Bahmani Sultanate

Independence

The sultanate was founded in 1347 by officers of Muhammad bin Tughlaq's Deccan administration who revolted against Delhi. Its capital was first at Gulbarga and then at Bidar, and it held the northern Deccan for a hundred and eighty years, fighting Vijayanagara across the Raichur doab throughout.

The state's politics were dominated by the split between the Deccanis — Muslims long settled in India, together with Ethiopian and local converts — and the Afaqis or Westerners, immigrants from Persia and Central Asia who brought administrative and military expertise and were resented for it. This division ran through the whole of Deccan sultanate history.

Mahmud Gawan

Mahmud Gawan, a Persian merchant who rose to be chief minister from 1466, is the outstanding figure of the sultanate. He reorganised the provinces to break the power of the great governors, reformed the revenue and the army, extended Bahmani authority to both coasts, and built at Bidar a madrasa on the Central Asian model — a three-storey college with lecture halls, a library of three thousand manuscripts and student lodgings, faced in coloured tile. Much of it survives, damaged by an explosion in the seventeenth century.

He was executed in 1481 on a forged charge of treason, and the sultanate unravelled after him.

The five successors

Between 1490 and 1518 the provincial governors made themselves independent, producing the five Deccan sultanates: the Nizam Shahis of Ahmadnagar, the Adil Shahis of Bijapur, the Qutb Shahis of Golconda, the Imad Shahis of Berar and the Barid Shahis of Bidar. The Bahmani line survived nominally at Bidar until 1527.

The five states fought one another constantly and Vijayanagara intermittently, combining only once — decisively — at Talikota in 1565. Their courts produced the Deccani Urdu tradition, the Deccani school of painting, and an architecture of great domes and arcades quite distinct from northern Indian work.