Khaljis and Tughlaqs: expansion, experiment, and crisis

The Khalji dynasty, which seized power in 1290, took the Sultanate beyond northern India. Alauddin Khalji, who reigned from 1296 to 1316, repelled Mongol invasions and sent his general Malik Kafur on campaigns into the Deccan, bringing back wealth and extending Delhi's influence southwards. At home, Alauddin is remembered for market reforms: he fixed prices for grain and other goods, controlled the markets through officers, and paid his soldiers in cash. Historians debate how far these controls actually worked, but they show a ruler trying to feed a large standing army at stable cost.

The Tughlaq dynasty followed in 1320. Its second ruler, Muhammad bin Tughlaq, who reigned from 1325 to 1351, is famous for bold experiments that failed. He moved the capital from Delhi to Daulatabad in the Deccan, then moved it back; he introduced token copper currency, which failed when counterfeits flooded the market; and he raised taxes in the Doab during a famine. The traveller Ibn Battuta, who visited his court, left a vivid but hostile account of these years, and modern historians warn that his stories need to be checked against other evidence.

The strain of these policies helped break the empire apart. In 1347 the Bahmani kingdom was founded in the Deccan, and in 1336 the Vijayanagara Empire had already been founded in the south. Firuz Shah Tughlaq, who reigned from 1351 to 1388, tried to restore stability by building canals, towns, and charitable institutions, and by leaning on the support of the religious scholars, but he could not recover the lost provinces.

The end came with Timur's invasion in 1398. The Central Asian conqueror sacked Delhi and carried away craftsmen and wealth, leaving the Sultanate a shadow of itself. The Khalji and Tughlaq story is a lesson in the limits of central power: ambitious reforms failed when they outran the state's ability to administer them, and over-expansion created the very regional kingdoms that replaced Delhi's authority.