Everything on Bahmani Sultanate

Born of an army mutiny against Delhi in 1347 and dissolved by factional strife by 1527, the Bahmani Sultanate was the first independent Muslim kingdom of the Deccan. From its twin capitals of Gulbarga and Bidar, this Persianate state fought Vijayanagara for the river doabs, built one of medieval India's great colleges, and destroyed itself in the quarrel between Deccan-born and foreign-born nobles.

In 1347 the Deccan stopped being a province of Delhi and became a state. The men who did it were not conquerors from outside but Delhi's own officers - the amiran-i sadah, commanders of a hundred, garrisoning the fortress-capital Muhammad bin Tughluq had built for himself at Daulatabad - and they rebelled because they had good reason to believe they were about to be killed. Out of that mutiny came a sultanate that lasted about 180 years and set the political shape of the Deccan until the Mughals. Its founder took the throne as Alauddin Hasan Bahman Shah; almost everything else about him - where he came from, what his epithet Gangu meant, which city he was crowned in, and on what day - is disputed by sources that contradict each other, and the disagreement is the most instructive thing the record contains.

The Bahmani sultanate, the first independent Muslim state of the Deccan, ruled from two capitals in succession: Gulbarga, renamed Ahsanabad at the 1347 usurpation, and Bidar, renamed Muhammadabad, a hundred kilometres northeast, from some point in the 1420s. The move re-founded the kingdom's administrative, military and spiritual geography at once, and settled which city would be the Deccani heartland and which the base of the Persianate immigrant elite whose quarrel eventually broke the state. It is also a decision the sources cannot date: citable authorities give 1424, 1425, 1427, 1429 and 1430. Almost nothing survives that was written while Ahmad Shah I was alive, so the question turns on a single mosque inscription set against chronicles composed 170 to 200 years later - an argument about epigraphy dressed as an argument about a date.

Taj ud-Din Firoz Shah took the Bahmani throne in a palace coup in Gulbarga in 1397 and lost it, twenty-five lunar years later, to his own brother in a room he could no longer leave. Between those two acts he ran the most ambitious cultural experiment the fourteenth-century Deccan had seen: annual ships sent to Iran and Arabia to buy scholars, an observatory begun above Daulatabad, a new palace city on the Bhima, a marriage treaty with Vijayanagara that broke a caste convention. Almost every one of those claims reaches us through a single historian writing two centuries afterwards, and the same reign that imported the talent opened the fault line — foreign Afaqi against Deccan-born Dakhni — that would split the sultanate apart. This entry is as much about what the evidence for Firoz will bear as about Firoz.

For nineteen years the Bahmani sultanate reached further than it ever had before or would again: west to Goa and the Konkan ports, east to the Godavari delta, south in one raid to Kanchipuram. Almost none of it was the work of the sultan whose name the coins carry. Muhammad Shah III came to the throne at nine or ten, and the state was run by a Persian merchant turned minister, Mahmud Gawan, who made its four provinces eight, tied army pay to muster rolls, stripped the great governors of their forts, and built a college at Bidar. In April 1481 the sultan had him killed on the strength of a letter two chroniclers say was forged. The chronogram for the reign's end was kharabi-e Dakan, the ruin of the Deccan: within a decade the eight provinces designed to weaken the governors had become the sultanates that replaced the state.

He was captured as a Hindu child in a Bahmani raid, converted, raised in the palace as a royal slave and educated beside the crown prince; he ended as the most powerful man in the Deccan, and was strangled in a room at Bidar by a client he had made. Malik Hasan Bahri - Nizam-ul-Mulk Bahri, later Malik Naib - led the Deccani faction at the Bahmani court, forged the letter that killed the minister Mahmud Gawan in 1481, ruled as regent for five years, and left a son who founded the Nizam Shahi sultanate at Ahmadnagar. His career is the hinge on which one Bahmani state broke into five, and it repays study because the mechanism is unusually visible: not a clash of peoples but a sequence of offices, jagirs and forged paper, traceable through chronicles that disagree about nearly everything except the killing.

For roughly two centuries the ruling class of the Deccan sultanates was split down the middle by a distinction that had nothing to do with religion and only loosely to do with birth: on one side the Dakhanis, Muslims settled in the peninsula long enough to speak its languages and marry into it, together with the African soldiers who threw in their lot with them; on the other the Afaqis or gharibs - the 'horizon-men', 'strangers' - Iranians, Turks and Arabs newly arrived across the Arabian Sea with Persian chancery skills, war-horses and credit. The distinction was written into the seating plan of the Bahmani audience hall, fought out in banquet massacres and palace coups, and finally resolved by partition: when the Bahmani state broke apart between 1490 and 1518 it broke along the factional seam, each successor sultanate inheriting a bloc as well as a province. Understanding the split is the precondition for understanding why there were five Deccan sultanates rather than one.

For nearly a century and a half a single Muslim sultanate ruled the Deccan plateau from Gulbarga and then Bidar. Between about 1490 and 1527 it stopped ruling and became five states — Ahmadnagar, Bijapur, Berar, Golconda and, last and smallest, Bidar itself, where a minister named Qasim Barid and his son Amir Barid kept a line of Bahmani princes alive on the throne precisely because a name was worth more to them than a crown. The break-up is usually told as a sequence of declarations of independence; it is better understood as a slow withdrawal of obedience by provincial governors who went on using the titles their sovereign had granted them for another forty years. It matters because everything the Deccan does afterwards begins in that ambiguity, and because the sultanate's terminal date is genuinely unsettled: 1518, 1527, 1528, 1538 and 1545 all have named authorities behind them.

The first independent Muslim kingdom of the Deccan, founded in revolt against Delhi — and the trunk from which every later Deccan sultanate grew.

The Chishti master who left Delhi for Gulbarga in old age — and in doing so carried a spiritual lineage south, connecting the Deccan to a chain that runs back to the Prophet ﷺ.

A Persian merchant who became the Bahmani state’s chief minister, built a madrasa on the Central Asian model at Bidar, and was executed on a forged letter.

First Bahmani capital, and the town where a Chishti master from Delhi chose to spend his last twenty years.

Second Bahmani capital, site of a Timurid-model college — and the town that gave its name to an inlay technique.

He arrived in India at forty-two hoping to sell horses, and stayed to run a kingdom for twenty-three years. He built a three-storey residential college out of his own money, on the model of one in Khurasan, and took the Bahmani state to its greatest extent. Then a faction produced a forged letter and the boy-sultan he had raised had him beheaded. Within nine years the kingdom had broken into five. The college survived as a gunpowder store until it blew up.

A Timurid college transplanted to the Deccan — tiled, three-storeyed, with a library, built by a minister who had seen the originals.