Bahmani Sultanate

A ploughman, a chain, and a crown

Drafted from Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829)formation

Zafar Khan, a Delhi-born officer known to history as Hasan, served in the Deccan under Muhammad bin Tughluq, sultan of Delhi, a ruler whose capricious punishments had made his own governors afraid to obey his summons. When the sultan tried to recall his Deccan officers to Gujarat, the messenger sent to fetch them treated them with such open contempt that they chose open revolt over returning "like sheep to the slaughter." The rebellion spread quickly, drawing in disaffected local rajas along with the officers themselves, and by the time it reached its climax the rebels held Daulatabad and much of the Deccan outright.

A throne offered rather than seized

Nasir-ud-din Ismail, the rebels' own interim king, noticed that his officers and soldiers deferred to his general Zafar Khan more readily than to himself, and rather than contest it, called a meeting and proposed that Zafar Khan be elected king in his place. The assembly agreed unanimously. On a Friday judged auspicious by the court astrologers — 3 August 1347 — Zafar Khan was crowned Ala-ud-Din Hasan Bahman Shah, taking a black canopy in imitation of the Abbasid caliphs and making Gulbarga his capital.

A pedigree the chronicler himself doubted

The new king's name drew on a story of his own rise: as a young servant to a Brahmin astrologer named Gangu, he had once turned up a buried hoard of gold coins while plowing a field, and reported the find honestly to his master rather than keeping it for himself. Gangu is said to have predicted great things for him and asked only that, if those predictions came true, Hasan take the name Gangu for himself and keep him as finance minister — a promise Hasan kept. Some court genealogists later traced Hasan's own ancestry to Bahman, a king of ancient Persia, and the dynasty took its name from that claim. Firishta, writing centuries later, records having seen such a pedigree in the royal library at Ahmadnagar, but doubts it was anything but a flattering invention: Hasan's own origins, he judges, were too obscure ever to trace with any confidence, and the name Bahmani more plausibly honored Gangu the Brahmin than any Persian king.

A beard grown grey in service

Drafted from Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829)peak

Muhammad Shah III came to the throne at nine years old in 1463, and for most of his reign the kingdom's affairs rested in the hands of two ministers acting under the regency of the queen mother. Chief among them was Mahmud Gawan, a Persian-born former merchant who had turned down offers to serve as vizier to greater courts before settling in the Deccan. By the time the kingdom's territory had grown large enough that its old four-province structure no longer served it, it was Gawan who persuaded the king to divide the realm into eight provinces instead, redrawing administrative boundaries across the entire sultanate and reserving several districts, including Bijapur itself, under his own direct charge.

A minister richer in reputation than in gold

Gawan's own integrity became, after his death, a matter the king could verify for himself. Rivals at court, envious of his standing, had spent years poisoning Muhammad Shah's confidence in him; when the king finally had Gawan's private treasury examined, he found not the concealed fortune his accusers had implied but two accounts, one for official expenses and one, nearly empty of substance beside it, that Gawan called the treasury of the poor. His household kept a modest kitchen, a servant's mat for a bed, and a personal library of three thousand volumes willed entirely to the college he had founded rather than to his own family.

A forgery, a drunken order, and an old man's dignity

None of this integrity was known to the king in the moment that mattered. Rivals produced a letter, bearing what appeared to be Gawan's own seal, addressed to a hostile raja and full of treasonous implications. Warned that the king's fury made the charge dangerous to answer in person, Gawan went to court anyway, telling his own household that a beard "grown grey in the service of the father" would be no less honorably spent in the service of the son. Confronted with the letter, he acknowledged the seal as his but denied any knowledge of the letter itself — a defense the intoxicated king, past reasoning, did not pause to examine. Gawan was executed within the hour, kneeling and professing his faith as the blow fell.

A king's remorse, and an empire that would not forgive it

Muhammad Shah's own investigation of Gawan's estate came only after the execution, and the discovery of his minister's poverty broke him with a grief he could not undo. Provincial governors who had served under Gawan's own administrative reforms began withdrawing from the royal camp within days, accepting the king's belated apologies and further concessions but never fully returning to court. Muhammad Shah died the following year, his own epitaph recording, in a chronogram his court poets composed, that his death spelled "the ruin of the Deccan" — a judgment the years that followed would not contradict.

A king who ruled nothing

Drafted from Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829)end

The provincial governors who had drifted from court after Mahmud Gawan's execution never fully returned to Bahmani obedience. Over the following decades their own governorships hardened into outright kingdoms: Bijapur under a line calling itself Adil Shahi, Ahmadnagar under the Nizam Shahis, Golconda under the Qutb Shahis, Berar under the Imad Shahis, and Bidar itself, the Bahmani capital, eventually under a line of Barid Shahis descended from the sultanate's own last powerful ministers. None of them formally deposed the Bahmani throne outright; they simply stopped answering to it while continuing, for a time, to issue documents in a Bahmani king's nominal name.

A minister who kept his king as a prisoner

By the time Kalimullah Shah came to the throne, styled king in name only, real power at Bidar belonged entirely to the minister Amir Barid, who kept the young sovereign confined to his own palace and permitted him no part in government at all. When Kalimullah once tried to gain more freedom of movement, Barid tightened his confinement rather than loosen it.

An appeal to Delhi's new master

In 1526 the Mughal prince Babur conquered Delhi, and the rulers of Bijapur, Ahmadnagar and Golconda — former Bahmani governors turned independent kings in every practical sense — sent their own embassies to the new power, seeking recognition on equal terms. Kalimullah, still nominally their sovereign, sent an appeal of his own: a secret petition, carried by a disguised companion, describing his kingdom as usurped and his own person confined by rebellious servants, and offering to cede Daulatabad and Berar to Babur in exchange for rescue. Babur, still occupied subduing Malwa and Gujarat, did not act on it.

An exile that closed the dynasty

Amir Barid learned of the mission and answered it by confining Kalimullah more rigidly still. The king escaped his own captivity and fled to his uncle, Ismail Adil Shah of Bijapur, hoping for shelter from family rather than a minister's mercy; dissatisfied with his reception there, he moved on to the court of Burhan Nizam Shah at Ahmadnagar, who at first paid him the courtesy of standing in his presence before concluding that the gesture only advertised a defect in his own claim to kingship, and dropping the practice. Kalimullah remained at Ahmadnagar until his death, in exile from a capital he had never actually ruled — and with him, the source states plainly, the Bahmani dynasty came to its end, in a Deccan already divided, in substance if not yet fully in name, among the five kingdoms his own governors had built out of its fragments.