Beyond the Sultan's Court: How Regional Languages Told Their Own History
India's medieval past wasn't written in just one language — or from just one point of view Painting depicting the court of Muhammad bin Tughluq. Salar Jung Museum, Hyderabad The "Official" Story — and Why It's Not the Whole Story When we study the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526 CE) in textbooks, most of what we read comes from Persian court chronicles — histories written by scholars like Minhaj-i-Siraj and Ziauddin Barani. These were the "insiders": court-employed writers who recorded wars, conquests, and royal decisions from the sultan's point of view. Alongside Persian, Sanskrit was still used by Hindu royal courts for genealogies, land grants, temple records, literature and the mainstay in Brahmanical rituals — a tradition of "high" courtly writing stretching hundreds of years back. But here's the question; what if we only ever heard history from the top? What about the farmer, women, the soldier, the weaver, the devotee singing ...