Does Prime Minister Narendra Modi indulge in the fine art of small talk before taking up hard business during his many meetings with world leaders? If he does, here’s a great icebreaker for when he meets his Mongolian counterpart, Chimediin Saikhanbileg on Sunday: in India’s capital, for generations, an extremely popular dish is named after the father of the Mongolian nation. Changezi Chicken, a recipe of roasted chicken in a tomato gravy that is suspiciously too crimson, can be found all over the Old City.
How did this come to be named after Changez Khan, the great Mongol conqueror from the 13th century? No one really knows, although any real link with Changez Khan is unlikely. If ever Changez did come to Delhi to eat Chengezi Chicken, there’s a good chance he wouldn’t like it, suffused as it is with typically Indian spices, quite alien to the spartan steppe diet. Thankfully, this food tasting never took place because Changez never visited Delhi. He came pretty close, though, making it as far as the Indus, but turned back, saving the subcontinent from a Mongol holocaust.
War with the Khwarazmian Empire
Changez (or Genghis to the Europeans) was probably the single-most influential leader in history. The Khan united the different, desperately poor Mongol tribes and by the time he died, had conquered so much of Eurasia that a quarter of the world’s population lived under his rule, making the Mongol Empire the largest ever in history.
In the early 13th century, when Changez was just getting started – he had conquered two-thirds of China – to increase his prosperity, he expressed a wish to trade with the Khwarazmian Empire, a Persian state and one of the superpowers of its time. Unfortunately, the Khwarazmian Shah, Alauddin, was extremely suspicious of Khan's intentions and, in one of history's greatest miscalculations, he ordered one of his governors, Inalchuq, to arrest a 500-man strong caravan of traders sent by Changez.
Angered, Changez proceeded to annihilate the Shah’s empire. The destruction took the Mongols only two years and it was so brutal that the world would not see such culling of whole populations till the 20th century (when modern technology made it easer for humans to express their inner desires). Most readers would not have heard of this invasion but if they’ve been watching the popular television show, Game of Thrones, they might remember how Khal Drogo (a character based on Changez) killed Viserys Targaryen by pouring molten gold over his head. Well, that’s exactly how Changez Khan killed the Khwarazmian governor, Inalchuq for the impertinence of arresting his traders, which had triggered this war.
India connection
The Shah’s son, Jalaluddin, took over the throne after him and continued the fight – if it could even be called that – against the Mongols. Changez chased Jalaluddin across Central Asia and into the subcontinent, catching up with him on the western bank of the Indus. Here, Jalaluddin decided to put up a stand and as is par for the course for Mongol history, Changez Khan decimated the remains of the Khwarazmian army.
Jalaluddin, however, escaped by swimming across the Indus. He then asked the Sultan of Delhi, Iltutmish, for help. The Delhi Sultanate, at the time, was a weak state and seeing what had happened to the much stronger Khwarazmian Empire, Iltutmish, quite wisely, refused not only help to Jalaluddin but also denied him asylum in India, thus saving the country from an almost certain Mongol invasion.
The wisdom of Iltutmish’s decision can be seen from what happened to Baghdad only a few decades later. Baghdad was, at least outside of China, the largest city in the world at the time and the centre of the Islamic world. Hulagu Khan, grandson of Changez, destroyed Baghdad and the Abbasid Caliphate so thoroughly that it was only in the 20th century, with wealth from oil, that the region could rebuild some of the irrigation systems that the Mongols had smashed.
The death blow to Islam
Hulagu Khan dealt, what a contemporary historian Ibn-ul-Athir called, "the death blow to Islam and the Muslims”. So hated is Hulagu Khan still by Arabs that, in a recorded message in 2002, Osama bin Laden compared Colin Powell and Dick Cheney to Hulagu and claimed that during the First Gulf War, the Americans had wrecked Baghdad worse than the Mongols (a definite overstatement).
Coming back to India: for the next 50 or so years after Jalaluddin, the Mongols kept on threatening to invade Delhi and at least once managed to sack Lahore. A combination of good strategy by the Delhi Sultans and Mongol preoccupation elsewhere (they had conquered all of Asia and quite a bit of eastern Europe by then) saved Delhi from ruin.
This constant contact, though, meant that Delhi got its first Mongol residents, army deserters who converted to Islam and settled down in a suburb outside the city walls called Mughalpura (“Mughal" is the Persian word for “Mongol”). Mughalpura is lost now but was located somewhere in modern-day Paharganj. Unfortunately for these Delhi Mongols, in 1298, Sultan Alauddin Khilji suspected them of trying to assassinate him and ordered them all to be killed (a fact that Modi might want to exclude from the small talk).
The Indian Mughal Empire
If “Mughal" is the Persian word for “Mongol”, were the Mughals who ruled Delhi for three centuries ethnic Mongols then? Not really. Lexically, “Mughal” does mean “Mongol” in Persian and Babar’s mother was a Mongol – a direct descendent of Changez Khan, as it so happens. Babar’s father, however, was a Turk and that is how he saw himself. He, in fact hated the Mongols and had this to say about them in his autobiography:
Settled societies, more often than not, dislike steppe nomads like the Mongols (as late as World War I, the British were disparaging the German by calling them "Huns", another steppe tribe who had sacked Rome) and Babur was channeling that emotion. Unfortunately for him, when Babur invaded Afghanistan and then India, he was called a "Mughal" like so many other invaders who had come in from that general region and ironically, that is what the empire he founded would be misnamed for posterity.
Bollywood connection
In spite of Changez never really making it to India (touch wood), Bollywood, has, quite incredibly, made a biopic on him, called Changez Khan. In the 1957 film, one of Changez Khan’s motivations for conquering the world is that he’s in love with a woman called Azra and needs to find her. Looking for an Indian connection, the film's script invents a character called Bindusar who is Changez’s best friend and advises him on his campaigns. The film even has Johny Walker play a Mongol called Tez Khan – quite possibly the only time anyone has ever thought of presenting a soldier from Changez Khan’s army as a comic character.
Not just that, Bollywood has even produced a biopic on Hulagu Khan, Changez’s grandson, in which the character of the Mongol plunderer has fittingly been played by Pran. This time the Khan falls in love with and abducts a Persian girl (Meena Kumari) even as she pines for her boyfriend, Parvez (Ajit). This movie also has a global first: a “mujra” number for a Mongol emperor. In it Helen and Minoo Mumtaz dance for Hulagu Khan, singing, “Aji chale aao, tumhe aankhon ne dil main bulaaya”: exactly the sort of sentiment Modi will be looking to convey to the Mongolians, as he hopes to send a message to China.
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How did this come to be named after Changez Khan, the great Mongol conqueror from the 13th century? No one really knows, although any real link with Changez Khan is unlikely. If ever Changez did come to Delhi to eat Chengezi Chicken, there’s a good chance he wouldn’t like it, suffused as it is with typically Indian spices, quite alien to the spartan steppe diet. Thankfully, this food tasting never took place because Changez never visited Delhi. He came pretty close, though, making it as far as the Indus, but turned back, saving the subcontinent from a Mongol holocaust.
War with the Khwarazmian Empire
Changez (or Genghis to the Europeans) was probably the single-most influential leader in history. The Khan united the different, desperately poor Mongol tribes and by the time he died, had conquered so much of Eurasia that a quarter of the world’s population lived under his rule, making the Mongol Empire the largest ever in history.
In the early 13th century, when Changez was just getting started – he had conquered two-thirds of China – to increase his prosperity, he expressed a wish to trade with the Khwarazmian Empire, a Persian state and one of the superpowers of its time. Unfortunately, the Khwarazmian Shah, Alauddin, was extremely suspicious of Khan's intentions and, in one of history's greatest miscalculations, he ordered one of his governors, Inalchuq, to arrest a 500-man strong caravan of traders sent by Changez.
Angered, Changez proceeded to annihilate the Shah’s empire. The destruction took the Mongols only two years and it was so brutal that the world would not see such culling of whole populations till the 20th century (when modern technology made it easer for humans to express their inner desires). Most readers would not have heard of this invasion but if they’ve been watching the popular television show, Game of Thrones, they might remember how Khal Drogo (a character based on Changez) killed Viserys Targaryen by pouring molten gold over his head. Well, that’s exactly how Changez Khan killed the Khwarazmian governor, Inalchuq for the impertinence of arresting his traders, which had triggered this war.
India connection
The Shah’s son, Jalaluddin, took over the throne after him and continued the fight – if it could even be called that – against the Mongols. Changez chased Jalaluddin across Central Asia and into the subcontinent, catching up with him on the western bank of the Indus. Here, Jalaluddin decided to put up a stand and as is par for the course for Mongol history, Changez Khan decimated the remains of the Khwarazmian army.
Jalaluddin, however, escaped by swimming across the Indus. He then asked the Sultan of Delhi, Iltutmish, for help. The Delhi Sultanate, at the time, was a weak state and seeing what had happened to the much stronger Khwarazmian Empire, Iltutmish, quite wisely, refused not only help to Jalaluddin but also denied him asylum in India, thus saving the country from an almost certain Mongol invasion.
The wisdom of Iltutmish’s decision can be seen from what happened to Baghdad only a few decades later. Baghdad was, at least outside of China, the largest city in the world at the time and the centre of the Islamic world. Hulagu Khan, grandson of Changez, destroyed Baghdad and the Abbasid Caliphate so thoroughly that it was only in the 20th century, with wealth from oil, that the region could rebuild some of the irrigation systems that the Mongols had smashed.
The death blow to Islam
Hulagu Khan dealt, what a contemporary historian Ibn-ul-Athir called, "the death blow to Islam and the Muslims”. So hated is Hulagu Khan still by Arabs that, in a recorded message in 2002, Osama bin Laden compared Colin Powell and Dick Cheney to Hulagu and claimed that during the First Gulf War, the Americans had wrecked Baghdad worse than the Mongols (a definite overstatement).
Coming back to India: for the next 50 or so years after Jalaluddin, the Mongols kept on threatening to invade Delhi and at least once managed to sack Lahore. A combination of good strategy by the Delhi Sultans and Mongol preoccupation elsewhere (they had conquered all of Asia and quite a bit of eastern Europe by then) saved Delhi from ruin.
This constant contact, though, meant that Delhi got its first Mongol residents, army deserters who converted to Islam and settled down in a suburb outside the city walls called Mughalpura (“Mughal" is the Persian word for “Mongol”). Mughalpura is lost now but was located somewhere in modern-day Paharganj. Unfortunately for these Delhi Mongols, in 1298, Sultan Alauddin Khilji suspected them of trying to assassinate him and ordered them all to be killed (a fact that Modi might want to exclude from the small talk).
The Indian Mughal Empire
If “Mughal" is the Persian word for “Mongol”, were the Mughals who ruled Delhi for three centuries ethnic Mongols then? Not really. Lexically, “Mughal” does mean “Mongol” in Persian and Babar’s mother was a Mongol – a direct descendent of Changez Khan, as it so happens. Babar’s father, however, was a Turk and that is how he saw himself. He, in fact hated the Mongols and had this to say about them in his autobiography:
“Were the Mongols an angel race, it would be bad,
Even writ in gold, the Mongol name would be bad.”
Settled societies, more often than not, dislike steppe nomads like the Mongols (as late as World War I, the British were disparaging the German by calling them "Huns", another steppe tribe who had sacked Rome) and Babur was channeling that emotion. Unfortunately for him, when Babur invaded Afghanistan and then India, he was called a "Mughal" like so many other invaders who had come in from that general region and ironically, that is what the empire he founded would be misnamed for posterity.
Bollywood connection
In spite of Changez never really making it to India (touch wood), Bollywood, has, quite incredibly, made a biopic on him, called Changez Khan. In the 1957 film, one of Changez Khan’s motivations for conquering the world is that he’s in love with a woman called Azra and needs to find her. Looking for an Indian connection, the film's script invents a character called Bindusar who is Changez’s best friend and advises him on his campaigns. The film even has Johny Walker play a Mongol called Tez Khan – quite possibly the only time anyone has ever thought of presenting a soldier from Changez Khan’s army as a comic character.
Not just that, Bollywood has even produced a biopic on Hulagu Khan, Changez’s grandson, in which the character of the Mongol plunderer has fittingly been played by Pran. This time the Khan falls in love with and abducts a Persian girl (Meena Kumari) even as she pines for her boyfriend, Parvez (Ajit). This movie also has a global first: a “mujra” number for a Mongol emperor. In it Helen and Minoo Mumtaz dance for Hulagu Khan, singing, “Aji chale aao, tumhe aankhon ne dil main bulaaya”: exactly the sort of sentiment Modi will be looking to convey to the Mongolians, as he hopes to send a message to China.
