Indian rulers:
I. The Turks were hardy warriors and skilled horsemen and had at their disposal the finest horses in the world that had been captured from the steppes of Central Asia. Horses bred in India could not match the Central Asian horses in swiftness, nor could the Indians match the Turkish horsemen in their skill and speed of manoeuver. The mountains around Ghur were also rich in metals, particularly iron, and there was a tradition of production of war material there, as also in many cities of the region.
II. There was a growth of what is called the ‘ghazi’ spirit in West Asia at that time. The non-islamized Turks had infiltrated Transoxania and had wrecked havoc to the existing Muslim Turkish Iranian rule in the area. These nomadic non-Muslim Turks, called ‘Turkomans’ or Turkmen, such as the Guzz / Oghuz and tribes living in the Kara Khitai Khanate exerted continuous pressure upon the Turkish rulers of the area. While defending themselves, the Turkish rulers used to make continuous raids into the Turkmen held Central Asian steppes for capturing slaves who were in high demand in the slave markets of Samarqand and Bukhara. A number of volunteers fired by the spirit of defending and spreading Islam also used to take part in such raids. Since they were not paid regularly, they used to make up for their pay by plunder. These were called the ‘ghazis’. This same ghazi spirit was to be later on used against the ‘unbelievers’ in India by Mahmud of Ghazna whose exploits in India are well known.
III. The growth of the Turkish military power in Khorasan and Iran was also aided by institutional factors like the ‘iqta’ system. The iqta system was established in the 9th century AD to relieve the state treasury when insufficient tax revenue and little booty from campaigns made it difficult for the government to pay army salaries. Land subject to the iqta was originally owned by non-Muslims and thus was subject to a special property tax, the kharāj. While the land remained legally the property of its owner, the iqta was a grant of appropriation to a Muslim officer entitling him to collect the kharāj from the owner. Out of this the officer was expected to pay the smaller ‘ushr’, or tax, on income, but was allowed to keep the balance as his salary. It did not, however, imply the officer interfering with the existing land rights, or granting them any rights over the person, wealth, wives and children of the cultivators. In return, the officer was under the obligation of maintaining a fixed number of troops, and to furnish them to the sultan at his call. However, it proved difficult for the government to extract any payments from the officers, and the Buyids, an Iranian dynasty (reigned 932–1062), made the iqta a grant of usufruct by which the muqta (recipient officer) collected taxes from the land – calculated to approximate his usual pay. As the officer usually lived in a city remote from his iqta, he had little interest in the land or its cultivators. The grant was merely a wage, and as soon as the land or its people were depleted, it was exchanged for a more productive area. This system was mainly evolved by the Turkish sultans because it implied that the existing rights of the Iranian land holders, called the dehqan, would not be interfered with. Nor would the Turkish military leaders develop any hereditary rights in land, but would be completely dependant on the Sultan who could deploy them as and where he chose. As a result, the military force remained highly mobile all the time. By the time that the Seljuq regime (1038–1194) ended, the iqta had been introduced into the provinces and the number and size of iqtas had proliferated drastically, accounting for as much as half the land of the state, while the term of ownership also had grown, occasionally leading to hereditary succession.
In the next series we’ll start with our medieval history.
IASBakra 