If Delhi forgets the Sultanate, what remains of its history?

What happens when the University of Delhi drops a paper on the Delhi Sultanate?

The question is not as simple as it sounds. Delhi University’s revised postgraduate History syllabus, notified on August 7th, has left out The Delhi Sultanate: Structures of Authority in Medieval North India (13th–14th Centuries)—a paper that had been taught for years and examined not merely a succession of rulers, but the making of political authority, the Sultanate state and the intellectual and religious worlds of medieval North India.

But the Sultanate paper was not the only casualty. Of the 38 Discipline Specific Elective papers proposed by DU’s History Department, only 16 made it to the notified Semester III syllabus. Courses dealing with women in early India, North Indian history between 1400 and 1550, ancient political structures and other historical themes were also left out. The department had already cleared these courses through the prescribed stages, yet several disappeared from the final notification.

DU has denied that the omissions represent deliberate withholding. Its explanation is that changes introduced at different stages of the syllabus process—including additions, deletions and alterations to units and readings—created a trust deficit, prompting the university to send the courses for further review by an Expert Committee.

That explanation raises a question of its own. If a syllabus approved through the university’s academic process can undergo such substantial changes before notification, who ultimately decides which histories remain central to postgraduate study—and which ones are sent back for review?

And in this particular case, the irony is difficult to ignore. The university has dropped the specialised study of the Delhi Sultanate while standing in a city whose political and physical landscape was profoundly transformed by it.

Is Delhi being removed from the history of Delhi?

The irony becomes even sharper when one looks beyond the syllabus and at the city itself. Delhi was never a single, finished city. It was repeatedly built, abandoned, fortified and reimagined: from the Tomar-era Lal Kot and Qila Rai Pithora to the Sultanate’s Mehrauli, Siri, Tughlaqabad, Jahanpanah and Firozabad. Alauddin Khalji built Siri in the shadow of Mongol invasions; Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq raised Tughlaqabad as a formidable fortified centre; Muhammad bin Tughlaq enclosed the settlements between earlier cities within Jahanpanah; and Firoz Shah Tughlaq established Firozabad. The Qutb complex, Tughlaqabad and Firoz Shah Kotla remain physical evidence of these successive transformations. Delhi was not merely ruled by the Sultanate. It was repeatedly constructed by it. In one of his couplets, Mir Taqi Mir goes on to say -

(The streets of Delhi were like painted walls,

Every sight I saw looked like a picture)

Given the times of Mir, itself is a testimony to the fact the life though always politically turbulent in Delhi, did not give a chance to greif to extract the romance out of it.

But even that is only one part of the story. The Sultanate period cannot be understood by looking at Delhi alone, no period in history can.

At the same time, independent and regional Sultanates were emerging and consolidating across the subcontinent—in Bengal, Gujarat, Malwa and the Deccan. Political boundaries shifted, but ideas, people, languages, artistic forms and intellectual traditions travelled through them. Persianate political and literary culture developed alongside powerful regional and vernacular cults, producing an Indo-Persian world that was neither simply imported from elsewhere nor detached from the societies in which it found its assimilation.

This was also the period in which Sufi networks and Bhakti traditions expanded across different regions, creating new religious and cultural vocabularies. Saints, poets, scholars, craftsmen and travellers participated in worlds that did not respect the neat territorial divisions of modern history textbooks. Neither Urdu nor the rekhta, the roots were all deep in Dakhni,Punjabi, Farsi and Brajbhasha. The architecture of the Sultanate similarly emerged through encounters between Persianate forms and indigenous building traditions, local materials and craftsmanship. The monuments of Delhi therefore record more than just the stories of its sultans; they record a wider process of cultural negotiation and social transformation, that continue to stand tall.

This is why history cannot be read in isolation. Delhi’s Sultanate was simultaneously connected to histories unfolding in Bengal, Gujarat, Malwa and the Deccan; to the growth of Persian and vernacular literary cultures; to Sufi and Bhakti traditions; and to the movement of people and ideas across the subcontinent.

The question, then, is not merely what happens when one paper disappears from a university syllabus. It is what happens when a connected historical world is broken into isolated fragments—and when the city that still physically carries the evidence of that world is asked to forget the history embedded in its own landscape.

The controversy is not only about a paper being dropped. It is about what that paper allowed students to ask. 'The Delhi Sultanate: Structures of Authority in Medieval North India'was not a catalogue of Muslim rulers. It dealt with the making of political authority — state formation, administration, territory, social structures, and the relationship between power, religion and culture and an entire Indo-Persian world developing in the Indian subcontinent.

Removing it from the revised postgraduate syllabus therefore potentially narrows the framework through which medieval North India is studied.

But does that make the decision political?

Delhi University’s position complicates any easy conclusion. The university has said the revision followed the PG Curriculum Framework 2024 under NEP 2020 and involved restructuring the choice of Discipline-Specific Electives. Of the 38 DSE papers proposed by the History Department, 16 were included in the final notification, while several others were left out or remained under discussion. DU has also pointed to an Expert Committee comprising external experts and university representatives. The Sultanate paper, therefore, was not the only course affected.

Yet the controversy enters a longer history. Earlier UGC-linked curriculum changes and NCERT textbook revisions have triggered allegations from historians and academics of selective deletions and ideological motivations. Critics have described these changes as part of an attempt to reshape how India’s past is narrated and remembered. But those precedents, by themselves, cannot establish that the present DU revision was politically directed.

There is evidence of curricular restructuring; there is evidence of an established political controversy around historical revision; there are allegations of ideological intervention. What remains unproven is whether the removal of this particular paper was itself politically driven.

And that leaves the more consequential question: when a specialised history disappears from postgraduate study, is the curriculum merely being reorganised—or are the questions future historians are encouraged to ask about India’s past being reorganised with it?

In 2023, DU’s undergraduate History revision dropped the paper 'Inequality and Difference', removed the term Brahmanisation from course titles and introduced matriarchal perspectives into units on patriarchy. The university defended these changes as an effort to make the curriculum holistic, inclusive and less ideologically loaded; critics saw the removal of terms dealing with caste hierarchy as politically consequential.

The same year, the NCERT rationalisation controversy intensified. Entire sections on Mughal courts, references to Hindu extremists’ hostility towards Gandhi and the RSS ban after his assassination, and portions dealing with the Gujarat riots were among the changes that historians and Opposition voices criticised as selective. NCERT, however, maintained that the exercise was undertaken by experts to remove repetition and reduce curricular load, denying political pressure.

This history does not prove that the 2026 DU decision was politically ordered. But it establishes something more: the curriculum has become an arena in which competing versions of India’s past are being negotiated.

And Delhi makes that negotiation particularly charged. The city still carries the Sultanate in its monuments, neighbourhoods, languages and Sufi dargahs and qawwali. Its history cannot be edited as neatly as a syllabus.

The real question, then, is not about a paper that has been dropped.

It is who decides which questions about India’s past deserve to remain.

What stays as a testimony to the past is perhaps

On the land of Hind, from the nations of the world

- Firaq.