The Deccan

What the archive does not know

Every unresolved question the sources left open across this collection, gathered in one place rather than buried at the foot of each page. Showing 24 of 56; the remaining 32 are on the pages they belong to.

• Zebrowski's Deccani Painting (1983) is the foundational work on this subject and was not read for this essay; every characterisation attributed to him here is quoted at second hand. The same is true of Hermann Goetz (1949) and of Haidar and Sardar's 2015 Met catalogue, which is the current standard reference. This essay is a survey built on surveys.

  Small Heads, Tall Women, Flat Buildings: Deccani Painting and What It Refused

• What was lost is unquantified. No painting survives from the Bahmani period at all, and the quality of the earliest Ahmadnagar work implies a trained local tradition — probably mural — that has left no direct trace. Whether any Deccan wall painting survives in situ, in the forts at Bidar, Gulbarga or Daulatabad, was not established here.

  Small Heads, Tall Women, Flat Buildings: Deccani Painting and What It Refused

• The Deccani Ragamala group is 'much discussed' and unattributed: the provincial centre that produced it, the Hindu patrons who commissioned it, and how many original sets the dispersed group represents are all open. This is the largest identified gap in the field and it is a gap in the scholarship, not only in this essay.

  Small Heads, Tall Women, Flat Buildings: Deccani Painting and What It Refused

• Farrukh Beg and Farrukh Husain are treated as one person here, following the sources read. That identification is standard but it is an identification, and the evidence for it was not examined.

  Small Heads, Tall Women, Flat Buildings: Deccani Painting and What It Refused

• The count of surviving Ahmadnagar paintings — 'only about twenty' — comes from one source and was not corroborated. Comparable counts for Bijapur and Golconda were not found at all, so the essay can say the corpus is small without being able to say how small.

  Small Heads, Tall Women, Flat Buildings: Deccani Painting and What It Refused

• The Nujum-ul-Ulum's illustration count is given as a range of 400–800, which is a very wide margin for a single manuscript held in one library. The Chester Beatty Library's own catalogue would settle it and was not reachable during this research.

  Small Heads, Tall Women, Flat Buildings: Deccani Painting and What It Refused

• European influence is asserted ('identifiable borrowings from European images') without a single example being named in any source read. Which prints reached the Deccan, through Goa or the textile trade, and which paintings show them, remains to be established.

  Small Heads, Tall Women, Flat Buildings: Deccani Painting and What It Refused

• This essay is built almost entirely on tertiary sources, and its central claims are claims ABOUT scholarship ('contemporary scholars reject', 'many scholars however reject') rather than the scholarship itself. Burton Stein's Cambridge volume on Vijayanagara, Eaton's chapter on Rama Raya, and the archaeological reports from the Vijayanagara Research Project are the works that would let the archive state these positions on its own authority rather than reporting that others hold them. None was read.

  Rakkasagi–Tangadigi: What Happened at Talikota, and What Was Made of It

• The sources contradict each other on the destruction of the city and the archive cannot yet adjudicate. One page says the alliance 'destroyed the entire city... with important temples being razed to the ground'; another page says archaeologists find 'little evidence... beyond the Royal Center'; UNESCO's citation states six months of pillage as fact. The survival of the Vitthala and Virupaksha complexes favours the narrower reading, but that is an inference drawn here, not a finding taken from an excavation report.

  Rakkasagi–Tangadigi: What Happened at Talikota, and What Was Made of It

• The Gilani brothers are named in every account and identified in none. Whether they existed under that name, what they commanded, whether they defected, and whether any source earlier than Federici (1587) mentions them was not established. If they are a literary invention the whole treachery tradition rests on nothing, and that is checkable against the seven contemporary chronicles.

  Rakkasagi–Tangadigi: What Happened at Talikota, and What Was Made of It

• One source read states that 'Bahamani Sultan camped in Vijayanagar for six months, post war'. There was no Bahmani sultan in 1565 — the archive dates that state's dissolution to 1527. Either the passage means one of the five successor sultans, or it is an error carried from an older account. It is flagged rather than repeated.

  Rakkasagi–Tangadigi: What Happened at Talikota, and What Was Made of It

• The seven contemporary chronicles are listed here from a secondary summary. None was opened. The Burhan-i Maasir and Ferishta's Gulshan-i Ibrahimi both exist in published English translation and are the obvious next acquisition for this page.

  Rakkasagi–Tangadigi: What Happened at Talikota, and What Was Made of It

• The 'stone representation of Rama Raya's head' is mentioned without location, date or maker in the only source that names it. If it is a contemporary object it is among the very few physical memorials of the battle and deserves its own entry.

  Rakkasagi–Tangadigi: What Happened at Talikota, and What Was Made of It

• Whether Ibrahim Quli Qutb Shah's seven years at Vijayanagara left any trace in his conduct at or after Talikota — whether he, like Ali Adil Shah, argued against the execution — is not addressed in anything read. It is the most interesting unexamined question about the battle's participants.

  Rakkasagi–Tangadigi: What Happened at Talikota, and What Was Made of It

• Chand Bibi's death is a standing transmission question for this archive and is not asserted here. The received account — denounced as a traitor by an adviser, murdered by her own garrison, the defence collapsing without her — is internally convenient for a chronicle explaining a lost city, and the two dates given for it are four months apart. Whether any contemporary source describes the killing, and which, was not established. Radhey Shyam's The Kingdom of Ahmadnagar and Wolseley Haig's Historic Landmarks of the Deccan are cited by the accounts read and would be the place to start.

  Regents, Not Consorts: The Women Who Governed the Deccan

• Khunza Humayun has no dedicated modern study in anything read here, and her article carries no date of birth or death — she is recorded only as 'fl. 1571'. When and where she died, and whether she was released from Shivneri, is unknown to this essay. She governed a major Deccan kingdom for six years and the archive cannot say when she died.

  Regents, Not Consorts: The Women Who Governed the Deccan

• Whether the erasures in the Tarif-i Husain Shahi can be dated, and whether they were done at Murtaza's order or later, is not established in anything read. The manuscript is in the Bharat Itihas Sanshodhak Mandal, Pune; a technical examination would answer both, and would establish whether the surviving dohada image escaped by accident or by choice.

  Regents, Not Consorts: The Women Who Governed the Deccan

• Hayat Bakshi Begum governed longest and is documented least. The essay's account of her rests largely on one article drawing on a masters thesis and a VR film; the substantial sources it cites — Sherwani's biography of Muhammad Quli, Siddiqi's History of Golcunda, Nayeem — were not read. Her regency's actual duration ('the first few years') is nowhere stated precisely.

  Regents, Not Consorts: The Women Who Governed the Deccan

• Punji, the Maratha mother of Ibrahim Adil Shah I who is said to have defended her son's succession in armour, appears in one clause of one fort description. Her name, her family, whether she converted, and whether the armour story has any source earlier than the nineteenth century are all unexamined. If it holds, she is the earliest of these figures by two generations.

  Regents, Not Consorts: The Women Who Governed the Deccan

• The essay's fourth observation — that these women's authority was contested factionally and not on religious grounds — rests on the absence of such objections in the accounts read, which is weak evidence. A chronicle that objected on doctrinal grounds might simply not be among the tertiary summaries used here. The claim should be tested against the Persian chronicles before it is relied on.

  Regents, Not Consorts: The Women Who Governed the Deccan

• No woman of the Barid Shahi or Imad Shahi houses appears anywhere in the sources read for this essay. Whether Bidar and Berar produced no comparable figures, or produced them and recorded nothing, is unknown — and the two smallest sultanates are also the two whose archives are thinnest generally.

  Regents, Not Consorts: The Women Who Governed the Deccan

• No Dakhni text was read for this essay — not one line of Kadam Rao Padam Rao, the Kulliyat, Kitab-i-Nauras, Sab Ras, Pem Nem or the ʿAlī-nāma. Everything here is description of a literature at second hand. Annemarie Schimmel's Classical Urdu Literature from the Beginning to Iqbal (1975) and Grahame Bailey's A History of Urdu Literature (1932) are both cited by the sources used and would let the archive quote the corpus rather than describe it.

  The Language That Went North: Dakhni Before It Was Called Urdu

• Whether Kadam Rao Padam Rao has ever been published in a critical edition or translation was not established. If the earliest surviving manuscript in Urdu is not in print, that is a fact worth stating plainly, and this essay cannot state it either way.

  The Language That Went North: Dakhni Before It Was Called Urdu

• Shah Miranji is named as the exemplary Sufi vehicle of early Dakhni and is described nowhere in the sources read. The Sufi vernacular literature of the Bahmani period — the material that made Dakhni a written language before any court took it up — is the least documented part of this subject and the most important to it.

  The Language That Went North: Dakhni Before It Was Called Urdu