Abstract
In Rebel Sultans, Manu S. Pillai presents a history of the five Deccani Sultanates, together with the Vijayanagar Empire, the Marathas, the Mughals and other dynasties with which they came into contact, in an elegant and lucid style. Pillai brings together a wide range of sources to weave a fascinating narrative of a historically important and understudied region and period in South Asian history. His bibliography is extensive and sophisticated, and the book is engaging enough to hold the interest of specialist and non-specialist readers. Beyond merely reproducing a narrative of peaceful coexistence and cultural interchange between Hindus and Muslims, for instance, Pillai brings the anticipated Richard Eaton and Philip Wagoner corpus—arguably the best-known scholarship on the topic—into conversation with broader literature on early modern community formation in South Asia. He integrates into his argument the work of Valerie Stoker and Cynthia Talbot, producing a nuanced perspective on religious culture in the Deccan. Further, through focusing on Persian and European encounters with the Sultanates, Pillai aptly demonstrates the region’s strategic and cultural importance in the early modern world, which is perhaps the most important contribution of the book.
Pillai takes as his starting point the lacuna he perceives of pre-Maratha histories of the Deccan. While prior works ‘often begin with the story of Shivaji’, 1 he focuses on the time frame spanning broadly from the victory of Alauddin Khilji over the Yadavas in 1296 to the death of Aurangzeb in 1707. The majority of the book’s pages, however, are devoted to accounts of the four most important Sultanates—the Bahmanis, Adil Shahis, Nizam Shahis and Qutb Shahis—at their height. The book is organized relatively chronologically: Chapter One covers the origin of the Bahmani Sultanate and several of the dynasties with which it came into contact. Chapters Two and Three provide accounts of the Bahmani and Vijayanagar kingdoms respectively, while Chapter Four describes the Sultanates’ collective defeat of the Vijayanagar Empire. Chapters Five through Seven focus on the Adil Shahi, Nizam Shahi and Qutb Shahi kingdoms, highlighting important figures associated with each: Ibrahim Adil Shah II, Malik Ambar and several of the Qutb Shahs.
One of the book’s strengths is its ability to cover such a vast time frame in a concise 299 page volume. While Pillai is most interested in political history and is clearly indebted to Richard Eaton’s A Social History of the Deccan in organizing much of the book around specific influential personalities, he also manages to cover many aspects of the cultural and religious history of the region. This is especially evident in Chapter Five, ‘Saraswati’s Son’, which focuses on Ibrahim Adil Shah II of Bijapur. Pillai brings excerpts from the Dakani Urdu Kitab-i Nauras and Deborah Hutton’s art-historical scholarship on portraits of the Sultan into conversation with more traditional historical sources, demonstrating his familiarity with an impressive range of secondary literature.
Pillai devotes substantial attention to Hindu–Muslim interaction in the Deccan, which has often been the major concern in historical scholarship in the region. But he also emphasizes the complexity of the religious landscape of the Deccan, stating that while Hindu–Muslim rivalries existed, ‘the world was really not perceived in terms of religious or communal divide’. 2 Pillai mentions shared styles of art, architecture and dress between Hindu and Muslim dynasties that Eaton and Wagoner have drawn attention to in their scholarship as well, but also highlights less well-studied sites of exchange between religious communities such as the shared Sufi and Virashaiva devotional site at Ahmad Shah’s tomb. 3 More importantly, Pillai’s book reflects a nuanced understanding of the early modern Deccan as a region where interreligious contestation rarely took the form of a clear-cut Hindu–Muslim divide. In Chapter Three, ‘Hindu Sultans’, Pillai interprets an inscription commissioned by the Vijayanagar king, Bukka Raya, which lists ‘the Turks’ alongside other adversaries such as the Hindu rulers of Orissa and the Tamil Colas. He notes that the inscription depicts the Sultans ‘as respected political rivals (of Vijayanagar), just like the other Hindu powers of the peninsula’. 4 Pillai’s description of tensions between Jains and Sri Vaishnavas at Bukka Raya’s court also highlights that major religious disputes did not take always place between Hindus and Muslims, nuancing his depiction of inter- religious relations at the Vijayanagar court.
Pillai’s focus on Persian and European encounters with the Deccan enables him to gesture towards an important point about the cultural and political importance of the region in the early modern period. Engaging with the work of Sanjay Subrahmanyam, he consistently emphasizes the centrality of the Deccan as a region of great importance not only to other South Asian dynasties, but also to European and Persian travellers. Pillai begins the book by alluding to the Deccan as a cosmopolitan space: ‘Fine horses bred in Iraq trotted along the Deccan’s roads, even as the region’s elite succumbed to the sartorial fancies of their friends in Iran. Travellers from lands as diverse as Burma and France descended upon the Deccan’s dusty plains’. 5 Pillai highlights the Deccan as important not only because its dynasties predate the ascension of the Mughals and the Marathas, but also because its court cultures force us to recalibrate our understanding of the early modern world. While the names of Muhammad Qutb Shah and Ibrahim Adil Shah have fallen largely into oblivion, at the turn of the seventeenth century, the courts of Golconda and Bijapur attracted the attention of travellers from around the world. Pillai emphasizes the cosmopolitan culture of the Deccan in every chapter of the book, from Ibrahim Adil Shah II’s coveted collection of Chinese porcelain to Tavernier’s likening of Qutb Shahi Golconda to Paris. Pillai’s focus on travel and material exchange between the Deccan, Europe and Iran intelligently draws from Subrahmanyam’s work, but Pillai himself does not focus on the category of early modernity. The book makes a strong case for the importance of turning our attention to the Deccani Sultanates not merely as predecessors of the Mughals and Marathas, but as important cultural and historical actors in their own right.
Pillai’s book is significant not only because it is the first history of the Deccani Sultanates written for a general audience, but also because of the breadth of sources it integrates. While the book’s overarching argument is not unprecedented, Pillai’s use of scholarship from a range of fields and his inclusion of many sources from the last ten years gives the work a notable sophistication. The time frame of the book is ambitious, but it does not compromise attention to detail. While his inclusion of eclectic anecdotes occasionally distracts from his broader historical points, his focus on individual personalities and events is generally very effective. The book’s only notable shortcoming is its depiction of the Sultans as ‘rebels’, indicating Pillai’s eventual reluctance to depart from a traditional, North India-focused account of the Sultanates. While this term seems to gesture to the first Bahmani Sultan’s splitting off from Delhi, as well as to the emergence of the other four kingdoms from the remains of the Bahmani Sultanate, it is unclear what exactly characterizes the Sultans as ‘rebels’ in contrast to the other political figures discussed in the book. This minor qualm aside, Rebel Sultans is an excellent contribution to the literature on an important and understudied period in South Asian history from which both scholars and the general public will benefit.