Everything on Adil Shahi Dynasty

Regional Divisions

10 items

• The Khutba and the Chatr: Sovereignty as Two Acts in Ferishta's Deccan — essay · Adil Shahi Dynasty · 14 sources
  Ferishta does not describe Deccan sovereignty in the abstract; he narrates it as two repeated, datable acts. A man became king when the Friday sermon was read in his name, and when he stood under a canopy reserved to rulers. Both acts could be given, and both taken back: a founder reads the khutba for himself in 895 AH and is acknowledged king in the same sentence; his neighbour at Ahmadnagar raises a white canopy, is talked out of it, and then back into the khutba, by the same officers; a Sunni son strips the sermon of the twelve Imams his Shi'i father had put there; a captive king is made to read another sovereign's name over his own city; and one man, crowned with the full ceremony, later turns out to have no claim to the throne he was given it on. The instruments did not certify legitimacy so much as perform it.

• Yusuf Adil Shah — Person · r. 1490 – 1510 · Adil Shahi Dynasty
  The Bahmani governor who had the khutba read in his own name at Bijapur and founded a dynasty — with an Ottoman birth story the archive treats as a transmission question, not a fact.
• Ismail Adil Shah — Person · r. 1510 – 1534 · Adil Shahi Dynasty
  Came to the throne a child under the regent Kamal Khan, and grew into the Bijapur sultan Ferishta’s informant found “fonder of the Turkish and Persian manners, music, and language, than the Deccany”.
• Mallu Adil Shah — Person · r. 1534, deposed and blinded within the year · Adil Shahi Dynasty
  The eldest son who succeeded by birthright, and whom his own grandmother had deposed and blinded within months — the shortest reign in the Bijapur line.
• Ibrahim Adil Shah I — Person · r. 1534 – 1558 · Adil Shahi Dynasty
  Raised to the Bijapur throne over his blinded elder brother, he restored Sunni observance and spent his last years suspecting his own son of Shiism — which is how the succession after him came to be left to the ministers.
• Ali Adil Shah I — Person · r. 1558 – 1580 · Adil Shahi Dynasty
  Invested with the royal insignia at Miraj before his father was dead, enthroned in a garden two miles outside Bijapur, he married Chand Bibi, fought at Talikota and built the city’s Jama Masjid — and was assassinated with an ambassador of Akbar in the city.
• Muhammad Adil Shah — Person · r. 1627 – 1656 · Adil Shahi Dynasty
  The sultan under whom the Gol Gumbaz was begun and left unfinished at his death — the one Bijapur accession after Ferishta stops for which the archive has not yet opened a page saying how it happened.
• Ali Adil Shah II — Person · r. 1656 – 1672 · Adil Shahi Dynasty
  Commanded some eighty thousand horse where his father had a hundred and twenty thousand, and left a child on the throne — the reign in which Bijapur stopped growing and began to be taken apart.
• Sikandar Adil Shah — Person · r. 1672 – 1686, the last · Adil Shahi Dynasty
  Enthroned at four or five and never allowed to govern; the fourteen years of his reign are fourteen years of regents, and the reign ends with the keys of Bijapur handed to Aurangzeb.
• Kamal Khan Deccany — Person · regent, 1510–1511 · Adil Shahi Dynasty
  A noble of the Bijapur court who rose from Meer Nobut to prime minister under Yusuf Adil Shah, was named regent for the infant Ismail Adil Shah on Yusuf's deathbed, and was assassinated after trying to seize the throne outright.