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Tughlak, Mahomad : In 1320, Tughluq, founded the Tughluq dynasty by murdering the Sultan of Delhi; Timur-i-lang ended that dynasty in 1398. 1325, Ghiyas-ud-dīn’s son Mahomad is believed to have contrived his ‘accidental death’. Mahomad began by suppressing the rebellion led by his own cousin in South India, & the one led by his governor of Multan, & then conquered the South Indians kingdoms of Warangal, Devagiri, Malabār, & Dwara-Samudram. In 1327 he ordered the transfer of his capital from Delhi to Devagiri (q.v.) because it was situated at the centre of his empire which then extended from Punjab to Bengal & the foot of the Himalayas to Kanyā Kumari, & renamed it Daulatābād. Then he ordered all lay residents of Delhi to join his officials & armed forces whom he had ordered to shift to Daulatābād – 700 miles away across the Vindhya Mountains & that too on foot. The majority died or became lifelong invalids. So Mahomad ordered them all to return to Delhi. Ibn Battutah found Delhi in 1334 “deserted in some places & bearing the marks of ruin”. ― In 1330 he issued copper coins in place of gold ones but could not control their counterfeiting. Two years later he collected a vast army to invade Persia but too much money was spent in the preparation & abandoned the project. A second invasion was sent in the Kumaon region but that too proved disastrous. Hasty & hot-tempered, he brooked no opposition from anyone. The growing sense of the failure of his policy made him charge the people with perversity. In course of a talk with a contemporary official, Ziā-ud-dīn Barnī, he exclaimed: “I visit the people with chastisement upon the suspicion or presumption of their rebellious & treacherous designs, & I punish the most trifling act of contumacy with death. This I will do until I die, or until the people act honestly, & give up rebellion & contumacy. I have no such Wazir as will make rules to obviate my shedding blood. I punish people because they have all at once become my enemies & opponents. I have dispensed great wealth among them, but they have not become friendly & loyal.” He enhanced the rate of taxation & revived & created some additional cesses. According to Yahiya bin Ahmad Sirhindi the increment was twenty-fold & to this was added house-text & pasture tax. Then famines broke out in different parts of his empire & he became more tyrannical leading to revolts in 1334-35 in the South, in Gujarat & Sindh & in Bengal. The foreign Amīrs revolted in Daulatābād, resulting in the birth of the Bahmani kingdom in August 1347, & subsequently, the dismemberment of his vast empire of 23 provinces. After his death, his nephew, 46-year-old Fīrūz Shah was proclaimed Sultan in 1351. Fīrūz invaded Bengal in 1353 & again in 1359. He failed to defeat the sultan of Bengal, notes a historian, in spite of his offering a reward for every Hindu head, paying for 180,000 of them, & raiding Hindu villages for slaves. [Based on Bhattacharya: 293, 649-50, Dr Majumdar et al’s Advanced History…: 309-13, 318, etc.]

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... belief that so we became cosmopolitans and men of enlightenment. Page 1101 Yet all the time India was as much & more outside the great life of the world than it was in the days of Mahomad Tughlak or Bahadur Shah. The number of men in educated India who had any vital conception or any real understanding & mastery of the great currents of life, thought & motive which sway the vast world outside ...

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