Trusted nobles and officers were organised into a 'group of Forty'…

Turkan-i-Chahalgani ("the Corps of Forty") refers to a select body of trusted Turkish slave-officers (bandagan-i-khas) that a Sultan of Delhi raised to the highest military and administrative posts. Because these officers owed their rank entirely to the ruler who trained and promoted them, rather than to birth or hereditary right, the corps let a Sultan concentrate loyal, capable men around the throne and counterbalance the older, more independent nobility.

Iltutmish, the third ruler of Delhi's Slave (Mamluk) dynasty and himself a Turkish slave who had risen through Qutbuddin Aibak's household, organised this corps of about forty loyal Turkish nobles after he secured the throne. He used them to suppress rival claimants to the Sultanate and to staff key provincial and military charges (iqtas), which consolidated central authority in the early years of the Delhi Sultanate.

• Balban rose to prominence as one of the Chahalgani nobles during Iltutmish's reign; only decades later, after becoming Sultan himself, did he move to dismantle the group's collective grip on power.

• Iltutmish assembled the corps of about forty loyal Turkish officers described above, in the years after he secured the Delhi throne.

• Malik Kafur was a slave-general under the later Khalji dynasty's Sultan Alauddin Khalji, remembered chiefly for commanding the Khalji military campaigns into the Deccan and southern India.

• Nusrat Khan served as a noble and military commander under Sultan Alauddin Khalji, associated with the Khalji campaigns in Gujarat.

The Turkan-i-Chahalgani was therefore organised by Iltutmish, in the early decades of the Delhi Sultanate, well before the later Khalji-era careers of Malik Kafur and Nusrat Khan, and before Balban's own later rise to the throne.