Abraham Eraly - The Age of Wrath - A History of the Delhi Sultanate

This was in April 1481. Gawan was then 78 years old, and probably did not have very many more years to live, so he could die without regrets. But his execution portended ill for the Sultanate, for several of the foreign nobles, who were the strongest pillars of the state, then left for their provinces, and so did several of the conscientious Deccani nobles, and this presaged the disintegration of the Sultanate. Muhammad himself presently realised the dreadfulness of what he had done, and, overcome with grief and remorse, soon drank himself to death, screaming in his dying moment that Gawan was rending his heart.

MUHAMMAD DIED IN March 1482, aged just 28. After him, five of his descendants followed him on the throne of Bidar, but they were kings only in name, being mere puppets in the hands of domineering nobles. Besides, the Sultanate during this period gradually broke up into four independent kingdoms: Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Berar and Golconda. The rulers of these kingdoms continued to profess allegiance to the Sultan in Bidar, but that was only a formality, and involved no real subservience. And though the sultan continued to sit on the throne, he had virtually no power at all even in Bidar, the royal capital. The last of these titular sultans was Kalimullah, and when he died in 1528, Bidar lost even its nominal overlordship, and it became just another kingdom, like the other four kingdoms into which the Bahmani state had split.

This splintering of the Sultanate multiplied by several times the points of friction and conflict in the peninsula, and the scene became quite chaotic, as endless wars now raged between these splinter kingdoms, as well as between them and the other peninsular kingdoms, all confusedly slithering over each other in ever-shifting alliances and hostilities, like a bunch of rat-snakes in a snake-pit. Religion played hardly any role in this — Muslim kingdoms often allied with Vijayanagar against fellow Muslim kingdoms; and sometimes Vijayanagar factions sought the help of Muslim kingdoms in their internal conflicts.

There was however one decisive battle in this seemingly never-ending melee, when four of the successor states of the fragmented Bahmani Sultanate — Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Golconda and Berar — united to give a virtual deathblow to Vijayanagar in a battle fought at Talikota in January 1565. [6] For details of the battle, see the next chapter But after the Talikota battle, the Muslim states once again turned snarling on each other. And so it went on for several more decades, till the seventeenth century, when the Mughals, who had been pushing into the peninsula for some years, finally obliterated most of the kingdoms in the region.

Such is the story of the Bahmani Sultanate. It is not an edifying tale. However, the Deccan sultanates did make some noteworthy contributions in the field of culture, by blending Indian and Persian streams in art and architecture, and by giving a strong local flavour to their rule. For instance, Ali Adil Shah, the late-sixteenth-century sultan of Bijapur, integrated his rule with the life of the local people by patronising Telugu culture, and by giving land grants to Brahmins and Hindu temples, and by not enforcing the collection of jizya. He was also an ardent patron of learning, who maintained a large library of books on various subjects, and was so avid about books that he carried several of them with him in boxes even when he travelled.

In administration the Deccan sultanates followed the usual pattern of Muslim states, the only notable developments being the reforms introduced by Gawan. Even these were not radical reforms, but meant only to tighten the prevailing system, so as to curb the power of provincial governors who often functioned as virtual potentates. Gawan divided the existing four provinces of the Bahmani Sultanate into eight provinces so as to reduce the area under the rule of each governor, and to make the administration of the provinces more manageable. He also placed some districts in the provinces directly under central administration, which collected for itself the revenue from them. Further, Gawan sought to curtail the military power of the governors by allowing them to occupy only one fort in their territory, the other forts being kept under the direct control of the sultan. And the royal officers who were given land assignments as pay were made accountable to the sultan for their income and expenditure.

AN EVENT OF critical historical importance of this age was the arrival of European naval fleets in the Indian seas. A Portuguese fleet under the command of Vasco-da-Gama arrived at the Kerala port city of Calicut (Kozhikode) in 1498, nearly three decades before the invasion of India by Mughals under Babur. Then gradually, over the next few decades, the Portuguese entrenched themselves in a few enclaves on the coast of peninsular India. Their main interest was in overseas trade, and this brought them into conflict with Arabs, who had till then dominated the Arabian Sea trade. In a series of naval campaigns in the early sixteenth century, the Portuguese broke the Arab sea power, and that enabled them to virtually monopolise the sea trade around India.

This development made it imperative for the peninsular kingdoms to maintain good relationship with the Portuguese, to ensure that the critically important overseas supply of horses from the Middle East and Central Asia for their armies was not disrupted. And this in turn enabled the Portuguese to play a role, though only a minor role, in local political affairs. They also did some missionary work at this time, converting a number of local Hindu families to Christianity, and even inducing some families of the ancient Syrian Christian community of Kerala to shift their affiliation from the Syrian Orthodox Church to the Roman Catholic Church, which the Portuguese claimed was the only true Christian church.

None of this particularly bothered Indian kings. But when the Portuguese intruded into the Vijayanagar kingdom and took to temple looting, it became imperative for Ramaraya, the king of Vijayanagar, to chastise them. He then launched a dual attack on their settlements, in Goa (on the west coast) and in San Thome (on the east coast), plundering the residents there and exacting punitive tribute. That apparently taught the Portuguese a lesson, for they desisted from giving any more trouble to the raja. The Portuguese in any case had no future in India. Though they dominated the Indian seas for about a century, they made no notable territorial gains in the subcontinent, and in the late sixteenth century, as the Portuguese power declined in Europe, so did their politico-economic role everywhere in the world, including India.

The entire medieval history of India, stretching over a period of about thousand years, from the eighth to the eighteenth century, was dominated by Muslim invaders and rulers. During this period there were only two Hindu kingdoms of subcontinental prominence, that of Vijayanagar and of Marathas. No one would have foreseen this destiny for either of these kingdoms at the beginning of their history, for they were both then obscure mountain kingdoms. This was particularly so in the case of Vijayanagar, which within just a few decades of its founding rose to become one of the two dominant kingdoms of peninsular India, rivalling the Bahmani Sultanate, the other dominant peninsular kingdom.

The early history of Vijayanagar is obscure, shrouded in diverse legends. The kingdom apparently evolved out of Kampili, a chiefdom in the rocky highlands on the northern bank of Tungabhadra. Two related developments facilitated its ascendancy — the subjugation of the long established Hindu kingdoms of South India by Muhammad Tughluq in the first half of his reign, followed soon after, in the second half of his reign, by the collapse of his power in South India. It was out of the political debris left by these developments that Vijayanagar rose to prominence.