In 1391, just seven years before Timur launched his India campaign, four governors were sent out from Delhi to bring order to the provinces of an unsteady Tughluq empire. Each would establish an independent sultanate soon after the Turkish warlord sacked Delhi. Khizr Khan founded the Saiyid dynasty of rulers in Delhi, Malik Sarwar the Sharqi sultanate of Jaunpur and Zafar Khan the Gujarat sultanate. The fourth governor, Dilawar Khan Ghuri, was posted to Malwa, the rich though landlocked tableland in west-central India north of the Narmada. When Timur began sacking Delhi in December 1398, the last Tughluq sultan, not a paragon of courage, quietly slipped out of Tughluqabad fort and fled to Gujarat. He had hoped that Zafar Khan would help him reclaim his capital. When such assistance was not forthcoming, the fugitive king moved on to Malwa, where Dilawar Khan hosted him for several years. So long as the royal exile was his guest, Dilawar Khan tactfully refrained from declaring his independence. But as soon as the erstwhile sultan had taken his leave, Dilawar declared himself sovereign and built congregational mosques in what would be the core cities of the Malwa sultanate: Ujjain, Lalitpur, Mandu and Dhar. Meanwhile his son, Alp Khan, busied himself strengthening the fort of Mandu. Situated in a spectacular natural setting some thirty-five kilometres south of Dhar, this would soon become one of the architectural gems of medieval India. Jutting out from the Vindhya Mountains, its southern side sharply dropping 400 metres to the Nimar plain below, the city stretches along a jagged-edged plateau about twenty-five kilometres north of the Narmada. This would be Alp Khan’s new capital when he succeeded to his father’s throne as Sultan Hoshang Shah (r. 1406–35).
The new sultan, however, was challenged by Zafar Khan of Gujarat, now reigning as Sultan Muzaffar, who not only invaded Malwa but captured and held Hoshang Shah prisoner for a year. When finally released, the humiliated sovereign vowed revenge, as would his successors, making Gujarat the lasting enemy of Malwa. To defend his kingdom from Gujarat, Hoshang made several strategic moves. First, although Malwa, like Jaunpur, did not have ready access to war-horses, it was well positioned to acquire elephants that roamed the heavily forested jungles to the east. In 1420 Hoshang seized the fort of Kherla, located some 300 kilometres east of Mandu, and installed as its chieftain a vassal who would pay an annual tribute in elephants. Second, he began recruiting soldiers from the eastern Gangetic valley, or Purbiya. Later known as ‘Purbiya Rajputs’, these men would form a central component of Malwa’s army. They also settled undeveloped tracts of the Nimar plain, south of Mandu.
On Hoshang Shah’s death in 1435, his son briefly occupied the throne but was outmanoeuvred by the son of Hoshang’s vazir (chief minister), who in 1436 was crowned Sultan Mahmud Shah Khalaji (r. 1436–69). Descended from the Khalaji rulers of Delhi, Mahmud Shah continued his predecessor’s policies of strengthening the state with mercenaries and war-elephants. In 1440 he marched some 600 kilometres east from Mandu to Bandhavgarh, a major entrepôt for elephants in present-day Umaria District, Madhya Pradesh. From there he moved into the Surguja region of northern Chattisgarh, which remained a permanent source of the sultanate’s war-elephants. These he deployed to exert Malwa’s control over much of Rajasthan.
Meanwhile, the affairs of the Saiyid dynasty in Delhi had reached such a pitiful state that a delegation of disgruntled clerics invited Mahmud Shah to invade their capital and even take the throne for himself. In 1442 Malwa’s sultan accepted the challenge and, although his battle with Delhi’s army was inconclusive, along the way he demonstrated sufficient power and largesse to attract the leaders of prominent clans to his vassalage, including those of Nagaur, Ajmer and the guardians of a number of forts in Mewar. When the powerful raja of Chittor, Rana Kumbha, expelled his younger stepbrother owing to a conflict between their households, the latter sought and was given refuge by Mahmud Shah, who granted him land assignments near Malwa’s border with Mewar. By exploiting such internal dissensions, the sultan was able to assert Malwa’s authority across much of Rajasthan. In the 1440s he seized Bayana and Ajmer, reinforced his grip on Ranthambhor, conquered Mandalgarh and regained his kingdom’s control over Gagraun (in Jhalawar District, Rajasthan).39
Malwa’s history highlights three interconnected themes of India’s long fifteenth century: the strategic importance of elephants in inter-state warfare; the exploitation of inter-household conflicts by outside powers as a strategy of territorial expansion; and the importance of India’s vast military labour market. All three helped Mahmud Shah create what amounted to a classic Circle of Kings, or mandala. Surrounding his political core (Mandu and Dhar) was a ring of inner provinces governed by his own courtiers (Ujjain, Sarangpur, Bhilsa, Hoshangabad), which were encircled in turn by a belt of states governed by allies (Ranthambhor, Mandasor, Gagraun, Chanderi and Kherla), beyond which lay a distant circle of tributary states (Ajmer, Bayana, Kalpi, Raipur, Ratanpur, Bairagarh, Baglana).40 This elegantly constructed geopolitical system suggests how far a Tughluq successor state had succumbed to Indian understandings of inter-state politics. Instead of a centralized polity in which a sultan enjoyed uniform authority throughout his realm, assisted by a cadre of personally loyal nobles, Malwa under Mahmud Shah Khalaji approximated to the classical Indian model of a polycentric state in which power and authority, being distributed unevenly among semi-sovereign allies, gradually diminished the further one moved from the core.
And yet, even while acting according to traditionally Indian political norms, the ruling class avidly participated in the Persianate cultural sphere. The language of the sultanate’s civil administration was Persian, and three of the four Persian dictionaries compiled in fifteenth-century India were composed in Malwa.41 It was by producing such normative texts that this isolated regional court asserted its claims to literary and linguistic status within the larger Persianate world.42 Sultan Mahmud Shah Khalaji certainly imagined himself a major player in that world – and even beyond. An inscription in Dhar dated 1455 described him as:
A king of graceful countenance, Sultan of the world,
Visitors bowing at his door step were the Great Khan and the Emperor of China.
‘Ala al-Din va’l-Dunya Abu’l-Muzaffar
Triumphed over his enemies with the help of God,
So in that era, with Mahmud as the king of the world,
The world flourished like heaven, thanks to his justice [‘adl].43
This was not entirely hyberbole. In early 1466 the sultan actually did receive a mission from a claimant to the office of caliph of Islam residing in Cairo. The envoy brought a black robe of investiture representing the sultan’s formal ‘appointment’ as a legitimate ruler in the eyes of Islam. Two years later, the visit of another foreign mission linked Mahmud Shah directly with the legacy of Timur. In January 1468 he received an emissary from Abu Sa‘id Mirza (r. 1424–69), Timur’s great-grandson, who then ruled the heartland of his ancestor’s former empire. The gifts Mahmud Shah presented to the envoy projected an image not of a great conqueror, but of a connoisseur of high Persianate culture: a book of wisdom, a ruby cup, a carnelian plate, a turquoise dish, an alabaster basin, a crystal tray, fine silks and cottons, amber, musk, talking birds and some horses and slaves.44
Mahmud Shah’s architectural projects at Mandu also suggest his desire to participate in Timur’s resplendent world, especially when contrasted with those in nearby Dhar, which had been patronized by governors of the Delhi sultanate. In the early fourteenth century Sultan ‘Ala al-Din Khalaji’s first governor in Dhar had built a structure known today as the ‘Kamal Maula’ mosque.45 Stylistically mimicking Delhi’s iconic Qutb mosque, it symbolized Dhar’s inclusion in the Delhi sultanate’s political orbit. A century later, in 1405, the last Tughluq governor in Dhar installed an iron pillar in a nearby mosque known as the ‘Lat Masjid’, making visual reference to a similar pillar that Sultan Iltutmish had placed before Delhi’s Qutb mosque.46 Mahmud Shah, on the other hand, looked westwards. Near Samarqand, one of Timur’s inscriptions boldly proclaims: ‘If you challenge our power, look at our buildings.’47 Timurid architecture was characterized by imposing, free-standing structures meant to be seen from afar, complex vaulting techniques supporting large dome chambers on high drums, exterior surfaces richly decorated with glazed and unglazed brick, and geometric patterning using interlocking star and polygon patterns [see Fig. 7]. The style also featured ensembles of buildings, made by grouping together such features as a madrasa, a tomb, a mosque, a Sufi hospice, a palace or a garden. The effect was an integrated complex of monuments and open space. Established by Timur and elaborated by his successors in Central Asia and Iran, this aesthetic vision diffused across India with the quickening circulation of diplomats, pilgrims, merchants, adventurers, literati and artisans throughout the Persianate world.
In the heart of Mandu, Mahmud Shah Khalaji constructed precisely such an integrated complex, the first to be seen in India. Consisting of three monuments and an open square, all of them set in a single row in similarly sized square units, the ensemble asserted Mandu’s transformation from a provincial backwater to a world-class centre of Timurid-style power. The first in the ensemble is a large congregational mosque that Hoshang Shah had begun shortly before his death in 1435, and which Mahmud Shah spent the first eighteen years of his reign completing. To its west is an elegant tomb made entirely of white marble that he built for Hoshang Shah. To the east of the mosque, separated by a spacious square, is the ensemble’s most ambitious and imposing structure. Known as the ‘Ashrafi Mahal’, this is a madrasa-cum-dynastic tomb complex that was begun in 1441 and was still under construction twenty-seven years later. Although nearly entirely ruined today, its design can be reconstructed from notices by visitors and a resident chronicler. Its ground level incorporated a madrasa and a khanaqah with cells built into all four sides of its base. Standing on one part of the base was a tomb for three royal graves, its large dome rising to a height of twenty-seven metres above ground level, and its walls richly decorated by Iranian craftsmen working with green- and cobalt-striped jasper, red cornelian, agate, white alabaster and black marble. It also contained a great hall in white marble with carved doorways, windows and cornices decorated in mosaics of precious stones and friezes of blue and yellow glazed tiles. On all four corners stood circular structures, the most imposing being a seven-storeyed tower measuring fifteen metres in diameter at its base and rising to a height of forty-five metres, or two-thirds the height of Delhi’s Qutb Minar.48 In short, unlike the sultanates of Bengal or Gujarat, where patrons continued or revived indigenous building traditions, Malwa’s architects experimented with forms having no local precedents.49 If Timur had taken Indian architects with him to Samarqand, where he developed his distinctive style, a generation later architects from Khurasan had brought that style to the heart of India.50
Following Mahmud Shah’s reign, however, the kingdom began a steady decline. His son and successor, the eccentric Sultan Ghiyath al-Din Shah (r. 1469–1501), withdrew altogether from politics and governance. Protected by a palace guard of 500 Ethiopian slave women dressed in men’s attire, the sultan ardently devoted himself to the pursuit of pleasure. He is best known for patronizing a remarkable cookbook, the Ni‘mat-nama (‘Book of Delights’), which is not just a catalogue of Mandu’s culinary traditions, but an epicurean’s digest of pleasures, including detailed instructions for preparing perfumes, medical remedies, aphrodisiacs, betel nut and so on.51 Depicted in paintings wearing dainty slippers and a formidable moustache, the bon vivant Ghiyath al-Din neglected his father’s shrewd policy of constructing and maintaining an outer belt of tributary states. To the west, he failed to challenge the annexation of Champaner by Gujarat’s Mahmud Begada, and to the north he left uncontested the occupation of the forts of Kalpi and Bayana by Delhi’s Bahlul Lodi. The kingdom’s core, meanwhile, fell under the domination of powerful chiefs who recruited ever-larger numbers of soldiers from the east, the so-called Purbiya Rajputs, on whom the kingdom had become militarily dependent.
Malwa thus presents a curious hybrid, inhabiting several worlds simultaneously. Important Sanskrit literature was produced during Mahmud Khalaji’s reign, including a copy of the Kalpa Sutra, a revered work on Jain rituals that maps a path for crossing life’s river of rebirths. Completed at Mandu in 1439, the Kalpa Sutra is also one of India’s earliest manuscripts bearing dated miniature paintings.52 In fact, most of the styles of Rajasthan’s famous miniature tradition evolved from copies of this text that were produced either in Mandu or in the state’s hinterland.53 This was probably due to the prominent role that powerful warrior chiefs linked to courts in Rajasthan played in Malwa’s political system. In 1463, while accompanying the sultan on a military campaign, Mahmud Khalaji’s chief treasurer, also a Jain, composed another important Sanskrit work, the *Buddhi Sagar.*54 Because Jains were so prominent in managing the government’s accounting and revenue departments, and because the government relied so heavily on wealthy Jain merchants for financing its projects, the state actively supported its Jain community. It was similarly invested in indigenous military systems. Lacking access both to war-horses and to Turko-Iranian military labour, rulers recruited war-elephants from the forests to the east and military labour from Rajasthan and the eastern Gangetic plain. By the time of the sultanate’s last dynast, Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1511–31), 40,000 men later identified as Rajputs were in state service, most of them recruited from the eastern Gangetic plain, or Purbiya.