Sultanate

🎯 How This Word Works in UPSC Writing

A state ruled by a sultan. The Delhi Sultanate spans five dynasties, the Mamluk or so-called Slave line, the Khaljis, the Tughlaqs, the Sayyids and the Lodis, and its institutional legacy outlasted its political collapse. Alauddin Khalji's market regulations fixed prices for grain, cloth and other goods, enforced through registration of merchants, an intelligence apparatus and severe punishment, undertaken principally so that a large standing army could be maintained on modest cash salaries rather than out of concern for consumers, which is the point most often mis-stated. The Sultanate also introduced a new architectural vocabulary of the true arch and the dome, and established the Persianate court culture and administrative vocabulary that the Mughals inherited wholesale. Its structural weakness was that authority rested on the sultan's personal capacity to command a fractious nobility, so contested successions recurred throughout.