Roy Fischel's new monograph is a welcome addition to the growing literature on India's Deccan plateau. Rejecting an earlier convention of studying single dynasties, Fischel considers the entire northern half of the Deccan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, offering a comparative analysis of its principal sultanates, their respective theories of sovereignty, and their dominant political classes. After briefly sketching the history of the Bahmani sultanate (1347–c. 1500), the author turns to the five kingdoms that succeeded the Bahmanis in the early sixteenth century, and more particularly, the Nizam Shahi dynasty of Ahmadnagar, the ʿAdil Shahi dynasty of Bijapur, and the Qutb Shahi dynasty of Golkonda. These three sultanates grew to prominence after the Battle of Talikota (1565), in which a coalition of the northern sultanates crushed their powerful neighbour to the south, Vijayanagara, which had sprawled over the southern Deccan since the mid-fourteenth century.
Two themes, in particular, animate Fischel's analysis. One is the relationship between linguistic and political geography, a crucial issue being the location of the capitals of the three above-mentioned sultanates. Because Ahmadnagar and Golkonda were each nested within the core regions of a vernacular language, Marathi and Telugu respectively, these sultanates sank deeper roots in Deccani culture and consequently enjoyed greater internal stability. Clear down to its final conquest by the Mughal empire in 1687, Golkonda was supported by Brahmin clerks and Telugu martial classes, while the dynasty associated itself with a long-defunct but prestigious Telugu-speaking kingdom, the Kakatiyas (1163–1323). Similarly, although Ahmadnagar faced sustained Mughal pressure from as early as 1585, the sultanate managed to survive until 1636, when its territory was divided between Bijapur and the Mughals. This, argues Fischel, was because its principal strongholds were located in the core area of another vernacular language – Marathi. One of those forts, Devagiri, had been the capital of the Yadava dynasty (1175–1318), another long-defunct but prestigious regional state. Consequently, throughout its final fifty years the Nizam Shahi sultanate of Ahmadnagar was kept afloat, most prominently, by Marathi Brahmins and Maratha martial classes. A panegyric courtly poem written for the founder of the Maratha kingdom, Shivaji (d. 1680), characterized the Nizam Shahi sultan as pious, served by Maratha chieftains, and residing in the old Yadava capital of Devagiri (p. 220). By contrast, the capital of the ʿAdil Shahi sultans of Bijapur was located in a shatter zone distant from the core region of any of the Deccan's three vernacular tongues. Its rulers therefore presented themselves as non-vernacular kings of the whole Deccan, for which purpose they deployed the rituals, architecture, and political language of two defunct but pan-Deccan empires, Vijayanagara and the much earlier Kalyana Chalukyas (974–1190). But the strategy failed. Even before 1686, when it suffered defeat and annexation by the Mughals, Bijapur had been largely abandoned by the same class of Maratha warriors that had once sustained Ahmadnagar, while its attempt to annex territory in the remote Tamil south only drew it further from its base, a problem that was as much cultural as logistical.
The book's other main focus is on the two groups of ruling Muslims found in all three northern sultanates – the Deccanis and the so-called Foreigners (gharībān). The latter were recruited immigrants who were known as “Westerners” (gharbīān), as is seen in the Tārīkh-i Firishta, an authoritative contemporary source for Deccan history completed around 1607 (Lucknow: Nawal Kishor, 1864–65, 1: 332). The Deccanis, by contrast, were mostly descendants of north Indian migrants who, having colonized the northern plateau during the expansion of the Delhi sultanate in the early fourteenth century, rebelled against their former patrons and established the Bahmani state. Over the next several centuries they sank roots in the Deccan and evolved their own vernacular tongue, Dakani. The Foreigners, by contrast, were migrants from Central Asia or Iran, recruited by the Deccan's sultans as elite administrators, literati, clerics, merchants, or soldiers. Historians have long understood the bitter resentment harboured by Deccanis for the privileges given to these Persian-speaking foreigners, which led to endemic and often deadly conflict between the two classes. Fischel's concern is with the political implications of the Foreigners’ considerable mobility across the plateau and their minimal investment in Deccani culture. With one foot still in their homeland somewhere west of India, Foreigners showed only tepid loyalty to their royal patrons, whom they often abandoned for more favourable terms elsewhere. Soon after the Mughals mortally threatened Ahmadnagar in 1610, for example, the court's Foreigners fled in droves, leaving Deccanis, Marathas, and Ethiopian slaves to rescue the state from total collapse.
Reading this monograph, one wonders how fixed, in practice, the binary categories of Deccani and Foreigner actually were. In one passage, the contemporary historian Firishta includes Turks, Tajiks, Anatolians (“Rumi”), and Mughals in the category of “foreigner” (gharīb). But then he notes that twelve years after Bijapur's Ismaʿil ʿAdil Shah (1510–34) had banished Deccanis and Ethiopians from his service, Foreigners at his court lobbied that their own sons not be treated like Deccanis, even though they had been born in the Deccan. The sultan consented. Five or six months later, he went further and ruled that Afghans and Rajputs could also serve the state, provided they had not participated in any act of rebellion (Tārīkh-i Firishta, Tehran, 2014, 3: 60–61). In short, Rajputs and Afghans – in addition to Deccan-born sons of Foreigners – could be treated as de facto Foreigners, suggesting that one's political behaviour could trump religion, ethnicity, and even place of birth in defining this category.
Furthermore, if the Foreigners were so uncommitted to Deccani culture, and if a cloud of suspicion hovered over their political loyalties, why were they so eagerly sought after in the first place? Was it only a matter of their respectability and their Persianate cultural cachet? If so, they would seem almost mirror opposites of the numerous Ethiopians in the Deccan. If Foreigners brought to their royal patrons specialized expertise and the graces of high Persianate culture, notwithstanding their dubious loyalty, it would seem that Ethiopians were recruited above all for their fierce loyalty, even if, as slaves, they brought zero respectability or cultural cachet to their political patrons. From a practical standpoint, it would seem that such a trade-off struck a certain socio-cultural and political balance that worked – until, that is, it didn't.
