Creating an Ecumene: Cultural, Economic, and Social Boundaries of the Deccan Sultanates

Abstract

A notional region was fashioned by the rulers of the sixteenth-century Deccan; they used cultural, economic, social, and urban organisations to define the region. In the choices they made about minting currency, marital alliances, or the distribution and scale of mosques, they defined their region. The sixteenth-century Deccan was known for geographical and social mobility, with people from several places around the Indian Ocean littoral. But they soon became part of this ecumene and found their own position within it. The kingdoms of the Deccan thus created their own world, fashioning a socio-cultural region that was not defined solely on the basis of politics. This paradigm of a region challenges the assumption that regions are defined only as parts of, or on the periphery of, larger imperial formations.

Keywords:

• Deccan sultanates
• coinage
• Shi’i mosques
• marital alliances
• cultural region

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The kingdom of Vijayanagara (est. 1337), which shares much with these sultanates, has a slightly different political history, having emerged from the empire of the Khilji-Tughlaqs almost at the same time as the Bahmanis (est. 1347), and was partially absorbed by the five sultanates after the Battle of Talikota (1565).

2. For example, Sanjay Subramanyam, ‘Iranians Abroad: Intra-Asian Elite Migration and Early Modern State Formation’ in The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 51, no. 2 (May 1992), pp. 340-363; Phillip B. Wagoner, ‘Fortuitous Convergences and Essential Ambiguities: Transcultural Political Elites in the Medieval Deccan’ in International Journal of Hindu Studies, vol. 3, no. 3 (Dec. 1999), pp. 241-264.

3. Philip Wagoner and Richard Eaton, Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India’s Deccan Plateau, 1300-1600 (New Delhi:, Oxford University Press 2014).

4. Pushkar Sohoni, ‘Vernacular as a Space: Writing in the Deccan’ in South Asian History and Culture, vol. 7, no. 3 (Apr 2016), pp. 258–270.

5. Phillip B. Wagoner, ‘“Sultan among Hindu Kings”: Dress, Titles, and the Islamicization of Hindu Culture at Vijayanagara’ in The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 55, no. 4 (Nov 1996), pp. 851-880.

6. Sanjay Subramanyam, Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), mentions several instances of shared court cultures in the Deccan.

7. For an explanation of shared cultures, see Alan Dundes, Studies in Folkloristics (Meerut: Folklore Institute; New Delhi: Manohar Book Service, 1978).

8. Several kings are known to us only through the numismatic evidence that yields their name, even if other documents are silent about their rule, thus confirming the symbolic potency of the act of minting coins; for examples, Daud Shah II (1397) and Mujahid Shah (1375-78), both Bahmani sultans, had coins minted in their name even though they ruled for insignificant periods of time.

9. Pushkar Sohoni, ‘The Non-issue of Coinage: The Monetary Policies of the Post-Bahmani Sultanates’ in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 28, issue 3 (October 2018), pp. 645–659.

10. John S. Deyell and Robert E. Frykenberg, “Sovereignty and the ‘SIKKA’ Under Company Raj: Minting Prerogative and Imperial Legitimacy in India” in The Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. XIX, 1 (Jan–Mar 1982), esp. p. 9.

11. Phillip B. Wagoner and Pankaj Tandon, ‘The Bahmani ‘Currency Reform’ of the Early Fifteenth Century in Light of the Akola Hoard’ in American Journal of Numismatics, vol. 29 (2017), esp. p. 227

12. Sabita Singh, ‘Socio-Political and Economic Aspects of Marriage’ in The Politics of Marriage in Medieval India: Gender and Alliance in Rajasthan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019), 48-84.

13. Ruby Lal, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 166-175 passim.

14. For example, in an earlier example, Ahmad Shah Wali Bahmani’s (reg. 1422-1436) daughter married the Shah Nurullah, grandson of Shah Ni’matullah of Mahan, and there were a few other such conjugal arrangements between the two families.

15. Iqtidar Alam Khan, ‘Ahmadnagar and the Sur Empire, 1537 to 1553 – a study of contemporary documents’ in The Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 44^th Session (1984), 176-188, esp. 176.

16. For the use of imagined Turco-Mongol lineages, see Ali Anooshahr, Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires: A Study of Politics and Invented Traditions (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) and for the conceit of Persian origins, see Blain Auer, In the Mirror of Persian Kings: The Origins of Perso-Islamic Courts and Empires in India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

17. Roy Fischel, Local States in an Imperial World: Identity, Society and Politics in the Early Modern Deccan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 14.

18. Samira Sheikh, ‘Alliance, Genealogy, and Political Power: The Cūḍāsamās of Junagadh and the Sultans of Gujarat’ in The Medieval History Journal, vol. 11 no. 1 (2008), 29-61, esp. 46-47.

19. Sheikh, ‘Alliance, Genealogy, and Political Power’, 50.

20. Sheikh, ‘‘Alliance, Genealogy, and Political Power’, 50.

21. Michael H. Fisher, ‘Political Marriage Alliances at the Shi ‘i Court of Awadh’ in Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 25, no. 4 (Oct. 1983), 593-616, esp. 594-595.

22. For example, see Imtiaz Ahmad, ‘Endogamy and Status Mobility among the Siddique Sheikhs of Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh’ in Imtiaz Ahmad (ed.), Caste and Social Stratification among the Muslims (Delhi: Manohar, 1973), or Afzal Husain, ‘Marriages among Mughal Nobles as an Index of Status and Aristocratic Integration’ in Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 33 (1971), 304-312.

23. Radhey Shyam, The Kingdom of Khandesh (Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Dilli, 1981), 3-4.

24. Radhey Shyam, The Kingdom of Khandesh, p.11.

25. Roy Fischel, Local States in an Imperial World, 231, footnote 107.

26. Roy Fischel, Local States in an Imperial World, 96, footnote 13.

27. Possession of a fort included the revenue provinces in its vicinity, and the rights to collect taxes and tolls, and in this case, included the revenues of five and half districts around the fort.

28. M. Hidayat Hosain, ‘Conquest of Sholapur by Burhan Nizam Shah I (914-961 A.H., 1508-1553 A.D.) as described by Shah Tahir’ in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. V (1939), article no. 2, 133-153, esp. 134.

29. John Briggs, History of the Rise of the Mohamedan Power in India, vol. 3 (New Delhi: Adam Publishers and Distributors, 2006), 131-132.

30. M. Hidayat Hosain, ‘Conquest of Sholapur by Burhan Nizam Shah I’ in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal (Letters), vol. V (1939), 133-153.

31. Wolseley Haig, ‘The Religion of Ahmad Shah Bahmani’ in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, no. 1 (Jan. 1924), 73-80, esp. 77.

32. John Briggs, History of the Rise of the Mohamedan Power in India, vol. 3 (New Delhi: Adam Publishers and Distributors, 2006), 299.

33. Muzaffar Alam, ‘The Deccan frontier and Mughal expansion, ca. 1600: Contemporary perspectives” in Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 47, no. 3 (2004): 357-389, gives details of the daughter of Ibrahim Adil Shah II rather reluctantly being sent as a bride to the Mughal prince Daniyal.

34. Pushkar Sohoni, ‘Patterns of Faith: Mosque Typologies and Sectarian Affiliation in the Kingdom of Ahmadnagar’ in David Roxborough (ed.), Envisioning Islamic Art and Architecture: Essays in Honor of Renata Holod (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 110-127.

35. Farhad Daftary, The Ismāʿīlīs: Their History and Doctrines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), has made an argument regarding the true faith of Shah Tahir, suggesting that he was actually a Nizari: “One must bear in mind, however, that Shah Tahir and other Nizari leaders of the period were obliged to observe taqiya very strictly. It is certain that Shah Tahir propagated his form of Nizari Ismailism in the guise of Twelver Shiʿism, which was more acceptable to the Muslim rulers of India who were interested in cultivating friendly relations with the Twelve Shiʿi Safawid dynasty of Persia” (ibid., 489).

36. It appears frequently in the Burhān-i maʾāsir, Tārīkh-i Firishta, and the Tadhkirat al- mulk, and we can assume that unless it is specified as the fort (qalaʿ) that the references are to the city.

37. Wolseley Haig, “History of the Nizam Shahi Kings of Ahmednagar,” Indian Antiquary, vol. 50 (1920), 108. The article is a serialized version of the Burhān-i maʾāsir.

38. Muḥammad Qāsim Hindūshāh Astarābādī Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India till the year A.D. 1612, trans. John Briggs (Calcutta: Editions Indian, 1966), vol. 3, 201.

39. Johannes Pedersen, s. v. “Masdjid,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Brill Online, University of Pennsylvania, 28 December 2011.

http://proxy.library.upenn.edu:2822/subscriber/entry?entry=islam_COM-0694.

The entry on “Masdjid” was published in print in 1989 (fascs. 107–112, 644–707. See 6:644, col. 2.

40. For popular beliefs, see Rula Jurdi Abisaab, Converting Persia: Religion and Power in the Safavid Empire (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), who notes “For the most part, however, Shiʿites viewed the rule of Sunnite caliphs and sultans as a usurpation of the rights of their Imams, the descendants of ʿAli and Fatima. Consequently, they rejected participation in Friday prayer… A decade after the investiture of Shah Ismaʿil, many people seemed confused and uncertain about the legal status of Friday prayer during Occultation” (ibid., 21).

Adisaab also observes: “Al-Karaki was among the earliest Shiʿite clerics to lift the prohibition against the convening of Friday prayer, encouraging full participation in this ritual. In 921AH/1515CE, he defended his position, emphasizing the merits of Friday worship… Curiously, Arab and Persian scholars at the Safavid court and outside publicly challenged al-Karaki’s views on Friday prayer. Possibly, al-Karaki’s emphasis on the pivotal role of the jurist in convening Friday prayer angered the sadrs. The latter feared clerics would promote their exclusive rights in performing Friday prayer, and hence strengthen their ties to the monarch and the public… The opposition he incurred perhaps explains why Friday prayer was not widely practiced during his time and remained in abeyance several decades after his death” (ibid., 21–22).

41. David Shea and Anthony Troyer, ed. and trans., Dabistan, or, School of Manners (Paris: Printed for the Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland, 1843), cxlvii: “At last, in the month of December, A. D. 1579, twenty-six years before his death, he substituted for the common profession of the Muhammedans the new: “There is no God but God, and Akbar his khalif (or deputy).”

42. For the dynamic role of kingship and its associated rituals of feasting and prayers under Shah ʿAbbas, see Said Amir Arjomand, The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam: Religion, Political Order, and Societal Change in Shiʿite Iran from the Beginning to 1890 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 105–210.

43. Jean Calmard, “Shi’i Rituals and Power,” in Safavid Persia: The History and Politics of an Islamic Society, ed. Charles Melville, 139–90 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996), 141: “Friday prayer tending to take a facultative character or to be simply forbidden in the absence of the Hidden Imam.”

44. Gujarat had its own cultural world and sphere of influence in a zone that stretched from Sindh to Malwa, with Khandesh in between.

45. For an extensive treatment of every language in the Deccan in this period, see chapters by M. Yousuf Kokan (Arabic), Masud Husain Khan (Dakhni-Urdu), P.B. Desai (Kannada), S.G. Tulpule (Marathi), M. Nazir Ahmad (Persian), V.W. Paranjpe (Sanskrit), and Laxmi Ranjanam (Telugu) in the section ‘Language and Literature’ in P.M. Joshi and H.K. Sherwani, eds., History of medieval Deccan vol. II (Hyderabad: Government of Andhra Pradesh, 1974), pp. 1-172.

46. Pushkar Sohoni, ‘Vernacular as a space: writing in the Deccan’ in South Asian History and Culture, vol. 7, no. 3 (Apr 2016), pp. 258-270, esp. p. 260: “Persian was the language of high court culture, diplomacy, and literature, making possible correspondence and diplomacy with north Indian, Central Asian, and West Asian countries. Sanskrit occupied a space for religious ritual and literary conceit, and was very important in connecting Brahmin communities and literati across South Asia.”

47. Muzaffar Alam has written extensively on the dynamic between regional kingdoms and the imperial Mughals in their respective deployment of languages, particularly Persian, towards political ends; see Muzaffar Alam, “The pursuit of Persian: language in Mughal politics”, Modern Asian Studies 32/2, 1998, 317–49; “The culture and politics of Persian in precolonial Hindustan”, in Sheldon Pollock (ed.), Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

48. For a history of the Dakkhani language and its connections with the vernacular languages, see S.R. Kulakarni, Dakhanī bhāṣā: marhāṭī saṃskritīcā eka āviśkāra (Mumbai: Rajya Marathi Vikasa Samstha, 1998) [in Marathi].

[In Marathi.]

49. Jamal Jalibi, ed., Kadamrāv Padamrāv (Karachi: Anjuman-i taraqqi-i Urdu, 1973) [in Urdu]; Jamal Jalibi, ed., Divan-i Hasan Shauqi (Karaci: Anjuman-i Tariqqi-i Urdu Pakistan, 1971) [in Urdu].

50. The politics of Hindi and Urdu have made the Dakhani language a contested claim, as pointed out by David Matthews, “‘A survey of Dakhani” – problems and prospects’ in Journal of Deccan Studies vol. XI, no. 1 (Jan–Jun 2013), pp. 18-41, esp. p. 29; also see Pushkar Sohoni, ‘Vernacular as a space: writing in the Deccan’ in South Asian History and Culture, vol. 7, no. 3 (Apr 2016), pp. 258-270.

51. There is another school of thought, particularly that of Paul Veyne, who thought that pre-modern euergetism was only a natural expression of grandeur, and not instrumental at all; however, in the case of the Deccan, we know of very few charitable projects, most being utterly pragmatic; see Paul Veyne, Le pain et le cirque: Sociologie historique d’un pluralisme politique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1976).