The Architecture of a Deccan Sultanate

Courtly Practice and Royal Authority in Late Medieval India

Pushkar Sohoni

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781838609276
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

The Deccan sultans left a grand architectural and artistic legacy. They commissioned palaces, mosques, gardens and tombs as well as decorative paintings and coins. Of these sultanates, the Nizam Shahs (r. 1490-1636) were particularly significant, being one of the first to emerge from the crumbling edifice of the Bahmani Empire (c. 1347-1527). Yet their rich material record remains largely unstudied in the scholarly literature, obscuring their cultural and historical importance. This book provides the first analysis of the architecture of the Nizam Shahs. Pushkar Sohoni examines the critical relationship between architectural production, courtly practice and royal authority in a period when the aspirations and politics of the kingdom were articulated through architectural expression. Based on new primary research from key sites including the urban settlements of Ahmadnagar, Daulatabad, Aurangabad, Junnar and the port city of Chaul, Sohoni sheds light on broader Islamicate ideas of kingship and shows how this was embodied by material artefacts such as buildings and sites, paintings, gardens, guns and coins.
As well as offering a vivid depiction of sixteenth-century South Asia, this book revises understanding of the cultural importance of the Nizam Shahs and their place in the Indian Ocean world. It will be a vital primary resource for scholars researching the history of the medieval and early modern Deccan and relevant for those working in Art History, Islamic Studies, South Asian Studies and Archaeology.

CHAPTER 1

LOCATING ARCHITECTURE: SOCIAL HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE DECCAN

The Deccan: A Brief History

The Deccan plateau has had an important role in the cultural and political history of South Asia [Map 2]. The Deccan (also spelled Dakkan, Dekhan, etc.) is a term broadly used to describe the lands south of the Narmada river, and specifically meant the areas bounded by the Vindhya ranges to the north, the Western Ghats (Sahyadris) to the west, the Bay of Bengal to the east, and the Mysore plateau to the south. Today, the Deccan is comprised of the plateau regions of Maharashtra, northern Karnataka, and Telangana. Below the Mysore plateau is the region historically called the Carnatic, but in the North India-centric view, everything south of the Vindhyas was often called the Deccan. The Carnatic comprises the states of present-day Tamil Nadu, southeastern Karnataka, southern Andhra Pradesh, and northeastern Kerala. The name Deccan is a corruption of the Sanskrit dakśiṇa, literally ‘right-hand’ or ‘south’, suggesting that it was employed by early Indo-European settlers who traversed the North Indian plains from west to east in the Indian Iron Age (c. 1200–600 BCE), for whom ‘right-hand’ and ‘south’ therefore connoted the same direction. Most historical narratives of India written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the South Asian subcontinent became increasingly imagined as a nation, have been centred on North India (known as Hindustan since the early second millennium CE) as the heartland; the Deccan has usually been represented as an important frontier and region to be subjugated.

Map 2 The major settlements of the Deccan Plateau in the sixteenth century.

A large intermediate zone about 300 miles wide extends across South Asia from Gujarat to Orissa, separating the Indus and Gangetic river basins and alluvial plains from the Deccan. As Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund astutely observe, ‘But for military intervention, this intermediate zone has always been a major obstacle.’¹ Traditionally, few routes connected the North Indian riverine plains to the Deccan. As this buffer zone was historically traversed only in a very few places, the connection between Hindustan and the Deccan remained quite tenuous till the early modern period. Under the Delhi sultanate (c. 1206–1526 CE), the Mughals (c. 1526–1857 CE), the British (c. 1857–1947 CE), and the Republic of India (c. 1950–present), efforts were made to meld these large regions of South Asia – Hindustan and the Deccan – into a single political entity. The first two efforts lasted less than a century each, and only the British and Indian Republic continuum has seen Hindustan and the Deccan comprise a single political state for over a hundred years. The Deccan and regions further south have therefore always had a distinct cultural development vis-à-vis the northern regions, Malwa, and the Gangetic plains.

In the first millennium CE, the western seaboard of the Deccan, along with Gujarat, grew in importance for overseas trade, particularly connecting West Asia with South Asia. The western seaboard of peninsular India has been mentioned in Greek and Arab sources from the first century CE, as seen in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and in works by Ptolemy, Arrian, Maʾsudi, and others.² As the emergent Buddhist and Jain networks spread across Asia, the Deccan became an important centre for facilitating mercantile, missionary, and monastic networks. The port cities of the west coast became significant entrepots in facilitating exchanges between the Deccan and West Asia, even as far as Africa.

From the early historic period onwards, Buddhist and Jain sites are found profusely throughout the Deccan, including the inscriptions of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka (c. 304–232 CE).³ However, there is little evidence of direct Maurya authority in the Deccan, and the empire must have controlled the region only through feudatories. The geographical variations in Mauryan inscriptions suggest regional cultural identities, including the Deccan. After this period, the next important dynasty known in the region was that of the Satavahanas (c. 230 BCE-220 CE). They were based in the central Deccan, and were challenged by the trans-local Indo-Scythian Western Satraps (c. 35–405 CE) located in the northwestern Deccan, primarily at Junnar and Nasik. Within a few hundred years, the imperial Guptas (c. 320–550 CE) demonstrated their presence in the Deccan, usually through marital alliances with the Vakatakas (c. 250–500 CE), a local dynasty in the Godavari basin. These relationships allowed the Guptas to make nominal claims over the Deccan as their extended domain, much as the Mauryas would have done more than half a millennium earlier, but the real extent of their prowess in these regions is unknown.

From the sixth century onwards, the Chalukyas of Badami (c. 543–753 CE), followed by the Rashtrakutas (c. 753–982 CE) and the Western Chalukyas (c. 973–1189 CE), ruled over large areas of the Deccan. Eventually, the latter two polities were succeeded by several smaller states, such as the Hoysalas of Dvarasamudra (c. 1026–1343 CE), the Yadavas of Devagiri (c. 1173–1334 CE) and the Kakatiyas of Warangal (c. 1158–1195 CE). These late kingdoms have been commonly misunderstood as the political and cultural basis for the three modern linguistic states of Republic of India, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh (now bifurcated further into Andhra and Telangana), with linguistic identities projected retrospectively upon them. The three medieval polities were eventually subjugated by the campaigns of the Delhi sultanate in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The kingdom of Vijayanagara (1336–1565 CE) and the Bahmani sultanate (1347–1547 CE) were the survivors to the Khilji-Tughluqs of the Delhi sultanate until their decline in the sixteenth century, when a host of new sultanates dominated the landscape of the Deccan.

If the Deccan is to be understood as the area that constitutes the drainage basins of the Godavari and the Krishna rivers (including all their tributaries), there emerged two very strong sacred geographies centred about these two rivers [Map 2]. The Godavari has been considered a homology of the Ganges. Nasik and Paithan (Pratisthana) emulated aspects of Varanasi, from hosting Sanskritic learning traditions to being the locus of festivals like the Kumbh Mela. The familial networks of learned Pandit families that moved between the Ganges and Godavari basins in the north and south, respectively, kept alive this connection for over a thousand years. The creation of homologous places and shared toponyms between Hindustan and the Deccan provided the mechanism for a religious unification of the two landscapes of the north and south. On the other hand, the basin of the upper Krishna, with its tributaries such as the Tungabhadra, became the locus for another sacred geography, with towns such as Pandharpur and Hampi that saw the emergence of new cults focused around the newer forms of devotional religions (e.g., Bhakti traditions) and temple Hinduism.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw many new players, including the Portuguese, the Mughals, the English, and the emergence of the Marathas as an independent political force. The mid-eighteenth century saw a political consolidation of the Deccan between the Marathas in the west and Nizam-ul Mulk Asaf Jah in the east, both operating nominally as vassals of the Mughals, but in reality independent and rival kingdoms. The Marathas at Pune were finally subjugated by the British in the Anglo-Maratha wars (1775 to 1782, 1803 to 1805, and 1817 to 1818 CE), and the Nizams of Hyderabad became British allies and eventually vassals after their first signing of a subsidiary alliance treaty in 1798 CE. Under the colonial patchwork of British territories and princely states, the Deccan ceased to be a single cultural region. Only geographical realities, fauna and flora, and the Deccani language (understood as a dialect of Hindustani) kept it alive in people’s imaginations as a shared zone.

Hindustan and the Deccan as Diverse and Unified Landscapes

With the emergence of the Delhi sultanate and its conquests in the Deccan, new forms of Islamicate culture came to the region. These forms of Islamicate kingship borrowed heavily from Timurid models of kingship, building technology, and visual culture. Models of architecture and planning from Central Asia and Iran in a style indebted to the Timurid dynasty found local expression in the emergent kingdoms settled by the emergent Turco-Mongol dynasties in South Asia. Most such transmissions of ideas, materials, and people came in largely through the coastal networks, as the independent kingdoms of the Bahmanis (c. 1347–1527 CE) and Vijayanagara (c. 1336–1565 CE) relied on sea routes to facilitate such an exchange. It is important to note that these states, which shared the Deccan between them, were both founded through a rebellion against the Delhi sultanate that had briefly subjugated the Deccan in the fourteenth century.

In early modern accounts, the Hindustan of the Mughals referred to the Gangetic plains and parts of north-central India. It was surrounded by various other vilāyats (regions) including those of Bengal, Malwa, Gujarat, and Afghanistan. Beyond Malwa was the vilāyat of the Deccan ruled from the ṣūbaḥ (province) of Ahmadnagar (the ṣūbaḥ was later called Daulatabad and eventually Aurangabad). In the large and important frontier province, Mughal princes were often deputed as viceroys and governors of Daulatabad. Under the emperor Aurangzeb, the kingdoms of Golconda and Bijapur were also annexed in 1686 and 1687 and added as new ṣūbaḥs to the empire.

As late as the eighteenth century, the Deccan still was understood as a separate cultural and geographical entity vis-à-vis Hindustan. Partly as a result, independent kingdoms in the Deccan defined themselves in contrast to North India and the Hindustanis. Therefore, many of the regional polities from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as the Deccan sultanates (Ahmadnagar, Bijapur, Golconda) and the Marathas, saw themselves as regional resistance against Hindustani Mughal expansion. Regional habits and distinct cultural expressions reinforced this sense of being Deccani. In the interests of realpolitik, the Deccan sultanates usually were content to congratulate the powers at Delhi and try to use them to settle scores with their neighbours. From Firuz Shah Bahmani I (reg. 1397–1422 CE), who sent a letter of submission to Timur in 1398 to 1399 CE, and received a firmān confirming his kingdom in return, to the sultanates of Ahmadnagar, Bijapur, and Golconda, which all sent congratulatory letters to Babur upon his takeover of Delhi in 1526 CE, the kingdoms of the Deccan were interested in the affairs of Hindustan.⁴ Particularly for the Nizam Shahs, this was an ongoing fascination, since it allowed them to participate in the court intrigues of Gujarat, Khandesh, and Malwa, all kingdoms that bordered them to the north. On several occasions, particularly under Ahmad Nizam Shah I and Burhan Nizam Shah I, there were confrontations with the Muzaffarid sultans of Gujarat, usually over the issues of succession in the sultanate of Khandesh.⁵ The independent identity of the Deccan as intimately connected with Shiʾi Iran was being challenged by new pan-continental networks that were patronised by the Mughals. The proliferation of Islamicate practices, while understood as a great unifier, also allowed for a nuanced understanding of regional differences. The cultural sensibilities of the Deccan were in part shaped by the landscape and the climate, and along with its unique historical contingencies had resulted in the genesis of distinctive cultural forms. It was eventually not just the economic and military might of the Mughals but the dominant cultural hegemonic practices that helped their expansion into the Deccan. It was eventually the new north–south axis of the Naqshbandi Sufi order that integrated the Deccan into a Timurid–Mughal imperial geography in the sixteenth century, one of the factors in explaining the eventual expansion of Mughal Hindustan into the Deccan. In terms of physical networks, Hindustan could be connected with the Deccan by only two relatively easy routes: either the Burhanpur gap controlled by Asirgarh Fort, or the Sendhwa pass after the fort at Mandu. These two axes, through the regions of Khandesh and Malwa respectively, were the easiest ways of moving people and goods from north to south across the Vindhyas and the Narmada-Tapti basins. To the west, coastal routes ran along marshlands, and to the east, the dense forests of Gondwana prevented such a conveyance. As pointed out by B.G. Gokhale and Stewart Gordon, Burhanpur therefore became an important trading centre and manufacturing location, connecting various trade routes, including one from Surat to Agra.⁶ Therefore, it was hardly surprising that control of the Deccan by any power in Hindustan first meant control over the regions of Malwa or Khandesh, in order to maintain communication and supply lines. These two areas had been independent kingdoms for over 200 years after the decline of the Delhi sultanate in the fourteenth century; it was only under Akbar (reg. 1556–1606 CE) that the Mughals annexed the Malwa sultanate in 1562 CE and the Faruqi sultanate of Khandesh in 1601 CE. The Mughals could only then think of expanding into the Deccan, a task that would have been impossible without first taking control of these kingdoms. Thus, as the sultanates of Gujarat, Malwa, and Khandesh were conquered by the Mughals, the emperors Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb all made forays into the Deccan, with varying levels of success.

The Visual Culture of the Deccan Sultanates

The sultanate at Delhi, under the Khiljis and then Muhammad bin Tughluq (reg. 1325–1351 CE), territorialised a large part of the Indian subcontinent in the fourteenth century, either by direct conquest or through tributary rulers. After Muhammad bin Tughluq’s reign, most of his territories rebelled and declared independence from the empire that he had tried to consolidate. The sultanates of Bengal (c. 1342–1576 CE), Deccan (Bahmani: c. 1347–1518 CE), Khandesh (c. 1382–1601 CE), Malwa (c. 1392–1562 CE), Gujarat (c. 1391–1583 CE), and Jaunpur (c. 1394–1479 CE), along with the kingdom of Vijayanagara (c. 1336–1565 CE), were all the successor kingdoms to the Khilji-Tughlaq empire. The mid-fourteenth century saw a rebellion against the Delhi sultans by various regional governors, one of the strongest to emerge being Hasan Gangu Bahman Shah (d. 1358 CE), the founder of the Bahmani dynasty. He succeeded in establishing a provincial sultanate at Daulatabad (later shifted to Gulbarga and then to Bidar) in c. 1347 CE and con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Locating Architecture: Social History and Historiography of the Deccan
• 2. Multiple Pasts: The Nizam Shahs of Ahmadnagar
• 3. Urban Patterns, Water Supply Systems, and Fortification
• 4. Palaces and Mansions
• 5. Mosques: Piety and Prayer
• 6. Tombs
• 7. Miscellaneous Buildings
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright