Composite Culture under the Sultanate of Delhi By IQTIDAR HUSAIN SIDDIQUI

Abstract

Writing a socio-cultural history of pre-Mughal era is fraught with certain problems, a major issue being inadequacy of information from contemporary chroniclers. One has to sift through an expansive corpus of source materials, of different forms and tenors, in order to gain insight into the social history of the period. Although scholarship on the Delhi Sultanate over the last few decades has introduced us to the significance of non-political sources in understanding the social moods of the times, areas requiring fresh enquiries still remain. A primary concern of Professor I. H. Siddiqui’s book is to highlight those aspects of life and culture of the Delhi Sultanate that require a renewed focus and in-depth study. At a time when scholarship on the Sultanate is unfortunately dwindling, this work will be seen as a welcome addition. The book is divided into three parts of unequal length. The first (six chapters) deals with different aspects of life and culture in the Delhi Sultanate. The second part (two chapters) is on the foreign relations of the Sultans mainly with the Mongols. The final part (also with two chapters) studies the representations of women in the Sultanate period. In his introduction to the book, the author refers to some conceptual issues that arise when we apply geographical terms such as ‘shatter zones’ and ‘core areas’ to understand the processes of acculturation in the Sultanate period. In the following chapters, the author tries to show how complex the process of acculturation was, but does not explain how his arguments support or refute the application of such geographical terms to the historical data. A main theme of the book is the emergence of ‘composite culture’ over the Sultanate period. He notices a percolation and continuity of traditions and elements of the ‘composite culture’ from the Arab and Ghaznavid times to that of the Delhi Sultans. He explains in the Introduction, that prior to the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate, the north-west region including Sind, Multan, Punjab and Roh became the nucleus of a ‘composite culture’ under Arab and Ghaznavid rule and that the traditions set over that period influenced the newly established Sultanate in the thirteenth century.