This is not my first bollywood-history essay. A while ago I wrote a very satisfying one titled What do two microhistories and one bollywood film have in common? Clearly, films keep opening little historical trapdoors in my mind, and I keep falling through them with great joy.

Recently, while revisiting the medieval Indian history classic M. Athar Ali’s Mughal India: Studies in Polity, Ideas, Society and Culture (2006), a short chapter on ‘Nobility under Muhammad Tughluq’ unexpectedly brought me back to a dialogue from Shah Rukh Khan’s Chak De! India (2007). The film, as everyone knows, is a sports drama about Kabir Khan, a disgraced former hockey star seeking redemption by coaching a women’s national team to international victory.

In one memorable scene (memorable at the least to this historian in me), senior player Bindiya Naik, irritated by Kabir Khan’s sternness and his choice of a younger player as captain, snaps (in rough translation from Hindi): ‘Have you heard of Muhammad bin Tughluq? He was that mad emperor who replaced gold coins with copper ones’. A classic bollywood historical reference and who among us doesn’t have a weakness for those?

But that throwaway line got me thinking. Why is Muhammad bin Tughluq (r. 1325–51) such a touchstone of ‘madness’? Why does his name so easily stand in for erratic leadership?

Athar Ali calls him ‘a controversial figure’, someone described by contemporary chroniclers with phrases like ‘devilish hypocrisy’ or ‘a genius seeking pleasure in human distress’. Modern historians, of course, have been more cautious, insisting that one must read his policies in terms of ‘the requirements of the actual situation rather than in primitive psycho-analysis’.

Under Muhammad bin Tughluq, the Delhi Sultanate reached both its largest territorial extent and its deepest administrative crisis. The crisis, Ali argues, had its roots in bureaucratic factionalism: an elitist bureaucracy, not at all loyal to the Sultan, and certainly not bound to his vision of a reorganised state. In fact, chronicler Ziyauddin Barani, who was himself part of this very elite faction, complained almost bitterly about the ‘intransigence of officers’ who suddenly appeared to dominate the closing years of the Sultan’s reign.

Well, to give him the benefit of the doubt, Muhammad bin Tughluq did inherit a bureaucracy that did not trust him, and that he, in turn, did not trust. His response? Fill high offices with his favourites, many of them former slaves, Hindu converts and men of relatively humble origin. Barani records (with a tinge of horror, of course) that although the Sultan publicly denounced ‘men of low birth’, he appointed large numbers of them to influential posts. Add to this the wide-open door he kept for Persian and Central Asian immigrants, and we begin to see a pattern.

Ali suggests that this policy was not merely eccentricity, though that is the popular interpretation. It was a deliberate attempt to create a heterogeneous bureaucracy, one that was dependent on the Sultan, unrooted in old oligarchies and capable of reshaping the state’s political culture. If this sounds familiar, it should. It is precisely the kind of composite polity that would later be perfected under Mughal ruler Akbar, and to what much of his success is attributed.

And suddenly, the Chak De! reference doesn’t feel so random anymore. Kabir Khan, after all, builds a composite team. The film goes out of its way to show the federation of differences with women players from Haryana, Chandigarh, Jharkhand, Manipur, Mizoram, Punjab, Andhra Pradesh and beyond. They bring with them their accents, tempers, insecurities and pride. The older players, like Bindiya Naik, feel alienated and the younger ones, often from smaller towns or marginalised regions, are elevated. What the selectors see as chaos, Kabir Khan sees as possibility. It is a modern, fictional—and successful, one might add—experiment in heterogeneity.

Tughluq’s experiment was real, risky and historically overdetermined. Kabir Khan’s is fictional, cinematic and ultimately redemptive. But both men, separated by centuries and worlds of context, pursue a somewhat similar vision, that is, diversification of ranks. The difference is that Chak De! gives us a triumphant ending, while history gives us a collapse that later chroniclers happily pinned on the Sultan’s ‘madness’.

Now, let me linger briefly on the name Kabir Khan. This is where the historian in me refuses to let anything slide. Kabir, the name, comes from the fifteenth-century mystic poet Kabir, beloved across India for his refusal to be categorised. He rejected religious binaries and composed verses that insist on the ultimate sameness of Hindu and Muslim devotional universes. He wrote:

Hindus call Him Ram, Muslims Khuda.

Says Kabir, Whoever lives,

never bothers with this duality—

Ka‘bah then becomes Kashi, Ram becomes Rahim.

Moreover, when Kabir died, both Hindus and Muslims claimed him as their own.

And then, of course, there is Shah Rukh Khan’s Kabir Khan played by an actor who himself occupies an unusually capacious place in India’s cultural imagination. SRK is one of those rare figures claimed, loved, defended and celebrated across communities. Much like the saint Kabir, he becomes a shared emotional vocabulary.

So what do Muhammad bin Tughluq and Kabir Khan have in common? More than a scriptwriter’s joke, it turns out. Both—one historical, one fictional—attempted to build new orders out of heterogeneity and in response, were judged, in their own ways, through the anxieties of their times.