When Timur raided north India in mid December 1398, Delhi’s poorer classes had little choice but to remain and face the devastation. But many of the city’s elites, well aware of the warlord’s prior conquests and possessing sufficient resources, hastily packed their things and escaped before the storm broke. Among these was Muhammad Gisudaraz (d. 1422), who would become the most famous Sufi shaikh of the Deccan plateau. His tomb in Gulbarga, then the Bahmani sultanate’s capital, remains today the Deccan’s most popular Sufi shrine.1
Gisudaraz had actually grown up in the Deccan, as his family migrated there around 1327 when Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq transferred a large part of Delhi’s population to the new imperial co-capital of Daulatabad. Seven years later, while still in his teens, he returned to Delhi with his mother and elder brother, his father having died in Daulatabad. In the Tughluq capital he gained stature as a public figure and a prominent shaikh in the Chishti tradition. But just as Timur was about to capture Delhi, he and more than seventy of his disciples and camp-followers abandoned the city and headed south. It had been sixty-three years since he left the Deccan for Delhi. Now a venerable shaikh acclaimed throughout north India, he was returning with the immediate aim of visiting his father’s grave site in Daulatabad, the city of his boyhood.2 He and his considerable entourage finally reached the Deccan in the summer of 1399.
Considering it a boon that such a distinguished shaikh had fallen into his lap, the Bahmani ruler, Sultan Firuz (r. 1397–1422), personally rode up to Daulatabad to greet the newcomer and invite him to settle near his palace in Gulbarga. The shaikh agreed, but over time their relationship soured. Following a bitter falling-out, Gisudaraz was finally obliged to shift his residence to a site at a considerable distance from the Bahmani citadel, ostensibly because the large crowds attending his khanaqah had caused a security threat to the capital. Firuz also considered the shaikh deficient in the very branches of knowledge in which he claimed to excel, such as rhetoric and geometry.
IMAGE Peninsular India, 1565
The rift between the Sufi and the court widened further when it was learnt that Gisudaraz had been teaching lessons on a highly controversial text, the Fusus al-hikam, authored by the Spanish-Arab mystic Ibn al-‘Arabi (d. 1240). The sultan sent a secretary to the shaikh’s khanaqah to investigate and report on how Gisudaraz was using this text. But upon attending the discourses, the secretary became spellbound himself and enrolled as one of the shaikh’s disciples, much to the court’s dismay. Matters became political, however, when the shaikh refused to support Firuz’s plan to be succeeded by his son, widely considered a weak and dissipated prince. In fact, the shaikh predicted that Firuz would be succeeded by his own brother, Ahmad, a mystically inclined prince who had shown personal veneration for the shaikh. Ultimately, Firuz accepted the political reality that the kingdom’s amirs preferred such an outcome, and in late 1422 Ahmad was crowned sultan. Ten days later Firuz died, as did Gisudaraz a month afterwards.
The tortuous relationship between Gisudaraz and Firuz Bahmani points to a fundamental conflict between spiritual and royal authority. Having founded or inherited dominion over newly conquered territory, sultans sought the support of men whose blessings were thought to lend moral legitimacy to their rule. However, Sufis were popularly regarded as ocupying a moral plane above the sultan’s world of glitter, corruption and violence, making it problematic for them to consort with royal courts. Indeed, the greater a shaikh’s popular esteem, the more obliged he might feel to reject courtly patronage. Further complicating matters, sultans could be deeply jealous of a Sufi’s popularity, as is suggested by Firuz’s demand that Gisudaraz relocate his residence on the pretext that the throngs of people attending the shaikh’s musical and teaching sessions posed a security threat. Relations between Sufis and royal courts could be vexed, to say the least.
Firuz Bahmani’s relations with Timur were another matter altogether. Like other Indian monarchs, the Deccani sultan held in awe his towering contemporary, at that time the world’s most powerful ruler and most lavish patron of Persian arts. From Bengal to the Balkans, Timur’s dazzling court at Samarqand had set a transregional standard for imperial splendour. Shortly after Timur sacked Delhi, Firuz prudently rushed ambassadors and gifts to the Turkish conqueror, enlisting himself as the warlord’s most faithful servant, doubtless hoping that he would not put the Deccan on his to-do list. In response, Timur addressed Firuz as ‘son’ and sent him a belt, a gilded sword, four royal robes, a Turkish slave and four splendid horses, items typical of the material gifts that circulated within, and helped constitute, the Persianate world.3 In a gratuitous gesture, Timur also offered Firuz sovereignty over Gujarat and Malwa, two former Tughluq provinces and now independent sultanates that the warlord had not even bothered to conquer.
Even before receiving Timur’s gifts, Firuz had embarked on an ambitious programme of Persianizing his court. In each year of his reign he had sent ships from his principal seaports on the Arabian Sea – Goa, Dabhol and Chaul – to the Persian Gulf to recruit Persian-speaking men of letters, administrators, soldiers and artisans. In 1399, only months after Timur sacked Delhi, he began building a new palace city, Firuzabad, twenty-seven kilometres south of Gulbarga. There, the sultan would emulate Timur’s aesthetic vision, just as Sultan Mahmud Khalaji would do in Malwa’s capital at Mandu. Between 1379 and 1396, shortly before launching his India campaign, Timur had built the most grandiose of his own architectural projects – the Aq Saray (‘White Palace’) in Shahr-i Sabz, the warlord’s birthplace south of Samarqand [see Fig. 7]. On the spandrels of this structure there appeared the image of a pair of lions, an ancient symbol of Persian royalty.4 News of this monument probably reached Firuz as he was planning Firuzabad, for the two lions also appeared on the spandrels of the city’s western gateway, built just three years after the completion of the Aq Saray palace.5
Upon succeeding his brother Firuz in 1422, Sultan Ahmad Bahmani (r. 1422–36) transferred the state’s capital from Gulbarga to Bidar. Located in the heart of the plateau at the junction of the Deccan’s three major subregions – the Kannada-speaking south-west, the Telugu-speaking east and the Marathi-speaking west and north-west – the site was well suited as the capital of a state aspiring to transregional, imperial status. Moreover, with Delhi still largely ruined since Timur’s invasion several decades earlier, Bidar would lay claim to being India’s most imposing imperial centre, at least architecturally. In contrast to the low, squat arches found at Gulbarga, the tall arches and graceful spandrels of Bidar’s Royal Chamber recall the sweeping vision of Timurid Samarqand. Those spandrels also repeat the same lion and sun motifs seen on the Aq Saray palace and at Firuzabad. Like Timur’s palaces, Bidar’s Hall of Public Audience was adorned with a profusion of blue, yellow, green and white glazed tiles.
Stylistically, Bidar’s most Timurid-looking monument is the madrasa, patronized by the renowned Mahmud Gawan (d. 1481). A high-born merchant prince from Iran’s Caspian Sea region, Gawan had joined the throngs of so-called ‘Westerners’ (Persian gharbian) who had been migrating to the Deccan from the Middle East ever since the Bahmani revolt against Muhammad bin Tughluq in 1347. Having severed their ties with Delhi, the Bahmanis now looked across the Arabian Sea for administrative talent and war-horses. Reaching the port of Dabhol in 1453, Mahmud Gawan, forty-one years of age and with considerable commercial and political experience behind him, was exactly the sort of person the regime wished to recruit. He easily convinced Dabhol’s governor that he was no ordinary horse merchant, but a cosmopolitan Iranian who had already travelled through Anatolia, Syria, Egypt and Central Asia and had declined offers to serve as minister in courts in both Iraq and Khurasan. Upon reaching the Bahmani capital he was interviewed by Sultan Ahmad II Bahmani (r. 1436–58), who made him an amir with a command of 1,000 cavalrymen. In 1458, after suppressing a minor rebellion in the eastern plateau, he was promoted to chief minister of the whole kingdom with the title ‘prince of merchants’ (malik al-tujjar), an office whose name indicates the importance the kingdom attached to trade with the outside world. In 1466 he was made regent for two successive boy monarchs and entrusted with supervising the administration of all the kingdom’s provinces, which then stretched from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal.
Boasting personal and commercial connections from the Balkans to India, the cosmopolitan vazir was determined to put Bidar on the world map. This is seen in his voluminous correspondence, which he maintained with luminaries all over the Persianate world, including the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II, who had conquered Constantinople the same year Gawan reached India. In these letters he sought to attract the brightest scholars of that world, for which purpose he built his famous madrasa, completed in 1472 and located just beyond the citadel in the heart of the city. Although a quarter of it is missing today owing to damage by lightning, the brilliant glazed tiles covering the minaret and eastern façade, the sweeping arches, the vaulting and the structure’s sheer monumentality reflect Timur’s aesthetic vision [see Fig. 6]. Standing before this remarkable structure, one can easily imagine oneself in Herat, Bukhara or Samarqand.
To the south, meanwhile, Vijayanagara’s ruling class had begun absorbing Persianate ideas and practices even before waves of Timurid culture washed over India in the early fifteenth century. From its founding in 1347, as we have seen, the state’s rulers styled themselves ‘sultan among Indian kings’ (hindu-raya-suratrana), a title used a century later by even minor Hindu chieftains in the Andhra country.6 By 1355 Vijayanagara’s rulers were referring to themselves simply as ‘sultan’ several decades before they began using Sanskrit imperial titles such as rajadhiraja (‘king of kings’) or rajaparameśvara (‘supreme king’).7 In 1442 they established direct contact with the Timurid court when Timur’s son and successor, Shah Rukh (r. 1405–47), sent an envoy on a diplomatic mission to important courts in south India. Sailing from the Persian Gulf, the envoy, ‘Abd al-Razzaq, first reached Calicut, the commercially important city state on India’s Malabar coast. When Vijayanagara’s King Deva Raya II (r. 1422–46) learnt of this, he summoned the Timurid ambassador to his court, where he gave his guest two private audiences a week and a generous allotment of gifts and cash, letting it be known how pleased he was that ‘the great Padishah’ (Shah Rukh) had sent him an emissary. What most impressed ‘Abd al-Razzaq in his report on the Vijayanagara court was the apparel he saw. The king, he noted, wore a tunic of Chinese silk locally known by a variation of the Persian term qaba. Made of cotton or silk, this long-sleeved pullover had first appeared in Iran in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Subsequent visitors to Vijayanagara noted that royalty and members of the nobility also wore tall, brocaded, brimless headgear whose name derived from another Persian word – kulah. Both the headgear and the name for it had come from Iran. By adopting the title of ‘sultan’ and wearing garments and headgear then fashionable in the cosmopolitan Timurid world, members of Vijayanagara’s ruling class showed their desire to participate in that world.8
Vijayanagara was drawn into the Persianate cultural orbit in other ways too. By the late fourteenth century, the capital had grown far beyond the temple complexes that hug the banks of the Tungabhadra, constituting the city’s Sacred Centre. Measuring thirty-nine kilometres in circumference, the city’s walls were extended southwards, snaking through the maze of jumbled granite boulders that define the area’s extraordinary, moonlike landscape [see Fig. 4]. Several kilometres south of the city’s Sacred Centre, these walls embraced the Royal Centre, where the kingdom’s ruling household and governing classes presided over cycles of elaborate political rituals. The participants in the processions central to those rituals – elephants, horses, warriors, entertainers, musicians, dancers, and so on – are vividly represented in the exuberant bas-relief figures that cover the outer surfaces of several prominent monuments.9 In contrast to the city’s Sacred Centre, most of those in the Royal Centre lavishly incorporate the architectural vocabulary of the Persianate world – domes, pointed arches, cross-vaultings and stucco reliefs – as seen in such structures as the so-called ‘Elephant Stables’, the ‘Queen’s Bath’, the ‘Lotus Mahal’ and in numerous gateways, watchtowers and water pavilions. At the heart of the capital’s Royal Centre stands a great audience hall of 100 columns, forty metres square, whose design closely adheres to those found in Persianate courts elsewhere in India and the Iranian plateau, the forerunner of which reaches back to the Hall of a Hundred Columns in Persepolis (fifth century BC), capital of the ancient Persian empire. Serving as a stage for enacting courtly rituals, receiving foreign emissaries and displaying the court’s cosmopolitan identity, the Royal Centre made manifest the rulers’ claims to being sultans among Indian kings.
Commerce and military concerns also linked Vijayanagara with the Persianate world. The base of the capital’s great ceremonial platform known as the Mahanavami Dibba, built in stages between the fourteenth and early sixteenth centuries, is adorned with bas-relief panels that depict, among others, foreign merchants. Appearing to be Turks from Central Asia, these men lead their horses to be received by the king and his attendants.10 Such images point to the state’s chronic dependence on war-horses imported from the Persian Gulf region and its active participation in maritime commercial networks. Far more numerous than foreign merchants were the Muslim soldiers recruited into the state’s army. In 1430 Deva Raya II employed 10,000 Turkish troops in his armed forces, and in 1535 Rama Raya (d. 1565) recruited 3,000 Iranian and Turkish troops.11 Tombs and mosques located in the urban core north-east of the Royal Centre indicate where they and their officers were settled. Krishna Raya (r. 1509–29) so valued his Muslim soldiers that in his 1520 invasion of Raichur he placed them in the vanguard of his troops.12 And in the capital itself, we find sculptures of Turkic – and presumably Muslim – warriors guarding the precincts of the city’s Hindu temples. On a free-standing hall in the walled compound of the city’s Vitthala Temple, the city’s most politically important temple in the sixteenth century, such warriors are depicted, three-quarters human in size, riding rearing lion-like beasts and armed with diverse weapons.13