Berar
Fathullah Imad-ul-Mulk, a Bahmani governor of Berar who had been born a Hindu in the Vijayanagara country and taken as a boy, declared independence in 1490 — the same year as Bijapur and Ahmadnagar. Berar is the black-soil cotton plain of eastern Maharashtra, agriculturally valuable and militarily hard to defend, with no natural frontier.
The sultanate was the weakest of the five and spent its eighty years manoeuvring between Ahmadnagar and Gujarat.
Ahmadnagar annexed it in 1572, and Berar passed to the Mughals in 1596 as the price of a temporary peace with Ahmadnagar. Its cotton later made it valuable enough that the British took it from the Nizam of Hyderabad on lease in 1853 — a transaction that supplied Lancashire during the American Civil War and remained a grievance in Hyderabad into the twentieth century.
Further reading
- Asher, Catherine B. India Before Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2006
- Fritz, John M. Hampi Vijayanagara. Jaico, 2003
- Jackson, Peter. The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History. Cambridge University Press, 1999
- Richards, John F. The Mughal Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1993
- Stein, Burton. Vijayanagara. Cambridge University Press, 1989
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.