The Bahmani court’s efforts to recruit talent from the Persian-speaking world came at heavy cost. As more so-called Westerners – ethnic Persians and Turks – arrived from across the Arabian Sea and acquired positions of influence, the kingdom’s native Muslims, the Deccanis, felt increasingly embittered and alienated. This class was descended from north Indian immigrants who, such as Gisudaraz’s parents, had settled in the Deccan from the 1320s, when the Tughluqs established Daulatabad as their empire-wide co-capital. Born in the Deccan, this class spoke indigenous languages in addition to an early form of Hindavi called Dakani. And, to a far greater extent than Westerners, they had adopted the plateau as their natural home. During their successful struggle against the Tughluq regime in Delhi, they had positioned themselves against north Indians. But after achieving independence from Delhi, their rivals became the Westerners, whom they viewed as interlopers who had been given preferential treatment by the court. The differences between the two groups were therefore both political and cultural. By the mid fifteenth century a de facto apartheid system had emerged. In Bidar’s Hall of Public Audience, Westerners attending court stood to the right-hand side of the throne and the Deccanis to the left. While on military campaigns, the two factions continuously clashed, each side blaming the other for insubordination, cowardice, even treason.
As prime minister, Mahmud Gawan had addressed these tensions by decreasing the influence of both Deccani and Westerner amirs. To minimize quarrelling over lands coveted by either faction he increased the size of those controlled directly by the court; he also forbade amirs to have charge of more than a single fort. But the minister’s many months away from the capital directing military campaigns only gave his enemies opportunities to conspire behind his back, as one chronicler put it, ‘like wounded vipers, writhing in the torment of jealousy’.14 Gawan himself wrote: ‘Out of sheer malice they would kill each other and make me the object of all the wrongs which it is in their power to perpetrate.’15 In this vicious atmosphere the minister, himself a Westerner, became the object of conspiracies hatched by disaffected Deccanis. In 1481 members of that faction plied his seal-bearer with gifts and then gave him a blank sheet of paper that required Gawan’s seal. Told that it was only a routine document, the seal-bearer obligingly stamped it. The conspirators then filled in the document with treasonous words purporting to be Gawan’s, inviting a foreign power to invade the kingdom and share the spoils with him. When the sultan was shown the authenticated document he flew into a rage, summoned his minister to court, and forthwith had him beheaded for treason.
From this point on, the Bahmani kingdom fell into a downward spiral from which it never recovered. The deep and intractable Deccani–Westerner rift, and the poisonous intrigues and destructive civil wars it spawned, ultimately undermined the state’s stability. On the one hand, the court was obliged to patronize the Deccanis inasmuch as they were descended from the northern settlers who, having rebelled against Muhammad bin Tughluq, had launched the dynasty. But in order to earn a coveted place in the cosmopolitan Timurid world, rulers in Bidar felt equally obliged to recruit immigrants from the Middle East or Central Asia. In the end, the Deccanis and Westerners represented not just two competing political factions, but two different conceptions of state and society. Each class being legitimate in its own way, neither could be dislodged. Mahmud Gawan’s policy of politically balancing the two classes proved an impossible juggling act: no administrative measure could resolve the ideological rift.
Within a decade of Mahmud Gawan’s execution, the Bahmani kingdom began to disintegrate into five successor states, as provincial governors scrambled to assert their independence. The first to do so was Malik Ahmad, who founded the Nizam Shahi dynasty of Ahmadnagar (1490–1636). He was the son of one of the last Bahmani prime ministers, a staunchly partisan Deccani who in the 1480s had aggrandized all power and reduced the sultan to a puppet, exacerbating the perennial Westerner–Deccani conflict. In 1486 he was assassinated, and four years later Malik Ahmad, embittered by the politics of the court and the murder of his father, declared his independence at the fort of Junnar in Maharashtra, where he had been governor. He also established a new capital named after himself, Ahmadnagar, soon to become one of the Deccan’s most important centres of artistic patronage.
Variations on this pattern were now repeated throughout the plateau. To the north, Fath Allah ‘Imad al-Mulk (r. 1490–1504), the governor of the Bahmani province of Berar, also grew disgusted with the deteriorating affairs in Bidar and in 1490 declared his independence, founding the ‘Imad Shah sultanate (1490–1574) with the fort of Elichpur his capital. About the same time Yusuf ‘Adil Khan (r. 1490–1510), the provincial governor of Bijapur, asserted his de facto independence. An immigrant from Ottoman Anatolia, Yusuf declared Shi‘ism Bijapur’s state religion in 1503, shortly after Iran’s new Safavid regime (1501–1736) had done the same. Yet he never imposed his faith on Bijapur’s subjects. His son and successor Isma‘il (r. 1510–34), by contrast, was far more zealous. Brought up by an aunt who had migrated directly from Iran, Isma‘il seldom spoke Dakani, the language of the Deccani class, and employed only Westerners, banishing all Deccanis from his court. Clearly, the same ethnic poison that had killed the Bahmani parent state had infected its political offspring. In 1519 Isma‘il had the Friday prayers offered for Iran’s Safavid family and ordered his entire army to imitate the Safavid courtly custom of wearing scarlet caps with twelve points, symbolizing the imams of ‘Twelver’ Shi‘ism. Isma‘il’s son Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah I, however, identified himself and his regime with his native Deccan and embraced Sunni Islam, the sect of most Deccani Muslims. In a move more dramatically expressing his identification with the plateau’s history and culture, he explicitly invoked the memory of the Kalyana Chalukyas (974–1190), one of the peninsula’s most illustrious imperial dynasties. Bijapur itself had once been an important Chalukya provincial centre known by its Sanskrit name, Vijayapura. The sultan referenced the past by placing Chalukya inscription tablets and a stunning ensemble of twenty-four Chalukya columns in conspicuous locations in his citadel’s grand gateway, the kingdom’s most public space.16
Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah’s son and successor ‘Ali ‘Adil Shah I (r. 1558–80), however, reoriented the dynasty’s sectarian affiliation back to Shi‘ism. No zealot himself, he was actually a serious intellectual and free-thinker. While on tours or on military campaigns he would take cartloads of books with him for his personal use. He invited Portuguese clerics to his capital so that he could learn about Christian tenets.17 His crowning intellectual achievement was to author a remarkable text, the Nujum al-‘ulum, or ‘Stars of the Sciences’, which, composed in Persian but replete with Dakani words, drew on Indic, Islamic, Greek and Turkic traditions to render a comprehensive vision of medieval Deccani courtly knowledge. Blending astrology, incantations, conjuring, talismans, omens, the interpretation of dreams, alchemy, poetry, music and martial skills, the text aimed at transforming a culturally diverse and politically divided body of courtiers into a cohesive whole. It was also lavishly illustrated with miniature paintings that artfully blended the Persianate and Sanskrit worlds. The planet Mars, for example, is depicted as a hero wearing a leopard helmet, which is associated with Rustam, the most celebrated hero of Persian mythology. But he also holds a trident, associated with the god Śiva. In another painting, the text depicts an anthropomorphic image of the sun drawn in Central Asian style, driving a chariot across the sky like the god Helios in Greek mythology. But the figure also holds a conch shell and a mace, which are associated with the god Vishnu.18 The text’s royal author thus emerges as a thoroughly cosmopolitan figure, epitomizing the degree to which the Deccan plateau had, by the mid sixteenth century, become a crossroads of diverse cultural traditions.
In the Bahmanis’ former capital of Bidar itself, the last Bahmani prime minister, Qasim Barid (d. 1505), established the Barid Shahi dynasty more or less by default, as he found himself effectively marooned in the old Bahmani capital, abandoned by rebellious provincial governors who, one by one, had withdrawn their support for the central government. Although the sultanate of Bidar (c.1490–1619) inherited the substantial fortifications and outworks of the last Bahmani capital, together with the palaces and audience halls that recalled the formerly united kingdom, it was also the smallest and weakest of that kingdom’s five successor states.
Finally, in the eastern Deccan another migrant from Iran, Sultan Quli (r. 1497–1543), had been appointed Bahmani governor of Telangana in 1496 with the title Qutb al-Mulk. But he soon asserted his independence, founding the Qutb Shahi dynasty, with his capital at the famous hill fort of Golconda. On the death of Sultan Quli Qutb Shah in 1543, his son Jamshid (r. 1543–50) blinded his elder brother and seized the throne. Anticipating the same fate for himself, Jamshid’s younger brother Ibrahim prudently fled south to the court of Vijayanagara, where he spent seven years as a guest of that state’s autocrat, Rama Raya, immersing himself in Telugu poetry and his host’s courtly culture. When Jamshid died in 1550, a coalition of Telugu and Westerner commanders met at the fort of Koilkonda (100 kilometres south-west of Hyderabad), where they resolved to invite Prince Ibrahim to return to Golconda and rule the kingdom.19 Ibrahim accepted the invitation and marched from Vijayanagara to Koilkonda, from where he was escorted to the Qutb Shahi throne.
Golconda’s hybridized culture is seen in the remarkable career of ‘Abd al-Qadir Amin Khan (fl. 1568–83), a prominent amir and a Deccani with long-standing family roots in India.20 At Patancheru, thirty kilometres north-west of Hyderabad, he patronized the construction of a mosque and a tomb for himself, the latter bearing an elegant Persian inscription indicating his humility, his piety and his devotion to a local Sufi shaikh. At the same time, he employed a Brahmin as his personal secretary and established a tax-free village (agraharam), ‘Aminpuram’, for the support of traditional Brahmin priests. He was also an enthusiastic patron of Telugu literature, commissioning a Telugu adaptation of part of the Mahabharata epic. Titled the Yayati Caritramu, this is the first known work that sought to ‘purify’ Telugu of its Sanskrit loan words, and as such compares with the Shah-nama, in which the epic poet Firdausi had endeavoured to do the same for modern Persian by minimizing his work’s use of Arabic loan words. There is even evidence that the Telugu poet was inspired by Firdausi’s example.21
The cultural achievements that appeared in the reigns of Golconda’s Sultan Ibrahim Qutb Shah and Bijapur’s ‘Ali ‘Adil Shah I were not isolated phenomena. The entire period from 1565 to the Mughal conquest in the 1680s enjoyed unprecedented peace, prosperity and artistic florescence. It was a golden age for the principal Deccani sultanates, whose great wealth, based especially on the production and export of textile fabrics, astonished foreign visitors. In the imagination of Europeans – and later, of Americans – Golconda in particular became synonymous with fabulous wealth, thanks to European merchants who travelled to that city’s bazaars and gave glowing accounts of the fine diamonds taken from nearby mines.22 The best evidence of Deccan-wide prosperity is the significant urbanization that took place in this period. Older cities such as Daulatabad were greatly enlarged to accommodate growing urban populations, while entirely new cities also appeared – most prominently Hyderabad, which Ibrahim’s successor, Sultan Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah (r. 1580–1612), founded in 1591.
Located several kilometres from Golconda fort and centred on the famous Charminar monument, Hyderabad is often called an ‘Islamic city’. But in reality, its layout and design reflect the aesthetic sensibilities of the new social classes that had attained prominence in the late-sixteenth-century eastern Deccan. One of those groups, the nayakwaris, were Telugu-speaking Hindu warriors whose political prominence dates back to the Kakatiya period. Although nayakwari families maintained strong ties to particular ancestral locales, the more successful among them enjoyed a good deal of mobility, moving easily from one chieftain or court to another, offering their military service in exchange for estates where they could maintain their troops. As suppliers of soldiers to would-be patrons, they served in the Deccan’s military labour market, which operated much like its counterpart in contemporary north India. As a class, Telangana’s nayakwaris were thoroughly familiar with Persianate courtly practices and had adopted Persianate military and administrative technology.23
Another prominent group in sixteenth-century Golconda were the Niyogis. These were worldly-oriented Telugu Brahmins who had given up their caste’s traditional priestly roles to assume salaried political and administrative appointments in the Qutb Shahi sultanate. Whereas most of them served as village accountants, maintaining official records such as tax ledgers, others kept records for towns, or served as governors, diplomats to neighbouring states, or court advisers. The prosperity of the Qutb Shahi sultanate depended upon its ability to recruit talent from all its four most powerful constituent groups – Deccanis, Westerners, nayakwari warriors and Niyogi Brahmins – and the willingness of their members to act in concert with one another politically, as happened when nayakwaris and Westerners collaborated in raising Ibrahim Qutb Shah to power.
Given the prominence of Niyogi Brahmins and nayakwaris in Golconda’s ruling structure, it is not surprising that, when planning his new city of Hyderabad near Golconda fort, Sultan Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah drew upon the aesthetic and material legacy of Telangana’s most important regional dynasty. These were the Kakatiya kings, who had established their capital at Warangal towards the end of the twelfth century. Located 140 kilometres north-east of Golconda, Warangal is South Asia’s best surviving example of a city replicating classical Indian conceptions of the world – that is, a great circular continent divided in four quarters and surrounded by a series of ring-shaped oceans, with the cosmic mountain Meru, where Śiva dwells, lying at its centre. At Warangal, the area within the inner, stone wall replicated the central continent, in the middle of which stood a great temple that was dedicated to Śiva and represented Mount Meru. Beyond the stone wall lay a moat representing a cosmic sea, with a second, outer wall and moat corresponding to the sea surrounding a second, ring-shaped continent and another sea. Standing at cardinal directions around the temple precincts, four majestic ceremonial gateways symbolized the sources of four rivers that flow outwards from Mount Meru, defining the universe’s four quarters.
Although Warangal’s Śiva temple had been demolished by the Tughluq prince Ulugh Khan when he seized the city in 1323, Qutb Shahi authorities in Golconda were well aware of Warangal’s cosmographic plan and its homology between Śiva as the lord of the universe and the Kakatiya king as lord of the human realm. The Qutb Shahis had ruled Warangal throughout the sixteenth century, and Telugu histories of the Kakatiyas had begun to appear from around 1550. Telugu verses praising Ibrahim Qutb Shah specifically connected that sultan with Mount Meru, identifying him as a chakravartin (‘world-conqueror’) who had crossed the seven seas and circled the seven continents of classic Indian mythology. All this suggests that for Qutb Shahi elites – whether nayakwari, Westerner, Niyogi Brahmin or Deccani – Warangal’s open plaza and four ceremonial gateways carried rich memories of the Kakatiya past and were powerfully redolent of imperial domination.
The physical parallels between Warangal and Hyderabad are also striking.24 Both cities were built on a plain seven kilometres south-east of a former capital and hill fort – Hanamkonda and Golconda respectively. Like Warangal, Hyderabad was laid out on a four-quartered plan produced by four avenues extending in cardinal directions from a distinctive structure that indicated the crossing point of those four avenues. Both cities featured a broad, open plaza defined by four lofty gateways, or toranas, located immediately north of that central crossing point. At Warangal these are the central plaza’s four ceremonial gateways, and in Hyderabad, four great portals, the ‘Char Kaman’. In both cities a palace complex was situated immediately west of the plaza, with which it was axially aligned. At Warangal, that palace was the well-preserved Tughluq audience hall, the so-called ‘Khush Mahal’ [see Fig. 3], and at Hyderabad it was the Qutb Shahi royal palace, subsequently destroyed. Most strikingly, in Warangal a simple, two-storeyed open-pillared structure, a chaubara, stands to the south-west of the plaza in the precise centre of the fort where Warangal’s four roads meet. Taking the idea of Warangal’s chaubara as marking the centre of the Kakatiya capital, Muhammad Quli built to the south of Hyderabad’s plaza what has become the most iconic monument of the Deccan, the famous Charminar, which marks both the city’s centre and the intersection of its principal avenues. Far more complex and sophisticated than Warangal’s chaubara, the Charminar features spacious arches, a domed chamber, two upper storeys, a mezzanine, arcades with views looking outwards, four tall minarets and at the topmost level a sumptuously decorated mosque.
As Hyderabad was established in 1591, corresponding to the year 1000 in the Islamic calendar, the city’s founding also inaugurated the second millennium of Islam. This would explain an important difference between these two structures: whereas Warangal’s chaubara is aligned with the cardinal directions, the Charminar is aligned with Mecca, which at Hyderabad’s latitude turns the structure ten degrees clockwise from cardinal directions. On the other hand, at the interior apex of the Charminar’s uppermost storey is a large solar lotus – the iconic Indian symbol of life and energy – with twelve smaller lotuses placed around it in the manner of the zodiac. In this way, the Charminar combined Indic and Persianate forms, while it was set in a city whose layout had been inspired by the memory of Telangana’s most famous regional dynasty, the Kakatiyas of Warangal. The monument may be understood, then, as one of India’s most eloquent visual representations of the interpenetration of the Indic and Persianate worlds.