Nasiruddin Qabacha (r. 1205-28) was a former slave-lieutenant of Mu’izz al-Din Ghuri (d. 1206) who was stationed at Uch (present-day Uch Sharif in Punjab, Pakistan). After the death of Mu'zz al-Din, Qabacha created and extended a Uch-based polity that linked Multan to Khambat to Aden. Qabacha's long rule at Uch provided the pivot for the re-alignment of Central Asian intellectual class during the Mongol campaigns. Famously, Qabacha was able to hold off the Mongol assault on Multan in 1224 CE. However, soon thereafter, Qabacha lost Uch, and his life, to Iltutmish (another Ghurid commander). Iltutmish established Delhi as the central nave of north Indian Turkic power-- relegating Qabacha and Uch to footnotes in history. My presentation will re-frame the Ghurid legacy in South Asia by focusing on Qabacha's gathering of intellectuals to his court in Uch in 1220s. These jurists, historians, and poets gathered at Madrasa-i Firuzi established by Qabacha. They went on to create some of the seminal historical and literary texts of Delhi's muslim rulers. I will focus on Muhammad ’Awfi’s Jawāmi al-Hikāyāt wa-Lawāmi ul-Rivāyat (completed in 1231), Ali Kufi's Chachnama (completed in 1226) and Minhāj Surāj al-Juzjāni’s Tabaqāt-i Nāseri (completed ca. 1260). The afterlife of these Ghurid texts lies in the shaping of Persian literary history and Muslim political thought in South Asia. The circulation and citation of these texts helped shape the contours of political rule into the seventeenth century. To understand the role played by Qabacha (and by extension Ghurid rulers) in the longer history of Muslim rule in north India, we need to revisit these pivotal texts, and the significance of Uch as a material and textual space in South Asia.

This paper considers the migration of Muslim literati between Central and South Asia across the 12th and 13th centuries. Travel and transmission of knowledge was intensified through the expansion of Ghaznavid (10th-12th centuries), Ghurid (12th-13th centuries) and Delhi Sultanate (13th-14th centuries) imperial realms that unified diverse geographical regions through trade, intercommunal marriage, military alliances and conquest. Imperial expansion created new social and cultural networks that supported intellectual exchange, translation and knowledge production through court patronage. This paper explores the scholarly travels of the ulema, Sufi shaykhs, pilgrims, emissaries and envoys who traversed Central and South Asia and the effects of the sharing and communication of knowledge in different courts and contexts. I will consider how intellectual and literary networks were created, maintained and disrupted, particularly in light of Mongol conquests, over two centuries. The goal is to understand the extent of travel, the exchange of ideas and diverse scholarly worlds in the cosmopolitanism of this period.

This paper analyzes the role of khidma (lit. “service”) relationships, within the general concepts of loyalty and contracted rights and duties, in the construction and functioning of the Ghūrid polity. This far-flung and transient empire (ca. 545–612/1150–1215), which stretched from Khurāsān to west Bengal, was heir to a variety of political and social traditions. Its rapid construction necessitated a decentralized and highly heterogeneous polity that often incorporated or utilized existing political structures, over which was grafted the Ghūrids’ unique imperial system. While previous studies have explored the functioning and theoretical underpinnings of “acquired loyalties” (particularly under the Būyids and Seljuqs), and have described the emergence of new elites in the early Delhi Sultanate, no one has analyzed how the concepts of loyalty, service and benefit worked in practice within the Ghūrid context. The main thesis is that binary khidma relationships--a normative social institution of reciprocal obligations and benefits between a superior and his retainer--played a central role in Ghūrid state formation. Furthermore, the very flexibility and scalability of the khidma concept was crucial to the success of the Ghūrid expansion across northern India and to the incorporation of “Rajput” elites into the Ghūrid imperial system. This suggests that the Ghūrid conquests were far from a decisive break in northern India, but rather a process of flexible adaptation involving a large degree of continuity in administrative and political structures. The first section analyzes the role of khidma bonds in the Ghūrids’ tripartite sultanate and between local dynasties, Ghūrī amīrs, tribal leaders, and mamlūk commanders. It is demonstrated that these types of relationships derive from or have antecedents in the late Seljuq Empire and in the Ghūrīs own clan-based social arrangements. The second part describes the role of khidma relationships in the Ghūrids’ military expansion across northern India. Finally, the paper examines how existing power holders within the Hindu kingdoms of northern India, including ṭhakkuras/rāṇakas (subordinate rulers) and rājaputras (“princes” or petty chiefs), were integrated into the Ghūrid polity. A wide array of sources will be employed to sustain the argument, including the standard Persian and Arabic chronicles (Jūzjānī, Ibn al-Athīr, ʿAṭāʾ-Malik Juwaynī) as well as Sanskrit literature, inscriptions and foundation texts, and numismatic evidence. The most important literary source for khidma relationships in northern India is Ḥasan-i Niẓāmī’s Tāj al-Maʾāthir (ca. 614/1217), which embeds deeds of appointment and other official documents into its discursive narrative.

This paper examines the materiality of military travel in central India during the centuries shortly following the turn of the first millennium. It focuses on the ways in which the movement of armies engaged natural topographies and effected transformations in the architectural landscape, with an emphasis on the areas that extended around the regional political centers of Gwalior, Narwar, and Chanderi. Built as large hilltop fortresses overlooking a largely forested terrain, all three had longer histories predating the Ghurid campaigns of the 1190s that made them crucial to the establishment and maintenance of territorial control under the succession of Delhi sultans. While Gwalior had served in earlier periods as a major outpost of the imperial capital at first Kannauj, Narwar and Chanderi grew to prominence under regional Hindu rajas during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Situated directly along older historic routes of travel, they served both as administrative nodes in larger systems of regional governance and as defensible outposts. They facilitated both the transmission of knowledge through long-distance networks and also the launching of ambitious military campaigns aimed at conquering the Deccan. While these fortresses sat at the pinnacle of regional politics and cultural practices, my investment in this presentation is less in larger centers than in the fortification of smaller places that served as stopping points in the landscape that extended between them. These included a wide range of villages and towns which functioned variously as postal stations, agrarian and industrial enclaves, and outposts of mercantile exchange. Although such places played a crucial role in the facilitation of governance and travel, they are frequently forgotten by scholars, in part because they possess only a limited textual footprint. At such places, the movement of people and ideas is traceable primarily through their instantiations in architectural environments and material culture, such as seen most readily through the establishment of new village and town walls, the erection of memorial stones and chattris, the construction of stepwells and artificial lakes, and the foundation of new temples and mosques. In addition to charting broader trans-regional movements associable with the Ghurids and their immediate successors, this presentation will also consider the more circumscribed paths that were followed by the armies of regional and local Hindu rulers, who, as late as 1281, were vying similarly for control of the areas around Narwar and Chanderi in efforts to secure a foothold over a distinctly contested domain.