Ahmadnagar Sultanate

The Ahmadnagar Sultanate held the north-western Deccan, in what is now Maharashtra in western India, from 1490 to 1636. Ruled by the Nizam Shahi dynasty, it was one of five sultanates that emerged as the Bahmani Sultanate broke apart, and from the 1580s it spent half a century resisting Mughal expansion into the Deccan. Its founder, Malik Ahmad, built the city of Ahmadnagar, which gave the state its name.

Malik Ahmad's father, Malik Hasan, came from a Brahmin family of Pathri in Marathwada and rose to be chief minister of the Bahmani state after the death of Mahmud Gawan. Ahmad served as governor of Beed and of Junnar, and when the Bahmani court sent armies against him he defeated them, one reportedly 18,000 strong. On 28 May 1490 he declared himself independent. His first capital was the hill fort of Junnar, later called Shivneri; in 1494 he began building Ahmadnagar, and in 1499 he took the great fortress of Daulatabad.

When Ahmad died in 1510, his seven-year-old son Burhan Nizam Shah I came to the throne, at first under the control of court officials. Influenced by Shah Tahir, a Persian refugee and religious leader, Burhan adopted Shi'a Islam, and the dynasty kept close cultural ties with the Persianate world. He reigned until 1553.

Burhan's son Hussain Nizam Shah I joined Bijapur, Bidar and Golconda in an alliance against Rama Raya, the effective ruler of the Vijayanagara Empire. At the Battle of Talikota in January 1565 the allies won a crushing victory, and Rama Raya was beheaded, reportedly by Hussain himself. His son Murtaza Nizam Shah I took Berar in 1574, giving the sultanate its largest territory, and in 1586 turned back an invasion sent by the Mughal emperor Akbar.

Murtaza was murdered by his own son in 1588, and a run of short, unstable reigns followed, marked by rivalry between court factions and, briefly, by the promotion of the Mahdavi movement. After a civil war, Chand Bibi, sister of Burhan Nizam Shah II, became regent for an infant sultan and drove off a Mughal attack with help from Bijapur and Golconda. Soon after her death in July 1600, the Mughals took the city of Ahmadnagar and imprisoned the sultan.

Much of the kingdom stayed out of Mughal hands. Malik Ambar and other officials crowned a new sultan in 1600, with a capital first at Paranda and later at a new city, Khadki, which became Aurangabad. As chief minister, Ambar reformed land revenue, assessing fields by fertility, abolishing revenue farming and setting the tax at a share of the yield. After his death in 1626 his son Fath Khan surrendered Daulatabad to the Mughals in 1633. The general Shahaji kept the dynasty alive by enthroning an infant prince, but in 1636 the Mughal governor of the Deccan, the future emperor Aurangzeb, defeated him and the sultanate's lands were divided between the Mughal Empire and Bijapur.

The oldest surviving Deccani painting school comes from Ahmadnagar. Its rulers built the Farah Bakhsh Bagh palace, completed in 1583, and the Hasht Bihisht Bagh, strengthened forts including Daulatabad, Paranda and Ausa, and patronised court literature and Sanskrit scholarship. Within a few years of its founding, Ahmadnagar was compared to Cairo and Baghdad.

Our maps show the sultanate, labelled Ahmadnagar, in 1492, 1500, 1530, 1600 and 1650, between Bijapur, Bidar, Golkonda and the Mughal Empire. The 1650 map still draws it, although it had been annexed in 1636.