Early Medieval and Medieval Deccan

Hailed as the badshah of mizahiya shayri, Khateeb, who is still relatively unknown across the subcontinent, was prolific, and composed and performed a great number of his works in Dakhani. Suffused with regional idioms, pithy folk wisdom and the sumptuous inflections of the Deccan’s vernaculars, his poetry was accessible to and singularly popular among the people of the region. Khateeb was not just a guardian of Dakhani, he became one of its most be- loved ambassadors. He lit a lamp in the darkened corner to which the language had retreated; his poetry was like a stick of incense burnt in propitiation to its glorious history.

The article (in Farsi), written as introduction to Farsi translation of the biography of Mir Momin Astarabadi (by Syed Mohiuddin Qadiri Zore), takes a bird's-eye view of the contributions of Iranian scholars and other men of letters who migrated to the Shiite kingdoms of the Deccan, in particular that of Golconda, during the 16th and 17th centuries.

The present essay turns to the Sabhasad bakhar to highlight how the Bhonsles envisioned and created for themselves claims of a divinely ordained sovereignty. The Bhonsles are the clan to which the founder of the Maratha state, Chhatrapati Shivaji and his descendants belonged. Shivaji’s coronation in 1674 was a watershed event in the history of the Marathas. However, this coronation of his was not without roadblocks, for there were doubts regarding Shivaji’s kshatriya status. All these doubts were overcome when a lineage was brought in by the Varanasi brahmin Gagabhat that traced Shivaji’s ancestry back to the Sisodiya Rajputs of Mewar, in turn, making him a pure kshatriya. However, in the Maratha accounts produced after this event, such as the Sabhasad bakhar, this lineage takes a back seat when it comes to the sovereign claims of the Bhonsles and rather it is shown that it was the goddess Tulja Bhavani [a form of the goddess Parvati, popularly worshipped in Maharashtra] and lord Shambu Mahadev [lord Shiva] who had bestowed the sovereignty of the “south” on the Bhonsles. These can be seen as attempts by the Bhonsles for proclaiming for themselves a form of divine kingship. Moreover, Bhavani is presented as a central figure in the political career of Shivaji, often guiding him in his actions by visiting him in his dreams and often possessing his body and making prophecies through him. The essay focuses on the aspects of Maratha sovereignty derived through Bhavani, and how “divine providence” received though Bhavani was often used by Shivaji to justify his autocratic actions. It also highlights the important role Shakta traditions have played in the making of the Maratha kingdom.

In this essay, I seek to re-read the literary genre of Hindi premakhyans (love stories) or "Sufi Romances" and critically examine the dominant discourse of classifying Hindavi/Dakani love stories as 'Sufi devotional texts', focusing my analysis primarily on the Deccan region in India during the medieval period (14th to 18th century). I argue for an alternative reading of "Sufi Romances" as "Mirror for Princes" or lessons in kingship by reexamining Sufi Literary sources and contemporary historical records from this period and establishing that the Sufi-State relationship in Islamic state-building has been underplayed by current scholarship in favour of a much-celebrated religious syncretism that links Sufis more firmly with the masses than the rulers. In challenging the categorisation of the Hindi premakhyans as "Sufi Romances", I shall firstly evaluate the methods of production, transmission and reception of these stories. I shall then examine the function these stories could potentially play in Sufi devotional practices and seek to validate this function in Sufi biographical texts and historical records. I shall additionally demonstrate support for my argument by looking at the 'material culture' of this literary genre-illustrated manuscripts from the Deccan. Lastly, I shall enumerate the marginal scholarly discourses on this genre to argue that modern-day readings ascribe meanings and symbolisms that perhaps best reflect our period's concerns with the texts rather than reflecting the position of the original readers, writers and patrons of the premakhyans.

This paper takes its inspiration from Karl W. Butzer's course on the human Use of Landforms at the University of Chicago. It builds upon that concept through an exploration of regional settlement patterns and landforms in the Deccan volcanic province of west-central India. The first section develops a conceptual framework for analyzing human adjustment to landforms on regional, settlement, and site scales. The second section employs that framework to analyze four major landform-settlement configurations in the Deccan from antiquity to the end of
the eighteenth century. The Satavahana kingdom (ca. 100 BCE to 200 CE) had a strong southeast to northwest alignment along the Godavari River. Their capital city of Paithan was located at a navigable sacred ford across the river (tirtha), which was linked with upstream confluences (sangams), tanks (kunds), mountain passes (ghats), and port cities on the Arabian Sea. Subsequent Hindu dynasties (ca. 850–1300 CE) shifted from fluvial landforms to a north-south alignment along steep mesa escarpments and buttes in the central Deccan that provided defensive fortress and cave temple sites. Sultanate and Mughal forces expanded the urban footprint on nearby plateau lands at sites protected by surrounding mesas (ca. 1330–1700 CE). These cities were supported
by local watershed runoff and long distance water channels. The final precolonial phase of Deccan settlement entailed a shift from the semiarid central plateaus to humid headwaters of the Western Ghats, whose buttes and scarps provided sites for scores of forts controlled by the founder of the Maratha empire Chhatrapati Shivaji in the seventeenth century. Maratha success led to development downstream at the capital city of Pune (1627–1803 CE), located at a river confluence flanked by mesas, which combined the strategies of previous periods. Over two millennia these four distinct, yet intersecting, patterns of human-landform relations have shaped an evolving geocultural region on the Deccan plateau that deserves comparison with other flood basalt regions.

In the study of medieval and early modern South Asia, archaeologists, historians, and art historians have studied selected monuments in depth or surveyed regions for monumental ruins and other features, but have less commonly studied their datasets as a group to infer processes of socio-political change. Using the example of the Golconda kingdom of India’s Deccan plateau, this study describes the evidence of the kingdom’s physical presence across a wide area, and shows how by combining the distribution across space with evidence of changes over time, aspects of the kingdom’s socio-political evolution can be inferred, from the development of the capital to the kingdom’s changing relationship with its more distant peripheries. Some overlooked monuments, when placed in this context, critically suggest the early formative stages of central political authority; others point to a growing culture of elite wealth, patronage, and competition during the era of increased international trade.

The travelogue of the 8th century Korean Buddhist traveller, Hyecho, provides important insights to the world of domesticated animals in the various regions of the Indian subcontinent. Such descriptive details, which this acute observer of the local animal wealth provides, is rarely encountered in the memoirs of more exemplary Chinese pilgrims, who on account of their better linguistic skills remained more concerned in providing details of the cities, its people, kings, religion and culture. A more contextualized study of the regions described in the text and their respective animal wealth could provide important linkage for the integrated study of the local ecology and economy. The early medieval western Deccan, as the text suggests, shows a greater dependence upon cattle pastoralism in the local economy. To some degrees, the apparent vagueness in the description of the texts can be resolved through a greater contextualization of the animal data provided. The latter also help in finding the routes followed by the traveller himself and understanding the world he encountered. The contextual analysis of the local animal data, through the study of this text, is forwarded as a workable methodological tool for the history writing.

Lepakshi: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting
Authors: Anna L. Dallapiccola, Brigitte Khan Majilis and George Michell with John M. Fritz
Photography: Surendra Kumar
Publisher: Niyogi Books, New Delhi
Year of Publication: 2019
ISBN: 978-93-86906-90-8

This article published in souvenir of 'Coinex 2019' in Pune, highlights the rare copper coins of Zafarnagar mint of emperor Shah Jahan. An enigmatic couplet which was yet unread is published here with all the latest finds about these rare copper coins.

Recent studies have reported that the mausoleum of Aḥmad Shāh I Bahmanī (r. 1422-1436), in Ashtur (Karnataka), is frequented by both Muslims and Vīraśaivas. Now, setting out from the pilgrimage performed on the occasion of the sovereign’s ʿurs, the aim of the present contribution is to analyze some of the architectural sites that are touched by the pilgrimage, and to examine how their spaces are understood and perceived by the devotees. The paper aims to shed light on the coexistence of these two religious groups and on the way in which certain forms of competition and negotiation have come to be transposed onto the cultural and historical landscape.

The village of Torgal (Karnataka, India) is a remarkable set of fortifications which extends from the period of Calukyas of Kalyani (11th-12th c.) to the Marathi period (17-18th c.). This work focuse on fortifications and shows the evolution of military architecture observed at Torgal with artillery
technology.

Numerous pilgrim inscriptions are available at different parts of India attesting names of certain Jogis. Earlier several efforts were made for documentation and interpretations regarding the identity of these Jogis.  The present paper is a small effort to study the time frame of these inscriptions and adding sectarian affiliation with the help of Literary, Epigraphical studies and Oral traditions.

This dissertation examines the itineraries of two European travelers to the Golconda kingdom in the seventeenth century, Jean Thevenot and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, to analyze how later historians have used their accounts and the implications for understanding the Golconda kingdom's political organization.  The study of road networks in the Golconda kingdom has been limited, despite their importance to any large political system.  For my research, I combined perspectives from archaeology, history, cultural geography, and architectural history to critically re-examine past use of European accounts by historians and consider new ways to understand the road networks of the Golconda kingdom.  I determined the modern locations of the places Thevenot and Tavernier visited on several routes, visited these and related sites, and documented standing architecture and other cultural features, particularly those built in the style associated with the kingdom's capital.  Combining this information with previous scholarship, I concluded that evidence for centralized elite investment in roads and facilities for travelers was irregular in its distribution and form.  There was no sign of an extensive building program that could be linked to a particular ruler suggesting imperial expansion or increased centralization.  The initial portion of the road leading from the capital in Golconda and Hyderabad toward the port of Masulipatnam showed greater evidence of such architectural features, most of which can be dated to the middle phase of the kingdom (late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries).  This same area also contained an absence of evidence for previous structures and patronage by earlier kingdoms, suggesting its development began with the Golconda kingdom.  But rather than a centralized, imperial expansion, the irregular distribution of structures along the roads more likely reflected patronage by court elites acting individually on lands in their possession.  Such actions were a part of a 'culture of building' that peaked during the middle phase of the kingdom.  These structures deserve additional study and protection, and should be included in future analyses of the kingdom in addition to the better-known structures cited in existing published works on the Golconda kingdom.

The Deccan plateau between the early 16th century until the mid 17th century experienced a conscious process of artistic exchanges amongst various groups during the reign of the Deccan Sultanates, namely, Barīd-šāhīs of Bidar, ʿImād-šāhīs of Berar, Quṭb-šāhīs of Golconda, ʿAdil-šāhīs of Bijapur, and Niẓām-šāhīs of Ahmadnagar. This initiated appropriation and re-formulation of distinct visual elements in the courtly arts of the Deccan plateau, which in turn brought a new phase of artistic frameworks, stylistic compositions, and elaborate aesthetic formulations. Moreover, from this phase, a small group of zoomorphic incense burners survives, in which the archetypical forms of these Deccan incense burners majorly take the shapes of peacocks and leonine figures; yet they also often embody features of other animals, which constitute the cases of hybrid creatures. Accordingly, the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington (F1991.12) hosts one of these lion-shaped incense burners with hybrid elements dated to be early 16th century Deccan India, which will be the subject of our discussion. Primarily, the paper will argue that these incense burners belong to the courtly élite of the ʿAdil-šāhīs of Bijapur, especially that of Sulṭan ʿAli ʿAdil Šah I (r. 1558–80) in contrast to the persistent claim that they are from the period in which Deccan plateau was ruled by the Sultanate of Delhi. Accordingly, the discussion will begin with investigating the contextualised meaning that the Deccan incense burners carried within the environment of courtly élite of Bijapur with certain references to the Persian historiographic sources as well as specific courtly paintings. As such, the paper will inquire and theorise about the origins of these artefacts as well as their compositional forms not only through Indian sources of mythological, religious, literary and artistic tradition but also through the Great Salǧūq and the Timūrīd visual heritage that the Deccan courtly arts are heir of, especially the styles of incense burners from the Great Salǧūq artistic tradition. Overall, it will be observed that the Freer incense burner embodies an instance of siṃha-vyāla in the shape of gaja-krānta and how this literary and visual element of Medieval India and its iconography and symbolism predominantly envision power in its multiple aspects, such as power that subjugates or destroys, power in terms of royal leadership, authority and protection as well as power through (divine) legitimacy. Hence, the adaptation and appropriation of the Medieval Indian motif and its manifestation on the courtly arts of the  Deccan Sultanates carry certain framework that is grounded on conscious religio-political facets. This is understandable as the Twelver Šīʿī Ṣafawīds on the one hand, and the open and tolerant Muġal court under Akbar (r. 1556–1605) on the other, desperately yearned for the artistic symbolism and language that formulated the concept of universal legitimacy and ideal model for kingship. As such, the usage of the Medieval Indian motif by the Deccan Sultanates in general and courtly élite of the ʿAdil-šāhīs in particular carries the deliberate function of depicting a powerful and legitimate monarch in accordance with divine precepts of rule. This universal framework is quite perceptive as the concept of monarch ruling through temporal power and divine legitimacy is a pivot around which Ottoman, Muġal, and Ṣafawid ideologies revolve. Therefore, the Freer incense burner expresses a distinct religio-political language of self-autonomy of the Deccan ruling élite through the synthesis of the Medieval Indian motif and Turco-Mongol artistic and aesthetical heritage.

With the rapid spread of Islam towards the east and the subsequent establishment of Indo-Islamic states in South Asia from the early thirteenth century, there followed steady waves of immigration from central and west Asia into the Indian subcontinent. This movement of people such as artists, scholars, warriors, statesmen, merchants and saints took place via both land-routes (across north-west India) and the Indian Ocean. The Iranians were arguably one of the major communities who left an indelible imprint on the history of the subcontinent. Historical scholarship has focussed on the role of these Iranians in aiding the process of political formations during the medieval period. The active policy of attracting human capital from Persia followed by the Bahmani Sultanate from the fifteenth century, that was taken up by their successors—the Niẓām Shāhīs of Ahmadnagar, the ‘Ādil Shāhīs of Bijapur and the Quṭb Shāhīs of Golconda—had significant repercussions. By a close reading of Indo-Persian court chronicles, this essay seeks to locate symbols of power and sustenance that enabled the migrant Iranian community to negotiate their identity within the heterogeneous political society of the Deccan. Their contest with the different sections of the ruling elite enables the scholar to engage with certain interesting problematics. How far did sectarian differences impact the dynamics of this contest? What were the means by which they articulated their identity in the foreign land? Of what relevance is their service in the capacity of diplomats and ambassadors, that facilitated communication between the polities of medieval South Asia and Safavid Iran, in this regard? By addressing these questions, this paper attempts to complicate existing historiographical understandings of the various facets of interactions that they fostered.

Keywords: migrant, community, diaspora, identity, Iranian, medieval Deccan, political Islam, maritime trade, power contestation, diplomacy