Seuṇa Yādavas of Devagiri

Devagiri

The Yādavas rose from Chalukya feudatory status in the late twelfth century and unified the northern Deccan. Their capital Devagiri is a conical rock rising some two hundred metres from the plain, scarped smooth on all sides and approached through a single tunnel — among the most formidable fortresses in India, and later renamed Daulatabad.

Their inscriptions increasingly use Marathi alongside Sanskrit and Kannada, and the dynasty's period is when Marathi emerges as a language of administration and literature. Jñāneśvar's Jñāneśvarī, the Marathi commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā that stands at the head of the Vārkarī devotional tradition, was composed in 1290 under Yādava rule.

Scholarship

Hemādri, minister to the last kings, compiled the Caturvarga Cintāmaṇi, an enormous digest of ritual and religious law, and gave his name to the Hemāḍpanti style of temple building in Maharashtra. Śārṅgadeva wrote the Saṅgītaratnākara at this court — the treatise that both the Hindustani and the Carnatic traditions treat as their common ancestor, written just before the two diverged.

The court also patronised the astronomer Changadeva, who founded an observatory and school at Patan in Khandesh.

Conquest

Alauddin Khalji, then a provincial governor, raided Devagiri in 1296 in a surprise expedition that netted an enormous treasure and financed his seizure of the Delhi throne. Tribute was imposed, defaulted on, and enforced again; Malik Kafur took the fortress in 1308 and used it as the base for the campaigns that reached Madurai. The dynasty was extinguished in 1317.

Muhammad bin Tughlaq later attempted to move the Sultanate's capital and much of Delhi's population to Devagiri, renaming it Daulatabad — a scheme abandoned after a few years, and among the most notorious episodes of Sultanate history.