Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji

by Manu S. Pillai

The Deccan, to the world, was uniquely Indian; to India, however, it was a mirror of the world.

the Deccan became also something more sinister: the undoing of mighty kings, a graveyard of glorious empires.

Men from the world over arrived in their capital, bringing old customs astride bold ideas: patterns seen in Persepolis were replicated in the mammoth pavilions of Vijayanagar, characters from Turkey and Arabia enshrined in its temple columns forever.

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Despite the gore in which it lay drenched, the Deccan created art too of striking originality – a portrait of the goddess of learning, Saraswati, for instance, unprecedented in its Islamic form, or of a Hindu yogini bearing influences from countries as distant as China.

Free from prejudice, we discover, society can scale the heights of greatness. Divided and broken, on the other hand, doom is quick to ensnare.

Between the rivers Krishna and Tungabhadra lay the prized triangular district of Raichur, exquisitely fecund but also rich in iron and diamond deposits. In the days of yore, the Kakatiya and Hoysala dynasties had quarrelled over it, and the Chalukyas and Pallavas before them.

In the late 1460s the Bahmanis reinforced the inner citadel with strong outer walls, ‘capitalizing on new engineering technology imported from north India and the Middle East’, constructing a ‘moat, numerous bastions, and imposing gates on the city’s eastern and western ends’.21

Persian chronicler Ferishta, sympathetic to the Adil Shah, would later blame the ignominy the latter endured on the fact that he was drunk – it was the alcohol that addled his senses and caused him to rush across the river to challenge Krishnadeva without thought.36

The Raya of Vijayanagar, it was announced to all, was now also the Yavana Rajya Sthapana Acharya – the Hindu

monarch who re-established the kingdom of the Turks.48

Islam, tradition claims, had arrived on the Malabar coast during the lifetime of the Prophet himself, touching the Deccan at any rate by the tenth century thereafter.

Ghiyasuddin Balban, the ninth Sultan, for instance, never set foot in the south. Yet he felt impelled to have his power flaunted in a classical idiom of hyperbole to a very Indian audience:

Furthermore, the Sultan, who claimed to be Allah’s shadow, is also portrayed as Vishnu’s representative among mortals, so that with the ‘earth being now supported by this sovereign’, the lord ‘taking Laksmi on his breast and relinquishing all worries, sleeps in peace on the ocean of milk’.

The Yadavas were lords of the Marathi lands, while the Kakatiyas in Warangal ruled over Telugu domains. Karnataka was held by the Hoysalas from their seat in Dwarasamudra

Alauddin and his 8000 cavalry met practically no resistance on their way to Devagiri in 1296, except at a single point where a chieftain, assisted by two nameless Maratha women (who ‘fought like lionesses’), unsuccessfully stood in the way.

Alauddin had also seized the queen of Gujarat, and it was from that kingdom that the enslaved eunuch Hazardinari (‘1000 coins’, after his initial price) was acquired. Destined to go down in history as Malik Kafur, this man was Alauddin’s most dreaded general – and his controversial lover.

This was a region where Kakatiya inscriptions reveal remarkable social mobility in the medieval era, with nearly a third of inscriptional evidence showing fathers and sons holding different occupations, free from rigid compulsions of caste and birth. Kakatiya dynasts, unlike most Indian ruling houses that fabricated genealogies from the sun, moon or legendary heroes of their choosing, themselves claimed no exalted origins; ‘with only one exception, [they] embraced sudra status’.

a rebel faction that established a short-lived Sultanate in Madurai. After all, the collapse of the three great houses of the Deccan had left behind an enormous political vacuum, notionally occupied by the Tughluqs, and many were those, Hindu as well as Muslim, seeking to turn the tide in their own favour.

From this bloody mess that was now the Deccan emerged shortly the states of Vijayanagar, its founders sons of the soil, and Bahmani, whose architects were immigrants from the north. And it was in their image that the country would flourish for three centuries hereafter, embattled as much as enriched by the legacies they forged.

On 3 August 1347, a date declared auspicious by Daulatabad’s Hindu stargazers, Hasan Gangu was

proclaimed Abul Muzaffar Alauddin Bahman Shah, first king of the Bahmani Sultanate.44

This was not implausible, for Muhammad bin Tughluq and his father too were believed to be sons of Hindu mothers.

the Karimuddin Mosque in Bijapur, constructed between 1310 and 1320, has been appreciated for its architecture that closely weds different styles, resembling ‘a Hindu temple more than anything Islamic’.

(though, ironically, it was mainly Vijayanagar’s currency – or as Ferishta calls it, ‘infidel coinage’ – that actually happened to service Bahmani realms).

It was from here that the northern rulers recruited military talent and slaves, obtaining a steady stream of immigrants who came to India to make their careers – and, frequently, even to anoint themselves kings. Exposed to ‘the flowering of the Persian Renaissance . . . a vibrant literary and cultural movement . . . these refugees [also] brought with them the entire spectrum of cosmopolitan Persian culture, which soon took root in North India’.14

Firoz Shah also utilized his years in power to make the most determined effort yet to transform the Bahmani Sultanate into one of the more sophisticated seats of art and culture in the East.

contingencies of politics conspired with the provision of opportunity to help transform the Deccan into a seat of international cosmopolitanism.

with the coming of the Europeans, white men too would make their mark in the Deccan – a sixteenth-century cavalry commander called Firangi Khan, originally Sancho Pires, was of Portuguese origin,40 while the 1638 commander of Bijapur fort, Niamat Khan, was born in Rome.

successor states also pursued, awed more by faraway Iran than the powerful Mughal empire that would soon flower in their own neighbourhood, and which would one day seek to swallow the Deccan whole.

Gisu Daraz

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Turquoise Throne.

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Ceremonies associated with the commemoration are presided over not by a Muslim priest or even a Sufi saint but by the jangam (spiritual preceptor) of the Shiva-worshipping Lingayats of Madhyal.

They, with hundreds of devotees (the Hindus considering Ahmad Shah a reincarnation of the twelfth-century Lingayat mystic Allama Prabhu65

The period of the Bidar Sultanate’ became ‘one of internal peace. Intrigues there no doubt were . . . But it is remarkable that after the blood-thirsty atmosphere which Ahmad left at Gulbarga . . . we find that there is not a single case of regicide’ until the collapse of the dynasty in the next century.

Afanasy Nikitin

for instance, and while the cotton of the Deccan had long ago earned a reputation abroad,

Trade and empires

the Dakhnis, descended from those early Muslim

immigrants from northern India who were of Turkic or local (converted) origins,78 and the Afaqis, or ‘Westerners’, who had crossed the seas to win success under Bahmani patronage. (Hindu lords were lower down in the hierarchy to matter as far as court intrigues were concerned.)

Mahmud Gawan. And as it happened, this wise statesman offered the Bahmani Sultanate its final era of prosperity, even as the dynasty itself tottered with intrigue and dissension.

Gawan, for instance, who established the Bidar Madrasa in 1472,

‘Dew Ray [Devaraya] upon this,’ we are informed, ‘gave orders to enlist Mussulmans in his service, allotting them estates, and erecting a mosque for their use in Beejanuggar. He

but the fact was that in the Deccan, north and south, the elite ‘enjoyed considerable mobility, moving from patron to patron according to changes in political winds’, and not on the basis of what religion they pretended to uphold11 – a state of affairs quite at odds with the enduring picture of Vijayanagar as a Hindu bulwark against Islamic bigotry.

And most revealingly, Bukka, one of the founders of Vijayanagar, invited the Sultan of Delhi back to the south so they could together eat the Bahmanis for breakfast – hardly the mark of an implacable Hindu zealot whose pre-Islamic paradise was shattered by Muslim barbarians from Delhi.17 Like

Their world was not one of black and white, though religion did lend itself to the invention of grand narratives, regardless of which faith was under consideration, on either side of the political divide.19

Among the oldest ruins visible today at Hampi, on the Great Platform in the Royal Centre of the city, there are various reliefs carved in stone, featuring not only Hindus but also Muslims – depicted with long noses, pointed caps and shoes with pointed ends – who are seen riding horses, bearing arms and even dancing for the Vijayanagar king. The Ramachandra temple nearby features stone carvings of Arabs leading horses, while in the celebrated Vitthala temple there is a mandapa with a column that shows a ‘turbaned Muslim warrior’.

This explains why literary sources incorporated Muslim rulers into familiar metaphors. The king of Orissa was Gajapati, or Lord of Elephants; the Bahmani Sultan was seen as Ashvapati, or Lord of Horses; and completing the circle was Narapati, or Lord of Men in Vijayanagar.

And while it is romantic to proclaim that in founding Vijayanagar ‘the Hindus of the south’ were making a ‘bid for freedom’,30 the actual careers of Vijayanagar’s founders, one of whom, Harihara, is even said to have served the Delhi Sultanate, shows that plain realpolitik, often couched in a vocabulary of faith, was what actually motivated them.

And from the doldrums emerged Vijayanagar and the Bahmani Sultanate that, for reasons of economics cloaked in a language of religion, waged war against one another till nothing but ashes remained.

Hinduraya Suratrana, or Sultan among Hindu Kings. Five years later another brother, governing a different part of this stitched-together kingdom, took the same title, followed in 1354 by Harihara too naming himself Sultan.43 It was the first time Indian rulers applied the term ‘Hindu’ to distinguish themselves from Muslims of foreign origins – in other words, a geographical term applied to Indians in general by outsiders was now internalized.

And, at the end of the day, in ‘expelling Tughluq imperial might from the region, leaders of both’ the Vijayanagar and Bahmani kingdoms ‘defiantly and successfully appropriated the conceptual basis of Delhi’s authority—the title’ of Sultan.46