Well this has received a lot of attention. I can’t help but feel that a lot of responses are to the title of the thread, and not the actual content of my original post.
The fundamental issue was that I did not find the name Delhi Sultanate apt for the entire region because:
- It does not even represent a single dynasty, nor one single culture
- The borders shifted significantly over time, and only briefly spanned most of the subcontinent
- There were multiple other large, indigenous kingdoms in India at the time that get excluded.
- It does not work as an demonym. It is a retroactive name given by historians to make it easier to talk about and study. They were sultans that ruled from Delhi. It says nothing about the civilisation itself. Mughals by contrast were at least one dynasty.
- It is inconsistent with other civilisation names as they use demonyms/regional names and not individual empires.
- Delhi was ruled by Rajputs until 1193 AD anyway.
So yes, India in modern terms wasn’t a thing back then, nor was there one single empire or nation or even culture (even though certain things were common in most of the region). You had smaller kingdoms that could be thought of as distinct sub-cultures, but then again when talking about a broad civilisation that inhabited a region, what else would you call it, except Indian, Hindustani, Indo-Islamic, or North/South Indian? Indic, maybe? It’s tricky for sure.
In AoE II for example, the civilisation is Indian and there exists a Prithviraj Chauhan campaign. How would you do that with AoE IV? Prithviraj Chauhan of the Delhi Sultanate??? On the other hand, you could have an Indian civ with a Delhi Sultanate/Tughlaq campaign and it would still be consistent.
So that leads to the other question - does Relic plan to introduce more South Asian dynasties/civs? If so, going this granular might be okay, but perhaps Delhi Sultanate is still an awkward name, since it references a retroactively named period in history, and not the people or culture or region, even. Perhaps Indo-Turks is a better name?
I don’t think it’s right to call this civilization as ‘India’ or ‘Indian’ (btw I am Indian too) because like others have said, India didn’t exist as such
Sure but the Delhi Sultanate didn’t mean too much back then either, it would have been X dynasty’s kingdom or empire. As I said above, it’s a retroactive name. I would be happier with it being called Mughals, although as others have mentioned, it came towards the end of the period of the game.
The Mughal Empire was founded by Turkic Mongols, which was almost the same as the Sultanate of Delhi, and was ruled by foreign nationalities.
Founding Sultanate rulers were Turkic, Turko-Afghan and later Indo-Turkic but not Mongol. Babur of the Mughals was part Turkic and part Mongol ancestry. Both sets of rulers gave rise to heterogeneous Indo-Muslim nobility, so it’s hard to call them foreigners after the Mamulks were overthrown.
p.s. The fact that some people didn’t find the name Indians appropriate in earlier games is fairly irrelevant - I for one had no problems with this, for example. The rationale behind finding it more or less appropriate is what is really important.