A slave who kept his king
Drafted from Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (1829)formation
Qasim Barid arrived in the Deccan as a purchased Georgian slave, brought to Bidar and admitted among the Bahmani king's own household attendants. He distinguished himself putting down a Maratha revolt between Paithan and Chakan, killing the rebel chief Sabaji in battle, and was rewarded with the dead man's own daughter in marriage to his son and with Sabaji's confiscated territory besides — a match that brought several hundred of the chief's own former Maratha followers into Barid family service, many of whom Qasim's son later persuaded to convert alongside him.
An estate that swallowed the kingdom around it
As Bahmani authority collapsed under a string of weak and manipulated kings, Qasim Barid did what several of his fellow nobles were doing at the same moment: he seized territory for himself rather than wait for the sultanate to fall around him. On the advice of the same governors who were founding Bijapur, Ahmadnagar and Berar as independent kingdoms, Qasim Barid took the forts of Owsa, Kandhar and Udgir, leaving the Bahmani king only the town and citadel of Bidar itself — and even there, it was Qasim who had the public prayers read and the coin struck in his own name, not the king nominally still on the throne. Unlike his neighbors, though, Qasim Barid never claimed the title of king for himself, content to rule as the power behind a sovereign who had, in every practical sense, stopped ruling at all. He governed his estate for twelve years before his death in 1504.
A title finally claimed
Qasim's own descendants inherited both the substance of his power and his reluctance to formalize it — until his grandson Ali Barid, three generations into the family's control of Bidar, finally adopted the style of Shah outright. By then the fiction that Bidar answered to any Bahmani sovereign at all had long since become impossible to maintain; the family that had once kept a king as a figurehead in his own capital had nothing left to defer to but its own name.