The Marathas, Part 1 - The Breaking of the Deccan

The Deccan Before the Dark

Devagiri, the Yadavas, and a civilisation at its ease

To understand what Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj accomplished, one must first understand what had been lost — and the measure of that loss is not a battle but a civilisation. In the thirteenth century the Deccan was governed from Devagiri, the hill-fortress that rises out of the plain near modern Aurangabad like a clenched fist of rock, five hundred feet of scarped basalt so sheer that it was reckoned among the most impregnable positions in India. From it the Seuna Yadavas ruled a kingdom that ran from the Narmada to the Tungabhadra, taking in nearly the whole of what is now Maharashtra with parts of Karnataka, Telangana and Madhya Pradesh.

Their court was not a garrison but a seat of learning. It was under Yadava patronage that Marathi came into its own as a literary language — the age of Jñāneśvar, whose Jñāneśvarī, the Marathi commentary on the Bhagavad-Gītā composed in 1290, remains among the supreme achievements of Indian devotional literature and is read aloud in Maharashtra to this day. It was under the Yadavas that Hemādri Paṇḍit, minister to Mahādeva and Rāmacandra, wrote the vast Caturvarga Cintāmaṇi on dharmaśāstra and gave his name to the Hemāḍpanti style of temple architecture — dry masonry, interlocked stone without mortar — whose black basalt shrines still stand across the Deccan. The astronomer Bhāskarācārya's tradition was honoured here; Sanskrit and Marathi flourished side by side; the Mahānubhāva and Vārkarī movements were taking shape in the countryside.

The scale is worth fixing in the mind. Devagiri's revenue territory ran to some of the richest cotton and grain country in India. Its trade reached the Konkan ports and from there to the Gulf and to South-East Asia. The Yadava kings styled themselves Cakravartin and Yādava-nārāyaṇa, and issued gold in their own name. Hemādri's Caturvarga Cintāmaṇi ran to four great sections and thousands of pages on vrata, dāna, tīrtha and mokṣa — the work of a state that had leisure, endowment and libraries. Under Rāmacandra's predecessors the temples at Ellora and across Marathwada were endowed; the astronomical tradition that produced Bhāskarācārya's Siddhānta Śiromaṇi was patronised at this court's periphery.

And it was open. The Mahānubhāva sect, founded by Cakradhara Svāmī in the thirteenth century, wrote its scriptures in Marathi and admitted men and women of every community; the Vārkarī tradition was already walking to Pandharpur. Jñāneśvar, who was perhaps twenty-one when he composed the Jñāneśvarī, opens it by saluting the Word itself, and then does something politically enormous without seeming to: he renders the Gītā's Sanskrit into the ovī metre of Marathi song, so that a cultivator who would never see a Sanskrit manuscript could receive it whole. That single act put the tradition beyond the reach of any conqueror — though nobody in 1290 knew it would need to be.

This was a settled, literate, prosperous Hindu polity with a functioning revenue system, a temple economy, and a scholarly class that had been transmitting its knowledge without interruption for a thousand years. It was also, fatally, unprepared for what was coming.

1296: The Hammer Falls

Alauddin Khalji, Devagiri, and the first breaking of the Deccan

In February 1296, Alauddin Khalji — then merely governor of Kara, and not yet Sultan — left his province with some eight thousand cavalry and did something no northern power had attempted. He crossed the Vindhyas. He kept his march secret even from his own sovereign in Delhi, spreading the false report that he was moving on Chanderi, because the wealth of Devagiri was to fund a usurpation. At the pass of Ghati Lajaura he met resistance from Kanhan, a feudatory of the Yadava king — and the fourteenth-century historian Isami records that Kanhan's force included two women commanders who fought like tigresses and drove Alauddin back. It is worth pausing on that detail, because it is the first note of a theme that runs through this entire history: on this soil, when the invader came, women took the field.

The march itself deserves attention because it established the template for everything that followed. Alauddin took no siege train and almost no infantry — only cavalry, moving fast, living off the country, covering the roughly eleven hundred kilometres from Kara to Devagiri in a matter of weeks through country no northern army had crossed. He put out that he was moving against Chanderi so that neither Delhi nor Devagiri would prepare. He arrived before news of his coming. The Yadava state, which had every material advantage — more men, a better treasury, an impregnable fort — was defeated by speed and deception before it could bring any of those advantages to bear.

The blow landed at the worst possible moment. The main Yadava army was away on campaign under prince Simhaṇa; the fort held insufficient provisions; and King Rāmacandra, retreating to the citadel while the lower city was ransacked, was compelled to buy peace. Simhaṇa returned and gave battle, and was defeated. The terms were crushing: an enormous indemnity and the revenues of Achalpur in perpetual tribute. Alauddin carried the treasure back to Kara, invited his uncle and sovereign Jalaluddin to visit him, and had him murdered there. The wealth of the Deccan bought the throne of Delhi. Settled

The tribute lapsed. In 1308 Alauddin sent Malik Kafur south with a great army; Devagiri was taken again and Rāmacandra reduced to vassalage. Then came the systematic dismantling. Kafur used Devagiri as the forward base from which to fall upon Warangal, upon the Hoysalas at Dwarasamudra, and finally upon Madurai in the far south — the campaigns in which the temple cities of the Tamil country were stripped, and the accumulated wealth of centuries of Hindu kingship was carried north on elephants. Rāmacandra's successor Śaṅkaradeva was defeated and killed.

The southern campaigns: what was carried north

Devagiri's reduction was not an end but a doorway. From 1310 Malik Kafur used it as the forward base for the systematic stripping of the Hindu south, and the record of what was done comes not from the victims but from the conquerors' own court poet, Amir Khusrau, who accompanied the expedition and wrote it up in the Khazā'in ul-Futūḥ with evident satisfaction.

In 1310 Kafur besieged Warangal, capital of the Kākatīyas, and extracted an enormous tribute from Prataparudra II — by tradition including the diamond later known as the Koh-i-Noor. In February 1311 he besieged Dwārasamudra, the Hoysala capital, with ten thousand men; Vīra Ballāla III submitted without a general action. On 10 March he marched into the Pāṇḍya country. At Kāñcīpuram, reached at midnight on 15 March, the sleeping population was put to the sword, the images broken, the temples emptied and thrown down, and those who came to defend their deity killed where they stood. At Madurai — the temple city of the Pāṇḍyas, whose Mīnākṣī Sundareśvara complex held the accumulated offerings of centuries — he found the city abandoned, burned the shrine of Sokkanātha, and moved on to Rāmeśvaram, where Firishta records that he raised a mosque to mark the victory. Settled

Khusrau's own words record that the images which had stood for hundreds of years were demolished and the golden temple covered in blood; he states plainly that the object of the expedition was to spread the rule of the sharī'a in the south. Kafur returned to Delhi in October 1311 with 612 elephants, 96,000 *maunds* of gold, 20,000 horses and chests of precious stones — a quantity of wealth that R. C. Majumdar judged more spectacular than politically effective, since no lasting conquest was established. Settled But the political point was made and the economic point was decisive: the temples of the south had functioned as the banks of a civilisation, accumulating gold over centuries, and in the space of eighteen months that accumulation was carried north on elephants.

The consequences ran for generations. The Madurai Sultanate was established in 1335 in the ruins of the Pāṇḍya kingdom; prayers in the great temple were stopped, and the image of Sundareśvara survived only because the priests walled up the sanctum and installed a substitute. The Hoysalas were finished; Vīra Ballāla III died fighting the Madurai Sultan in 1342, and his body was flayed and hung on the walls of Madurai. Ibn Battuta, who was in Madurai in 1342, recorded the Sultanate's conduct with a matter-of-factness that is its own indictment.

The end came in 1318. Harapāladeva, Rāmacandra's son-in-law, rose in revolt with his minister Rāghava and reclaimed Devagiri — the last Yadava to hold the throne of his fathers. Qutbuddin Mubarak Shah marched south, routed Rāghava's ten thousand horse, and hunted Harapāladeva through the hills until he was wounded and taken. He was brought before the Sultan and flayed alive; his head was set over the gate of his own capital. Settled

The manner of it was the message. A defeated king may be killed in battle, executed, imprisoned or pensioned; each carries a meaning. Flaying is none of those. It is a punishment reserved for the destruction of a person's standing as well as his life — the body unmade in public, the head displayed on the gate his ancestors built, so that every person entering the city passed beneath it. It was intended to end not merely a reign but the idea that the Deccan could have a king of its own. Rāghava, his minister, was executed with him. The Yādava line was extinguished.

Devagiri was renamed Daulatabad — the city of wealth — and a decade later Muhammad bin Tughlaq would attempt to move the entire population of Delhi to it, a forced march that killed thousands and is remembered as one of the great administrative atrocities of the age. The fort that had been the seat of Marathi kingship became the instrument of Marathi subjection. And with Harapāladeva's death the sovereignty of Hindu kings over the Deccan ended. It would not be restored for three hundred and fifty-six years — until a young man walked up the stair at Raigad in June 1674.

The Sultanate Century

What replaced the Yadavas, and what it did

What followed 1318 in the Deccan was not one settled order but a succession of them, each established by force and each maintained by it.

Delhi held the country directly for a generation, and held it badly. Muhammad bin Tughlaq's decision in 1327 to shift his capital to Daulatabad — and, according to the chroniclers, to march the population of Delhi the eleven hundred kilometres south — produced a catastrophe of mortality on the road and an administration that governed neither city well. The Deccan's revenue was farmed with a brutality that provoked constant revolt. In 1347 the Delhi governors in the Deccan rebelled and founded the Bahmani Sultanate, which ruled the plateau from Gulbarga and later Bidar for a century and a half.

The Bahmani state was, on its own terms, considerable: it built, it patronised Persian letters, it drew scholars and soldiers from Iran and Central Asia, and under the minister Mahmud Gawan it acquired a madrasa and an administration of real quality. It was also, continuously and as a matter of stated policy, at war with Vijayanagara across the Tungabhadrā and the Krishna, and the conduct of that war is recorded by the Muslim chroniclers themselves. Firishta gives the figures without embarrassment: campaigns in which the object was the destruction of the enemy's agricultural population, and totals of Hindu dead in the hundreds of thousands. He records that Muhammad Shah I in the 1360s vowed the slaughter of a hundred thousand Hindus, and that his successors held to similar undertakings; the Doab between the rivers was fought over for two centuries, and its cultivators were the object rather than the incidental victims of the fighting. Settled

When the Bahmani state broke up around 1500 it produced the five Deccan Sultanates — Bijapur (Adil Shahi), Ahmadnagar (Nizam Shahi), Golconda (Qutb Shahi), Bidar (Barid Shahi) and Berar (Imad Shahi) — which spent the sixteenth century fighting each other with an energy they rarely spared for anyone else. That mutual hostility is the single reason Vijayanagara survived as long as it did, and their composing of it in 1565 is the reason it did not survive longer.

For the Marathi country the practical consequence of these two centuries was a particular and corrosive arrangement. There was no Marathi sovereign, but there was constant demand for Marathi soldiers. The deśmukhs and deśpāṇḍes — the hereditary district gentry — held their offices under sultanate sanction, collected revenue for sultanate treasuries, and supplied cavalry for sultanate wars. Marathi families like the Jādhavs, the Mores, the Nimbālkars, the Ghorpaḍes, the Mānes and the Bhonsles rose high in that service. They fought each other in it. And their position was never secure: Lakhujī Jādhav and three of his sons, as the next part records, were cut down in the Nizamshahi durbar hall in 1629 on their master's order.

This is the condition that must be grasped before anything else about Shivaji Maharaj makes sense. It was not that Marathi arms had been extinguished — Marathi arms were everywhere, and were valued. It was that they were always in someone else's hand. A Marathi commander could win battles, hold districts, accumulate wealth and be murdered at a durbar without recourse; his sons would then take service with the murderer, because there was nowhere else to go. The Deccan produced excellent soldiers and no sovereignty of its own for three centuries. What was missing was not courage or capacity. It was a flag.