As modernized forts began to appear across the plateau, the balance of military advantage tipped from attackers to defenders. Besieging armies found it difficult or impossible to seize reconstituted forts, which thereafter virtually ceased changing hands. For the first time since the emergence of the five sultanates in the early sixteenth century, the Deccan’s internal frontiers stabilized. As this occurred, the cultural production of the northern sultanates grew in quantity and became more differentiated in quality. For example, for the first seven or eight decades of their independent existence, the Deccan’s four principal sultanates used existing stocks of Bahmani and Vijayanagara coins, which remained in circulation during that period. But then, between 1578 and 1584 – shortly after the northern Deccan’s internal borders had stabilized – each of the region’s sultanates began minting its own coins, reflecting an awareness of, and a desire to express, their distinctive identities. A similar thing happened regarding architecture, art and literature produced after the mid sixteenth century.
Shortly after the Battle of Talikota, the Nizam Shahi sultanate of Ahmadnagar saw a surge of cultural production, beginning with an illustrated chronicle, the Ta‘rif-i Husain Shahi, that narrated the famous battle. In the reign of Husain’s son Murtaza Nizam Shah (1565–88) there appeared architectural gems such as the Damri mosque (1568), which was delicately carved from brown-grey basalt, and the elegant Farah Bakhsh Bagh pavilion. In the reign of Sultan Burhan Nizam Shah II (1591–5), a new and distinctive school of drawing appeared using simple ink and line drawing, combined with technical effects such as stippling and shading. That ruler also patronized the first history of the Nizam Shahi dynasty, the Burhan-i ma’athir, which reflected an awareness of Ahmadnagar’s distinct identity among Deccani states.
Cultural production at Bijapur, like that at Ahmadnagar, did not peak until the latter sixteenth century and continued well into the seventeenth. Miniature painting came into its own there with the illustrations for the Nujum al-‘ulum, an extraordinary text composed in 1570 by Sultan ‘Ali ‘Adil Shah I himself. Whether in architecture, literature, music or painting, Sultan Ibrahim II’s reign (1580–1627) witnessed Bijapur’s high point in cultural achievement. Ibrahim was also an author, having composed a book on music, the Kitab-i Nauras (‘Book of the Nine Emotions’), which reveals his eclectic religious sensibilities and his personal devotion to Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of literature and the arts. It was in the latter half of the seventeenth century, too, that Bijapuri architecture evolved a distinctive style that included broad arches, domes with carved lotus petals around their drums, delicate plasterwork, finely carved brackets, bulbous turrets and relief ornaments featuring pendants from stone chains. Outstanding examples include ‘Ali ‘Adil Shah I’s congregational mosque (begun 1576), the Anda Masjid (1608), the Mihtar Mahal (early 1600s) and, most remarkably, the Ibrahim Rauza (c.1627–35), Sultan Ibrahim II’s sumptuously carved tomb complex.
The same pattern holds for the other Deccani sultanates. In Bidar, ‘Ali Barid Shah (1543–80) patronized the construction of the Rangin Mahal (‘coloured palace’), in the heart of the former Bahmani court. Adorning this structure’s arch is inlaid mother-of-pearl worked into polished black basalt, an aesthetic that prefigured the production of Bidriware, a kind of metalwork in which sheets of silver or brass floral or geometric motifs were inlaid into a blackened alloy of zinc and copper. This craftwork was singularly associated with Bidar, after which it was named, and was used for trays, incense burners, basins and especially water pipes, or huqqa. The latter proliferated in the late sixteenth century, along with the widespread use of tobacco, an American product recently introduced via Portuguese maritime contact with India. The Bidriware huqqa thus bears witness to the interplay of both global and regional forces. Just as Bijapuri engineers had responded to the introduction of Portuguese swivel guns by developing a new kind of cannon that involved redesigning their forts, so also Bidari metalworkers addressed the introduction of American tobacco by adapting their own craft traditions, as with Bidriware water pipes, to a growing demand for the plant.
In the easternmost sultanate of Golconda, Ibrahim Qutb Shah cultivated and promoted a distinctively regional culture informed by Telugu language and literature and a revived consciousness of Telangana’s past history. Ibrahim patronized the construction of large tanks for storing water from dammed-up streams, which were essential for sustaining agriculture in the dry, upland eastern plateau. It was a practice that stretched back to the region’s Kakatiya kings. As noted above, Kakatiya traditions had also found expression in the layout of the Qutb Shahis’ greatest legacy to subsequent history, the city of Hyderabad, with its incomparable gem, the Charminar monument. At the same time, for their mosques and tombs these kings evolved a style that included nearly spheroid domes with the forms of lotus petals at their base, plaster and carved stone, and minarets with miniaturized, bulbous domes.
In sum, by the 1570s and 1580s newly designed forts had given defenders a strategic advantage over besiegers in each of the sultanates of the northern Deccan. This, in turn, lowered the level of inter-state warfare, froze inter-state boundaries and allowed the sultanates to devote their energies to patronizing cultural projects that were both distinctive and remarkable.