Sultanate of Malwa

A fortress built while his father lived

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

Dilawar Khan Ghuri was already governing Malwa for Delhi by 1392, appointed, most probably, by Firuz Shah Tughluq shortly before that sultan's death. He never claimed the throne himself, but Timur's 1398 sack of Delhi left him with no real sultan left to answer to, and he governed the province in every practical sense as an independent prince for the rest of his life — hospitable enough, in that independence, to shelter the fugitive Delhi sultan Mahmud Shah Tughluq as an honoured guest for three years after Timur's invasion drove him from his own capital.

A son who disapproved of the guest

His son and heir, Alp Khan, took a harder view of that hospitality than his father did. He considered the deference shown to a dispossessed Delhi sultan beneath the dignity of a Malwa that no longer owed Delhi anything, and while the royal guest remained at Dhar, Alp Khan withdrew to the fortress city of Mandu and spent his time there perfecting its defences rather than attending his father's court — a son visibly preparing for a kingdom his father had not yet agreed to let him rule as one.

The throne he could not wait to inherit

He did not wait for nature to resolve the disagreement. In 1406, growing impatient for the inheritance he believed a Delhi-deferring father was squandering, Alp Khan poisoned Dilawar Khan and ascended the throne himself as Hushang Shah — the first ruler of Malwa to claim outright royal title rather than a governor's office, and the founder, by the act of his father's murder, of Malwa's status as an unambiguous independent kingdom rather than a province still nominally answerable elsewhere.

A fifteen-day king

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

Hushang Shah's own line did not hold the throne for long after him. His grandson Ghazni Khan ascended in 1435 and was poisoned within the year by his own cousin, who seized the throne in his place and took the title Mahmud Khalji — founding, in the same stroke of murder that had put Hushang on the throne a generation earlier, the Khalji dynasty under which Malwa would reach the widest extent it would ever hold.

Warlike and, on balance, effective

Haig describes Mahmud Khalji as an active and warlike prince, and the thirty-three years of his reign bore the description out. He campaigned against neighbouring Gujarat and against the Rajput states along Malwa's borders, fought Rana Kumbha of Mewar to a costly standstill more than once, and by the time of his death on 31 May 1469 had built a kingdom substantial enough that Gujarat, Malwa's most persistent rival, never managed to reduce it to a client state during his own lifetime, whatever it would go on to do to his descendants.

A throne no less violent for being royal now

The paradox of the Khalji line was that it never wholly escaped the method by which it began. Ghazni Khan's own murdered claim to the throne had lasted only fifteen days; Mahmud Khalji's own usurpation of it was, by the standard of the dynasty he founded, simply the one attempt at seizing Malwa's crown that happened to succeed and then hold. The kingdom he built was real, and its wars were fought by a state with genuine resources behind it rather than a pretender's improvised following — but the throne underneath all of it had been won by the same tool that had put both his predecessors there before him.

A mercy that did not last

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By the reign of Mahmud II, Mahmud Khalji's line had fallen under the influence of its own Rajput minister, Medni Rai, whose faction had grown powerful enough at Mandu that the king's Muslim nobles were purged, dismissed or driven from court outright. Mahmud fled his own capital in 1517 to escape his minister's grip and appealed to Muzaffar II of Gujarat for help — help that came, restored him to his throne, and left Malwa more dependent on Gujarat's goodwill than it had ever been on its own resources.

Defeated, captured, and set free

The Rajput faction Mahmud had escaped was not finished. In 1519, backed by Rana Sangrama of Mewar, it drew Mahmud into a battle near Gagraun that went badly wrong: his army, exhausted by a forced march, was cut to pieces before it could properly form up, and Mahmud himself, wounded while fighting on with real courage, was captured and brought before the Rana. Sangrama could have annexed the broken kingdom outright. He chose instead to receive his defeated rival with what Haig calls the chivalrous courtesy a Rajput knows how to show a beaten foe, exacted only the surrender of Mahmud's crown jewels, and sent him home under armed escort to reclaim his own throne — a mercy so widely remarked upon, Muslim and Hindu chroniclers alike, that one of Gujarat's own officers was said to have named a dog after the Rana out of sheer irritation at hearing his generosity praised.

The debt that finally came due

Mahmud repaid none of it. When Bahadur Shah ascended Gujarat's throne in 1526, Mahmud sheltered his rival brother and openly encouraged him to contest it; three years later, hearing of Sangrama's death, he raided the territory of the very Rana who had spared him. Sangrama's successor retaliated, and Mahmud, having exhausted the goodwill of both the man who had once shown him mercy and the man he was supposed to be allied with, found himself with no protector left when Bahadur Shah's own army arrived at Mandu on 17 March 1531. The fortress fell, and the Khalji dynasty — founded in one poisoning, sustained through a century of real conquest, and preserved once already by an enemy's clemency — ended in a siege its own king's ingratitude had done as much to bring about as any army had.

A kingdom run by viceroys

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Bahadur Shah's conquest did not settle Malwa so much as open it to a decade of men who ruled it without ever quite owning it. Mallu Khan, a former officer of the fallen Khalji kings, used the confusion of Bahadur's later wars against Humayun to reassert control over Malwa's fief-holders from his own base at Mandu and crowned himself Qadir Shah — a self-made sovereign with no dynasty behind him and no real claim beyond having been the strongest man left standing in the wreckage.

An insolent reply, and an invasion that followed

Qadir Shah's undoing came from the direction he least expected. Sher Khan Sur, still consolidating his own power in the east and pressed for resources, demanded assistance from him in terms Qadir Shah found too peremptory to tolerate, and sent back an insolent refusal. Sher Shah, by then king of Delhi in his own right, marched into Malwa in 1542; Qadir Shah submitted at Sarangpur rather than fight, was given a consolation post in Bengal instead of the province he had just lost, and fled his new patron's camp shortly afterward out of fear for his own safety. Sher Shah left Malwa in the hands of viceroys rather than restoring any king to it at all.

The massacre at Raisen

The bloodiest single episode of this viceroy period belonged to Puran Mal, a local Rajput lord who had massacred the population of Chanderi after occupying it and assembled a harem of two thousand women, Hindu and Muslim alike, at his fortress of Raisen. Sher Shah besieged him there in 1543 and lured him into surrender with promises of safe conduct, then attacked his disarmed followers with war elephants the moment they were in his power. Rather than accept the massacre that followed, Puran Mal's Rajputs carried out the rite of jauhar and died fighting rather than be taken — one more act of violence in a province that had not had a king of its own, secure enough to prevent such things, in more than a decade.

A viceroy who stopped calling himself one

Malwa's last viceroy under this arrangement, Shuja'at Khan, survived a falling-out with Sher Shah's own son and successor and an assassination attempt carried out with that successor's tacit approval, and by the time Humayun recovered the Mughal throne in 1555, Shuja'at Khan had simply stopped acknowledging any overlord at all, governing Malwa in every practical respect as an independent sovereign in his own right — the quiet reappearance, after a lost battle, two invasions and a massacre, of a throne with no dynasty behind it and nothing to legitimise it beyond one man's refusal to keep answering to anyone else.

The pavilion at Mandu

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Shuja'at Khan died in 1555 still ruling as an undeclared sovereign, and his son Miyan Bayazid, known to history as Baz Bahadur, took the throne over the objections of his father's adopted heir, Daulat Khan Ajyura. Baz Bahadur settled the rivalry the way most of Malwa's rulers before him had settled theirs — he lulled Daulat Khan's suspicions with a proposed partition of the kingdom, then seized and killed him once his guard was down, and assumed the royal title cleanly on his own.

A defeat that ended his ambitions early

His one serious military campaign, against Rani Durgavati of the Gonds at Garha-Katanga, went badly from the start: the queen defeated him decisively and drove his army back across his own frontier, a setback Baz Bahadur never attempted to reverse. He withdrew instead into the company of his celebrated mistress, Rupmati, at Mandu — a retreat substantial enough, and famous enough even in his own lifetime, that a pavilion built for her survives at the fortress to this day, and that Haig records history remembering Baz Bahadur less for anything he governed than for the romance that occupied the years he might otherwise have spent doing so.

An emperor's officers, not an emperor

Akbar did not need to come himself. In 1561 his officers invaded Malwa, and Baz Bahadur, already discredited by his defeat at Durgavati's hands and with no real military reputation left to rally support around, was driven from his kingdom with comparatively little resistance. Malwa became a province of the Mughal empire — a kingdom whose founding dynasty had begun with one son poisoning his father for the crown, and whose independent existence ended with a king remembered chiefly for the woman he shared his final years with rather than for anything he had managed to hold onto.