Unlike Kashmir or Bengal, Gujarat had been politically well integrated with the Tughluq empire ever since Sultan ‘Ala al-Din Khalaji annexed this commercially rich region in the early fourteenth century. Basing themselves in the province’s eastern corridor that leads to upper India, the Delhi sultanate’s governors were well positioned to profit from the caravans transiting from the seaports to India’s interior, and courtiers paid substantial bribes to be appointed provincial governors or commanders of strategic Gujarati forts.30 Merchants and rulers, moreover, were mutually dependent. The former needed the security, the stable currency and the predictable taxation that the state could provide, while rulers required the silver, the horses and the arms that could be obtained from merchants. By the late fourteenth century, though, Tughluq rulers had become displeased with their governor in Gujarat over his failure to remit taxes to the central administration. They also feared that he had set down local roots and had built up a provincial army composed mainly of local soldiers. Keeping provincial rulers loyal to the political centre being a perennial metropolitan anxiety, in 1392 Zafar Khan, the son of a peasant convert to Islam and a former confident of Sultan Firuz Tughluq, was sent down to restore central rule in the wayward province. After confronting and defeating the former governor, the khan managed to pacify the province’s strategically important eastern corridor leading to the sea, though he spent the rest of his life battling recalcitrant chieftains both in the mountains to the east and in the Saurashtra peninsula to the west.31
Only a few years after Zafar Khan had taken up office in Gujarat, however, Timur invaded India, weakening – or even wrecking – Delhi’s grip on its remaining provinces. After a period of uncertainty, in 1407 Zafar Khan declared his independence from Delhi and titled himself Muzaffar Shah (r. 1407–11), sultan of the new sovereign state of Gujarat. Independence from Delhi now led to many of the same consequences in Gujarat as it had in Bengal. When Timur invaded India the region had been mainly pastoral, punctuated by scattered, commercially rich towns. Ensconced in well-defended forts or within walled, commercially active towns, merchant-princes had made ad hoc alliances with pastoral chieftains. But with the appearance of Muzaffar Shah’s independent sultanate, a fully developed court society evolved in which the regional sultan presided over a host of petty chieftains.32 Yet Gujarat was slow to emerge as a self-conscious, coherent region. The new state was not truly consolidated until the reign of Muzaffar Shah’s successor and grandson Ahmad Shah (r. 1411–42), who in his first year as sovereign built Ahmedabad. Named after himself, the new capital lay in the heart of the busy corridor that connected the maritime hub of Cambay with routes leading north to the Indian interior. With Delhi no longer draining wealth from the province, coast and hinterland became even more mutually dependent, to the advantage of each. Agriculture was intensified in the more prosperous eastern districts, which soon became some of the leading engines of textile manufacturing in the world. Although Gujarati block-printed cotton goods exported to markets in Egypt can be dated to at least as early as the eleventh century, under the sultans the volume of these exports increased exponentially. The exports also facilitated the importation of silver and war-horses, which in turn enabled the sultans to maintain a standing army at a time when most Indian states were raising mercenary armies on an ad hoc basis.
Dominating the second half of the fifteenth century in Gujarat was the sultanate’s sixth ruler, Mahmud Begada (r. 1458–1511), who established centralized control over all the province’s subregions. Several strategic objectives guided his policies. The first was to protect and extend trade between the commercially active coastal cities and the agrarian hinterland. This he did by ensuring safe overland trade routes, imposing uniform and stable rates of taxation, establishing a standard silver coin, the mahmudi, and maintaining a formidable navy. The mahmudi, which became one of the most stable currencies in fifteenth-century India, is by far the most common coin that survives from Gujarat’s sultanate period, largely because so many merchants invested their trust in it. As for his navy, Mahmud built some of the largest ships then plying the Arabian Sea. In a 1508 naval engagement off the port of Chaul, his ships meted out to the Portuguese their first defeat in the Indian Ocean.33
Another of Mahmud Begada’s objectives was to colonize forested regions and bring undeveloped land into cultivation. To pacify the Sabarmati valley – the strategic north–south corridor connecting Rajasthan with the Gulf of Cambay – he settled charismatic religious figures among refractory Kanbi and Koli communities. To stabilize the province’s turbulent eastern flank, in 1483 he built and made as his new capital the fort of Champaner, which abutted the mountains that had provided refuge for state rebels. Here the sultan granted courtiers permanent land holdings to encourage their long-term interest in clearing and developing the land for agricultural purposes. To the west, the Saurashtra peninsula and Kutch remained frontier zones, populated by pastoral communities that had been immigrating from Rajasthan or Sind. In 1472 he annexed the stronghold of Junagadh in Saurashtra, which even before the rise of the Gujarat sultanate had held out against Delhi’s repeated attempts to subdue the region.34 In all these subregions, Mahmud Begada aimed to control, or at least pacify, the various clans of armed pastoralists that for centuries had been migrating into Gujarat from the north and north-west. Some, arriving with their cattle and their martial traditions, had been driven out of Sind in the thirteenth century by famine. Others had been drawn to western Gujarat by the sultanate’s offers of tax relief to clear scrublands. However they arrived, the regime sought to play one group off against another by offering protection to some if they would suppress threats from others. Meanwhile, the clans and their chiefs redefined themselves in ways that disguised their obscure origins. To this end they built fortified settlements and set up petty courts where their chiefs patronized Brahmins and poets, who in turn provided their patrons with respectable genealogies or even royal pedigree, thereby masking their former identity as livestock-herding chieftains.35
Mahmud Begada’s attempts to ensure the security of pilgrimage routes led to the flourishing of different religious traditions in what has been called a ‘religious marketplace’ in fifteenth-century Gujarat.36 Pilgrimage sites such as Girnar hill in Saurashtra hosted multiple religious institutions side by side – Jain, Sufi, Nath, Śaiva and Vaishnava. Merchants were especially prominent among followers of popular forms of Vaishnava devotion, to which ruling authorities in Gujarat, like those in Bengal and Kashmir, were favourably disposed. Jain communities, which had been active in Gujarat since the fourth century, thrived from the earliest days of the Delhi sultanate’s rule in the province, undertaking such critical tasks as managing the mint for the sultans.37 The atmosphere of cultural pluralism promoted by Mahmud Begada is reflected in some remarkable works of contemporary literature. In his panegyric Rajavinodamahakavya, the fifteenth-century Sanskrit poet Udayaraja portrayed the sultan as an ideal warrior of the kshatriya class, even a chakravartin (‘universal conqueror’). Never referred to as Muslim, the sultan was seamlessly woven into classical Indian tropes of kingship, such as his descent from a long line of Indian rulers traceable to the Solar dynasty of kshatriya warriors. Mahmud Begada’s court, writes Udayaraja, was blessed both by Saraswati, the goddess of learning, and by Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth.38