And so it begins. With Padmavati set to hit the screens, there is a sudden rush to recreate the image of Alauddin Khilji as a just man wronged by history. This article appearing in a website seems part of such a project. In what is a desperate attempt at rebranding, Khilji is referred to as the ‘People’s King’ who implemented a series of reforms that included a new taxation system and the introduction of an espionage system ostensibly for the welfare of the people.

Among his other achievements is cited the successful fending off of successive Mongol invasions, while his subsequent vilification in Indian history as a cruel despot is blamed at Rajputs and other Hindu power brokers who got shunted out of the system when Khilji implemented his series of wide-ranging agrarian and fiscal ‘reforms’. The piece is not only factually misleading, in the sense that it deliberately hides from the reader a number of known facts about Khilji and his administration, it is also propaganda masquerading as an informed opinion that seeks to subvert the history of oppression and violence against a people.

Such an attempt at rebranding despots is of course nothing new and has been a part of a larger and much older debate about Indian history, where one side has been forcefully arguing that historical acts of genocidal violence against Hindus were merely ‘political’ in nature and, being embedded in specific historical contexts, should not be judged by modern standards . There is, in such interpretations of Indian history, a strong desire to purge any possible vestiges of religion as a driving motive for peoples’ actions. In its place, a secularised, or rather, a sanitised, narrative is posited, reminiscent of a vulgar Marxism long discarded even by the fringes of the academia, in which purely economic motives govern peoples’ lives, motives, desires and memories.

It is sad that despite recent advances in sociology and social history allowing for a far greater range of sources to be accepted as credible historical evidence – including oral histories and folklore – such crude materialism still appears to emanate out of certain sections.

The People’s King?

In the case of Khilji and this particular article, it is strange that nowhere does it occur to the writer that Khilji may have gone down the annals of history as a villain for his wanton murder and rapine rather than merely for economic reasons.

Take for instance the writer’s claim that the predecessors of the Rajputs were the primary land owners and power brokers in the late thirteenth century and Khilji’s supposed reforms broke their back leading them to revile the Sultan in their histories written two centuries later. It is true that with the onset of Islamic rule in India, practically all native chieftains saw a reversal in their fortunes. However, the power brokers and large landholders in early thirteenth century North India were not just Hindu Rajas but also included a large number of Afghans, Mongols, Persians and Turkish noblemen who had settled all over north India following the Ghurid invasion of 1192AD.

By the time Khilji came to power, Muslim rule had been established over most of north India for over a century during which Afghan and Turkic warlords acquired large landholdings and established themselves as middlemen between the state and the peasantry, eating into the power and influence of the Hindu warlords.

Although many Hindu chieftains still managed to cling on to their power and even managed to rise among the ranks, they always had to accept the suzerainty of the provincial governor who was, without exception a Turkic or Afghan nobleman, and they were always susceptible to the envy and the ire of the Persian/Turkic lobby who could, and in many instances did, invoke religion to curtail the power of the Hindus. Given such a scenario, it doesn’t seem logical to presume that Khilji should have come in for special vilification in history from these Hindu warlords whose power he supposedly effaced.

And what of the ‘reforms’ themselves? What was their nature and what effect did they have on the lives of the people who lived through them?

To understand this it is necessary to have another look at Khilji’s legacy, beginning with the famed taxation system which is touted in this article as the single greatest achievement that ought to have ensured lasting fame for Khilji in posterity.

Alauddin Khilji enforced four taxes on non-Muslims in the Sultanate — jizya (poll tax), kharaj (land tax), ghari (house tax) and charah (pasture tax). Of these, the Kharaj or the land tax was the form of taxation that the peasant paid in the form of nearly half of his standing crop. As the historian Zia-ud-din Barani, writing shortly after Khilji’s death, informs us about the consequence of Khilji’s taxation system :