Berar Sultanate

The Berar Sultanate was one of the five Deccan sultanates that emerged from the break-up of the Bahmani kingdom. Berar, in the highlands of the western Deccan, had been a Bahmani province governed by a tarafdar with his own army. In 1490 Fathullah Imad-ul-Mulk, a former Hindu captive from the Karnataka country who had been raised as a Muslim and served the Bahmani state, proclaimed his independence amid court disorder and founded the Imad Shahi dynasty. He annexed Mahur, fortified Gawilgad and Narnala, and made Ellichpur his capital. His successors ruled a relatively small but fertile and strategically placed state, squeezed between the sultanates of Ahmadnagar, Bijapur and Gujarat. Aladdin Imad Shah resisted Ahmadnagar with Gujarati help, and Darya Imad Shah sought an alliance with Bijapur. In 1562 the child sultan Burhan Imad Shah was deposed by his regent Tufail Khan, giving Murtaza Nizam Shah I of Ahmadnagar a pretext to intervene. Ahmadnagar invaded, executed Tufail Khan and Burhan, and annexed Berar in 1574. The sultanate is remembered for its coinage and for the Deccani architecture of Ellichpur, and its absorption strengthened Ahmadnagar until that kingdom too fell to the Mughals. Berar later became a Mughal subah and, in the nineteenth century, a province of British India.