167

The Bahmanids

748–934/1347–1528

The northern Deccan

1. The rulers at Aḥsanābād-Gulbargā

2. The rulers in Aḥmadābād-Bīdar

As the authority of Muḥammad b. Tughluq waned in the second half of his reign, the recently-conquered parts of the Deccan began to fall away from the control of Delhi. The governor of Ma‘bar in the extreme south proclaimed himself independent and founded the Sultanate of Ma‘bar or Madura (see above, no. 166). Much more powerful and enduring was the state founded on the table-land of the northern Deccan by the Amīr Ḥasan Gangu. Ḥasan’s origins are very obscure, but they seem to have been humble ones; the claim to Persian descent, seen in his assumption of the old Iranian name of Bahman (in the Iranian national epic, son of Isfandiyār), should not be taken seriously. After his successful rebellion in Dawlatābād, Ḥasan transferred his capital southwards to Gulbargā, and for over eighty years this remained the Bahmanid capital.

The rise of the Bahmanids meant that a strong and aggressive Muslim power now confronted the two chief Hindu kingdoms of the southern Decca, Warangal and Vijayanagar. For the next century or so, warfare was frequent, ending in the case of Warangal by its overthrow in 830/1425 by Aḥmad Shāh I and its incorporation into the Bahmanid Sultanate; Vijayanagar, on the other hand, which had already overwhelmed the Sultanate of Ma‘bar or Madura (see above, no. 166), was never conquered at this time.

A point of note in this warfare was the use from the second half of the fourteenth century onwards of artillery and firearms, knowledge of these weapons being acquired through South India’s connections with lands further west. After the conquest of Warangal, Aḥmad moved his capital to the more central Bīdar, and he also carried the war northwards against the Muslim rulers of Gujarāt and Mālwa. The Bahmanid Sultanate was until the second half of the fifteenth century essentially a land-locked kingdom of the northern Deccan, but Muḥammad Shāh III’s energetic chief minister, the Khwāja-yi Jahān Maḥmūd Gāwān, who was of Persian origin, allied with Gujarāt against the Sultanate’s enemies, intervened successfully in Orissa and extended the kingdom’s eastern boundary to the Bay of Bengal, and extended its western one over the Western Ghats to Goa and the Arabian Sea coast.

The Bahmanids thus acquired considerable fame in the Islamic world at large, especially as they made their court a great centre of learning; it was also under them that a specific Deccani style of Indo-Muslim architecture evolved. The Bahmanids were the first power of the subcontinent to exchange ambassadors with the Ottomans (between Muḥammad Shāh III and Muḥammad II Fātiḥ). The Bahmanid state, as well as being militarily powerful, had an effective civil administrative system. There was, accordingly, a need for skilled personnel, and many Turks, Persians, Arabs, etc., entered the sultans’ service. It was through this influx that there arose in the fifteenth century tensions between the native Deccani Muslims (the Dakhnīs or Deshīs) and the ‘outsiders’ (the Āfāqīs or Gharībdn or Par deshīs). Mounting internal chaos in the state and increasing ineffectiveness of the rulers are in part explicable by these rivalries. Toward the end of the fifteenth century, after the unwise execution by the sultan of Maḥmüd Gāwān, signs of disintegration began to appear. The last four sultans were fainéants under the tutelage of the Turkish amīr ‘Alī Barīdī; the fourth of these, Kalīm Allāh, appealed unsuccessfully to the Mughal Bābur for help in throwing off the yoke of the Barīdīs, and finally had to abandon his dominions for exile in Bījapur.

From the ruins of the Bahmanid Sultanate there emerged in the Muslim Deccan five successor states, all sprung from the commanders or officials of the Bahmanids: the ‘Imād Shāhīs of Berār, the Band Shāhīs of Bīdar, the ‘Ādil Shāhīs of Bījapur, the Niẓām Shāhīs of Aḥmadnagar and the Quṭb Shāhīs of Golconda (Golkondā) (see below, nos 169–73). The ‘Imād Shāhīs were absorbed by the Niẓām Shāhīs in the later sixteenth century, but the other four sultanates continued into the seventeenth century, in two instances until the time of the Mughal Awrangzīb, all of them eventually forming part of that Emperor’s vast but ephemeral empire.

Justi, 470; Lane-Poole, 316–21; Zambaur, 297–9.

EI² ‘Bahmanīs’ (H. K. Sherwani).

E. E. Speight, ‘The coins of the Bahmani Kings of the Deccan’, IC, 9 (1935), 268–307.

Haroon Khan Sherwani, The Bahmanis of the Deccan: An Objective Study, Hyderabad-Deccan 1953, with a chronology of events and the rulers at pp. 435–44 and a detailed genealogical table at the end.

R. C. Majumdar et al. (eds), The History and Culture of the Indian People. VI. The Delhi Sultanate, ch. 11.

M. Habib and K. A. Nizami (eds), A Comprehensive History of India. V. The Delhi Sultanat (A.D. 1206–1526), ch. 14.

H. K. Sherwani and P. M. Joshi (eds), History of Medieval Deccan (1295–1724), 1,141–222, with a detailed genealogical table at p. 142, II, 432–9.