Bahmani Sultanate

Politics and institutions

The Bahmani Sultanate began in 1347, when the Deccan amirs who had rebelled against Muhammad bin Tughlaq of Delhi accepted Zafar Khan as their ruler; he took the title Alauddin Bahman Shah and made Gulbarga his capital. The state was Persianate in style but Deccani in its noble families, and its provinces were governed by tarafdars who soon became powers in their own right. Sufi shaikhs legitimized the new dynasty, and the sultans ruled through a court divided between the older Dakhani elite and newer Afaqi immigrants from Persia and the Ottoman lands. Ahmad Shah I moved the capital to Bidar in the 1420s; Mahmud Gawan served as regent from 1466 until his execution in 1481. After 1490 the tarafdars broke away, and the last Bahmani sultans were puppets until the formal dissolution in 1527.

Economy and finance

The Deccan plateau gave the sultanate its grain, cotton and pulses, while its craftsmen worked metal, cloth and paper. Bidar became famous for bidriware, the blackened brass inlaid with silver that is still made there. Land revenue and tolls on the horse trade from the Persian Gulf and Central Asia filled the treasury, and the ports of the Konkan linked the plateau to the Indian Ocean. The court imported Persian luxuries and paid for Persian secretaries, architects and soldiers; Nikitin, the Russian traveller, noted the wealth of the nobility beside the poverty of the peasantry. War with Vijayanagara was both a drain and a source of plunder, tribute and slaves, and the annual campaigns after 1501 ruined the finances of the last real sultan.

Society and culture

Bahmani culture was a Deccan synthesis. Persian was the language of the court and chancery, but the soldiers and Sufis spoke Dakhni, the Urdu of the south, and the first Dakhni literature took shape under Bahmani patronage. The dynasty built the Jama Masjid of Gulbarga, the Bidar Fort, the madrasa of Mahmud Gawan and the Chand Minar at Daulatabad; the Bahmani tombs outside Bidar still carry Persian, Arabic and Urdu inscriptions. Sufi shrines, especially those of the Chishti order, anchored the state in the countryside. Society was hierarchical and slave-holding, and the court's taste for Persian ceremony, Nowruz and imported scholars did not erase the divide between the Persianate elite and the Dakhani gentry.

Military and frontiers

The Bahmanis were among the first Indian states to make gunpowder a core weapon. At Adoni in 1368 Muhammad Shah I used artillery against Vijayanagara, and by the 1470s cannon were part of Deccan siegecraft. The army combined Turkish and Afghan cavalry, Deccani levies, war elephants and a growing corps of gunners; forts at Gulbarga, Bidar, Daulatabad, Golconda and Raichur anchored the frontier. Mahmud Gawan pushed the sultanate to its greatest extent in campaigns against Malwa, Vijayanagara and the Gajapatis, but the same military system produced the tarafdars who would destroy the state. After 1490 the Bahmani army ceased to be a single instrument, and the Deccan Sultanates fought one another as often as they fought Vijayanagara.

Foreign relations

The sultanate's foreign policy was dominated by the Vijayanagara Empire to the south, with which it fought almost continuously over the Raichur doab, the Godavari basin and the Tungabhadra country. To the north it dealt with Malwa and Gujarat, to the east with Warangal and the Gajapatis of Orissa; the Deccan was a system of rival courts rather than a single frontier. Persian and Ottoman connections supplied prestige, officers and ideas of kingship, and the Chishti Sufis linked the Deccan to the wider Islamic world. The Bahmanis rarely had a stable ally: their diplomacy consisted of playing neighbours against one another, and when the tarafdars became independent after 1490, the sultanate's foreign relations fragmented into those of five successor states.

Legacy and influence

The Bahmani Sultanate created the political map of the Deccan for the next two centuries. Its five successor states — Ahmadnagar, Berar, Bidar, Bijapur and Golconda — inherited its Persianate courts, its gunpowder armies and its rivalry with Vijayanagara, and their combined victory at Talikota in 1565 ended the Vijayanagara Empire. Bahmani architecture, from the Gulbarga mosque to the Bidar madrasa, and the bidriware craft of Bidar, remain visible in the region. The Dakhni language and its literature, the Deccan's Sufi networks and the memory of Mahmud Gawan as the scholar-statesman all outlived the dynasty. In a longer view, the Bahmanis were the bridge by which North Indian Islam became a Deccan civilization.