Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji

by Manu S. Pillai

river goddess Pampa (from which is derived its current name, Hampi) and then with a male deity called Virupaksha. Both were connected to Devi and Shiva of the Sanskritic mainstream, and the Sangamas adopted their worship.

Instead, it might simply be that ‘these stories were composed by different authors to be communicated to very different audiences’ to establish the credentials of a new house in a new realm, embracing peoples speaking a variety of languages and with diverse cults and cultures, all under a single imperial umbrella.52

Vidyaranya,

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Tamil weavers not only obtained benefits on account of their importance to the economy, but were even granted superior status with the use of palanquins and the right to blow the conch on ritual occasions.

Abdur Razzak, a Persian ambassador,

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Persian culture was an arresting soft power asset, viewed across the trading world as ‘prestigious, cosmopolitan, and most important, readily portable across ethnic frontiers’ without narrow religious connotations.

For by the age of Devaraya II, men wore shawls, scarves and caps, which were succeeded, as evinced through surviving sculpture and art, by ‘close fitting, high-necked, full-sleeved shirts or jackets that were usually buttoned down the front’. Similar innovations applied to the dhoti, which was ‘covered by broad girdles and waistbands, the whole ranging from knee-length to ankle-length’.85 In a custom originally introduced in the south by Muslim invaders as we saw after the defeat of Prataparudra of Warangal, the Rayas commenced the practice of bestowing robes of honour on dignitaries,

The multi-columned pavilion where Abdur Razzak studied Devaraya II was reminiscent of ‘the throne hall and Apadana of Persepolis’,

Vijayanagar, however, like the Bahmani Sultanate, was a multiregional entity. Arabic and Persian linguistic influences melted into Kannada and Telugu, and urbanization was at an all-time high

Nuniz’s

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And so it was that Miyan Ali appears in Goan records, becoming what the scholar Sanjay Subrahmanyam calls a ‘Muslim fly in the ointment’ to these colonizers on the west coast.

Dona Maria de Alem-Mar,

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as Dom Joao Meale and Dom Fernando Meale. There was, to them at any rate, little irony that their new surname was simply a corruption of the name of their tragic ancestor, the ill-fated Miyan Ali.

Theirs was ‘essentially a Persian style profoundly modified by Hindu influence’ – where in the north the Mughals, for instance, married the Rajput tradition into their own court architecture, in Bijapur it was the South Indian fashion with its ‘distinctly baroque character, full curves, and rich jewelery’ that came to dominate – though most of this evolved under Ali’s successor.53

it was to his court that the previously mentioned Sancho Pires, wanted for murder in Goa, escaped and became a favourite artilleryman and cavalry head by the name of Firangi Khan.64 An Ottoman engineer of considerable ability called Muhammad bin Husain also arrived to serve the Nizam Shah, casting for him a famous fourteen-foot-long bronze gun by the name of Malik-i-Maidan, based on technology sourced from Hungary and so heavy that hundreds of oxen and elephants were needed to drag it into battle.

Garcia da Orta,

With the splintering of the Bahmani kingdom into five smaller states, Ramaraya appears to have calculated that he could play them against each other for his own gain; a perfectly reasonable assessment till it proved to be precisely the thing that brought about his downfall.80

This new alliance was fortified through marriage – Husain Nizam Shah was already father-in-law to the Qutb Shah of Golconda, and now he gave another daughter, the redoubtable future heroine, Chand Bibi, to Ali Adil Shah of Bijapur.

It was the inability of the Deccan’s ancient rulers – the Kakatiyas, Hoysalas and Yadavas – to join together against their common enemy that led to the fall of their order at the hands of the Khiljis and Tughluqs.

With his heir, Ibrahim II, aged only nine, Chand Bibi, the Nizam Shahi princess married to the deceased Ali as part of the alliances that were formed in 1564, now assumed the regency. This dowager was an extraordinary figure, described as ‘one of the greatest women that India has produced’

He was instrumental in patronizing Mir Fathullah Shirazi, a scholar and mechanical engineer who invented a number of clever artillery machines, before Akbar snatched him after Ali’s death for the interests of the Mughal empire.

Nujum al-Ulum (Stars of Sciences), ‘written in Persian but replete with Dakhni Urdu’, which ‘drew on Indic, Islamic, Hellenic, and Turkic traditions to provide a comprehensive vision of medieval Deccani court culture. Blending astronomy, mysticism, and politics,’ we are told, ‘the text shows that despite the bitter class struggles between [Dakhnis] and Westerners or the sectarian strife between Sunnis and Shiahs, courtly knowledge in the Deccan could achieve a remarkably eclectic synthesis of Indic and Persianate cultural traditions.’29

In the copper coins he minted, Ibrahim II referred to himself as Abla Bali (Friend of the Weak) in Sanskrit.

But when he was in his gentler, constructive mood, Ibrahim II could charm the world.41 A number of his farmans begin with an invocation of the Hindu goddess Saraswati.

Kitab-i-Nauras, of ‘fifty-nine devotional songs and seventeen couplets’,

But the ‘figure of Saraswati itself follows no known established pictorial model’ – unlike her current representations or even old sculptures, Ibrahim’s Saraswati is dressed in white robes, appearing more ‘in the form of a royal Deccan princess’ than in any immediately recognizable ‘Hindu’ style.

In matters of court culture, etiquette and dress, however, all factions were equally besotted with Persian fashions, a tendency that would carry well into the times of the Maratha confederacy of the eighteenth century.

The Adil Shah himself, a Mughal envoy was surprised to discover, preferred speaking Marathi in court,53 and one of his harem favourites was a Maharashtrian dancer called Rambha.54 It was also well known that Ibrahim II had an excellent grasp of Sanskrit, far superior than his grip over Persian, the language of his Westerner ancestors and of the imperial durbar in the north.

Jami Masjid,

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Cornelius Clausz Heda.

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Several are the portraits Beg did of his Bijapuri patron, in which his Persian roots, experience in Afghanistan and Mughal days all come into play – we see Ibrahim II with a smooth chin, hawking, just as we witness him atop Atash Khan, his elephant.

A three-dimensional realism, the hallmark of post-Renaissance Western art, begins to appear in local works, whether they are clearly paintings inspired by Christian themes, such as one of the Virgin Mary, or of Deccani women, who appear in dresses that look markedly European in the flow of the drapery (besides, of course, the occasional hat-wearing white man who appears within these frames).

‘The poetic conduit’, in fact, notes Deborah Hutton, is so strong even in paintings of the Adil Shah that they are ‘perhaps better understood not as portraits of Ibrahim II but rather as visualizations of poetic ideals regarding Ibrahim II’.66

Jacques de Coutre, a Flemish gem trader,

Gulshan-i Ibrahimi

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Battle of Talikota’,

Important context

While hereafter, the invaders declared, they would refer to the queen not as Begum but as Chand Sultan, the title was mere flattery that came as a consolation alongside the main price of imperial withdrawal – they wanted Berar for Akbar.100

The only obstacle in the way, however, was one man – a warrior Akbar decried as ‘arrogant’ and ‘evil-disposed’ and whom Jehangir would violently, in his frustration, denounce as ‘black-faced’ and ‘ill-starred’. His name was Malik Ambar.

Jamal al-Din Yakut,

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The exquisite Siddi Saiyyed Mosque in Ahmedabad was built by a habshi in 1572, and generations later the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb would appoint the African lord of the fortress of Janjira his naval commander, allocating to him an annual grant of 400,000 rupees to maintain the imperial fleet. In the old quarter of Delhi there is even an area by the name of Phatak Habash Khan,

It was a custom as old as time itself: when rulers found they could not trust implicitly their nobility, which wallowed in its feuds and vested interests, power was secured by obtaining slaves cut away from their own roots and loyal to masters who provided them protection and a purpose. In Egypt, Turkey, Persia and indeed in India, the formula had been applied many times over – the first kings of the Delhi Sultanate themselves were military slaves belonging to Muhammad Ghuri, the invader.

One scholar notes that under Ambar the Nizam Shahi state ‘effectively [became] a joint Habshi–Maratha enterprise’41 and indeed the kingdom could be perceived ‘as the nursery in which Maratha power could grow, creating the political preconditions for the eventual emergence of an independent Maratha state’ under Shivaji (whose grandfather happened to be an associate of Ambar’s).

Ahd Namah (Deed of Agreement) – it could never be a ‘treaty’ for the two sides were not, it was now clear, equal.

This was in contrast to the Inqiyad Namah (Deed of Submission) signed with the Qutb Shah in Golconda at the same time, for this prince was made to pay annual tribute to the emperor of 200,000 hons, mint coins in the Mughal style and suspend veneration of the Iranian kings.

Ikhlas Khan

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The Mughals were compelled to retreat and return to their own headquarters, Khirki, which had now been renamed after the emperor as Aurangabad.96

In 1680, when Sikandar was about twelve years old, two artists at court by the names of Chand Muhammad and Kamal Muhammad had produced a painting called The House of Bijapur.

Qutb Shahs of Golconda. Their ancestors, in the fourteenth century, were vassals of the Sultanate in Baghdad, and belonged to the Turkic Qara Qoyunlu (Black Sheep) tribe, which controlled parts of northern Iraq near Mosul, in addition to Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Aq Qoyunlu (White Sheep),

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Tarikh-i Qutb Shahi

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