by John Keay
Nonetheless a gradual acceptance, which would eventually lead to a glorious synthesis, was underway. The process was not articulated. Muslim writers continued to tell of idolaters massacred and temples destroyed, Hindu eulogists of mleccha enemies humbled and arya heroes exalted. The evidence is often inferential, fragmentary and widely scattered. It is to be sought less amongst the literate elites – the largely foreign ulema and the staunchly orthodox brahmans – and more amongst artisans, cultivators and the commercial and secretarial classes, be they Indian Muslims or lesser-caste Hindus. At this level, wherever Hindu and Muslim lived and worked in close professional proximity, social exchange is evident. Hindus adopted a modified version of the Muslim purdah (‘curtain’, i.e. the veil) to screen their women; Muslims adopted something approaching Hindu caste distinctions. Elements of ritual and popular devotion were also shared. Muslim shaikhs and pirs (Sufi saints) attracted Hindu followers; Hindu ascetics, dancers, musicians and craftsmen attracted Muslim patronage. In the arts and particularly architecture the results would soon be apparent.
But here again the evidence is diffuse and to be found not so much amongst the ruins of Delhi and in the chronicles of its sultans as in the records and remains of a dozen other capitals scattered across the subcontinent. From these places – Jaunpur, Ahmadabad, Mandu, Gulbarga, Chitor, Vijayanagar, Gaur – ruled the numerous sultans and kings who had succeeded in asserting their authority over particular regions – Awadh, Bengal, Gujarat, Malwa, the Deccan, Rajasthan, etc. – in the aftermath of the Tughluq decline and Timur’s invasion.
The regions themselves encouraged a social consolidation which transcended religious allegiance. Based on core territories, each with a long dynastic pedigree, an economically important hinterland and a now distinct language, they were ready-made for statehood, whether under Muslim rule or Hindu. Location and circumstance also conspired to favour local integration. Here Muslim rulers, mostly far removed from the Islamic world, often at war with the sultan of Delhi or other co-religionists, and always dependent on the loyalty of a largely non-Muslim population, had perforce to compromise. Likewise their Hindu counterparts, isolated on the margins of an increasingly Islamic India, yet obliged to co-operate with Muslim allies, and eager to recruit Muslim troops, could ill afford to indulge ideas of a dharma-led defiance or a Hindu renaissance.
STILLBORN STATES
The number of states which emerged from the collapse of the Delhi sultanate, not to mention the complexity of their mutual relations, could warrant a long narrational stride onto the terra firma of Mughal India. But it would be wrong to diminish the political importance of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In Europe the period witnessed the emergence of those strong, centralised and mostly monarchical states which would become the basic units of European history. Something very similar appeared to be underway in India: Bengal, Gujarat, Kashmir, Orissa, the south and various parts of central India began to forge the territorial, political and cultural identities associated with the concept of a nation-state. But whereas not even the most committed European federationist would dismiss Scotland or the Netherlands, let alone France or Spain, as ‘regional’ aberrations, such has been India’s subsequent experience of subcontinental hegemonies, and such today is Delhi’s and Islamabad’s paranoia about secessionist movements, that ‘regions’ is how these entities are designated. The recollection of their independent status is not much promoted. The nation-state in pre-colonial India would indeed be stillborn; yet the fact of its being born at all is significant.
In the Deccan the Bahmanid kingdom and, further south, that of Vijayanagar, both emerged from the remains of the Khalji conquests in the peninsula. Vijayanagar was founded in the late 1330s, the Bahmanid kingdom about ten years later. The kings of Vijayanagar were Hindus and are often credited with spearheading Hindu resistance to the Islamisation of the peninsula. The Bahmanids, on the other hand, were Muslim sultans and their frequent wars with Vijayanagar are commonly seen as a continuation of the Islamising process begun by the Delhi sultanate. This, however, is certainly not the full story, and it may be no more than a gloss imparted by zealous writers, mostly of a later date.
Suspicions are aroused by legends which credit both states with highly ambiguous origins. The future founders of Vijayanagar, two brothers called Harihara and Bukka, were once feudatories of either the Hoysala king or the Kakatiya. In C1327 these brothers were supposedly captured by Muslim forces and taken to Delhi. There, legend has it, they adopted Islam before being allowed to return south as feudatories of Muhammad bin Tughluq. Only later, when a Hindu sage of high repute miraculously recognised them as embodiments of the god Virupaksha, was the sin of their apostasy cancelled and their right to erect a kingdom founded on dharma accepted. Whether this is true or not, the status of Vijayanagar’s founders was obviously such that only elaborate mythologising and divine intervention could validate it.
Likewise, according to Ferishta, the Bahmanid sultans of the Deccan sprang from an unlikely alliance in Delhi. Hasan, who as Bahman Shah would become the first Bahmanid sultan, was once apparently the servant of a Delhi brahman called Gungu. By chance, while ploughing his patch of land, Hasan unearthed a cache of gold coins whereupon Gungu, in his capacity as an astrologer, predicted a great future for him. He also made him promise not to forget his one-time master. Encouraged by such predictions and by his evident good fortune, Hasan headed for the land of opportunity in the Deccan. There he rose rapidly in the service of Muhammad bin Tughluq; and when, at the end of the latter’s reign, both Gujarat and the Deccan defied Delhi’s authority, Hasan emerged from the subsequent confusion as the choice of his fellow commanders to assume the sultanate of the breakaway Deccani kingdom. Enthroned at Daulatabad, and now known as Bahman Shah, he remembered his promise to his brahman patron and duly summoned Gungu south to become finance minster of the new kingdom.
To be fair, Ferishta seems painfully aware of the implausibility of this story. It is thought that Hasan was of Afghan birth, and it seems most unlikely that a Muslim Afghan would ever have served a brahman. Ferishta was also surely wrong in suggesting that ‘Gungu was the first brahman who accepted office in the service of a Muhammadan prince.’17 Yet he adds that, in honour of the brahman, Hasan adopted the name Gungu as one of his titles, and that it was then used ‘on all public documents and remained engraven on the royal seal of that dynasty until its extinction’. He further claims that the name ‘Bahman’ was of similar provenance, being an approximate rendering of ‘brahman’. Others insist that the name derived from the ancient Persian King Bahman from whom the Bahmanids pretended descent. Howsoever, the willingness of a distinguished Muslim historian, who was writing within a century of the Bahmanids’ demise, to credit such accounts is significant. In the eyes of the Delhi ulema the orthodoxy of the house of Hasan, alias Gungu Bahman Shah, was clearly compromised.
Ferishta’s account of the Bahmanids is initially one of almost continuous conflict with their Hindu neighbours, most notably various rulers in what is now Andhra Pradesh plus the kings of Vijayanagar. Major wars with Vijayanagar’s Bukka, who succeeded his brother Harihara, and then with Bukka’s successors, Harihara II and Deva Raya I and II, are seen as triumphs for the Bahmanid sultans who repeatedly threatened the city of Vijayanagar itself. They also carried off hoards of treasure and massacred wholly incredible numbers of idolaters; as a noted authority on the Bahmanids has calculated, ‘if we were to add together the casualties inflicted on the Hindus by the Muslims as given by our Indo-Persian chronicles, there would not have been a Hindu left alive in the Deccan.’18 Rather fewer Muslim warriors ‘drank the sherbet of martyrdom’, as Ferishta puts it, but ‘without an influx from overseas it was the Muslims’, according to Professor Sherwani, ‘who were in danger of dying out.’ Mass conversions are not mentioned until the very end of Bahmanid rule, no doubt because Bahman Shah had rejected any idea of imposing the jizya on his Hindu subjects.
Significantly the great city of Vij
ayanagar (at Hampi in Karnataka), although repeatedly threatened, was never actually captured. No doubt its defences were as formidable as visitors reported and as its magnificent remains testify. Yet, according to Ferishta, it was in these wars of the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries that artillery was first deployed in India. The guns were operated by both Muslim and Christian mercenaries, the latter of whom also here make their Indian debut. Although this decidedly early instance of the new gunpowder technology might be attributed to peninsular India’s maritime links with the Middle East and the Mediterranean, the casting of cannon would have presented no difficulty to India’s highly skilled metalworkers.
If such firepower was indeed available, the destruction of Vijayanagar would have been possible. Annihilation, it seems, was not the object of the exercise. Nor, despite occasional mention of far-ranging ambitions, did either state entertain realistic expectations of bringing the other permanently under its sway. As with other warring neighbours of the period – Gujarat and Malwa, Malwa and the Bahmanids, Malwa and the rajputs of Chitor – victory invariably stopped short of conquest. Royal captives were released, defeated kings reinstated, and the victor’s spoils regarded more as a one-off indemnity than as an annual tribute.
Conflict amongst the ‘regional’ kingdoms of the fifteenth century looks to have been not about sovereignty, only partly about plunder, and mostly about frontier demarcation. At issue between the Bahmanids and Vijayanagar was a rich tract of land between the Kistna and Tunghabhadra rivers known as the Raichur Doab. To command this tract the Bahmanids, like the Rashtrakutas many centuries earlier, soon moved their capital from Daulatabad (near the Rashtrakutas’ Ellora) to Gulbarga and then Bidar (near the Rashtrakutas’ Manyakheta). It was the perfect base from which to create a trans-peninsular kingdom and, as the Bahmanids duly expanded their domains to reach the west coast between Bombay and Goa and then the east coast between the Godavari and Madras, the importance of holding the Raichur Doab became immense. As if in recognition of such purely strategic imperatives, Ferishta reports that, despite the injunctions of religion, the two protagonists agreed to end the mindless slaughter of non-combatants and captives. And when in the late 1440s the issue of the Raichur Doab was settled by agreement, direct hostilities between the two neighbours ceased. Conflicting claims to the west coast ports, including Goa, continued, but elsewhere the protagonists avoided attacking one another and on one occasion actually collaborated against a common foe.
Territorial definition is fundamental to the formulation of a nation-state. A similar but shorter conflict between the Bahmanids and their northern rivals of the new sultanate of Malwa also revolved around a disputed frontier tract. When it was settled, this time not to the Bahmanids’ advantage, the two neighbours resumed friendly relations. Parallel instances of the scimitar being readily sheathed once an outstanding territorial grievance had been resolved abound amongst the other powers of the period. When in the 1490s the Bahmanid kingdom suddenly plummeted from power as result of factional in-fighting, Vjayanagar would take advantage of the situation, and war over the status of the Raichur Doab would revive. But although Vijayanagar was left as much the most powerful of the Deccan states, it would soon find that a strong and territorially secure Muslim neighbour was infinitely preferable to the smaller, weaker but territorially ambitious sultanates into which the Bahmanid kingdom dissolved. The glorious heyday of Vijayanagar’s supremacy would prove to be short-lived.
Thanks to the Russian Nikitin, who spent some months in Bidar and Gulbarga in 1470, a dazzling picture of Bahmanid power at its greatest has been preserved. Nikitin’s military estimates, amounting to close on a million cavalry and infantry, must be wild guesswork but his first-hand evidence of both ‘long muskets’ and ‘heavy guns’ cannot be gainsaid. Nor can the almost unimaginable display of opulence. Sultan Shams-ud-din Muhammad, ‘a little man, twenty years old, and in the power of the Khorasani [i.e. Afghano-Persian] nobles’, rode forth to celebrate Bairam ‘on a golden saddle, wearing a habit embroidered with sapphires and on his pointed head-dress a large diamond; he also carried a suit of gold armour inlaid with sapphires and three swords mounted in gold’. Ahead of him walked a huge elephant dressed in silk and brandishing from its trunk a heavy chain with which it cleared a path through the crowds. Behind followed the sultan’s brother on a bed of gold, covered with velvet set with precious stones and carried by twenty men. Then came Mahmud Gawan, the able chief minister and mentor of successive sultans; he too reclined on a bed of solid gold which in this case was drawn by four horses in gilded harness. Hordes of riders in full armour followed, together with several hundred female singers and dancers. Some were practically naked but all were armed with shield and sabre, sword, lance or bow. Three hundred elephants ‘clad in damask steel armour’ completed the procession. Each elephant bore a ‘citadel’ which held six ‘warriors with guns’, and each had massive swords attached to its tusks plus ‘large iron weights hanging from its trunk’. In Nikitin’s mind there was no doubt that he was attending a potentate who, ranking above all others like a latter-day ‘Balhara’, was ‘the Muhammadan sultan of India’.19
SWINGING IN THE WIND
Such Bahmanid pre-eminence would not have been conceded by the sultans of Gujarat and Malwa. A latecomer compared with Vijayanagar or the Bahmanids, Gujarat became independent when its governor, the son of a rajput convert to Islam, assumed sovereignty after Timur’s invasion in the early years of the fifteenth century. At about the same time Malwa followed suit under its erstwhile governor Dilawar Khan Ghori. Dilawar Khan was presumably a Turco-Afghan Ghorid but he quickly signified a more conciliatory attitude to idolaters by encouraging rajput settlement and creating what was in effect a Muslim – rajput condominium. Gujarat’s sultans too, although more orthodox and credited with imposing the jizya and demolishing Hindu temples, habitually married rajput princesses, patronised Indian artists and Sanskrit scholars, and employed Hindus in the highest offices of state. Also prominent in both sultanates, and especially in their respective revenue departments, were Jains, whose survival in western India belied their near-extinction in the rest of the subcontinent.
Both Dilawar Khan of Malwa (or Amid Shah Daud, as he had become) and Ahmad Shah of Gujarat (who succeeded as sultan in 1411) signified their new status by establishing new capitals. Islam had provided a powerful stimulus to urbanisation. Muslims in India, as an elite minority largely dependent on royal patronage and united by the communal duties of prayer and mosque-attendance, were naturally drawn to city life. From Allahabad and Faizabad to Hyderabad and Aurangabad the map of India still betrays hundreds of Islamic urban foundations. In Gujarat Ahmad Shah’s choice fell on a site beside the Sabarmati river. There he founded and heavily fortified the city of Ahmadabad which, rapidly populated by Gujarat’s skilled craftsmen and commercially favoured by its location close to the Gulf of Cambay, had by the end of the sixteenth century become one of the largest and wealthiest cities in India, indeed in the world according to European visitors. It is still the capital of Gujarat, and in the midst of chaotic inner-city overcrowding there remain the many mosques, tombs and gateways of the Gujarati sultans and their usually rajput queens.
Were any proof needed of the eclectic Gujarati milieu, it is self-evident in the distinctive architectural style. Here elements and motifs from both Jain and Hindu tradition are incorporated not, as in the Delhi Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque, because dismembered temples were reassembled as mosques, but by gloriously intentional design. Gujarat’s strong tradition of temple-building, together with its skilled masons, simply transferred to the Islamic architectural canon and thereby transformed mihrab and minaret into splendidly ornate features. Clichés of the Mughal style like the perforated screen (jali) and the cupola-ed pavilion (chattri) are anticipated. The Jami masjid of Ahmad Shah himself has been hailed as ‘perhaps the most aesthetically satisfying [mosque] in the whole of India.’20
Very different was the new capital of Malwa. As if to challenge t
he lushly-sited and commercially-favoured city of Gujarat’s sultans, Dilawar Khan and his successors of Malwa lit upon the rugged heights of Mandu. From nearby Dhar, the one-time capital of the good King Bhoj, a prodigious effort was directed to encircling with fortifications the already nigh-impregnable heights above the Narmada valley. At the same time they smothered the upland meadows not merely with the mosques and tombs of Islam but also with the airy palaces, the echoing courtyards and the lotus lakes so beloved of the rajputs and later of the Mughals. If one may judge by what neglect has so obligingly preserved, it was here at Mandu, and in the contemporary Man Singh palace at Gwalior, that India’s secular architecture began to stake its claim as a serious rival to the religious tradition of temple, tomb and mosque.
No metropolis has succeeded to the site of Mandu. Deserted in the seventeenth century, it has remained so ever since, one of India’s – or anywhere’s – most wildly romantic sites. Malwa being landlocked with no very certain frontiers and a host of covetous neighbours, its sultans had frequent cause to congratulate themselves on the effort expended on their capital. Although repeatedly besieged by the Gujarati army and occasionally by expeditions from the Bahmanid sultanate and the rajputs of Mewar, Mandu stood firm throughout the fifteenth century. Under Sultan Mahmud Khalji (reigned 1431–69) Malwa took the offensive, with its forces penetrating deep into Gujarat, the Deccan and Rajasthan and briefly marching on Delhi. Mandu consequently basked in the splendours of lavish patronage. According to Ferishta, Mahmud’s successor was able to assemble a harem of ten thousand maidens. To accommodate them, a self-contained ‘city of women’ was constituted whose inmates formed their own administration and militia, ran their own markets and set up their own manufactures.