Rebel Sultans Quotes

“He also sacked and destroyed the Adil Shah’s pet city of Nauraspur where that ruler indulged his artistic inclinations and assembled his poets and painters.63 In the next year, 1625, Ambar seized Solapur from Ibrahim II and continued his train of victories.64 That is, however, till death took him away, for in 1626, approaching eighty, the”
― Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji

“independent Maratha state’ under Shivaji (whose grandfather happened to be an associate of Ambar’s).”
― Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji

“The Mughals were, in fact, obsessed with the colour of their enemy’s skin. But ‘Most of all the portrait reveals the emperor’s profound frustration with his failure ever to vanquish Ambar: he fantasized in art what he could not accomplish on the battlefield.’36”
― Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji

“In the same year Ambar suddenly descended on the Mughals with 50,000 horses and sacked Surat, the principal port of the Mughal empire, giving inspiration to the famous raid by Shivaji on that city five decades later.”
― Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji

“slow-moving Mughal armies, honing a military technique that the Marathas would improve to levels of perfection.”
― Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji

“The habshis had almost all of them begun their careers as slaves. And there certainly was a thriving market for men from Ethiopia in the courts and demesnes of the East. Writing as early as the fourteenth century, Ibn Batuta reports how habshis were ‘guarantors of safety’ for ships sailing in the Indian Ocean, with such fearsome reputations that ‘let there be but one of them on a ship and it will be avoided by . . . pirates’.”
― Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji

“eastern lands. Persians arrived, as did Arabs and Central Asians. Some graduated to princely ranks, while others soared to gratifying aristocratic heights. But among the legions of men absorbed by the Bahmanis and their heirs were also Africans who came primarily from the land we now call Ethiopia.”
― Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji

“glorify the Persian emperor as their overlord and spiritual mentor, while Sunni Adil Shahs preferred the Ottomans as their role models.”
― Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji

“Portugal called Frei Luis arrived at court, he was loaded with presents as well as a letter proposing a marital alliance between Vijayanagar and Portugal! The idea was that a Vijayanagar princess would proceed to Lisbon to become queen there, and a daughter of King Manuel of Portugal was to be sent to India, so that the ‘two kings would be allied for the purpose of joint actions on land and sea’ and ‘the blood of the two royal houses would mingle’.115 Nothing came of the idea – though it is tantalizing to imagine what Portuguese power at sea and Vijayanagar’s greatness on land might have achieved – and real glory in the league of Devaraya”
― Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji

“when Vijayanagar’s envoys were dispatched to Persia with Abdur Razzak, bearing rubies and other presents, these ambassadors of the Raya were also Muslims of Iranian origin.94”
― Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji

“Hormuz was already known as ‘Hurumanji’.”
― Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji

“Devaraya II was reminiscent of ‘the throne hall and Apadana of Persepolis’, and ‘sculptural reliefs carved at the base of Vijayanagar’s Great Platform depict processions of figures bearing tribute to the enthroned king’, just as they do on the Apadana thousands of miles away.”
― Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji

“The site the Sangamas chose for their capital lay along a bend of the Tungabhadra. It was a place with sacred associations, first with the river goddess Pampa (from which is derived its current name, Hampi)”
― Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji

“The Tughluqs had shattered the south and vanquished its old houses. 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.”
― Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji

“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.26 If all of the south towered in a ‘patriotic national’27 crusade against a monolithic blitz called Islam and its ‘alien attack’,28 the founders of Vijayanagar would not have had to suppress ‘widespread rebellions in Konkan and in the Tamil country’, raised by Hindu chieftains in the early days of their empire.29”
― Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji

“The Hindus did not unite as one to challenge Muslims, nor, with their own feuds and internal dissensions, were the Muslims of the north a single consolidated block, baring fangs and victimizing Hindus en masse before supper. In fact, the Bahmanis forged several Hindu alliances – the Telugu Reddy and Velama chiefs stood with them at one time, and not with fellow Hindus in Vijayanagar,23 and years later the suzerain of Orissa too allied with Bidar at the expense of the southern Rayas, despite their shared faith in the Hindu pantheon.24 In due course, several more instances would arise when Muslims from the”
― Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji

“Sometime at the beginning of his long and eventful reign, the Vijayanagar emperor Devaraya II (r. 1425–46) summoned a council of all his principal advisers and high nobility. And to this gathering he expressed wonder at how, despite his country being ‘in extent, population, and revenue’ vastly superior to the dominions of the Bahmani Sultans, his predecessors were ‘reduced to pay them tribute’. Some with foolish beliefs declared that Muslims possessed a divine mandate ‘for thirty thousand years’ to dominate the universe, while others, with more rational instincts, pointed out that the strength of the Bahmanis came from their horses and mounted archers. ‘Dew”
― Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji

“permitted his Muslim subordinates to even consume beef, despite protests from Brahmins at court.10 Admittedly, it was during his rule that the empire collapsed, 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.”
― Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji

“which came to include women from Russia, China, Afghanistan and Central Asia,25 and it was rumoured that he conversed, in bits and pieces at any rate, with each of them in her own tongue.”
― Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji

“But his most sensational endeavour appeared when this patron of the arts invited the celebrated Persian poet Hafiz to emigrate to India. Hafiz was willing, and travelled to Hormuz to board his ship. But a furious storm soon after he embarked weakened his resolve – the poet turned back, and conveyed an ode of regret in his place.12 For having tried, nevertheless, the admiring Sultan sent Hafiz a thousand pieces of gold from across the sea.13”
― Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji

“Though sensible in theory, the venture was doomed from the start. Under the Sultans before him, Delhi had transformed itself from a regional town into a glamorous international centre, rivalling, as Barani claimed, Baghdad and Cairo.”
― Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji