Sultanate of Gujarat

A governor's vengeance

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume III: Turks and Afghans (1928)formation

Zafar Khan was the son of a Rajput convert to Islam, Wajih-ul-Mulk of Didwana, and in 1391 the Delhi sultan Muhammad Shah sent him to govern a province whose existing administration had already stopped answering to the capital in anything but name. His predecessor Farhat-ul-Mulk, long since a law unto himself, met him in the field at Gambhir in January 1392 and was defeated and mortally wounded — the first act of a governorship that spent the next several years dragging Gujarat's disorderly nobles back under one authority.

A pretext, not yet a proclamation

Delhi gave him his opening without meaning to. In 1396 two rival kings, Mahmud Shah and Nusrat Shah, were both claiming the Delhi throne at once, and with no way to tell which one deserved his allegiance, Zafar Khan simply stopped rendering any — the moment historians mark as the true founding of an independent Gujarat, though he had been ruling the province as though it already were one for years.

A son's coup and a brother's poison

Old age slowed him rather than sons' patience. His son Tatar Khan, eager to march on a Delhi thrown into chaos by Timur's invasion, grew tired of waiting, seized his own father, imprisoned him, and had himself crowned Nasir-ud-din Muhammad Shah. Zafar Khan answered from captivity: he persuaded his own brother, whom the new king had just appointed regent, to follow Tatar Khan's camp and poison his wine. The regent did exactly that, freed his imprisoned brother, and restored him to the throne he had been forced off — and Zafar Khan, in 1407, ascended once more, this time under the title Sultan Muzaffar, a father who had outlived his own son's rebellion by arranging his murder.

What his grandson built on the ruins

Muzaffar died in June 1411, and it was his grandson Ahmad who gave the kingdom the seat it would keep for the rest of its existence. Putting down a rebellion of his own uncles without bloodshed and fighting off a fresh invasion from Malwa, Ahmad Shah built a new capital, Ahmadabad, on the site of the old town of Asawal — a city that would outlast every dynasty that ever ruled from it, standing today as Gujarat's largest.

Two forts

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume III: Turks and Afghans (1928)peak

Qutb-ud-din Ahmad Shah, the ruler who briefly followed Ahmad Shah's own son, died suddenly in 1458 after a bout of hard drinking, young enough and healthy enough beforehand that the court suspected poison — a suspicion that fell on his own wife and ended, once the accusations finished working their way through the family, with her being cut to pieces by jealous co-wives. His successor, an uncle, was deposed after twenty-seven days of open misrule, and the throne passed on 25 May 1458 to a youth barely out of boyhood: Abu'l-Fath Mahmud, who would rule for the next fifty-three years and become known to history as Mahmud Begada.

A child who outwitted his own conspirators

His first test came almost immediately. Courtiers persuaded the new king that his own minister was plotting to depose him in favour of an infant puppet, and Mahmud, still new to the court's intrigues, let them arrest and imprison the man. Warned overnight of the deception, he went in person to the gate where his minister was held, talked his way past the guards by sheer force of bearing, and restored him to his post before the conspirators could act — foiling, before he was even fully grown, a plot built on exploiting his own inexperience.

Two great fortresses and a new name

The military reputation that followed was built on real conquests: the Rajput strongholds of Girnar and, in 1484 after a Rajput garrison chose mass self-immolation over surrender, Champaner — a victory that left Gujarat's kingdom running unbroken from the borders of Malwa to the sea. It was after Champaner's fall that Mahmud first acquired the title by which he is remembered, Begarha — "two forts" — for the pair of legendary citadels he had taken.

The poison legend and the appetite behind it

His elder brother had died, by every appearance, of poison, and the stories that grew up around Mahmud's own survival were stranger than the suspicion that produced them. He was said to have absorbed poisons into his own body gradually from childhood until a fly landing on his hand would die on contact, immune to anything an assassin might put in his food — a legend durable enough that the English poet Samuel Butler was still invoking "the prince of Cambay's daily food" of "asp and basilisk and toad" in Hudibras, published in 1664, more than a century and a half after Mahmud's death. The reality behind the legend was more mundane and, in its own way, no less remarkable: a recorded daily intake of twenty to thirty pounds of food, a cup each of honey and butter and up to a hundred and fifty bananas on waking, and rice left at both sides of his bed each night so that he would find something to eat whichever way he turned.

Tall, robust, bearded to his waist, mild to his own servants and ferocious toward the Hindu kingdoms he fought, Mahmud died at Ahmadabad on 23 November 1511, summoning his designated heir Muzaffar from Baroda only in time to help carry his coffin to its tomb — the greatest of Gujarat's sultans, by his own historians' judgement, and the one whose fifty-three years on the throne left the kingdom at its widest extent.

A visit he could not refuse

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume III: Turks and Afghans (1928)peak

Bahadur Shah, who took the throne in July 1526, ruled a kingdom whose reach eventually stretched, on his own historian's count, from Gujarat and Khandesh through Malwa, Ajmer, Chitor and a dozen lesser conquests to the Deccan itself. His decisive campaign came on 17 March 1531, when he captured Mandu and extinguished the Khalji dynasty of Malwa outright — absorbing, at a stroke, the neighbouring kingdom whose own wars with Gujarat stretched back over a century.

An empire's worth of enemies at once

Success on that scale drew in an opponent Bahadur could not out-manoeuvre. Humayun, alarmed by a Gujarati sultan strong enough to absorb an entire neighbouring kingdom, marched against him, forced him into a humiliating flight from his own entrenched camp at Mandasor, and pursued him as far as Diu on the coast, where Bahadur had already, out of desperation, invited the one power capable of checking the Mughals: Portugal.

An ally he meant to betray

The alliance with the Portuguese was never meant to last. Bahadur granted them a fortress at Diu in exchange for naval support against Humayun, regained his kingdom once the Mughal threat had passed, and then began quietly planning to remove the ally he had needed only months before — a plan the Portuguese commander at Diu was well aware of before it was ever attempted.

The negotiation that became an ambush

Late in 1536 Bahadur pressed the Portuguese governor to meet him in person, and when repeated excuses failed to put him off, the king was finally persuaded, against every one of his own counsellors' advice, to visit the governor's ship on 13 February 1537. What began as a courtesy call turned into a trap the moment he tried to leave: Portuguese boats closed around his barge, swords were drawn, and in the fighting that followed Bahadur leapt into the water rather than be taken. He drowned within sight of his own coast, along with every officer who had accompanied him aboard.

A judgement history was still willing to make in his favour

His own court historian, weighing his one real strategic blunder at Mandasor against a reign of real conquest, called him liberal, generous and valiant, with a loftier ambition than any king of his line before him — and even Haig, writing centuries later with the Portuguese trap laid bare, allows that the judgement was not undeserved. What followed his death bore out the historian's harsher verdict on everything after him: Bahadur left no son, and the three kings who nominally succeeded him would rule, in Haig's own words, as puppets in the hands of a nobility no longer answerable to anyone above them.

A child of improbable parentage

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume III: Turks and Afghans (1928)contraction

Two puppet kings came and went in the confusion after Bahadur Shah's death before the throne settled, in 1554, on a boy of eleven, Ahmad Shah II, whose regent I'timad Khan kept him a virtual prisoner for the whole of his short reign. When Ahmad, old enough at last to resent his own captivity, fled to a rival noble's protection, I'timad Khan crushed the faction that had sheltered him and dragged the young king back to Ahmadabad in chains in all but name.

A boy's plots and a regent's fear

Confinement did not make Ahmad harmless in I'timad Khan's eyes. The boy amused himself hatching schemes for his gaoler's assassination with whatever officers could reach him, even play-acting the killing by slicing a plantain stem in two and boasting that he could do the same to his regent — games I'timad Khan knew were empty, but feared some ambitious officer might one day take seriously enough to act on. In July 1562 he settled the risk permanently: Ahmad was murdered, and his body thrown into the open ground below the citadel, with a cover story blaming an anonymous rival for a supposed nighttime tryst.

An heir invented rather than found

Ahmad's death left no acknowledged heir, and I'timad Khan supplied one: a child named Nathu, whom he swore under oath was a secret son of the previous king Mahmud III, hidden from birth after the king had first ordered the pregnancy aborted. The story convinced no one who examined it closely, but no noble in Gujarat was willing to accept a rival of equal rank on the throne instead, and the fabricated child was crowned Muzaffar III — a kingship built, from its very first day, on an oath its own author would later recant whenever it suited him.

Ten years of nobles at war with each other

What followed was ten years, by Haig's own description, of little more than open warfare between great nobles who had carved the kingdom into private fiefs and answered to no one above them. Afghan chieftains expelled each other from whole provinces; a noble's own kinsman was beheaded by his rivals on the way to a game of polo; I'timad Khan himself was driven out, recalled, and driven out again as the factions that had put him back in power turned on him within months. By the time any of them thought to look outward, the kingdom they were fighting over had almost nothing left to defend it with.

A throat cut in hiding

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume III: Turks and Afghans (1928)end

By 1572 the regent I'timad Khan had run out of Gujarati allies willing to back him and did what a decade of factional war had made almost routine among the kingdom's own nobles: he invited a foreign army in against his rivals, writing to the Mughal emperor Akbar and asking him to invade.

An empire that barely had to fight

Akbar needed little persuading. His army reached Patan while the noble besieging Ahmadabad was still in the field, and the mere approach of an imperial force was enough to send Gujarat's contending factions scattering in every direction, Muzaffar III among them. Found in hiding near Akbar's own camp that November, the fabricated king who had reigned for a decade over nothing more than his nobles' quarrels was brought before the emperor, detained as a political prisoner, and Gujarat was formally annexed to the Mughal empire without a single significant battle having been fought for it.

A prisoner's second chance, and what he did with it

Akbar did not keep Muzaffar confined indefinitely. He was eventually allowed to live out his life quietly in Kathiawar — a mercy the deposed king did not accept as final. In 1583, more than a decade after his capture, a fresh rebellion against Mughal rule offered what looked like a path back to the throne, and Muzaffar joined it.

Ten years a fugitive, then a blade

The rebellion gave him nothing but ten more years as a hunted man, the greater part of them spent in flight from one refuge to the next. In 1593 imperial troops finally ran him to ground. Rather than be taken alive a second time, Muzaffar III — a king whose very claim to royal blood had been invented by the regent who crowned him — cut his own throat, closing, on his own terms if nothing else, a reign that had opened with somebody else's oath.