A province that never stopped being a province
The Imad Shahi kingdom was a Bahmani provincial command — a taraf — that outlived its empire, and the man who made it a kingdom held it first as a Bahmani appointee: Bosworth records Fath Allah Darya Khan as 'governor for the Bahmanīs in Berār since 876/1471', dates his independence to 890/1485, and notes that his son 'assumed the title of Shāh in 896/1491' [19]. Nothing about the province's shape changed: the same forts, parganas and officers continued, and only the name in the Friday sermon moved.
The founder's origins were as unlikely as the state's. Ferishta reports that the family's first distinguished member 'was descended from the Canarese infidels of Beejanuggur' and, taken prisoner as a boy, 'was ad- mitted among the body-guard of Khan Jehan, the commander-in-chief, and governor of Berar' [9]. A captive from Vijayanagar, raised a Muslim in Bahmani service, ended as the founder of a sultanate — and, on the evidence of his own fortress gate, never disowned it. Above the Delhi gate at Gawilgarh, T. W. Haig identified 'the gandabherunda the fabulous two headed eagle of Vijayanagar, which preys upon elephants', an emblem of the dynasty Fathullah had been captured from, and read its presence as showing 'that he was proud of his origin' [17].
Berar's problem was confessional as much as territorial. Bosworth notes that with Bidar this was 'the only Sunnī principality among the Deccani successor-states to the Bahmanids', its independence 'filled with warfare with their neighbours, such as the ‘Ādil Shāhīs and Niẓām Shāhīs' [20]. A small Sunni state wedged between three larger and mostly Shi'i ones spent eighty years buying time, and ran out of things to buy it with.
What sovereignty looked like, and what it did not leave behind
The standard account has Berar declaring independence in 1490 alongside Ahmadnagar and Bijapur. Haig, working from the fort inscriptions, states that in that year Fathullah 'declared his independence, established a mint, and caused the khutbah to be read in his name in all the mosques in Berar. He made Gawilgarh his residential capital though Ellichpur was the most important town in his small kingdom' [13]. Two things are asserted there in the conventional formula — khutba and sikka, sermon and coin — and one of them is doubtful; the third, the dual capital, explains the shape of the war that ended the state.
Pushkar Sohoni's study of post-Bahmani monetary policy makes the general point sharply: 'the sultanates of the Deccan that succeeded the Bahmani kingdom did not strike their own coins for almost a century after they had declared sovereign status' [22]. No Imad Shahi coin type was located for this entry, and whether Haig's 'mint' rests on an inscription, a chronicle statement or an inference could not be established.
What the dynasty demonstrably left is epigraphy. At the Mahakali gate of Narnala, Haig found a short text 'very dexterously used as a chronogram which gives the date of the building of the gate as A. H. 892 (A. D. 1487)' [16] — three years before the accepted date of independence, a Bahmani governor was already dating his own gates in his own name. The material record of Imad Shahi Berar is fortification and inscription in the Satpura hills: no court chronicle, no palace, no coin.
Tufal Khan: the office before the throne
The man who ended the dynasty began as its whole administration. The Burhan-i Ma'asir, the Nizam Shahi chronicle of Sayyid 'Ali Tabataba, describes him with contempt but precision: he 'had attained to the position of Amir-ul-Umara, nay vahil and 2nsTiva, and thus held all power in the state' [1]. Strip the hostility and the OCR damage and the substance stands: commander of the amirs, plus wakil and peshwa — military, executive and revenue headships in one pair of hands during a royal minority. On this description the deposition formalised a monopoly rather than inventing one.
The coup itself Haig compresses into a sentence: Burhan 'succeeded to the throne as a boy and soon after his accession was seized and closely imprisoned in Narnala by his prime minister, Tufal Khan, who, with the assent of Ibrahim Qutb Shah of Golconda and the Sultan of Khandesh, assumed the royal authority' [14]. The clause about assent is what matters. Ferishta's Berar book adds the Nizam Shahi court to those who acquiesced, and his Nizam Shahi book records Murtaza, driven from his own capital after 1565, retreating to Berar and allying with the usurper he would later destroy [4]. If Ahmadnagar first tolerated and then allied with the usurpation, the demand of 1572 that Burhan be restored reads as a pretext its author helped manufacture. That is what the transmission supports; it supports no verdict on Murtaza's intentions.
Abu'l-Fazl, writing from the Mughal side a generation later, tells the same story in one clause and with a different subject: 'his son, Burhan, a minor, was raised to the throne, but the nobles perfidiously usurped the administration, till Murtaza Nizam-ul-Mulk conquered and annexed the country to Ahmadnagar' [10]. His plural — the nobles, not one man — hints that the concentration of power in Tufal Khan may have been a factional settlement rather than a personal seizure.
The compact of 1572 and a war of pursuit
Berar was disposed of in advance, by treaty between its neighbours. Ferishta records the bargain: Bijapur was to 'conquer as much of the Carnatic as would produce a revenue equal to Berar and Bidur ; which latter kingdoms Moortuza Nizam Shah should be at liberty to wrest from the hands of Toofal Khan and Ally Bereed Shah' [6]. Seven years after Talikota, the two surviving small sultanates were priced against the spoils of the south and traded as fungible revenue. Berar had survived the 1560s by buying off one aggressor at a time; in 1572 the aggressors stopped competing for it.
The war that followed was not decided by a battle. Ferishta dates the opening to A.H. 980: his general Chungiz Khan 'drove Toofal Khan from Elichpoor, compell- ing him and his son, Shumsheer-ool-Moolk, to fly to the hills'; thereafter 'Toofal Khan was driven from jungle to jungle for six months' [5]. Sherwani and Joshi close the arc: 'Tufal Khan and his son now returned to Berar and shut themselves up m the forts of NarnEla and Gawilgarh respectively', whereupon Murtaza besieged both, while 'In despair Tufal Khan had already appealed to the Mughal Emperor for asswtance' [18]. Ellichpur, the principal town, fell early and almost incidentally; the kingdom took two more years to die inside its hill forts.
That appeal to Delhi produced the first Mughal claim on Berar, and it was ignored. Ferishta: 'Akbur sent an envoy to Moortuza Nizam Shah, requiring him immediately to desist from his invasion of Berar ; but no attention was paid to the communication', after which 'Toofal Khan, with his sovereign, Boorhan Imad-ool-Moolk, and all his family, being captured, were confined in one of them' [4]. Mughal interest in Berar thus begins in 1573-74, not with the invasion of 1595, and it begins as an invitation from the losing side.
Three deaths, three stories, one author
Here the sources visibly stop knowing. In his Berar book Ferishta gives two rival traditions in one paragraph: the three prisoners were sent to a Nizam Shahi fort 'where, it is said, they were all three subsequently strangled by the King's order. Others assert, that their whole families, amounting to forty persons, died in one night, in consequence of the cruelty of their keepers', who shut them 'up in a small dungeon on a hot night, where they perished before daylight' [3]. In his Nizam Shahi book the same author offers a third: 'they shortly after died suddenly, and, it is conjectured, by poison' [4].
Every version is hedged — it is said, others assert, it is conjectured — and none claims a witness. The disagreement is not between a partisan source and a critical one; it sits inside the earliest full narrative, written by a man on the accused party's payroll. Briggs notes the position bluntly: Ferishta 'was at the time in the service of Moortuza Nizam Shah, and was compelled to fly from Ahmudnuggur in the year 998, two years after the death of that prince' [8]. The evidence will not bear a verdict on the manner of the deaths and this entry does not offer one. What all versions agree on is the outcome: nobody was restored to the throne of Berar, which was the announced purpose of the war.
The wider problem is that Berar is described almost entirely in the words of the state that annexed it. Tabataba wrote under Nizam Shahi patronage and frames the episode as the punishment of a traitor; Ferishta served the conqueror; no Imad Shahi chronicle survives. When the record calls Tufal Khan a usurper, that is the annexer's vocabulary being transmitted, and should be read as such rather than repeated as description.
Digestion, not sack: Berar inside Ahmadnagar
The annexation was an administrative takeover of a going concern. Tabataba records that Murtaza 'apportioned its towns and parganas inidofrtothe great amUs who had signalised themselves by bravery in the campai^,^', and that 'Bahram KUn Gilnnh was appointed commandant of Ghwil and Sayyid ‘Ali Zahir-ul-Mulk, commandant of Narnaia' [2]. Forts got new commandants, parganas new assignees, and the chronicle has the civilian population deliberately left unharassed. Iranica registers the event as flatly as the other consolidations of the period: 'the absorption of Berar by Ahmadnagar in 982/1574' [21].
Within three years the new province was being fortified against the north. Haig, dating the great south-west bastion at Gawilgarh by its Persian chronogram to A.H. 985 (A.D. 1577), names its builder as the commandant of Gawilgarh under the governor of Berar, and judges that 'The fort was probably thoroughly repaired at this time in expectation of the invasion of the Deccan by the emperor Akbar' [15]. This is the same Bahram Khan installed at Gawil in the settlement of 1574. The alarm of 1577 was false; the masonry it produced is datable and still standing. From the day it was taken, Berar under Ahmadnagar was a frontier province facing the Mughals.
Modern scholarship reads the annexation itself in that light. Mohd. Siraj Anwar, writing against the background of Akbar's advance into Malwa after 1562, argues that Murtaza 'was guided in taking this step not only by territorial ambition but also by an anxiety to check Mughal advance into the region' [23]. If so, the move backfired precisely, by creating a body of dispossessed Berari nobles for Akbar to cultivate: Khandesh 'had actively sided with the ruler of Berar' in 1574, and only an agreement of 1575 bound it so that it 'scrupulously refrained from helping the nobles of Berar against Ahmadnagar' [25]. Ferishta and Tabataba frame 1574 simply as the destruction of a usurper and the fulfilment of the compact with Bijapur. The readings are not exclusive, but they disagree about whether 1574 was Ahmadnagar's zenith or the first move of its long defeat.
Ceded on paper, 1596; taken by siege afterwards
Twenty-two years later Berar changed hands again, by argument rather than battle. Ferishta gives the terms Prince Murad extracted at the siege of Ahmadnagar: he 'agreed to quit the coun- try, on condition of receiving a grant for the cession of Berar, the sovereignty of which was required to be formally renounced by Ahmud- nuggur. Chand Sooltana at first refused these terms', but on the calculation that defeat would bring worse, 'she signed the treaty in the name of Bahadur Shah' [7]. A province annexed by conquest was surrendered by signature, in a child sultan's name, by a regent bargaining from inside a besieged fort.
The signature did not deliver the ground. Anwar records that 'Even after the peace settlement of 1596, the struggle between the Mughals and Nizam Shahi officers for the control of the territory, over ran by the former, continued', many of those officers being 'determined not to let the Mughals occupy particularly the territory of Berar' [24]. Haig makes the same point in stone: the hill forts stayed under commandants appointed from Ahmadnagar and were reduced only later [15]. Whoever wanted Berar had to besiege it, twice in a generation.
What the Mughals eventually administered was recognisably the old province, assessed in its own inherited currency of account: 'The total amounted to 40,162,704 Berari tankahs', which the Ain converts to '642,603,272 Delhi dams' [11]. The dynasty was extinct; its unit of account was not. The head town moved on — the 1911 Britannica records that Ellichpur 'was afterwards capital of the province of Berar at intervals until the Mogul occupation, when the seat of the provincial governor was moved to Balapur' [26] — but the sarkars, forts and assessment schedule of Imad Shahi and Nizam Shahi Berar passed intact into a third empire. That continuity, not the dynasty, is what 1574 preserved. The terminal date itself is not agreed: Jarrett's note in the Ain transmits an older reckoning putting the end two years earlier, that 'the State merged in that of .^hmadnagar in A.D. 1572' [12].
Dates in this essay
End of the Imad Shahi sultanate: 1574 or 1572. Ferishta dates the decisive campaign to A.H. 980 (1572-73) and Jarrett's note in the Ain transmits Elphinstone's terminal date of A.D. 1572; against this, Encyclopaedia Iranica gives 982/1574, Bosworth's table gives '982/1574 Conquest by the Niẓām Shāhīs', and Sherwani and Joshi close the kingdom by the middle of 982/1574. The sources themselves imply the reconciliation: invasion and the loss of Ellichpur in 980/1572, then a six-month pursuit and the sieges of Narnala and Gawilgarh, with the capture of the dynasty and the formal settlement of the province falling in 982/1574. This archive dates the state to the settlement that extinguished it, so 1574; 1572 is the rival date and is named in the prose.
Beginning of Imad Shahi sovereignty: 1484, 1485, 1490 or 1491. Ferishta (trans. Briggs) puts Fathullah's declaration in A.H. 890 (1485); Bosworth's manual dates Fath Allah to 890/1485 but separates power from style, dating the assumption of the title Shah by his son to 896/1491; Jarrett's note transmits a list giving 1484; Haig, reading the Gawilgarh inscriptions, and most reference works follow 1490, the year of the coordinated declarations by Ahmadnagar, Bijapur and Berar. On this archive's convention — sovereign power assumed in the state's own capital — 1490 and the 896/1491 assumption of the title both have claims, and the divergence is stated rather than resolved.
Transfer of Berar to the Mughals: 1596 by treaty, but not on the ground. Ferishta dates the formal renunciation of sovereignty to the settlement Prince Murad extracted at the siege of Ahmadnagar, signed by Chand Bibi in the name of Bahadur Shah; Anwar and Haig both record that Nizam Shahi officers and fort commandants continued to hold Berar afterwards, and that Gawilgarh and Narnala were reduced only later. Any date for the transfer should specify whether it means the cession or the occupation.
Where authorities disagree about when a state began or ended, the archive follows one rule — a polity is dated from the assumption of sovereign power in its own capital, and to the settlement that extinguished it — and records the alternatives rather than hiding them.
Open questions
The archive.org full texts relied on here (the Burhan-i Ma’asir in Haig’s translation, Sherwani and Joshi’s History of Medieval Deccan Vol. I, Jarrett’s Ain-i Akbari Vol. II, and Anwar’s thesis) are poorly scanned in places; every quotation above is an OCR transcription of a printed translation, garbles included, and the load-bearing ones should be checked against a clean printing before this entry is treated as settled.
Did the Imad Shahis ever strike coin? Haig asserts a mint at Gawilgarh in 1490, but no Imad Shahi coin type was located, and Goron and Goenka, Coins of the Indian Sultanates — the standard catalogue, cited by Sohoni — could not be opened here. The Berari tankah recorded by the Ain is a unit of account and is not evidence of an Imad Shahi issue.
What did the Imad Shahis actually build, beyond the two hill forts? Mitchell and Zebrowski, Architecture and Art of the Deccan Sultanates, is the standard authority and is cited for Berar in reference works, but no page of it opened here, so their comparative assessment of Berar’s architectural output is unverified.
Is the Chhoti Masjid at Gawilgarh, dated by inscription to 1577-78 and attributed to a Nizam Shahi official in web sources, confirmed by Epigraphia Indo-Moslemica or an ASI publication? If genuine it is the best-dated piece of Nizam Shahi building in Berar and pairs with Bahram Khan’s bastion of the same years.
Does the Burhan-i Ma’asir record the deaths of Burhan Imad Shah and Tufal Khan at all? The scanned text has a page gap between the siege of Narnala and the settlement of Berar, so no execution notice could be found in it. If the silence is real it is itself evidence about the transmission, and it should be checked in the 1936 Delhi edition or the India Office manuscript.
What did it mean that Tufal Khan was, in Bosworth’s phrase, Dakhni? No source read here explains how the Deccani-versus-foreigner factional split operated inside Berar, or how it interacted with the kingdom’s position as the Deccan’s Sunni outlier. This is probably the real fault line under the dynastic narrative, and it is unexcavated.
What revenue did Berar yield under the Imad Shahis themselves? The Ain gives a Bahmani-era base, an unattributed increase credited to Deccani princes, and Prince Murad’s addition, but no source read assigns a total to the Imad Shahi state.
Was cotton already the fiscal base of Berar in the sixteenth century? The province’s cotton economy is attested for the nineteenth century, but the connection back to Imad Shahi and Nizam Shahi revenue could not be traced from anything opened here.
Did Berar take part at Talikota in 1565, and was Rama Raya’s severed head sent to Tufal Khan afterwards? The claim is attributed by secondary writing to Rafiuddin Shirazi but could not be verified from Shirazi’s Tazkirat al-Muluk or any primary text opened here, and Berar’s participation in the confederacy at all is disputed in the secondary literature.
Is Haig’s reading of the Fath Darwaza inscription at Gawilgarh, which he states had not previously been deciphered, confirmed or corrected by any later epigraphic publication? None was located.
Where were Burhan Imad Shah, Tufal Khan and Shamshir-ul-Mulk held, and where were they buried? Ferishta says only “one of the Nizam Shahy forts”; secondary accounts name Ahmadnagar; no primary source read here specifies the place, and no burial site for the last Imad Shahi sultan is attested anywhere consulted.
What does Abu’l-Fazl say about the 1596 cession in his own words? Akbarnama Vol. III in Beveridge’s translation, pp. 699-700, is cited by Anwar for the terms and would give the Mughal framing, including the treatment of Ahmadnagar as an iqta granted to Bahadur; it was not opened, so Ferishta’s version is all this entry can support.
What exactly happened in Aziz Koka’s advance into Berar in 1586, which Anwar calls the only occasion before 1595 when Mughal mobilisation over Berar produced actual fighting, and which ended in the sack of Ellichpur? It is summarised in the thesis but was not read in detail, and it is the missing middle of the 1574-1596 story.