Sultanate of Khandesh

A rebel from the wrong direction

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

Every other regional sultanate that broke away in the chaos after Timur's 1398 sack of Delhi broke away from Delhi itself. Khandesh did not. Its founder, Malik Ahmad, had made his career in the Deccan, in the service of the Bahmani dynasty at Bidar, and it was against his own Bahmani masters that he rebelled in 1365, joining Bahram Khan Mazandarani's uprising against Muhammad I, the second Bahmani king.

A refuge on the Tapti

The rebellion failed, and Malik Ahmad fled north rather than face its consequences, establishing himself at Thalner on the Tapti river — a location chosen for distance from Bidar's reach rather than for any particular strength of its own. By 1382 he had subdued the surrounding country enough to rule it as an independent prince in fact, if not yet in any grand style: he and his descendants for several generations were content with the modest title of Khan rather than Sultan, and it was from this restraint that the territory itself took its name — Khandesh, "the country of the Khans."

(ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume III: Turks and Afghans (1928) · Ccmarathe · CC BY-SA 4.0

A caliph's name, claimed at a remove

The dynasty called itself Faruqi, tracing its descent from Umar al-Farooq, the second Caliph of Islam — a claim of genealogy rather than conquest, asserted the way founders of small and vulnerable states often asserted legitimacy when they had no larger empire's investiture to point to instead. It was a modest inheritance in every sense: wedged between Gujarat, Malwa and the Deccan, Khandesh would spend most of its existence not expanding at their expense but surviving between them, a rebel's refuge that outlasted the rebellion which produced it by more than two centuries.

A throne decided elsewhere

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

Malik Ahmad died on 29 April 1399, and his small state did what small states wedged between larger ones often do: it split. His two sons divided the territory between them, Nasir taking the east — where he founded Burhanpur in 1400 and captured the hill fortress of Asir from a Hindu chieftain — and Hasan the west, ruling from their father's old seat at Thalner. In 1417 Nasir ended the arrangement by force, capturing Thalner and imprisoning his own brother before Hasan's appeal to Gujarat for help could be answered; Hasan's descendants found permanent refuge at the Gujarati court instead, intermarrying for generations with the royal house that had failed to save him in time.

(ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume III: Turks and Afghans (1928) · Warren and Fisher · Public domain

Consolidation under Jharkhandi Sultan

The kingdom's real high point came later, under Adil Khan II, who took the throne in 1457 and ruled for over four decades. He consolidated Khandesh's hold over its own core territory, suppressed the Koli and Bhil raiders who had made travel through the region dangerous, and extended his reach as far as Jharkhand — modern Chota Nagpur — earning himself the epithet Jharkhandi Sultan for a campaign well beyond Khandesh's ordinary borders. He was proud enough of the achievement to briefly stop paying the tribute Khandesh had owed Gujarat since an earlier invasion, until a show of force from Mahmud Begada in 1499 or 1500 reminded him where the actual balance of power lay.

(ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume III: Turks and Afghans (1928) · Henry Cousens · Public domain

A succession no one inside Khandesh could settle

Adil Khan II died without an heir in September 1501, and what followed exposed exactly how little independence his own consolidation had really won. Two rival branches of the Faruqi family, one backed by Gujarat and the other by Ahmadnagar, spent seven years fighting for the throne through proxies and invading armies rather than through any process Khandesh's own institutions could resolve. It ended only when Mahmud Begada marched in person to install his own grandson on the throne as Adil Khan III in 1508 — a kingdom whose peak of internal strength had been real, but whose eventual succession was decided, in the end, by which neighbour's army arrived at Thalner first.

A reluctant tributary

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

By the later sixteenth century Khandesh's position between three stronger neighbours had narrowed from inconvenience into outright dependency. Raja Ali Khan accepted Mughal overlordship as a tributary in 1577, formalising a subordination that Gujarat's own earlier interventions in Khandesh's succession had already made plain in practice.

A vassal's loyalty pointed the wrong way

Tributary status did not mean loyalty. When Akbar's campaign against Ahmadnagar reached the Deccan in the 1590s, Raja Ali Khan was compelled to march with the imperial army, but his sympathies lay unmistakably with the kingdom under siege — he sent secret messages to Ahmadnagar's defenders encouraging them to hold out even while his own troops stood in the besieging camp, a small and clandestine act of resistance from a ruler with no realistic option to refuse his overlord's summons outright.

What forty years of tribute could not disguise

Khandesh's rulers after Adil Khan III never regained the freedom of manoeuvre their predecessor Adil Khan II had briefly enjoyed. Boxed in by a Gujarat that had once installed its own king by force and a Mughal empire that now claimed formal submission, the dynasty's remaining decades were a matter of managing dependence rather than exercising any independent policy — the quiet, unglamorous prelude to a confrontation its last king would eventually choose to have instead of continuing to avoid it.

Would to God that ye were women

endDrafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume IV: The Mughul Period (1937)

Bahadur Faruqi's defiance began quietly. When Akbar's son Daniyal arrived at Burhanpur in January 1600, Bahadur stayed shut in the citadel of Asirgarh and refused to come out and receive him — a provocation serious enough that Akbar himself abandoned his plans to winter in Malwa and marched on Burhanpur in person. He arrived on 8 April and opened the siege of Asirgarh the following day.

A siege both sides tried to win without fighting it

What followed was less a battle than a contest of patience. Bahadur opened negotiations with Akbar while privately hoping that Khandesh's own dwindling supplies would exhaust the besiegers before they exhausted him; Akbar, for his part, pressed the siege only fitfully through the spring and summer, distracted by rebellions in Bengal and by his own son Salim's open defiance elsewhere in the empire. It was December before an important outwork finally fell, and on 21 December 1600 Bahadur rode out to Akbar's camp and surrendered himself in person — but not the fortress.

(ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume IV: The Mughul Period (1937) · Valentine Blacker · Public domain

An order sent to be refused

Bahadur had planned that separation carefully. Before leaving Asirgarh he instructed its commander, an African officer named Yaqut, to hold the citadel to the last regardless of any order purporting to come from Bahadur himself once he was in Akbar's power — a device meant to let Bahadur present the garrison's continued defiance as a rebellion he no longer controlled, and so escape the blame for it. Yaqut, though he had argued bitterly against his king's decision to leave the fortress at all, obeyed the order faithfully. When Bahadur's own son Muqarrab Khan arrived from the imperial camp carrying Bahadur's command that the fortress be surrendered, Yaqut refused even to hear him out. Muqarrab returned, reported his father would never yield Asirgarh, and was stabbed to death on Akbar's orders shortly afterward — a killing Haig calls one of the darkest blots on Akbar's own name.

Freedom offered, and refused

Inside Asirgarh, nearly fifty princes of the Faruqi royal house sat imprisoned, kept there under the same jealous confinement of collateral kin that had secured every Faruqi king's own succession for two centuries — among them seven men closely enough related to Bahadur to have a real claim to his throne. With the fortress's fall now only a matter of time, Yaqut released every one of them and begged one to ascend the throne and lead the defence in Bahadur's place. None of them answered him. "Would to God that ye were women!" the old African is said to have exclaimed, and turned away and took poison rather than surrender what he had sworn to hold. Asirgarh capitulated on 6 January 1601, and Khandesh — the smallest of the post-Timur sultanates, and the only one that had never rebelled against Delhi at all — passed to the Mughal empire, renamed Dandesh after the prince who was made its governor.