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I read a book recently that had people getting trampled by mad elephants
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that had a father trying to burn his son in his bedroom
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but instead getting killed by his son in his shower.
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We had a Sultan behead his assassin and carry his head around on a horse
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while kingdoms went to war because a ruler developed a crush on a girl
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and decided he had to abduct her and have her in his harem.
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It's a mad story book and it makes A Game of Thrones look like a children's book.
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It's a book you won't put down when you start reading it
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especially if you're reading it on your smartphone
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because hey, who puts down their smartphones these days?
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen
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our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral science.
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Please welcome your host Amit Barma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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Today's subject is the history of the Deccan.
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Now for most people the Deccan is all about Shivaji versus the Mughals
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but actually the Deccan has an incredibly colorful history
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and the book I referred to a few moments ago is Rebel Sultans
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by the young historian Manu Pillai.
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Manu is only 28 years old and has already written two books
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The Ivory Throne and Rebel Sultans
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and his writing is exactly what good history should be.
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Lucid, easy to read, witty and very very entertaining.
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This is clearly a man in love with his subject
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and why would he not be?
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He committed his first homicide at the age of 13.
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This is something he casually revealed to me in a conversation
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before we recorded the podcast
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and since it was confidential I shall say no more on it.
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But do ask him about it if you run into him.
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And now for our conversation but before we get to that
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let's take a quick commercial break.
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Manu, welcome to the seen and the unseen.
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Thank you for having me. I've been hearing for a few months now
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but it's good to be on the program finally.
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So I'm very curious about how you became a historian.
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I mean first of all you're like 28 years old
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and you've already written two acclaimed books of history.
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So how did you sort of get drawn towards writing history?
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I think it began with stories
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because more than history as such
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it was the stories in my own family
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because every now and then you know I grew up in Pune
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but we would go to Kerala to my grandmother's place
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and she would tell these vivid riveting stories
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about her own family members
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and she had this fascinating way of telling stories
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because normally you have this image of your grandmother
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who tells you stories with moral lessons at the end of it.
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My grandmother told me no such story.
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She told me about her uncles
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and how many illegitimate children they had
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how many wives they married
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how they discarded their wives
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how the system there worked
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how when she was growing up
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what the agrarian economy was
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these were the things I grew up listening to.
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So it was a story of groves and gods
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and you know a great great great grandmother
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who could tame an elephant and things like that.
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So I started getting interested in these people
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and you know I referred to this uncle with illegitimate kids for example
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the idea was that she'd say it in such hilarious ways these stories
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I realized very quickly that
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although these people were not of my time
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their context was different
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their period was different completely
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they were not like us human beings
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they were made of flesh and blood
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they had the same instincts and impulses
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and that was to me was fascinating
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the idea that they may have lived as 150 years before me
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but they were just like me
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in terms of what they were trying to do
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what they were as people
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and once you start seeing history
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through the eyes of the people who make history
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then you start realizing that it's easier to connect with history
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so then for me the journey then moved to biographies of people
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I started reading about people in history
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and then of course when I was about 18
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I came across this long forgotten Malayali queen
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the Setu Lakshmi Bai of Travancore
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and the story was so fascinating for me
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that you know it launched something that lasted 6 years
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and from 19 till 25 I was working on my first book
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which came out in 2015, The Ivory Throne
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and then of course I came to The Deccan
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which was launched earlier this year
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so I remember when I was 19 back in the day
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pretty much the only thing I knew was how to mix Old Monk and Coke
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how do you know how to do history?
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doing history, I suppose there's no single answer to doing history
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of course it's a science in a way
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it needs a certain amount of responsibility
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but I didn't go into it thinking
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oh I'm going to write this book this way or whatever
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that evolved over time at 19
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you know I suppose when I went in
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I was looking for this fascinating story
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I was collecting material
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but I didn't know what the hell I was actually doing
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but then luckily for me because I invested the time in it
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it wasn't the 19 year old who went into the book
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who finished the book in 2015
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you know I had changed as a person
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the book changed me just as much as I ended up writing the book
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and in that process I did a masters degree at the time
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which I had to do a thesis
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so at university we were taught about research methods
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how to do your footnoting
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although that was in international relations
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the point was those skills so to speak
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ended up being perfectly applicable to history as well
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and I started figuring out how to access archives
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how to go about getting your material
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and then naturally things started falling into place
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so you have a combination of your material, your story
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as well as everything that needs to finally come together
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and create that recipe for it to work
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so I put together 3 or 4 or 5 drafts actually
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some parts of the book are 5 drafts
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and the interesting thing is the final draft
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the final version of the book was entirely trying to
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read it from the perspective of the reader
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in the sense that the first 3 or 4 drafts
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I was writing what I wanted to say
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it was the story I wanted to tell
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but the final version before it went to press
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for 6 months was trying to figure out
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how is the reader going to read this
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that's where the difference is right
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so you have academic historians who populate the seminar circuit
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but I didn't want to do that
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because I found there are these fascinating stories
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they need to be conveyed to a larger audience
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you have to have a bridge that takes solidly researched history
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but in an accessible fashion
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to as large an audience as possible
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so then you need to know what the audience is thinking
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you need to figure out what appeals to them
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your language has to have a certain elegance
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so for me doing history is academic rigor
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in terms of how you approach your material
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how you interrogate your material
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and how you draw your conclusions
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but also writing in a fashion that is literary
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that tries and reaches out to as many people as possible
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because this is frankly everybody's heritage
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if these stories could fascinate me in my teens
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someone needs to sort of disseminate them for a larger audience
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and doing that means your style of writing also matters
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and you of course talking about your book
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Ivory Throne which I'd encourage all my listeners to check out
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and what was sort of the early books
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which gave you a sense that history is not a boring subject
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but it can you know be told in as fascinating
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and gripping and engrossing a manner as a novel or a storybook
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you know funnily enough it wasn't so much history books
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that influenced the writing itself
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which was for example PG Woodhouse I keep saying
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that you know there's a certain irreverence
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that I picked up from there
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which you may have found in Rebel Sultan as well
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which is that every now and then
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I mean the whole idea is to say that
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although this is history
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although this is serious business
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never take yourself or your writing
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or even frankly any of these people too seriously
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because it wasn't like they woke up in the morning
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and decided oh we're making history today
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no they were just going about their lives
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we were able to look at history from a different perspective
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without getting completely overawed by what is happening
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but otherwise in terms of writing history in an accessible way
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William Dalrymple gets great credit
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because frankly for me in my early teens
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his books were the ones that really stood out
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and told me that hold on this is history
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it's archival material but it's sold so well
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and it's told so richly
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that you feel an inducement to turn the page
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you want to turn the page
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and that is what I wanted to do as well
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just as the stories I heard in my family
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could make me sit up with pleasure and delight
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I was reading a book that was making me do the same thing
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and I thought those are the kind of books that I want to do
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so partly it was fiction more than non-fiction
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your PG Woodhouse of the world
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your Aubrey Menon and his Ramayana retold
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it's a satirical take on the Ramayana
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it was one of the earliest books to be banned in India
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but it's fascinating to look at how one man could take this grand epic
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and give it this very interesting twist
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and of course then finally Dalrymple
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and all the other writers who were writing at that time
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and before we start talking about the rebel sultans
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which by the way I found
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something you wouldn't expect from a book of history
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not just in the events you described
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but also the way you write them as you said
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but before we get to that
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you also mentioned that the process of writing the ivory throne
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changed you as a person
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in what ways did it change you or the way you look at the world?
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well if you've looked at the ivory throne
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so I mean I didn't realize it was going to be such a long book
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but obviously it proved to be a fairly long book
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but you know going in at 19 meant
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that I wasn't an introverted person
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who was used to sitting at a desk
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and plodding away for hours every day
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but once the story sort of hooked me
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it took a life of its own
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and then everything became about that
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I had in 2009 access to all
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my protagonists personal letters and so on
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but then I realized the other piece in the puzzle
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was in the British archives in London
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so I wanted to go there
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how do you convince your parents at 19 or 20
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that you want to go abroad and write a book?
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so obviously I said oh I want to do a masters degree
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and of course you know parents being good parents
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they said of course we'll fund it you know there you go
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so then I chose a university where
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the workload would be lower
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so all the rest of my time I had access to the library
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so my routine was normally classes in the morning
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and then rush off to the archive
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and sit there till whenever they shut
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which was normally 5 o'clock the archive shuts
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and then the rest of the library at 8 o'clock
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which meant that from the age of 20 I was stuck
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and then sitting in a room full of quiet people
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for about 6-7 hours a day
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and then coming home and then doing my business
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so much so my friends started calling me the monk
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because I wouldn't go out, I wouldn't go out drinking
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if I drank on a Friday then you know you'd end up
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sleeping in late on Saturdays
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whereas Saturdays the library is shut early
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so I couldn't waste time there
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in terms of my personal life, what is happening
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but all the same you know I have no regrets as such
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work of course you know I graduated
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came to Delhi, started working in parliament
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that took its own toll so then from 9 to 9
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I was working on his job you know
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running his parliamentary office in Delhi
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and then about 10 o'clock to 3 was my writing time
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so I got into this routine of sleeping
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4 hours a night and strangely enough
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after all these years I haven't been able to shake it off
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I still can't sleep well
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I go to bed at 11, I stay there with my eyes open
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so in many ways you know the process
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of writing a book and being attached to that
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project for 6 years meant that
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everything depended on what the project
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needed at any given time
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so where I was, so when I needed the national archives in Delhi
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I came and worked in Delhi, when I wanted the British
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archives again I went back to London and started
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working there, finally it was in 2014
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I realised it's been 5 years
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since I've been doing this, I can't allow this
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to go on indefinitely because it's taking over
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my life, so one way or the other
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before I'm 25 the book has to be done
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so that's when I finally shut the project
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and you know got on with the task of publishing it
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how did you move on to the Deccan as a subject?
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The Deccan came, so the
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ivory throne relates to my Malayali
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heritage, as somebody, as a Malayali
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who grew up outside Kerala, I was always interested
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in the story of my ancestors and the past
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in Kerala, but I grew up in Pune
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so you know I grew up in the heart of the Deccan
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in that sense, Shivaji was this towering
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figure in all my school textbooks
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but the interesting thing is that
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great historians have done great books on Shivaji
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he's a figure that has been given
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a great deal of historical attention
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but I noticed that every now and then
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there'd be these other characters looming behind
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him and you got these cameos
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and occasional peep shows
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but they were largely footnoted, so every now and then
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Adil Shah of Bijapur or Nizam Shah of
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Ahmednagar would pop up, but you never
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really understood who these people were
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because they were merely secondary characters
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in the story of Shivaji, so at some level
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I kept wondering who were these people, because they're not
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Mughals, they're not South Indian
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they're Shivaji's people or the people who set the stage
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for Shivaji to arrive, but what about their
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I kept collecting these stories in a sort of
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ad hoc, non-committal fashion
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2016 when I was in Golconda, in Hyderabad
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I went to the Golconda fort and
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went and looked at the Khutub Shahi tombs there
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and I was fascinated because beautiful structures
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and strangely enough, you know, nobody
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seemed to know very much about it, other than the tour guides
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there and a not very impressive
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trickle of tourists, I was like why aren't these
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stories out there, they need to be told
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so that's when I decided I would sit down and do a book
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on the Deccan Sultans and then yeah, that's when
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the project picked up. Let's kind of go through
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the timeline of the book now, which is incredibly
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fascinating and your story in a sense starts in the
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13th century with the Delhi Sultanate
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and I was struck by an early
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bit of fake news about a character who's not really
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a character in your book at all, but you sort of mention
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Balban had never actually
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conquered South India or even been there
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or whatever, but he got a Sanskrit
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inscription commissioned
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which basically said, quote, he issued forth
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on a military expedition, the
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Gaudas abdicated their glory, the
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Andhra's who fear besought the
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shelter of the caves, the Kerala's
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forsook their pleasures, the Karnata's
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hid themselves in defiles
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the Maharashtra's gave their place
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the Gujaras resigned their vigor
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and the Lata's dwarfed themselves into
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and it's, you know, just as an early
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example of fake news and there are
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like sort of examples of fake news
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throughout your book, for example, you have one of his
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near contemporaries Ramchandra
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Yadav with breathtaking
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humility you mention, he
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compares himself to the mythological
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great boar in suckering
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the earth from the oppressions of
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the Turukas, which is of course the Turks and he'd never
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encountered a Turk. He'd never seen a Turk till then.
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Yeah, so your book immediately humanises
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this by, you know, placing it in a context
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that even we can understand today immediately.
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So the thing is, you know, Indian kings had this habit, it
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was part of an old Sanskrit tradition
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which is that you draw your legitimacy
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A, by connecting yourself to old institutions
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temples, previous dynasties
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by these exaggerated declarations
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normally in these classical languages
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so although Balban is the Sultan of the
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Delhi Sultanate, he's writing in Sanskrit here
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and the funny thing is a little later you have
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the Emperor Vijayanagar making the same claims
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about North Indian people he's never seen
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even in Shivaji's time you have similar claims
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where even the Madras rulers, which is essentially
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the British, even they're included in inscriptions
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as though everybody's running away
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at the sight of Shivaji's armies. The idea
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is kings try to project this supernatural
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power, because that's how kingship
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was constructed in India. The idea
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was, it was pointless if you merely had
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power. Power had to be demonstrated.
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How? Through great rituals, through great processions.
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Why do we have this great love of processions
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and display? It's partly this. If you had
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power, you had to show it. Why is it that
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Mughal emperors had to appear that window
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in the fort every day? Because otherwise
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if you didn't appear consistently for a few days
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people thought you were dead. Which meant what? Chaos.
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You don't know who the next ruler is going to be.
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So power had to be demonstrated.
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These inscriptions essentially do the same thing
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where they're trying to project to the
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elites that, oh my god, look at my influence
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all these people bow before me
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they may not necessarily, it's not completely
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true, but it's a way of sort of suggesting
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that look, I am the most potent of them
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all. I am the one who dominates the landscape.
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Your subjects don't know better, because their
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lives are fairly localised. But when you make this
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claim, you sort of elevate yourself to this
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degree where you're special, your
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power becomes then unquestioned.
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And you know, you go into a league of great
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rulers and emperors and others. And
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people are also imitating previous rulers.
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So each of these inscriptions is imitating
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a previous inscription. Which is why every
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dynasty, every area of this country
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when it comes to the Sanskrit language and
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these common themes, you find similar
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sort of bombastic, flamboyant
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claims, because they're all trying to look
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impressive and over majestic.
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And this is obviously before the age of mass media
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so in a sense, this signalling that
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is happening is happening for a very limited audience
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and part of that audience might be
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the emperor himself or whoever the
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person is. I mean it's almost like, you know, you want
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to look at it this way, you're
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Muslim elites ruling over a largely Hindu
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territory. One way of convincing yourself
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that you have the power is by repeating it constantly.
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Even the British were no less, even
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they had a similar habit of these, you know,
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bombastic proclamations. You know, Queen Victoria's
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proclamation was built up into
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this big hoo-ha. But really how many
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people in villages knew who Queen Victoria
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was or what she was saying? Nobody did.
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Why did the British build these grand monuments?
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Because the buildings were trying to convey
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the idea, project majesty and power
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which they may not necessarily have had.
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So all of this goes into that fiction
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of power, the idea that, you know, the more
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I say it, the more it becomes real,
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the more the chances are people start taking this seriously.
#
frankly, the reality of these kings, as I said, is
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that they were pretty much human like us.
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But if the people knew you were human, then hold on,
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why are we listening to you? Why are we your obedient subjects?
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You have to make yourself special.
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In the Ivory Throne, I have this
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what I found a very fascinating
#
episode where the king,
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Martaanda Varma, he's created this new kingdom of
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Ravinko in Kerala by conquering a whole
#
lot of places. And till then, he's
#
first among equals, you know, first among all the
#
nobles. And in his early career,
#
a lot of the nobles were trying to kill him.
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Suddenly, he realizes that you have to elevate royal
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blood to a very special degree so that, you know,
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even spilling royal blood becomes
#
a sin. How does he do it? He goes to
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this old Sanskritic ritual called
#
Hiranyagarbha where they essentially get
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a golden cow. They construct a cow made of
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gold. And the Raja goes in from the
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mouth of the cow. He's essentially just
#
a regular warrior. He sits inside the cow
#
for a certain duration. Brahmins pelt it with flowers
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and things to sort of, and chant mantras
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of birth. And then he pops out from under
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the tail of the cow and he's considered re-born.
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He's suddenly descended from the sun and the moon
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and Suryavamshi, whatever you want.
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And he becomes a twice-born Kshatriya
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who can wear a sacred thread and all of that.
#
It's the second birth, but it's also a birth
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that's elevating him from everybody else.
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Now nobody else may touch him. Nobody else
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may eat with him. Only Brahmins can eat with him.
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So by doing that, he slowly starts
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elevating his thing. Every time a member
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of the family goes out, there's a procession attending
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to them. All of this is visually reinforcing
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the idea that this family or this dynasty
#
is special. So these inscriptions,
#
these kings, their recordings, their sayings,
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they're all exaggerated to a degree
#
because all of them are trying to cement
#
power. At the end of the day, everyone knows power
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comes and goes. If all these claims were
#
true, these dynasties would have never fallen.
#
Why is it that every dynasty falls and then the
#
next dynasty makes the same claims? Because they're all
#
trying to shore up as much power as possible.
#
And like today, propaganda,
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PR, it all matters. We still
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in our own times have a Prime Minister
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who has a habit of saying things that don't
#
always add up when you look at the facts.
#
But the idea is, you know, what you say matters.
#
the potency you can show yourself as possessing,
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all of that matters. And this is what
#
they were trying to do at that time.
#
It's fascinating to think about modern ways of signaling
#
the same things. I mean, I can't see our Prime Minister
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entering the mouth of a cow, literally.
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When he's worshipping cows in other ways.
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Exactly. So your narrative really
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starts get going, let's say around 1290
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when Balban's dynasty is wiped
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out and the Khiljis come to power and the
#
nephew of first Khilji Sultan, Alawuddin
#
is sent down south. So let's start then.
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He actually comes down south
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partly for his own ambition, which is that he
#
you know, he realizes that the south has wealth.
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Now they've got most of the north in their hand now.
#
And if I may interrupt, you also point out that
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legend suggests that he left court to get as
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far away as he could from a nagging wife and
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overbearing mother-in-law.
#
What sources give you this?
#
You know, you can read about it in Farishta
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and a bunch of other places. The idea again though is
#
that, so every time you have
#
a historical source, you have to interrogate
#
it for multiple things. Who's written it?
#
What is the intended audience? What is the language?
#
And what is it achieving? So you know, if
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it's written in Persian, it's not for your lay
#
reader on the ground. It's not for the average
#
peasant. It's again targeting a certain
#
elite. Now when making this claim that he
#
is only trying to get away from a mother-in-law
#
and just happen to come down south and you know,
#
conquer a kingdom, all of this is trying to sort of
#
build up a parallel narrative.
#
In reality, the man knew exactly what he was doing.
#
He knew there was wealth in the south. And the thing
#
is, look, the Khiljis are a new dynasty,
#
right? Which means they haven't been cemented
#
in power yet. So if he topples his uncle,
#
he can quickly claim power.
#
And therefore, he needs money
#
to bribe nobles, to get people onto his side.
#
So for an independent source of wealth,
#
he needs to come south because the north is entirely
#
in his uncle's hands. Where can he get independent
#
wealth and money and gold? In the south.
#
So the Yadavas may be writing poetry about how
#
the Turks and the Muslims are shivering at
#
the thought of them. But they've never actually seen
#
a Turk. And when Alauddin shows up, they're
#
completely ill-prepared. Because their own
#
armies are in the south fighting with the Hoysalas.
#
Yadavas, Ramachandra, essentially locks himself
#
up in the fort. But very quickly realises
#
that he has an impregnable fort,
#
but he has no food. So finally he comes
#
to terms with Alauddin. And just then his son
#
comes back from the south with his army.
#
And there you have another, it's not fake news as such,
#
but it's a very clever strategy where
#
Alauddin Kilji realises he's outnumbered
#
and sends a bunch of horsemen into the distance
#
for a bit so that so much dust is raised,
#
it starts looking like a big army is coming to aid him.
#
And the Yadavas are horrified. They think there's
#
a massive imperial army coming from the north.
#
And they come to terms with
#
Alauddin Kilji, who then happily
#
walks away from Devagiri with heaps
#
and mountains of gold and takes it to
#
the north, topples his uncle and becomes an ex-sultan.
#
And in fact when you're talking about that
#
tactical maneuver where he had
#
his thousand horsemen raise such a whirl
#
of dust in the distance that the Yadavas believe
#
this inspired Gannad, you also have
#
a really nice sentence which gives a taste of the book
#
to the reader. Quote, and so it
#
was that a ghost army behind a blur
#
of earth and wind brought Devagiri
#
to his knees. Stop quote. And Devagiri
#
of course is the capital of
#
the Yadavas which later becomes Zalatabad.
#
little seen for me at the time that Kilji goes
#
to the Deccan, there are essentially
#
three sort of ruling kingdoms or dynasties
#
or whatever which eventually vanish
#
very fast within the next 50 years. But just
#
sort of tell us a little bit
#
about what those three are.
#
So that's why I've chosen this particular period
#
for rebel sultans which is, you know,
#
and it ends with the fall of these sultanates
#
in the late 17th century,
#
in the 1680s. And what's
#
interesting is that this is the Islamic period
#
that we have in the Deccan. Because before Kilji
#
shows up, what you have in what is primarily
#
the Maharashtra region is
#
the Yadavas ruling from Devagiri.
#
In Karnataka it's the Hoysalas
#
and then in Telangana you have the Kakatiyas.
#
And these three dynasties are old,
#
they have their own claims of Sanskritic glory
#
and so on. And they are all fighting each other
#
obviously. So the Kakatiyas are in Warangal,
#
the Hoysalas are based in Dwarasamudra.
#
just give a context of what these areas
#
would be. So yeah, I'd say you can
#
basically overlap them with modern day Karnataka
#
for the Hoysalas, Telangana
#
for the Kakatiyas and then
#
Maharashtra for the Yadavas. Because by
#
this time you also see the evolution of these languages.
#
You see Karnataka building up
#
Karnada and a sort of common
#
Karnataka identity through language.
#
In Maharashtra you see the Marathi language
#
evolving at the same time. And Telanganas
#
culture as well of their own. And the
#
Kakatiyas are particularly interesting because
#
I mentioned these bombastic
#
Sanskritic inscriptions and so on.
#
One place where this sort of Sanskritism
#
is conspicuous in its absences
#
in the Kakatiyan dynasty, where
#
with one exception all the kings embraced
#
what is called Shudra status. They didn't want
#
to be twice born, sacred thread wearing
#
Sanskritic Kshatriyas. They were more than happy
#
being Shudras. Richard Eaton's
#
fascinating research on how most of
#
the nobles in the last Kakatiyan king
#
their place at court through the logic of blood.
#
They'd actually worked for it. There was upward mobility
#
that was possible. There were great public works
#
that the Kakatiyas had installed in Telangana.
#
So it's very interesting how each
#
kingdom has its own flavour. Each was
#
of course phenomenally wealthy.
#
And one big reason was that these are all
#
peninsula kingdoms. So a difference
#
is that in the north where an empire means
#
great size, in the south you don't
#
necessarily need to be that large to be of equal
#
wealth because being in the peninsula
#
you have trade, which the north also
#
has trade of course, but in a very different way.
#
When you have seaports you have another
#
source of income which northern empires don't have.
#
So northern empires also realised
#
that as you come further south you get access to these
#
additional sources of revenue.
#
You get ports, you get trade and so on.
#
So these southern kingdoms existed in a little
#
cocoon of their own. They knew what
#
was happening in the north. They knew that Islamic
#
power had been established in Delhi and the
#
surroundings there. But they didn't quite
#
realise that they were going to come for them as such.
#
I mean it wasn't, you know, we
#
can now say that India, we have these particular
#
boundaries. In those days these boundaries didn't exist.
#
The north was as alien then as
#
we may today find Afghanistan alien.
#
It was just as different as that.
#
And it's easy to say with hindsight that
#
you know, had these three kingdoms sort of
#
united and fought together they could have
#
prevailed. I mean the same criticism that
#
you later make of the rebel sultans that it's
#
only when they are split up and on
#
different sides that they kind of fall apart.
#
But these guys didn't have that earlier lesson.
#
One of Allahwadeen's dreaded generals was
#
Malik Kapoor and the Yadavas
#
actually helped Malik Kapoor fight
#
the Kakatiyas. Yeah, because you know as I said
#
there was no, for people who try to project
#
nationalism and these sentiments to the past
#
it's unhistorical for the simple reason
#
that people didn't see it that way.
#
In the past power was held by a series of elite
#
interests that wasn't held in the name of any
#
grand nationalistic ideology
#
which meant that you know, okay
#
we've now come to terms, that guy's still my enemy
#
let's go eat him for breakfast together.
#
So you know that sort of mentality was there
#
which is why after the Yadavas were taken
#
they're the ones who showed the way to the other
#
kingdoms in the south, to Warangal and
#
to Hoysala because they knew that these were my enemies.
#
Why should I suffer alone? Let's try
#
and destabilise them as well.
#
So on the one hand the Yadavas are trying also to kick off
#
the northern yoke. They don't want to be under
#
the Delhi Sultans. But while the Delhi army
#
is there, let's also use them to get
#
rid of our own ancestral enemies.
#
And there's a fascinating nugget here
#
that you know when Muhammad bin Tughla comes into
#
the peace later on and there's a cousin
#
of his who's fighting with him who
#
takes refuge with the Hoysala's. And I
#
just want to quote this full para because it's fantastic.
#
The Sultan ordered the prisoner
#
to be skinned alive and as
#
his skin was torn off, his
#
flesh was cooked with rice. Some
#
was sent to his children and his wife
#
and the remainder was put into a great dish
#
and given to the elephants to eat.
#
The elephants we know reassuringly
#
refused to touch this ghastly offering
#
but the veil of the poor widow can only be
#
imagined. Her husband's skin was stuffed
#
with straw and exhibited through the country
#
as a lesson for all who might
#
harbour romantic notions about resisting
#
the Sultan in the name of their own
#
glory or to satisfy their own
#
ambitions, top quote. These are pretty
#
gruesome times, aren't they?
#
Power and violence went hand in hand at that time.
#
You know this often happens on Twitter
#
where people selectively pull
#
out a random Muslim Sultan saying so
#
and hold on, everybody was violent at this time.
#
It wasn't the monopoly of one
#
faith or one set of people because in those
#
days if you wanted to have power, you had to be
#
willing to shed blood. So
#
for everybody who says oh the Mughals killed their
#
brothers to claim power, I'm sorry
#
that happened in Vijayanagar also. A brother killed a brother,
#
a son killed a father, that happened in Vijayanagar.
#
Devaraya II, one of the most
#
Vijayanagar emperors had a coup
#
either orchestrated by a nephew or
#
a cousin, the exact relationship is not clear
#
but a close family member. In the
#
end Devaraya survives but what does he do? He cuts
#
his head off, gets it in his hand and
#
rides a horse across the capital just
#
to show people that I'm still alive and my
#
enemy is gone. That blood, the gore,
#
it was all very natural at the time because
#
as I said if you wanted to hold on to your power
#
you had to be willing to chop
#
off people's heads and do these gruesome things
#
and sometimes the gruesome things were done
#
also to make, to sort of establish
#
a lesson for others who might have such
#
similar notions which was that if
#
you do this, the punishment will not be kind.
#
You will not be comfortably poisoned to death or
#
anything, it will be painful, it will be slow.
#
The chilling effect, in fact in that whole Devaraya
#
incident where his cousin or uncle, whoever it is
#
before he goes to Devaraya you describe the scene
#
which is right out of Game of Thrones.
#
He has this elaborate banquet at his house
#
and he calls all the people close to
#
Devaraya and there's a beating of
#
drums and there is a lot of noise there
#
so that you know people can't really
#
hear much and then one by one at different
#
times because they're supposed to have dinner at different
#
times according to their, this thing they're taken
#
into the eating room and they are ritually
#
slaughtered and after a sufficient
#
number of them have been slaughtered he actually
#
goes to Devaraya and tries to do it there
#
and gets beheaded for his
#
at multiple points through the book you talk about
#
people being trampled to death by mad elephants
#
So you don't just put them to death.
#
And you figure out like really creative
#
ways. Everything is a scene, everything
#
has to be done in public and everything has to be
#
a way as possible so that the message goes
#
out. Don't come and fiddle
#
with me because you will pay
#
and pay badly because as I said power at this
#
time as although these inscriptions
#
make all these claims as we were discussing earlier it's
#
actually very volatile. You
#
have to have the right number of allies, you have to have the right number of
#
nobles on your side, the right number of horses
#
the right number of artillerymen
#
if you don't have all this your power starts very quickly
#
going. See even at this time
#
there were no fixed borders either. So
#
for example you often find that there were for example
#
Deshmukhs or village heads in
#
border territories and one
#
season they may ally with this king on this side
#
you may find that next year he is allying with the other king
#
so the border is constantly shifting.
#
How many power interests you can keep on your
#
side determine your power. And fear
#
is a great weapon. And fear is a very important
#
asset there because if they fear
#
you then they will listen to you. If you have money
#
then they will listen to you. And finally
#
you have to have some claims to legitimacy or if
#
you don't you have to invent these claims to legitimacy.
#
So even the rebel sultans when they
#
all broke off from Delhi and the Delhi sultans
#
established their own power
#
they are all scrambling for legitimacy. And this
#
isn't merely the Islamic kings, the Hindu kings do the
#
same. So Vijayanagara tries to
#
concoct, find its own legitimacy
#
by concocting relationships with previous
#
dynasties. So you know the early
#
emperors are claimed to be
#
through marriage related to the Hoysalas
#
or you know some connection with Telanganas
#
also found. In fact one of
#
the most enduring stories is that
#
the founders of Vijayanagara were actually captured
#
taken to Delhi, converted to Islam
#
and then when they came back to the south
#
they sort of threw off that and went back to
#
being Hindus. But that's why Vidyaranya
#
the sage advised them to sort of
#
rule in the name of Virupaksha their deity
#
because that would take away the taint of having
#
converted. What is it trying to do? Claiming
#
legitimacy. The sultans they were all trying to
#
get legitimacy. The later sultans from
#
the Persian Shah because the Persian Shah was a superior
#
force or from one of the caliphs of Islam
#
because by doing this you
#
stamp recognized as legal. Otherwise
#
you know if you have the right number of forces
#
anybody can take power. Even
#
Shivaji you know after he conquered and built his initial
#
Hindavi Swaraj. What happens is
#
that he also goes for an elaborate coronation
#
ceremony. He also acquires the
#
sacred thread. He also remarries
#
all his wives using Sanskritic rituals.
#
All of it is doing what? He is connecting himself
#
to an older tradition and legitimizing his
#
conquests. Till then everybody can treat him
#
as a warlord. But having gone through the coronation
#
he becomes a legitimate king.
#
And he himself in a letter notes how
#
after the coronation when he met the Qutub Shah
#
the Qutub Shah would earlier expect
#
Shivaji to sort of do this prostration
#
like everybody else in front of him. But once
#
Shivaji had gone through these rituals he was
#
received as an equal. So all of this was
#
again an effort to legitimize. And violence
#
was also an instrument for this.
#
Upinder Singh has written about violence in
#
India. It's a book spanning
#
several thousand years. And you find that violence was
#
always there. It's only now
#
that we can sit in times and think that violence was
#
sparingly used or whatever because that's
#
what we know. But back in the day violence
#
was ubiquitous. It was everywhere. It had
#
to be everywhere. Otherwise even your
#
remote local sense of power
#
being a village head or whatever, everything
#
depended on how many swords you had.
#
So let's kind of get back to Khilji for a moment
#
on how Khilji basically
#
over a period of time, not
#
Khilji per se himself alone but these three
#
started the process by which
#
these three empires got wiped out in the south.
#
So he comes to the south. He
#
obviously gets all the money from
#
Devagiri and then goes back. It's his
#
eunuch lover Malik Afoor
#
who eventually comes and finishes the job
#
by one by one picking off these kingdoms
#
and taking over. And what you then find
#
is that these Hindu kingdoms or empires
#
whatever you will, they start folding
#
and collapsing and various
#
either local powers emerge which is that when
#
there's a vacuum, other ambitious people locally
#
will emerge to claim it or sometimes
#
as you have in Madurai, a new Muslim
#
sultanate emerged there because one problem
#
the Delhi sultans faced consistently while
#
they had any influence in the south
#
was that they would send nobles to the south but
#
the distance was so large that these nobles
#
are too often tempted to rebel and sort of
#
establish their own independent kingdoms.
#
So the guy sent off to Madurai decided why am I
#
paying tribute to Delhi? I'm so far away.
#
I can become an independent sultan.
#
So he does that. You know people often
#
present Vijayanagara as a dharmic
#
Hindu cause. Well then they would have
#
prevented the Hoysalas and the other dynasties from
#
falling. No. They also took advantage
#
of the fall of these kingdoms. They didn't stall them.
#
They merely made sure that as these kingdoms
#
were falling, they were occupying the vacuum that came.
#
In fact, as I think you pointed out, the five brothers
#
who founded the Vijayanagara kingdom were also
#
claiming legitimacy by claiming to be descended
#
from the previous kingdoms and so on.
#
They all had various ways of
#
trying to make their conquests look
#
as legal as possible. But what they were all doing
#
what Alauddin Kilji essentially did was
#
he destabilized this entire region.
#
Everything started falling. And once these
#
existing powers fell, it became
#
a free for all. Anybody who had the capacity
#
could build something new. As it happened
#
in the Northern Deccan, it was the Bahmani
#
Sultanate that eventually emerged. In the Southern Deccan
#
it was Vijayanagara that emerged. And then these two
#
entities were locked in conflict constantly
#
with each other. Part of what enabled this was
#
blunder by Tughlaq. I mean we remember
#
Tughlaq for the shift to Dalitabad in
#
1327 which of course was a blunder
#
and the army had to kind of
#
go back after a while. And even this is told
#
very entertainingly by you because
#
you write about how he forced all of
#
Delhi to shift to Dalitabad and this included a blind
#
man who didn't want to go. And he was
#
actually dragged to Dalitabad so he
#
started losing his limbs and when he actually
#
reached Dalitabad he had only one leg.
#
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's an apocryphal
#
story but it's an entertaining one. The idea
#
being, this is one chronicler's way
#
of saying that this was how drastic the move was.
#
I'm pretty sure this didn't happen because
#
whoever was pulling would have realized that the man was
#
falling away in bits on the way.
#
But the idea was that you know
#
everybody had to move. And it's absolutely fantastic
#
but the real blunder was in 1345
#
did was that he recalled his old
#
guard governor from Dalitabad and
#
there was now this internecine battle between the
#
old guard whom he was trying to get rid of
#
people who he thought would be loyal to him.
#
So what he did was because all these
#
people going to the south were too
#
readily tempted to sort of stand up in rebellion
#
and claim independence, he thought
#
he would create a new aristocracy who would be personally
#
loyal to them. So of course you have
#
a critic of this saying that oh cooks and
#
cobblers and everybody's sons were overnight
#
turned into noblemen and then the
#
old guard was expected to relinquish power to them.
#
Now this could also be a legitimizing
#
trick for the old guard because they ended up
#
breaking away from Delhi. So they made it look like
#
oh look we are the legitimate ones. This king's
#
bringing low born people to power
#
which is not correct and therefore we're breaking away
#
from his unjust rule. But in the end
#
that failed because if he tried to create a new aristocracy
#
it didn't work. The old aristocracy
#
managed to hold together and create
#
an independent sultanate in the south which was of
#
course the Bahmani sultanate where they
#
ended up selecting their first sultan almost by
#
lottery because they chose the most
#
efficient among them and he's the one
#
who became the first Bahmani sultan.
#
And that was Hasan Gangu who called himself
#
Abul Muzaffar Alawuddin
#
you know there was some sort of
#
speculation about his surname itself
#
you know Bahman. Why is he calling himself
#
that? People think that he was a servant
#
to a Brahmin and this was some way of
#
commemorating his original master.
#
Another theory is that he was half
#
Hindu which is likely because even the Tughlaqs
#
took Hindu wives. So the later Tughlaqs
#
as you come further down the family tree
#
they're all essentially the sons of Hindu mothers.
#
So it's very likely that you know
#
Hasan Gangu's mother was also Brahmin
#
but of course connecting Bahman to
#
Brahmin is a little too convenient and
#
therefore it's very unlikely this was the
#
origin of that title and
#
in reality we know that he grew up in
#
Multan. He was involved in
#
the Sultanate. He even served in
#
Afghanistan briefly and he had his own career.
#
He was essentially a top level nobleman.
#
botched rebellion at one time but
#
then when the Deccan was finally breaking away
#
he landed up on the scene, did a very good job
#
and impressed all his peers and therefore they ended up
#
making him Sultan. And what's interesting
#
was that he immediately abolished Jaziya
#
you point out there's possibly two reasons for this. One
#
is just real politic because he was helped in his
#
quest to power by a bunch of Hindu chieftains
#
so obviously he's going to want to
#
keep him on their good side
#
and two, to distinguish himself
#
from the brutal northies
#
in a manner of speaking and this also
#
sort of ties back to something you mentioned in your
#
book about how there are sort of two faces
#
one is you have Islam coming pre the 10th
#
century to South India and it's very peaceful
#
and there are traders and there are perhaps
#
even refugees who are getting away
#
from where they are coming from and they are immediately
#
integrated into the culture and it's all
#
very peaceful and the other is invasions
#
from the north and so on and
#
so forth and that struck
#
me as pretty fascinating.
#
Yeah, the South, this is the thing where I mentioned
#
that there is a Northern bias in Indian history
#
because if you look at everything from the North
#
you get one perspective which is that Islam came
#
to India how? When the swords were raised in the Sindh.
#
Now if you look at the same issue
#
which is Islam's arrival in India from the South
#
completely different perspective because
#
if legend is to be believed the oldest
#
mosque in Kerala was built in the lifetime of
#
the Prophet himself, one year before the Prophet dies
#
you have this mosque being established in Kodangalur
#
okay there is no proof of this because the current
#
building is not that old but even then
#
two centuries later in the
#
800s you have inscriptional evidence
#
with Arabic signatures of Muslims
#
which is that Muslims are already witnessing royal
#
Hindu grants by this time. To have
#
that kind of influence they had at least been there for
#
100 years, they had at least been there for a while
#
to have that kind of power. So Islam
#
came to the South through peaceful embassies of commerce
#
they existed all around the Konkan coast
#
Kerala has more in common with Arabia than it has
#
with North India, Delhi has more in common
#
with Kabul than it has with South India
#
and this is not very convenient now for
#
people to say because we are now sort of
#
completely infected by this over nationalistic
#
history was you know people had various
#
links in this way and Islam therefore
#
in the South wasn't a disruptive force
#
people associated Islam with trade
#
and that is how even later in these
#
sultanates you find that a lot of culture
#
came through Islamic hit networks
#
so even now if you go to Tirupati
#
there are these famous bronzes of Krishnadevaraya
#
and his wife, the Vijayanagara emperor and his
#
wives, both two of them. If you
#
look at the bronze closely now they've draped
#
the women in sarees or whatever but they haven't
#
covered Krishnadevaraya's head, he's wearing a Turkish
#
hat because Turkish fashions
#
became fashionable in Vijayanagara at that time
#
if you go to Hampi you'll find that early
#
the ruins in Hampi, typical everybody's
#
wearing the South Indian mund or the
#
vesti or whatever and the top is
#
the torso is left bare but as time passes
#
you see in later structures that
#
have survived the tunic starts appearing
#
in the Vitthala temple there's a
#
pillar which shows an Arab or a Muslim
#
on a horse and this is in
#
a temple, a Muslim enshrined forever in its
#
at the great platform where all the
#
great rituals are supposedly held you
#
see Arabs carved into the sides and they're dancing
#
and entertaining the Vijayanagara emperor and so on
#
and most striking of all is
#
from the 1350s the Vijayanagara emperors
#
adopted a new title which was
#
Hindu Raya Surathrana, interesting
#
for two reasons because Surathrana
#
is the Sanskritisation of Sultan
#
you find it in the Delhi Sultanate where on the
#
coins on one hand, on the one side you have the
#
Arabic Sultan, on the other hand you have Surathrana
#
in Nepal when the Sultan of Bengal
#
invades he's called Surathrana, even in
#
Shah Jahan's time the word for Sultan
#
in Sanskrit is Surathrana, so the
#
Vijayanagara kings are calling themselves
#
Hindu Raya Surathrana which is
#
the sultans among Hindu kings which is that
#
funnily enough they are the first people
#
I think who are appropriating
#
Hindu which is a word normally outsiders use
#
for everybody in India and applying it
#
to themselves, so saying among Hindu
#
kings we are the sultans
#
which is that we are Hindus but we are also
#
a Telugu lord also calling himself Surathrana
#
culture was bringing all this to the
#
south, you know it was bringing soft power of a
#
what you were wearing, what you were eating
#
perhaps, what you were calling
#
yourself, everything depended on these
#
Islamic networks which was in the story
#
of the north, the north had a very different
#
experience with Islam but there also
#
you find these compromises because
#
Mahmud of Ghor for example you know famous
#
for destroying temples and killing so many
#
infidels, he happily boasts that he
#
killed so many thousand infidels but at the
#
same time in the coins he minted he had no option
#
but to have an infidel goddess Lakshmi
#
because otherwise the infidels would not
#
use his coins, so the thing is
#
for legitimising yourself
#
for audiences in the Islamic world
#
you play up the idea of you bringing
#
Islam to these eastern barbaric lands
#
whereas in reality in the so called
#
barbaric lands you have to come to terms with the people
#
which is what happened in the Deccan as well
#
you come to power but you realise very quickly
#
that you are a minority, you need
#
local power, you need local assistance
#
that's how the Marathas emerged as a very
#
powerful caste because they became the
#
middleman between the people on the ground
#
the agriculturists and the sultans in the big
#
towns and cities because they were the ones who knew
#
the countryside, they were the ones who rallied
#
the armies to fight for these sultans
#
so the Maratha caste itself rose
#
to prominence in the period of the sultanates
#
because finally they had a
#
particular purpose acting as the main
#
of power and as main brokers of power
#
as well. So I'm speculating here
#
and thinking aloud and this is probably very
#
simplistic but the thought just struck me when you were
#
speaking is that is it then possible
#
that the reason that that simplistic
#
of Hindus good Muslims bad
#
the north because the north has experienced
#
Islam more in that way?
#
I think that may be one example because
#
because their introduction to Islam
#
came through blood and violence and war
#
that would lead to a certain kind of
#
in Kerala again to give an example
#
the experience is a polar opposite because there's
#
been no violence till the Mopla rebellion
#
in 1921 in the previous century
#
the 19th century there were what were called
#
the outrages which had a religious
#
element there was a so called jihadi
#
element to it which is fascinating
#
but what is interesting is that in Kerala the
#
wedded into the general Hindu
#
society there was no parda
#
the women did not have parda there was a matrilineal
#
Muslim royal family the family
#
of the Arakkel Bibi which is completely against
#
the Sharia you know in the Arakkel family
#
it's the eldest child that inherits
#
if it's a girl it's called the Arakkel Bibi
#
if it's called it's called the Ali Raja but the point is
#
women had right of succession and this is a woman
#
who corresponded with the Turkish Ottoman Sultan
#
and so on but she was the product of a matrilineal
#
system which is very Malayali upper
#
caste thing it's not an Islamic concept
#
there's also something called the Mopla Ramayana
#
or the Muslim Ramayana in Kerala
#
where Shurpanakha tries to seduce Rama
#
and Rama says no no but I've already got a wife
#
and she quotes the Sharia to him saying no but look
#
you can get another wife so
#
wedded to local society just as the Christians
#
were you know their oldest churches
#
just like the oldest mosques in Kerala
#
there are no minarets there are no domes they're built
#
like Kerala structures made of wood
#
with gables and so on and
#
if you go to Calicut there's something called the
#
Mishkal Pallida which is a mosque
#
built about 800 years ago
#
at some point the Portuguese come and destroy it
#
I think the Zamoran of Calicut who's a Hindu
#
ruler goes to war against
#
the Portuguese, wins, dismantles
#
one of their forts, brings back all the wood
#
and reconstructs this mosque that was demolished
#
some 70 years before because
#
their identities didn't depend on their
#
religious loyalties or allegiances they were much
#
more than that even with rebel sultans
#
in general the point I make is that
#
religion is not what guided their
#
politics, religion often lent legitimacy
#
it often justified what they were doing
#
but politics itself was guided by the same
#
things that it is even today guided by
#
those human instincts. In fact religion was almost
#
in a sense a tool of their politics
#
in the same way that for example one of the
#
empires you mentioned declared itself Shia
#
so it could then appeal to Persia
#
to hey look after our interests and
#
that's pretty much what Persia actually did
#
Persia later intervening with the Mughal
#
emperor saying hey leave the Deccan alone
#
we'll give you land somewhere else but leave the Deccan alone
#
which is a funny and somewhat
#
odd offer to make because
#
normally the Mughals and the Persians are always fighting
#
over Kabul and those parts and to actually
#
offer this to the Mughals if they left the Deccan
#
alone it showed how much
#
the Persians viewed the Deccan as their sphere
#
of influence and the Deccan sultanates also
#
had it very comfortable because
#
the Shah of Iran was far away he was an ocean he was
#
across the sea so it was convenient
#
to sort of claim to be his vassals because
#
you didn't really have to see him you don't really have to deal
#
with him as such he wasn't coming and breathing down
#
your backs it gave you a degree of autonomy
#
but it also protected you from Mughal ambitions
#
of course the Mughals found this even more
#
irritating so every time the sultans
#
and the Deccan played up their Shia
#
or Persian links the Mughals got only more
#
aggravated and more desirous
#
of conquering the Deccan but
#
as I said these boundaries that we have
#
today were not the boundaries that were then
#
enforced and you know having links
#
to Persia having very active links
#
so much so that the Shah of Iran could ask the Qutub Shah
#
of Golconda for a daughter and the
#
Qutub Shah had the power to say no
#
is interesting because that meant that they
#
had their own little ecosystem so the Qutub
#
Shah's ecosystem wasn't not oriented
#
it was very much oriented towards Persia
#
and we have to go in for a commercial break
#
now but before we that a final
#
mention of Hassan Gangu with a little bit of
#
fake news which I found very entertaining
#
where you talk about how Hassan Gangu
#
no doubt wanting to establish his own legitimacy
#
story which you mentioned as obviously apocryphal
#
about the Nizamuddin Aliyah
#
that once he went to you know before he was
#
a Sultan he went to meet the Nizamuddin Aliyah
#
and Mahbud Min Tughlaq was just leaving at that time
#
and Aliyah reportedly said quote
#
one Sultan has left my door
#
another is waiting there
#
again, invent a story to paper
#
over inconvenient corners in history
#
that's also actually a very Indian
#
tradition as well, you create a legend when
#
history doesn't work for you
#
brilliant, let's take a quick commercial break
#
On the second episode of the paperback podcast
#
Satyajit and Rachita talk to author Raj Raman
#
he talks in depth about his book this melting
#
cauldron and recommends four more books that inspired him
#
on Geekfruit, Tejas and then Kardel
#
delve into the phenomena that is Superstar Rajini's
#
2.0 and try to figure out if it lives up to the
#
on Varta Lab, Akash and Navina are joined by comic and improv
#
artist GSAT, they talk about making the comedy
#
scene safer and more welcoming for new comics
#
last week on Football Twaddle, Saru and
#
Bharul were joined by a special guest, former Indian
#
midfielder Stephen Dyes, he sheds some light
#
about half time team talks, his career and
#
the current state of Indian and Mumbai football
#
and with that let's move on to your shows.
#
These stories are you know it's funny how
#
these stories are there and sometimes the
#
comedy gets to you but it also tells you
#
so much about the past as the relating
#
to the earlier point I was making, you know
#
these ironies, these strange
#
twists that happen in our own world
#
I mean look at a character like Trump, look at the
#
kind of things he's doing and we think
#
it's bizarre but it happened in the past as well
#
there have been bizarre cases, bizarre
#
events, bizarre things happening, a later
#
Adil Shah of Bijapur was murdered by two
#
eunuchs who he had a certain soft corner
#
for, he's trying to seduce them but they
#
decided to slaughter him, you know another
#
sultan gets killed by a maid
#
you know these things happened all the time
#
and sometimes the reasons were not
#
grand or glorious and people didn't die
#
grandly on the battlefield, they
#
ended up you know, another sultan you pointed
#
out died in a steam room, was killed in a
#
steam room by his son but before
#
that he had tried to have his son burnt alive
#
in his bedroom, so you know everybody got
#
what they deserved, very
#
entertaining, so anyway so you
#
know the first fascinating character of the
#
sort of the Bahmani sultans
#
Muhammad the second, who you describe
#
as Aristotle of the Deccan
#
and he turned towards the
#
essentially because he did not have
#
access to Persia from the north
#
imported the Persian renaissance
#
the Persian renaissance
#
In general the Bahmani sultans did this
#
which is that they realized that the sea was their way
#
of connecting to this Persianized
#
Islamicate culture because
#
you could get poets, you could get
#
artists, you could get frankly
#
what finally destabilized the Deccan
#
was these internal dissensions because
#
factions emerged, these sultans
#
on the one hand they had their Daknis which was
#
local Muslims would convert, people would come
#
then of course you have the Hindu element which is the Marathas
#
and others who often gave brides to these sultans
#
as your power grew you also want
#
soft power and in those days soft power was Persian
#
if even Vijayanagar was imitating Persian
#
clothes you can imagine that Persian
#
culture was seen as a soft power asset
#
so they wanted to import a lot of that
#
so increasingly not only soldiers
#
and warriors and generals but also poets and
#
artists and others were imported from Persia
#
and that starts a lot in of course
#
Muhammad's reign but then his eventual
#
success of Firohshah Bahamani
#
builds it up to an even greater extent where Firohshah
#
a patron of the arts because by now the Bahamani
#
realm is solid, the frontiers
#
are clear, powers in the hands of the
#
family and then Firohshah wants
#
to evolve a distinct culture
#
so on the one hand he wants that Timurid Persian
#
culture so he imports that from overseas
#
through ships, so ships are sent out empty
#
year after year and they always come back
#
full of people and the principle is this that
#
you go there empty and you bring as much
#
Persian culture and influence and manpower with
#
you but the other thing he does is
#
Firohshah is also the first Bahamani Sultan
#
who after a battle with the emperor
#
of Vijayanagar ends up saying okay
#
now we've come to terms I want
#
besides gold and pearls and whatever
#
I want your daughter so you have a Vijayanagar
#
princess marrying Firohshah Bahamani
#
and Firohshah Bahamani at this time makes another
#
interesting claim where he says in addition to
#
this I want 2000 cultural professionals
#
I want 2000 people which includes
#
poets, dancers, you know
#
artists, sculptors or whatever
#
people so he could consciously import
#
southern Vijayanagar culture
#
which in turn is influenced by Tamil culture
#
and other areas that Vijayanagar is conquering
#
in the south all of that he wants to consciously
#
import into his capital
#
and he becomes this very colourful figure
#
with multiple wives each of them
#
from different regions he has almost like
#
a collection of wives each with
#
a very distinct language, distinct background
#
distinct skin colours you know
#
he was a man who and he himself knew multiple
#
languages including all the Indian languages
#
plus Persian and blah blah blah
#
and he practiced them on his wives so if he had a Bengali
#
wife he had a reason to practice Bengali with her
#
and you know he had this habit
#
where each wife was accommodated
#
in a certain palace so it would be called a Mahal
#
so if it was an Arabic wife it would be called
#
Arbi Mahal where the wife and all her servants
#
they would all be Arabs so every time he
#
entered Arbi Mahal he would speak only
#
one of his other Persian wives he would end up speaking
#
Persian if it was a Maharashtrian wife he would end up
#
speaking Marathi the idea was that he used
#
all of these as little laboratories and little
#
experiments of his own so while he was
#
simultaneously running a kingdom he was also
#
running some sort of intellectual enterprise
#
trying to consciously build up
#
a collection of poets, a collection of wives
#
you know poets whatever he could get
#
and very consciously present the Bahamani state
#
as a new node on the global
#
network of power and cultural
#
exchange and thereby setting impossible
#
standards for modern husbands as well
#
they can't give Mahals to
#
their wives and learn their languages necessarily
#
always and there's another
#
here in the battlefield
#
also what Feroz Shah did was he created
#
another interesting optical illusion
#
which hearkens back to you know Khilji's
#
optical illusion of the thousand horses
#
Feroz Shah basically sent an army for
#
this when Feroz Shah said his
#
brother did this when Feroz Shah sent an
#
army for Amit Shah, Amit Shah quote
#
had his cavalry lined up on the battlefield
#
he added to it lines of
#
bullocks at the back with armed soldiers
#
on them contriving the image of
#
a much larger force than he actually
#
could field. Yeah because Feroz was trying to get
#
rid of his brother because Feroz wanted
#
his son to succeed whereas Amit Shah wanted
#
himself to sort of take over
#
after Feroz died so when Amit Shah
#
ran away Feroz sent an army in pursuit
#
and then Amit Shah turns around and does this little
#
clever thing where you know all sorts of farm animals
#
are lined up and presented as
#
horses because from the distance everything looks
#
impressive right so all you see is men mounted
#
on animals you can't really tell if they're
#
the buffaloes or bullocks or whatever
#
but yeah in the end that demoralized
#
force and he's the one who ended up losing
#
and although he died soon after
#
and Amit Shah became king there's also a
#
long standing rumor that Amit Shah actually had
#
Feroz Shah suffocated so much for his
#
intellectual activities and his
#
very many wives he also died a rather painful
#
death even though it was in bed
#
And Amit Shah sort of continued the process
#
cultures and foreign peoples like you
#
write about how he imported 3000 archers
#
Turkey and Arabia. What's Transoxania?
#
I'm actually not sure now. Transoxania is I think
#
parts of Central Asia somewhere
#
And Khorasan is of course
#
And so how does the narrative
#
proceed here? What are the Bahmanis trying to do?
#
First they come to power they of course consolidate
#
and all of that and by the time Feroz Shah has
#
come to power they have consolidated which is
#
why Feroz Shah is sort of looking at
#
his legacy and building up
#
And now Amit Shah also builds up his own new city
#
He moves the capital to Bidar
#
Where simultaneously Bidar was
#
used by various old dynasties including the
#
Chalukyas and others. Does it have a modern name?
#
Bidar. Oh it's still called Bidar
#
And so the idea is that he's trying to tap into all that
#
saying that this is an old city
#
with very many old links. I'm sort of
#
channelling that. But the other thing is also
#
as I said these are all military states
#
in the sense that you have to constantly keep
#
replenishing your military capacity
#
For that this importing from the west became extremely
#
important because the best horses
#
came from Persia. Horses do not thrive
#
in India. And this is why often Vijayanagar
#
was left behind. And the Vijayanagar emperors always
#
grappled with this internal conundrum
#
which was that even though they were bigger
#
even though they were often wealthier than the Sultans
#
they were often defeated on the
#
battlefield simply because they didn't have the latest
#
artillery technology that the Sultans
#
imported from Turkey. All the
#
artillerymen were usually Ottomans. They
#
got their best horses from Persia. And they got
#
these soldiers from Persia. And the thing is
#
the idea was that by getting these foreigners
#
in there would be a degree of loyalty. They also got
#
Africans. Thousands and thousands of Africans
#
who had absolutely no other loyalties. Their loyalties were
#
only supposed to be to the Sultan. So
#
Bahmani Sultans could tap into this Islamic
#
network that brought them the best of the
#
world at the time. Best of
#
technology, the best of arms
#
and ammunition that they needed
#
and of course the best of
#
actual manpower. Whereas Vijayanagar was
#
a little handicapped there because everything that
#
came to them first the Bahmani Sultans would have.
#
So scholars have found for example
#
that Vijayanagar never evolved a
#
fortification technique like the Northern
#
Sultans of the Deccan. Because the Sultans
#
kept upgrading their forts as
#
you know, upgradations happened elsewhere in the world
#
because the Islamic network connected them to that.
#
Whereas the Vijayanagar emperors never bothered to
#
build up their forts that way which
#
eventually they ended up paying a cost for.
#
So what Ahmad Shah was also doing was this
#
trying to reinforce on the one
#
hand this link to Persia to keep the
#
Bahmani Sultanate within that network.
#
On the other hand trying to milk that network
#
for whatever it was worth to get the best
#
into his kingdom whether it was people
#
or whether it was technology. And perhaps as
#
a consequence of this he then ended up defeating
#
Vijayanagar where he then
#
destroyed a lot of temples and what you call
#
And there's a very funny story about here when
#
the battle is ongoing about how
#
both the leaders of the forces, the Raya of
#
Vijayanagar and Ahmad Shah
#
himself almost got captured in battle.
#
The story about the Raya was quite hilarious.
#
Yeah these, I mean that again these
#
stories tell you that you know battle
#
as cinema shows you now where everybody meets on a battlefield
#
and clashes. You know huge establishments
#
are moving. Often the largest section
#
of a moving army is the cooks
#
and the cleaners and the prostitutes and people
#
like that, the bazaar that moves with it.
#
So there's a later quote towards the
#
end in the book about the Marathas and how
#
towards the end when the Mughals moved
#
there'd be a soldier, his wife would be
#
with him, his babies would be with him.
#
The soldier would be carrying things on his head, his gun
#
would be in the hand of his wife and she would have stuck
#
some kitchen ladle or something into
#
the barrel of the gun. And suddenly I would
#
know whether Marathas will appear on horses, cut off
#
everybody's head quickly and disappear into the hills
#
and before these guys could remove the ladle and start
#
taking aim, you know they were dead.
#
So armies on the move were also big
#
establishments that were on the move.
#
So in these situations sometimes you have
#
contexts where say the Raya is sitting
#
somewhere, his tent is pitched somewhere, ends up
#
being not protected well. Similarly in
#
this particular battle what happens is on the one
#
hand Ahimad Shah one day decides I want to go
#
for a hunt. So battle is not a one day event.
#
It's a leisurely pace, you know the king comes slowly,
#
they set up camp. It's a marathon
#
speed. Yeah, it's a very convenient thing.
#
So he decides let me go for a hunt. He ends up
#
going too far and ends up being ambushed
#
by a set of Vijayanagar people. And he's chased
#
till he reaches this rather unglamorous
#
situation where this Sultan of the Bahamni
#
is you know king of so many Persians and Africans
#
or whatever, ends up hiding in a barn
#
and sort of he's luckily
#
saved because a number of his own men come to
#
his rescue. But he could have fallen into Vijayanagar's
#
hands. Similarly you have this
#
Vijayanagar emperor who's reposing
#
somewhere in a field comfortably when suddenly
#
he discovers that you know these
#
Bahamni troops have come in. And
#
because he's sitting there in his South Indian clothes
#
he's not actually dressed like a king. He's just wearing
#
a lungi and he's sitting shirtless.
#
He's nearly naked. So people
#
think he's a nobody. He's just some random man who's
#
lying there. So he gets up and they say
#
we're now looting the sugarcane field.
#
Here hold the sugarcane. And he sort of
#
the soldiers try and make him their
#
I don't know their coolie for the day. And he
#
very quietly and cleverly decides not to say that he's
#
actually the emperor on the other side. And for
#
some time he's carrying the sugarcanes with them
#
because they just think he's some random man.
#
And of course then they discover that the main battle has
#
been won. And now there's gold to be had instead of
#
sugarcane. So they abandon him and go.
#
And that's how the Vijayanagar emperor ends up saving
#
himself. It's the same in the final battle
#
where Vijayanagar falls in 1565 as well
#
where the Vijayanagar sultans
#
is in a palanquin or one of those sedan chairs
#
or whatever. And he ends
#
up in the wrong place where an elephant comes
#
from the other side. His bearers of his
#
palanquin run away and he's just lying about there.
#
And then an idiot Brahmin
#
says no no no don't hurt him. He's the raya
#
of Vijayanagar. That's the only reason he was
#
captured. Otherwise the elephant and the elephant
#
rider would have moved on thinking he was just some
#
random nobleman. But because you know
#
so these things always happen in battle. These
#
comical somewhat you know
#
situations. Really comic almost
#
lapstrik situations. And you know I mean
#
I'm a proponent of the keto diet. I often say
#
sugar is poison. So you could argue that by carrying
#
sugarcane. You say that as big sip Coca-Cola
#
No sugar is written here. So you know
#
so when the raya was carrying sugarcane for
#
the enemy he was in a sense contributing
#
to the eventual downfall.
#
What's also interesting here is
#
you know people often paint
#
you know Vijayanagar as a Hindu empire
#
and you know it might seem that okay
#
they are fighting the Sultans, the Bahmani
#
Empire and therefore as a Hindu versus Muslim thing.
#
And you point out here that
#
Ahmad Shah on the one hand yes
#
whenever he captured 20,000 Hindus
#
he held a feast for example which is an
#
interesting factoid and one wonders
#
how he could come. It's a doubtful
#
claim. I mean not captured, killed.
#
So the idea is that every time he killed 20,000
#
Hindus he would hold a feast.
#
Now it's simply improbable because
#
you know if he was killing 20,000 Hindus on such
#
a regular basis Vijayanagar would have collapsed
#
because we don't know the exact population figures
#
but we do know from global population trends
#
etc that that sort of slaughter is
#
impossible because Vijayanagar went on to have a
#
great golden age after this.
#
Although of course golden age is not a concept
#
historians sort of play up but the idea
#
is that Vijayanagar grew after that.
#
It would not have been possible if 20,000 people were being
#
slaughtered on a daily basis. But the point you sort of
#
make here is that even though
#
this sort of sentiment was there he was
#
actually celebrated in the south by
#
Hindus even today. So that's what I'm
#
saying right. So his own chroniclers
#
will say oh yes he killed 20,000 infidels
#
on a daily basis. It's an exaggeration.
#
The idea is that yes he killed a large number of
#
people in the course of these conquests
#
but in reality you know he's worshipped
#
by Hindus. The Lengayats come to his tomb
#
every year and they perform on his birth
#
anniversary a certain ritual where they
#
smash the coconut and they do everything in a Hindu
#
way. And he was a great patron of Sufis
#
is the complexity that the Deccan highlights
#
which is that this binary Hindu-Muslim divide
#
does not quite work. There's
#
Vijayanagar for example on the one hand
#
as I said they already called themselves
#
Sultans because they have no
#
quams appropriating an Islamic
#
title and using it for themselves.
#
later in the Adil Shahi kingdom which is one
#
of the Bahamani successor states
#
where one Sultan dismisses
#
and warriors he has. Where did they go?
#
They all trot down all the way to the south and
#
seek service in Vijayanagar. Vijayanagar
#
had its own Muslims, it had its own mosques.
#
At one point the last emperor of Vijayanagar
#
even allowed the eating of beef because
#
he didn't want to. Similarly the
#
Quran was always placed in court because
#
the Muslim soldiers said they couldn't bow
#
other human being as such. Therefore they
#
would bow in front of the Quran instead. And the Quran
#
was behind his throne. And the Quran was kept near the throne so
#
that they wouldn't be awkward about bowing in front
#
of him. So the idea was that it was much
#
more complicated. It's an
#
encapsulated best in the 1565
#
which is where Vijayanagar is finally the city
#
falls and the empire starts disintegrating
#
and the Sultans of the Deccan take over
#
and start really win that historic
#
battle. What's interesting is
#
most of the especially right wing historians
#
in the Twitter school of history which is
#
the screenshot school of history. They say
#
oh this is a Hindu empire being destroyed
#
by these Muslim Sultans. Complicated
#
history here because what happens is
#
the emperor of Vijayanagar
#
who was leading the Vijayanagar forces
#
he began his career in the court of the
#
Kutub Shah of Golconda. He was a nobleman
#
of a Muslim Sultan. He only ended up becoming
#
emperor of Vijayanagar because he married Krishnadevaraya's
#
daughter. The Kutub Shah who was
#
fighting at that battle. He lived 7 years
#
as a teenager from the age of about 15 or something
#
in Vijayanagar where he Teluguised
#
his name from Ibrahim to Abhirama.
#
He came back to Golconda eventually
#
patronised poetry on the Mahabharata.
#
Acquired a wife who was of Vijayanagar
#
origin. He's a great patron
#
of Telugu. Look at the way poets
#
moved. A poet like Shetrayya could
#
compose poetry not only in Madurai
#
and Hindu courts but also for the Kutub
#
Shah of Golconda. He composed 1500
#
volumes because the Kutub Shah saw themselves
#
also as custodians of Telugu heritage.
#
Similarly at the 1565 battle
#
you have 6000 Marathas but they're fighting
#
for the Sultans. You have one Muslim
#
warrior called Ayanul Mul Gilani. He's
#
fighting on the side of the Vijayanagar emperor.
#
Now the Twitter school they pulled out screenshots
#
from recent books that say Ayanul Mul Gilani
#
defected and went over to the
#
side of the Sultans before the battle ended.
#
There's no evidence of this. I don't
#
know where the stories come from because the only
#
inscriptional evidence of Ayanul Mul Gilani
#
is where he's called in Telugu Ayanul Mulukka
#
and he's recorded as giving a
#
grant of land to 80 Brahmins.
#
So it's very mixed up. You can't
#
black and white categorizations. Even the
#
Sultans themselves. The Nizam Shahs
#
of Ahmednagar were descended from a
#
converted Brahmin and they actually
#
kept links with their Brahmin relatives.
#
They made grants of land to their Brahmin relatives.
#
They gave estates to their Brahmin relatives.
#
They married Persian women. The Adil Shah
#
of Bijapur, the Adil Shahi dynasty was founded
#
by a man called Yusuf who got on a boat
#
from Persia to build a career in India.
#
Somewhere on the way he decided, I'm going to start
#
claiming I'm a long lost son of the Ottoman
#
Emperor, comes here, marries a Maratha
#
woman and that's how the Adil Shahi dynasty is
#
founded. So where people say, oh the Adil Shahs
#
are Muslims, you're completely forgetting
#
the mother, the founding lady who's a
#
Maratha woman. And this Maratha woman is
#
very important because two generations down the line
#
when her legitimate grandson proves
#
to be not up to the mark, she has
#
no issues blinding him, putting him to the side
#
and having an illegitimate grandson
#
elevated to power. So she was not a docile
#
lady sitting wrapped up in some corner.
#
She was a political actor herself.
#
And different Adil Shahs sometimes highlighted
#
different sides of their heritage.
#
So the second Adil Shah was very Persianised.
#
He preferred Persian. He spoke only Persian.
#
He dressed his troops in Persian uniforms.
#
But then you have someone like Ibrahim Adil Shah
#
II who was a contemporary of Akbar and Jahangir
#
who was exactly the opposite
#
finds that barely he doesn't like speaking Persian.
#
He speaks Marathi. He prefers Marathi.
#
He was a Sunni Muslim but he wore the Rudraksh
#
mala, painted his nails red
#
and called himself the son of Guru Ganapati
#
and the pure Saraswati. He was
#
so besotted with Saraswati that he went
#
on to rename his capital from Bijapur
#
he's a Sunni Muslim but he has these other
#
sides to his identity as well. Just as
#
Akbar established Fatehpur Sikri for his great
#
debates with various religious experts
#
from other religions, Ibrahim Adil
#
Shah II had his Nauraspur where Jesuits
#
and Shaivites and everybody could come and
#
discuss religion with him. When a trader
#
comes to see him he finds the Adil Shah
#
surrounded by 500 bijeweled women
#
all of them playing the Veena because he loved
#
Veena music. You know so the man
#
is very colourful. He's very interesting
#
like this. So you have the option of
#
looking at him as O Ibrahim equal to
#
Sunni Muslim Sultan. But wasn't he a little
#
bit more than that? To the extent that when he
#
died, on his tomb you have a very
#
clever inscription that says
#
it's actually a quote from the Quran which says
#
no Ibrahim was not a Jew, he was
#
not a Christian, certainly he was not an
#
idolator, that is a Hindu. He was
#
a devout Muslim. It's almost like he's
#
teasing everybody in a sense of saying
#
that none of you can figure out who I was
#
you know what my religious identity was so I'll
#
just put it here on the inscription. But the
#
funny thing is although it says Ibrahim there
#
there also he's playing a little
#
bit of a, there's a little bit of wordplay there
#
because it could either refer to him or it could
#
refer to Ibrahim from the Quran. So
#
you can't really tell what his final loyalties were
#
whether he was part Hindu, part Muslim
#
or both. He had no contradiction
#
there. And when I was reading your book you
#
know two of the fascinating themes that kind
#
of stood out for me were globalization
#
and assimilation. So on the one
#
hand you have this kind of globalization where you
#
have say the soft power of the Persians being imported
#
and you see an influence
#
of that in clothes, in food,
#
in architecture for example
#
to quote you again, you write
#
about how Amit Shah started a new style of
#
architecture, quote, with the elegance of
#
Iran, the sensuality of South India
#
even the occasional influence from Europe
#
the so called elephant stables,
#
domes, domes are not a South Indian
#
architectural style. They borrowed very clearly
#
from Islam. So on the one
#
hand you have influences from across
#
the world, from Europe, from Africa, from the Middle East
#
on the other hand you also have a remarkable
#
assimilation to the extent of you know all the
#
things you pointed out that you have
#
these rebel sultans knowing all the local languages
#
adapting to local cultures
#
and this is happening back then
#
before there are you know regular flights between
#
these two places or YouTube where you can actually
#
immerse yourself more in the culture
#
and it's sort of a reminder of how
#
even in our current day we might be like
#
so sure of what our cultural identity
#
is but actually it's a blend of
#
just about everything. It always is a blend
#
globalization may be a new word that is in fashion
#
now but the phenomenon has existed
#
always. It may not have been as fast
#
and instant as it is today because there's no internet
#
and quick communication and travel but it existed
#
people always communicated
#
with other cultures and peoples
#
they had no issues absorbing from there
#
look at some of the names around us now
#
everybody you know recently there was this thing about Amit Shah's
#
name Shah being a Persian
#
thing. Now of course in Amit Shah's
#
case it could have been a
#
there is a theory that it's Sahoo that becomes
#
Shah but even then Shah is a Persian
#
pronunciation so even if Sahoo
#
adopted Shah there's a Persian influence there
#
but forget the Shah because that's
#
unsettled. Even the clothes Amit Shah and
#
Narendra Modi wear the Churidhar Kurta
#
that's classically Islamic. Look at some of the
#
Peshwas who succeeded the
#
actual Maratha rulers and became the real force
#
in the Deccan afterwards
#
Peshwa the title itself is Persian
#
it means minister it's a Persian title
#
Devendra Fadnavis is the current chief minister of
#
Maharashtra what is Fadnavis it's a Persian title
#
so these things are not gone I'm not talking
#
about a time that's left no
#
traces the traces are still in front of us
#
these traces still exist. Shivaji
#
himself referred to the Hindupad Patshahi
#
what is a Patshahi it's derived from Batshah
#
it's again an Islamic influence
#
look at all the clothes that
#
Shivaji and his contemporaries wore
#
again inspired by Islamic fashions
#
speaking of Shivaji you know Shivaji's father
#
was a man called Shahaji
#
now his grandfather who was a close
#
associate of the Nizam Shah of Ahmednagar
#
Maluji. Maluji couldn't have sons for a long time
#
so Maluji goes to a holy man
#
and the holy man blesses him and his wife and then
#
actually he has two sons. Interestingly
#
the name of the holy man is Shah Sharif
#
he's a Muslim holy man and what does Maluji
#
name his sons Shahji and Sharifji
#
this is Shivaji's father and uncle
#
if you go to Ellora where Maluji
#
you know one scholar the controversial James Lane
#
has made the mistake of saying that this is a
#
tomb where Maluji is buried
#
it's not a tomb it's a Samadhi but the reason
#
James Lane made the mistake is because if you go to
#
the Samadhi it looks like an Islamic monument
#
it looks exactly like the tombs you'll find in
#
Golconda and other places it's got that
#
Islamic structure with some Hindu influences
#
in terms of the ornamental activities but the
#
dome all of that if you look at it at one glance
#
it looks like an Islamic structure but whose Samadhi
#
is it Shivaji's grandfather
#
Shivaji himself commissioned a Sanskrit poem
#
called the Shiva Bharata the Nizam Shah
#
in one place so here you see the contradiction
#
emerging which is that on the one hand Shivaji
#
claims this is Vishnu reincarnated
#
to deliver the world from the oppressions
#
of the Turukas the Muslim kings
#
but on the other hand it also refers to the Nizam
#
Shah of Ahmed Nagar as a Dharmathma
#
it also refers to the famous African
#
warrior general Malik Ambar as brave
#
as the sun at one point
#
Malik Ambar is compared to the Hindu god
#
Kartikeya so the idea is that
#
even then there was this black and white
#
thing of history was very complicated you couldn't
#
do it very easily and even Shivaji
#
himself recognized it and
#
the Shiva Bharata has a fascinating case in
#
example and Malik Ambar is an even more
#
fascinating case because this
#
we've discussed the Persian influence we've discussed
#
Marathas we've discussed the Hindu blend
#
with all of this but the other element
#
in the Deccan was the Africans which is
#
that thousands and thousands of Africans came
#
as military slaves to the Deccan year after
#
year and this wasn't merely to
#
the Deccan in the 1200s in Razia
#
Sultan's time one of the reasons she was assassinated
#
in Delhi was because she had an Abyssinian
#
and Ethiopian African lover
#
in Bengal there was a brief
#
Habshi dynasty which is African
#
slaves kicking out the ruling dynasty and
#
seizing power for less than a decade but it existed
#
in Bengal in Uttar Pradesh an African
#
eunuch founded in Jaunpur a dynasty
#
that lasted for a while I think in the 14th century
#
so Africans were always
#
in India as late as 1724
#
the Mysore Maharaja had an African guarding one of
#
his forts the Nizam of Hyderabad in
#
19th century had Africans but the Deccan
#
it achieves an even more special place because
#
had African wives that is
#
picture this in present day Ahmednagar
#
which is a tier two town in Maharashtra
#
now there were African queens
#
two of them in the late 16th
#
century and early 17th century
#
one of them was a daughter of Malikambar
#
who began life as a young boy in the Oromo tribe
#
in Ethiopia gets enslaved when he is
#
about 10-12 years old gets
#
at some point ends up in the Deccan where he is
#
purchased by the Peshwa of Ahmednagar
#
who is the Peshwa also a black man
#
who has a thousand other black
#
people he has purchased Malikambar
#
then rises slowly ends up having this small
#
little mercenary force and finally
#
by the end of the 1500s
#
he becomes the main man standing between
#
the Mughals and the conquest of the Deccan
#
so it's several generations before Shivaji
#
with Shivaji's grandfather
#
as one of his right hand men it was this African
#
man who had adopted India
#
as his home become a Muslim who was
#
the main problem for the Mughals in terms
#
of conquering the Deccan
#
Jahangir if you read the Jahangir Nama
#
it's quite fascinating Jahangir is constantly
#
bitching and hating on this man he calls him
#
Ambar the ill-starred, Ambar the black-faced
#
Ambar that disastrous man
#
because he can't conquer this man Ambar is too clever
#
and Ambar is the one who develops what is called
#
Bargigiri, guerrilla warfare
#
which is what Shivaji then takes to perfection a few
#
generations later and Shivaji therefore
#
as I said describes Ambar as
#
brave as the sun in his own Shiva Bharata
#
because Ambar was a legend he was
#
a remarkable man Jahangir was so
#
frustrated with Ambar and his inability to
#
conquer and reduce Ambar to nothing
#
that he commissioned a painting which shows Jahangir
#
shooting an arrow at Ambar's severed head
#
impaled on a spear it was something Jahangir
#
never managed to do in real life
#
but he fantasized in art what he couldn't achieve
#
in real life and Ambar as it happened
#
died a very old man in his 80s
#
comfortable and secure in his fortress
#
undefeated by the Mughals
#
so the Deccan was a place where not only Persians
#
Marathas, Vijayanagar existed
#
but also thousands of Africans who came in
#
all of them left their marks on this
#
place and many of these people married Maratha
#
women and many of their descendants
#
would have been absorbed into the community so it's
#
a mix of all these not only
#
cultural influences but also blood from so many
#
places and many of us are probably descended
#
from Africans in a more immediate sense than
#
we think yes I think so
#
and just tangential question that occurs
#
to me how would Shivaji have known about Malik Ambar
#
because you don't have history books you don't
#
have podcasts you don't have YouTube I mean how
#
family tradition as I said Shivaji's father knew Ambar
#
Shivaji's grandfather was of course so it's all oral traditions
#
and he sees it's only two generations
#
when your grandfather is closely
#
associated with him and you commission
#
this so Ambar dies in the late
#
Shivaji several decades later Shivaji
#
commissions the Shiva Bharata why is
#
Ambar compared to Kartikeya because Ambar's
#
memory and his legacy still standing
#
tall that's something that clearly inspired
#
Shivaji for Shivaji to give Ambar
#
such prominence in the Shiva Bharata
#
which is otherwise a work of eulogy for
#
Shivaji himself it's a Sanskrit poem
#
that talks about Shivaji's conquests and
#
adventures but Ambar is a very prominent
#
figure there so let's kind of head back now
#
to the Brahmanis again and trace
#
how they fell you talk about like
#
another bit that fascinated me was the grandsons
#
of Amit Shah Humayun the
#
and you write about how
#
Hassan was made the Sultan and
#
then the paying crowds gathered outside
#
Humayun's palace waiting to
#
plunder it and he managed
#
to get out of that and he took power from
#
Hassan and then court and he did it
#
very cleverly he didn't have men with him so
#
what did he do he got a holy man to come and stand
#
next to him because that's a different kind of legitimacy
#
and then this crowd sort of backed off
#
when they saw the holy man and then
#
he walks all the way to Hassan who's sitting
#
in the in the darbar on the throne
#
walks up to him slaps him pushes him off
#
the throne and takes his seat on the throne
#
to just picture the scene
#
poor little Hassan and then you
#
quote Hassan thrown before tigers
#
ordered some of his adherents
#
to be cast into cauldrons full of boiling
#
water and oil and release
#
mad elephants and other wild beasts
#
to prey upon the unfortunate victims
#
stop quote yeah again as I said
#
violence displayed and violence
#
used in a very visually
#
ghastly fashion just to sort of
#
reinforce the idea that don't mess
#
with me and why mad elephants you
#
mentioned mad elephants like multiple times
#
they appear in the sources I think mad in the sense
#
that you know very aggressive
#
sort of elephants which will come in sort of like
#
throw you no matter what otherwise elephants
#
if it's a regular elephant that's standing there why will it come
#
and trample you you know so if
#
it has to be done with as much brutality
#
as possible you need a an elephant that's really
#
got something going for it
#
pissed off yeah unfed yeah
#
then you talk about how Humayun the cruel
#
was stabbed by a maidservant which is
#
also an anonymous way to die I suppose
#
for a guy like that how did the Bahmani Empire
#
come to an end the Bahmani Empire came to an end
#
because of the weight of its own internal contradictions
#
as I said at the height of
#
absorbing say you know a lot of Persians
#
absorbing the local Maratha
#
element absorbing culture from Vijayanagar all
#
that is possible and also the Daknis like you pointed
#
out are basically they've come
#
from the Turks they're either people who come from the
#
north but they're essentially Indian in the sense
#
that so largely the Daknis are Sunni Muslims
#
they're people who've converted within India and
#
they're considered Hindustani Muslims
#
whereas the westerners or the Afakis
#
they are Shias largely who've
#
come in from Persia later
#
and the thing is the westerners have a little bit of a
#
superiority complex in the Bahmani court because as I said
#
there's this Persian Persian is considered
#
the latest soft power asset
#
it's very glamorous etc compared to
#
which the Daknis look a little
#
like a little bit like poor cousins so
#
there's that internal sort of rivalry there
#
and would it be correct to say that the language also plays a
#
part so the Persian at that time is like the English
#
of today the elite speaker in fact Persian
#
was diplomatic language till the early
#
19th century and I was stunned when
#
I was working in my first book letters
#
written by the Marani of Travancore in the 1810s
#
to the British governor there in
#
Persian it wasn't even in English it was in Persian
#
because even the British recognized Persian
#
as the international language in this part of
#
the world and Persian had therefore
#
great value attached to it so therefore
#
the Persian faction was very influential so
#
you have the Persian faction you have the Dakni faction
#
you have the Marathas you have the Africans
#
all of these are groups if
#
so in the end the contradiction was
#
that if it was a Sultan who was confident and
#
broad minded enough he was able to
#
take all these people along with him he could inspire
#
that confidence but some Sultans made
#
the mistake of playing these groups against each other
#
so as political power started weakening
#
a little bit they started being tempted
#
to play one group against the other for their own
#
violence between these groups and slowly
#
the differences started solidifying
#
and you know as I said this was a military
#
state and these borders and loyalties
#
are not constant you can easily
#
you know one entire group can
#
remove themselves from this court and find patronage
#
in the next court so in that sense
#
and different Sultans so within the Bahamani
#
state by the end of their days of glory as it were
#
what you have is weak Sultan
#
who doesn't who can't hold all these factions together
#
and powerful governors so the
#
Nizam Shah is converted from a Dakni which is
#
a converted Brahmin and they are
#
the first ones to establish an independent kingdom and
#
found the city of Ahmednagar and so on
#
and they become an independent kingdom technically
#
the Bahamani Sultan is maintained for another 40-45
#
years but slowly the power
#
they just decipher the final Bahamani
#
Sultans are reduced to picking out the jewels
#
from their crown and selling it and then picking
#
out things from their throne and selling it because they have
#
no money then you have the Adil Shah
#
who realizes hold on the kingdom is falling
#
to bits let me also sort of consolidate my
#
little corner somewhere that Bijapur basically
#
Bijapur the Qutub Shah of Golconda does the same
#
in Golconda although he never proclaims
#
independence he still carves out his own
#
independent realm and you know he
#
sends a tribute annually to the Sultan
#
but then when that particular Sultan dies he stops
#
so eventually the Sultans are left with nothing
#
and the last it's quite tragic the last
#
descendant of the Bahamani Sultans at the end of
#
the 1530s is reduced to
#
going off to Mecca because he has nothing left here
#
he is nobody so the Bahamani Sultanate
#
essentially disintegrates
#
why do I call them rebel Sultans because
#
the Bahamani Sultanate was established by
#
a set of people in rebellion from
#
Delhi and it was destabilized by
#
another set of rebels who sort of
#
rebelled against the Bahamani Sultan
#
founded their own kingdoms and they were the next
#
generation of rebel Sultans as it were
#
so for about 150 years the Bahamanis are
#
in charge then you have a second cycle
#
which ends in the late 17th
#
century when successor states
#
come into the picture and the Bahamani Sultanate
#
disintegrates into five
#
smaller kingdoms but each of
#
them very powerful and strong and it's also
#
interesting how sort of that dynasty
#
the Bahamani dynasty sort of whimpers out
#
like the Mughals do almost
#
you know it's not like someone beheaded
#
then you become a nonentity yeah you just become
#
now before we talk about those sort of rebel
#
Sultans who succeed the
#
Bahamani Empire let's talk a bit about Vijayanagara
#
Vijayanagara is going through its own internal issues
#
which is unlike the Bahamani
#
states which disintegrate into several pieces
#
Vijayanagara you have three dynasties that come and
#
fall so first you have the
#
original dynasty the Sangama brothers who found
#
Vijayanagara they ruled for a certain time
#
then you have a short lived dynasty in the middle
#
which is a military general who takes over
#
and then his son he dies his son
#
is sort of kicked out and then finally
#
Krishnadevaraya's dynasty comes to
#
power and if the initial
#
ones founded the kingdom and I think
#
they were largely Shaivites Krishnadevaraya's
#
time is you start seeing more of a Vaishnava influence
#
this time again as I said is absorbing all
#
these influences it's expanding its boundaries
#
in the south failing frustratingly
#
when it comes to these Sultans because the Sultans have
#
more technology as far as Vijayanagara is concerned
#
and at certain times the Vijayanagara
#
kings have to pay tribute to the Sultans
#
sometimes the Sultans have to come and enforce it
#
but they have to end up paying tribute
#
interestingly after the
#
splinter states come to power in the northern deck
#
in the Adil Shahs of Bijapur, the Qutub Shahs in Golconda
#
Ahmednagar Vijayanagara then has
#
greater influence because Vijayanagara is
#
still solid it's still one big empire
#
mistake was that the last emperor of Vijayanagara
#
when I say last Vijayanagara survived but the last main
#
character before the historic battle
#
he starts meddling a little too much in
#
these northern kingdoms now again
#
there's no Hindu Muslim divide here so one of the
#
Adil Shahs of Bijapur was adopted by this
#
last emperor of Vijayanagara as his own son
#
as I said the Qutub Shah when he
#
had no place in his brother's court
#
he came and lived in exile in Vijayanagara
#
there are lots of continuities and commonalities
#
between them but Vijayanagara starts getting
#
tempted a little too much to start playing
#
politics with these people and these northern
#
kings realise that hold on we're all
#
losing and Vijayanagara is slowly gaining at
#
our expense so finally for the one
#
time in history where their survival was
#
threatened they come together and of course
#
this is justified in the name of Islam and all of
#
that but that's not the point the point is politics
#
they come together and they decide this is a common
#
enemy we may all hate each other but
#
for the time being this is our biggest threat
#
so they come to a series of marital
#
alliances where say one of
#
the Nizam Shahi princesses the famous
#
Chand Bibi is given in marriage to the Adil Shah
#
another daughter of the Nizam Shah goes off to the Qutub Shah
#
family similarly girls are exchanged
#
from those families and they have a new
#
alliance and that's when Vijayanagara is finally
#
destroyed in that historic battle
#
in Talikota and the city is sacked and
#
the sultans don't go out and try and conquer all of
#
Vijayanagara once a city is destroyed they go
#
back to their capitals they gain some territory
#
but they're not trying to completely
#
you know wipe out Vijayanagara from
#
the map of India that's not happening Vijayanagara
#
is still seen as a legitimate entity
#
and you see some of this in the texts
#
as well where there's this later
#
text called the Raya Vachakamu
#
where also you find some Hindu
#
Muslim polemics the early
#
beginnings of a certain polemical
#
line that's occurring at this time
#
where it's written after Krishnadevaraya
#
times some 70-80 years later
#
but it talks about how it says how all
#
the sultans of the Deccan are evil
#
men are being cut into half in the streets they're all
#
greedy their own ministers are scared of them
#
basically it's compared to the land
#
of death the Yamas kingdom that's how
#
bad the Dakhni sultans are
#
some people interpret this thing says all these Muslims are
#
so bad and the Hindus are clearly saying
#
this is bad but the same Raya Vachakamu
#
also says the Mughal emperor is great
#
it says the Mughal emperor is blessed by Kashi Vishwanath
#
so just as Vijayanagara
#
is blessed by Tirupati the Gajapati of Orissa
#
is blessed by Jagannath of Puri
#
the Mughals are blessed by Kashi Vishwanath
#
so they recognise to make the Deccan
#
play up the Mughals and make the Mughals look good
#
so again Vijayanagara wasn't playing a Hindu
#
Muslim game if they were
#
Bukka one of the founders of Vijayanagara who
#
claimed in his inscriptions to be Krishna
#
reborn to destroy the Malichas which is the Muslims
#
he had no issues trying to
#
seek an alliance with Feroz Shah Bahamani saying
#
you and I will join hands together and I'll come from the
#
south you come from the north and we'll destroy the Bahamani sultanate
#
politics is what guides it but Vijayanagara
#
of course has its own issues you have these coups
#
that are happening in Vijayanagara and so on
#
but finally of course it was over stretch
#
where the last emperor of Vijayanagara played
#
he tried to gamble in a way
#
that didn't quite work out in the way
#
he thought and these sultanates instead of
#
breaking away and his divide and
#
rule succeeding they instead united
#
and they decided to teach Vijayanagara a lesson
#
and I think this was partly because like you pointed out
#
in the book he got incredibly arrogant
#
he humiliated the Nizam Shah
#
more than he should have in a particular instance
#
and then despite allowing
#
with the others to fight with the Nizam Shah he
#
annexed part of their kingdoms and destroyed
#
mosques destroyed mosques and all annexations
#
would be accompanied by the destruction
#
of mosques and the humiliation of
#
women and I presume rape and perich
#
there is an interesting legend which is actually a footnote
#
in the book which is Chand Bibi's
#
mother Khunza Humayun which is Hussain Nizam Shah
#
the one who is at this battle his wife
#
the story goes that this is
#
from one particular poem from the Ahmednagar court
#
emperor of Vijayanagara demands tribute from
#
Ahmednagar and in the list of things
#
that the Nizam Shah should pay there is
#
this sexually loaded reference to Khunza
#
Humayun the Begum's Anklets
#
saying that you know the tribute includes the Begum's Anklets
#
and Hussain Nizam Shah says no I will avenge
#
her honour or whatever again it's an excuse
#
to justify what was geopolitics they essentially
#
wanted to destroy each other anyway
#
but it's interesting that a woman
#
appears here at this particular time
#
and as it happens Khunza Humayun is one of those
#
few women that appears in the history
#
of the Deccan as a political figure
#
and of course she rules for six years after her
#
husband dies but then her son
#
and his coterie eventually topple her
#
and imprison her and sort of wipe
#
her out to the extent that she's not only wiped out of
#
records she's painted over in
#
paintings she's reduced to this giant blot
#
in paintings where her husband still
#
remains intact but she's been reduced to
#
a smudge in these miniature
#
paintings. Which brings me around to a question
#
I plan to ask at the end of this but before we get back
#
to the narrative just to take it up and you'd mention
#
this yourself before is
#
how women are viewed in history
#
and how their roles are recorded in history
#
It's complicated because you know the further back
#
you go in time you find that most of the material
#
is authored by men which means there's that male
#
gaze it's largely about men
#
and their battles there are women
#
here and there occasionally but
#
the voices that tell their story are still not female
#
voices they are men who
#
often have their own prejudices their own
#
biases they often don't approve of these
#
autonomous strong women so Khunza
#
Humayun as I was mentioning she ended up rotting
#
in jail for some 15-16 years before she died
#
she was wiped out there was no glory
#
for her. Her daughter Chanbibi survives
#
a little bit in legend and popular
#
imagination partly because Chanbibi
#
died in the course of the Mughal invasion
#
and she died she was assassinated so
#
that tragedy therefore allowed her to be
#
enshrined as a sort of martyr. And before that she also kind of
#
fought a famous battle almost taking a
#
man's role and going out into the ramparts.
#
Yeah when the Mughals breached the fort she actually went
#
into the breach and ensured it was
#
reconstructed and so on. So she was a very
#
formidable figure the Mughals themselves
#
were in awe of her but because she died
#
a martyr as it were died in the course of battle
#
and not on the battlefield her own men
#
killed her it was an internal job but she died
#
violently. There was a certain
#
romance attached to her and romance therefore
#
keeps the story alive but a more
#
everyday woman like Khunza Humayun
#
her mother who didn't die on the edge of a sword
#
in a battle she didn't die violently
#
she tried on an everyday basis
#
to take power she tried on an everyday
#
basis to hold power and the men resented
#
that to the extent that they wiped her out.
#
So what happens in history is if you're a
#
woman and you play some sort of romantic
#
poetic role either as a tragic heroine
#
or some sort of sacrificing mother or
#
whatever then you have a place then your
#
story survives in some ways. If you're of
#
interest to the male imagination. If you're of interest to the male imagination
#
but if you're of Khunza Humayun
#
who tries to take charge of those bastions
#
of male power and use that and
#
exercise that on an everyday basis then
#
my god you're going to be wiped out of records, wiped
#
out of paintings, wiped out of everything.
#
So as a male historian how do you overcome this
#
because on one hand there is a problem that all
#
your sources are written from this male gaze.
#
What can you do differently? So in my first book
#
I was lucky in that sense because it
#
taught me a lot which is that my protagonist, my
#
antagonist they're all women often
#
the primary material the letters these are all their letters
#
so they're women writing it's their perspective
#
and so on. But with this with the second
#
book Rebel Sultans because as I said we're going further
#
back in time the material becomes
#
a problem. You can consciously try and
#
resurrect these women you can consciously try and
#
tell their stories but if
#
the material doesn't exist you can't invent
#
stuff. So that is the tragedy in
#
see as the solution is largely
#
more women writing history because
#
although historians are in the task
#
of connecting the dots as a man
#
or because most textbooks are written by men
#
we are taught or trained
#
at some ingrained level
#
to connect the dots in a certain way.
#
Whereas if a woman writes history if more women
#
come into history look at the same material
#
they will bring a different gaze to it
#
a gaze that has not so far received
#
as much space as it should. So I'll name
#
Parvati Sharma who's now written a book on Jahangir
#
or Ira Mukhoti who's written about Mughal women
#
and it's fascinating because they bring a completely
#
to this. The same material I would have
#
approached in a certain way but because they are women
#
they bring a completely different angle and it's
#
an angle that's been missing for too long
#
and it needs to be rectified. A man can do
#
his best to try and see it from that perspective
#
but naturally having more women
#
historians has its own advantages
#
as well. And on that note
#
let's get back to your narrative and to our
#
Tell me a little bit about how after the Bahmanis
#
you know how the different rebel sultans
#
how they evolved in different directions. For example
#
Bijapur almost seems to sort of
#
use faith as a weapon of real
#
politic. Yusuf Adil Shah declared
#
Bijapur a Shia state which was
#
also very interesting because at that
#
point there was still the pretense of the Bahmani
#
Empire going on. So in a sense
#
he had two masters nominally
#
which is the Bahmani King and the Shah of Iran.
#
The Persian Shah. And is this in
#
any way analogous to a dilemma
#
that Muslims face right
#
up to the 20th century where
#
you are part of whatever nation state you are part of
#
the Khilafat movement you saw a dilemma sort of playing
#
out that you are also part of the larger
#
Qom so to say. Which is what you know
#
right wing Hindutva people keep using against Muslims
#
what was the great Golwar
#
Sabarkar argument which is that oh you know to be
#
truly Hindu or Indian you need
#
to have not only your birth here, your
#
home here but also your place of worship. This
#
has to be your motherland and your fatherland which
#
is not the case for Muslims. If you are bowing to
#
Mecca which is in a foreign country then your
#
loyalties are suspect. But for
#
Muslims of course you know not acknowledging
#
that global aspect of it is
#
impossible because. And silly in fact.
#
It's silly and I know but it's
#
impossible to the idea which is that why must you be
#
either or. The whole point of this
#
country is that so much diversity, so much language,
#
so many castes, you can be all of it at
#
once. You can be you know a North
#
Indian, I am a South Indian but that doesn't make you
#
or me less Indian. I can be at the same
#
time a Malayali and this is an example
#
my ex boss Shashi Tharoor often gives which is
#
you can be a good Hindu and you can be a good
#
Indian. You can be a good Malayali and you can be a good
#
Indian. None of these are in contradiction to
#
each other. It's okay to have multiple layers
#
of course for the right wing the fact
#
that Muslims have a non
#
Indian link as well which is an identity
#
that rises above any one given
#
nation state that becomes a little bit of
#
a problem. But as I said that
#
it depends on how you want to look at it because
#
I don't think Indian Muslims are any less
#
Indian because they have a place of worship in
#
Mecca or because they are there of many
#
of them are descended from people who came
#
from Iran or whatever. As I said many
#
if you come to the South the oldest Muslim communities
#
are nothing to do with these later immigration
#
they've been here for thousands of years. And there's a great
#
hypocrisy inherent in these claims
#
because these claims are made by people who are wearing
#
clothing which have come from outside
#
from the Middle East. They're eating food. I had a
#
great episode with Vikram doctor recently about
#
the Indianess of Indian food about how so much
#
Indian food has sort of originated
#
in various different places and are still
#
nevertheless inherently completely
#
Bombay or Mumbai where we now
#
you know the Ganesh festival just happened
#
you would have seen there were so many marigold flowers
#
that were being used. Where did the marigold come from? South
#
America. It's only a 400-500 year old
#
That's the same point Vikram made in the show. We now
#
use the marigold for all our rituals
#
but the marigold is not even an Indian flower.
#
The potato is not Indian.
#
A lot of these spices that we use
#
the green chillies are not Indian.
#
South Indians make sambar now with potato and tomato
#
and onion. These were never there in the old version of sambar
#
These are vegetables that came
#
my grandmother tells me growing up in the 1930s
#
and 40s they never ate potatoes and onions
#
because they never came there. Once in a while
#
you'll see it coming from somewhere else in the country
#
but most of the time it was never eaten.
#
The tapioca, if you go to Kerala now
#
what we call kappa in mean curry
#
which is tapioca with fish. It's considered like a staple
#
quintessential Malayali dish.
#
Tapioca came to Kerala in the 1880s.
#
Have you heard my episode with Doc?
#
I don't think so because he said all of this.
#
I think the episode has gone on for a long time
#
so we can kind of rush through this
#
so sum up for me how this
#
dynamic is playing out. These different
#
rebel sultans after the Bahamani empire
#
in the North Deccan. What's really
#
going on? What are the dynamics?
#
Well as I said these are military states. They have no
#
grand agenda. They have no grand
#
nationalistic principle. Nothing.
#
It's just that one set of elites is in power
#
somewhere else another set of elites is in power
#
lower elites are trying to claim power. That's what ends
#
The most striking figure is towards the end of the book
#
so the book is subtitled from Kilji
#
to Shivaji. Shivaji is the one where I end
#
the book because what Shivaji is doing is
#
for 400 years, 500 years
#
the Deccan has been under Islamic
#
rule. Now this doesn't mean the Hindus have been displaced
#
the best example is this
#
little kingdom called the Gadwal
#
Raj which was in former princely state
#
of Hyderabad. Now initially
#
they were feudataries or vassals of the
#
Kakatiyas. Then the Kakatiyas are displaced
#
and the Delhi sultans come. They start serving the Delhi
#
sultans. Delhi sultans are called Bahamani's come
#
they start serving the Bahamani sultans. The Bahamani's
#
are gone. Finally the Adil Shahs and the Qutub Shahs
#
at various points end up being their overlords.
#
They sound a lot like the Indian bureaucracy.
#
Yeah. Yes. That's the point I'm making.
#
Finally they come under the hands of the Nizam of Hyderabad
#
who is an agent of the Mughal emperor and they
#
survive all the way till 1948.
#
So something that existed in the 1300s
#
that same family ruling of
#
the same 1000 square miles of territory
#
has continued to rule all the way till 1948.
#
keep changing and shifting and falling and rising
#
but just beneath that there aren't
#
that many changes. These are all very elite
#
level changes and discussions that are happening.
#
At the next level things are
#
pretty much you know they are in the hands of the same
#
family Muslims. Hindus have not been displaced
#
en masse or anything. What is
#
interesting with Shivaji is that
#
this Islamicate court culture that evolved
#
in the Deccan, a very peculiar blend of
#
part North India, part Persian, part Vijayanagar
#
all of it existed. Shivaji
#
now wants to go back to a Sanskritized
#
So he consciously starts
#
avoiding Persian words and creates
#
the Rajyavev Harkosha which is
#
a Sanskrit dictionary. Starts writing
#
letters towards the end of his reign in Sanskrit
#
to other Northern kings because he is trying to
#
construct a new court culture, a new
#
way of doing politics inspired
#
traditions. So he wants the Rajputs and him and all
#
these Hindu origin people
#
stick to the Sanskritized version of things rather than
#
the Persianized version of things. And would you say this is similar
#
to what happened in the early 20th century, the late
#
lot of these groups tried to take Hindustani and
#
separate Urdu from Hindi and build some kind
#
of separate Shudh Hindi. Yeah that
#
begins in the 19th century really where you have
#
this ultra Sanskritized Hindi
#
being born and this ultra Persianized
#
Urdu being crafted as a separate thing
#
whereas in reality they are children of the same mother
#
and that mother was much more mixed up than
#
either will admit. But this quest for purity
#
but that is largely a result of
#
the colonial intervention as well. That's a
#
later phenomenon. What's interesting in Shivaji's
#
time however is that simultaneously
#
with him in Golconda we have two
#
Brahmin ministers of the Kutub Shah called
#
Madana and Akana and they are brothers
#
and one of them refers, talks to a
#
Dutch merchant and he says, oh look all these Persians
#
coming here, they make their money and their fortunes
#
and they go back because those are their
#
fatherlands. We have only this as our land
#
so we are much better in terms
#
of we should be running this place properly.
#
It's interesting because this is almost a
#
Golwalkaresh, Savarkaresh argument
#
from the 20th century but we are hearing it in the
#
late 17th century. So what
#
it indicates is that at the elite
#
level there was some beginning of
#
an identity that was in
#
common saying that something
#
a sense of loss. And these intellectual
#
strains therefore existed from before
#
it's not like Golwalkar and Savarkar
#
sort of it began with them. I think they
#
took it to a completely different level.
#
Which is by making more mass
#
Why is this mass now? Because we've
#
now bought into this idea that the Sanskritic
#
version of Hinduism is the version of Hinduism
#
which is not true. What happened to
#
lower caste versions of Hinduism? What happened to tribal
#
versions of Hinduism? You know there are surveys
#
in South India from 1915 as late as 1915
#
people in South India did not subscribe to
#
Brahminical gods. They had their local tree gods
#
and local goddess of smallpox and things
#
like that. But as education came in
#
they started Brahminising or Sanskritising
#
and giving up their ancient gods
#
and becoming worshippers of Shiva, Parvati,
#
Vishnu. So this happens
#
simultaneously with that where you have this
#
mass reinforcement of the idea that the
#
faith of the Brahmin is the legitimate
#
form of Hinduism. Whereas in the earlier
#
phase what you see is this
#
sense of I think what happened is that
#
earlier if you were under a Hindu kingdom or a Hindu
#
king, your patronage was limited to
#
these elite groups. With the Muslims there was competition.
#
There were these Persians, there were these
#
Africans, so you weren't quite the top
#
of the chain as it were. So that seems to have
#
created a little bit of elite resentment which is
#
what you see in the 17th century. And Shivaji
#
was definitely therefore, when he says
#
he is building a Hindavi Swaraj, he does
#
therefore play up the idea of that. But
#
it wasn't something for all Hindus against all
#
Muslims. He employed Muslims, he had Qazis
#
where Afzal Khan is sent to murder Shivaji.
#
Now if you look at Afzal Khan versus
#
Shivaji, Muslim versus Hindu. But look at
#
the people coming with Afzal Khan, Ghor Pade.
#
Maharashtrian surnames,
#
Maratha surnames. On Shivaji's side
#
Siddhi Ibrahim. It's a Muslim. Shivaji
#
had plenty of Muslims, he had plenty of Islamic
#
influences in his court as well.
#
But he looked at power from a Sanskritic
#
seems to have begun something. And
#
simultaneously you have similar trends in Golconda
#
which means that at that particular juncture
#
when these sultanates are starting to collapse,
#
when the Mughals are coming in violently from the
#
north, there is this germination
#
of a new sense of elite
#
identity. I will not say it's a Hindu
#
identity because there was no one
#
broad Hindu community. For a Brahmin
#
a Dalit was as alien as a
#
Muslim. There was no commonality between them.
#
One could argue it's still the same today. Yeah.
#
I mean I don't think they see each other as
#
part of the same ecosystem or
#
whatever. So in that sense there was something
#
that was being born then. So I
#
wouldn't agree with many people who say that
#
communalism is entirely
#
a colonial invention. No, at the elite
#
level there seems to have been some
#
flavor that seems to have
#
been coming in at this particular time which
#
later assumed bigger proportions in
#
the colonial period. Now reading your book and
#
listening to you now, on one hand it seems
#
below the top layer, if you look below the
#
sultans and the people in charge, what you really
#
have are these vast, really solid
#
waves of history moving
#
like the same bureaucracy serving different
#
empires for hundreds of years
#
and so on and they are as they are.
#
But at the same time you
#
also see these powerful individuals
#
like maybe Alauddin Khilji
#
who have a huge impact on history just as
#
individuals. So what do you think of Thomas Carlyle's
#
great man of history kind of
#
the great man theory? See I think
#
they become great men largely in hindsight
#
in the sense that we pick and choose
#
who we want to highlight, who we want to
#
project more at the cost of whom. So as
#
I said, you know, Shivaji dominates
#
The Deccan is often reduced to Mughals versus
#
Shivaji, if you're lucky. Otherwise
#
it's only Shivaji, especially if you're in Maharashtra, it's only
#
Shivaji. He deserves his place in history, he's a very
#
charismatic, interesting figure. But
#
as I said, better historians have done good books on him.
#
What interested me was, why only him?
#
There are so many people before him, why not
#
Ibrahim Adil Shah II with his Rudrakshan
#
Saraswati love? Why not Malik Ambar,
#
the African who saved the Deccan
#
for at least two generations from
#
Mughal conquest? You know, these are people who also
#
made history. But because they have no political
#
constituency now, they've been
#
forgotten. So the great men of history are
#
also a reflection of our own anxieties,
#
our own insecurities, our own sense of
#
what we want to draw from history
#
rather than what actually happened
#
in history. Which is why more and more people
#
at least with my first book and my second book
#
the idea is to pull these people or pull
#
these stories out of the footnotes and give
#
them the broad audience that they deserve.
#
Because they don't deserve to merely be a footnote and a
#
larger story of somebody else. They were
#
actually independent actors in their own right.
#
In their own time, they were the main actors
#
and people who made history.
#
We shouldn't put them into the shadow of any one great
#
man or great woman as such. In fact, you mentioned
#
Ibrahim Adil Shah I died in a very
#
interesting way which you described that basically he fell
#
ill and every physician who tried to
#
cure him, when they couldn't take his pain away,
#
he had them trampled by mad elephants.
#
Which then led to a mass exodus of all physicians from his capital.
#
So he had no one to treat him and he died.
#
Which is a classic mistaking causation for
#
correlation. Something modern leaders
#
tend to do today as well. Listen, I have taken
#
a tremendous amount of your time and I would actually
#
have loved to go through the whole narrative all
#
the way to Shivaji and beyond all I can do
#
is urge readers to read your amazing
#
book because there is a lot more to the Deccan
#
than just Shivaji or the Mughals
#
On that note, Manu, thanks so much for appearing
#
on The Scene in the Unseen today. Thank you for having me.
#
I had a great time here.
#
Hi, my name is Abbas. I'm a producer
#
with other staff members of IVM
#
we do this show called IVM Likes
#
where we give recommendations of books,
#
shows that we've seen. We've even recommended
#
video games and YouTube channels.
#
And we are soon reaching our 100th
#
episode. We are on episode 99
#
right now and on the 100th episode
#
we'd love to hear from you.
#
So send us your messages, voice notes,
#
goodwill, all of it on shows
#
and we will read out your messages on the
#
100th episode of IVM Likes.
#
Tell us about the recommendations we've given
#
you that you've enjoyed. Tell us about the episodes
#
that you remember. Tell us about the conversations
#
that you've enjoyed and we will
#
read all of it out on the 100th episode.
#
Send your messages on shows at
#
indusvox.com and do tune in
#
to the 100th episode of IVM Likes
#
But from Monday 26th February
#
wear a topi all the time.
#
Because if he didn't, everyone
#
around him knew exactly what he was thinking.
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They knew that he was wondering
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how the girl in the yellow churidar
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would look without clothes.
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They knew when he was calling the boss
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But how did all this happen?
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And you gave me this story
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by giving me the starting word.
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This is the Croc's Tales.
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Catch the stories on Monday and Thursday
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on the IVM website, app
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and anywhere you get your podcast from.
