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Contemporary South Asia

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Who's the king of the castle? brahmins,

sufis and the narrative landscape of
Daulatabad
Nile Green
Version of record first published: 06 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Nile Green (2005): Who's the king of the castle? brahmins, sufis and the
narrative landscape of Daulatabad, Contemporary South Asia, 14:1, 21-37

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 Contemporary South Asia 14(1), (March, 2005) 21–37

Who’s the king of the castle?

Brahmins, sufis and the narrative
landscape of Daulatabad
NILE GREEN
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ABSTRACT This article discusses religious dimensions of three local ethnohistories of the
Indian fortress of Daulatabad and its surrounding landscape. Composed between the mid-
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, two of the accounts were written in Persian by
Muslim authors, while the third consists of a Maratha oral history (bakhar) recorded by an
early British surveyor. Despite differences in content, the three narratives bear many
similarities of structure in narrating a landscape ordered by the topographic signs of either
sufis and sultans or brahmins and rajas. More importantly, they all refer to the same local
landscape, with each history seeking an answer to the blunt facts of the region’s topography
and its corresponding architecture through recourse both to the cultural memory of their
respective traditions and to more contemporary social change in the lifetime of their authors.
Questions of aetiology are crucial to each of the accounts, with the different authors claiming
the landscape in the name of a primordial historical association with either a brahmin or a
group of sufis. All three narrators thus looked to the past to construct claims for symbolic
control of Daulatabad fort and the landscape that surrounded it by blurring the boundaries of
the geographies of royal and religious figures, of the narrative and physical landscape, and of
past and present events. In this way, we see how the same landscape is capable of projecting
profoundly different meanings according to the religious identity of the observer and their re-
interpretation and, indeed, re-imagination of the historical past.

The great fortress of Daulatabad towers over the plains surrounding it to dominate
the landscape of the northern Deccan. Centuries ago the almost vertical rock face
that elevates its inner citadel 60 metres above the surrounding countryside was
deliberately shaped to add to its defences.1 High walls and gateways surrounding
the volcanic escarpment bearing the inner citadel were added as its early Yadava
rulers (1185–1318) succumbed to the subsequent dynasties of Muslim rulers who
competed for its control during the centuries after its conquest by the Delhi Sultans

Correspondence: Nile Green, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, UK. Tel: +44 (0)161 275 3616.
E-mail: nile.green@manchester.ac.uk

ISSN 0958-4935 print; 1469-364X online/05/010021–17 Ó 2005 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/09584930500194876
 NILE GREEN

in 1296.2 In all, the colossal ruins of Daulatabad are the sum of almost 1000 years
of continued occupation by the various powers ruling the northern Deccan—a
history whose complexity is testified to in the fortress’s twin denomination as
Deogiri (Hill of the Gods) and Daulatabad (Abode of Fortune).3
Daulatabad is to Indian fortresses what Mont Saint-Michel is to European
churches.4 This comparison is based on more than the physical resemblance of the
two sites for, just as Mont Saint-Michel incorporated military architecture into its
overall ecclesiastical structure, so does Daulatabad contain a whole series of
religious sites, both Muslim and Hindu. Also, as the history and folklore of Mont
Saint-Michel record the role of the holy site in a variety of military encounters, so
is the military history of Daulatabad entwined in the historiography and folklore of
the surrounding region, with several distinct layers of religiosity. In this curious
magnetism between the symbolism and actuality of military and religious power,
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we are clearly dealing with an issue that recurs in the study of religions throughout
the world.
As the gateway to the central Deccan, Daulatabad has been the key to successful
rule of the surrounding area for centuries. Whoever held Daulatabad ruled the rich
countryside around it and the important trade routes between northern and
southern India that passed through the region, the longevity of which ensured the
region’s rich, and at times contested, history. While this article concentrates on
narrative aspects of Muslim and Hindu competition for symbolic control of the
fortress, it is important to also note the earlier Buddhist and Jain presence in the
region (not least at the famous Ellora caves a few miles from Daulatabad).5
Despite the many contours of this long history, one event has always stood head
and shoulders above the others. This was the conquest of Daulatabad in 1296 by
the armies of the Delhi sultans.6 Traditionally (and certainly problematically) read
as the defeat of the Hindu Yadava rajas by the Muslim Khalji sultans, this event
nonetheless heralded a centuries-long period of Muslim political rule in the
Deccan at large; until 1948 in the case of Daulatabad.7
After the conquests of the Delhi sultans, Muslim political power remained more
or less unchallenged in the Daulatabad region until the period of fragmentation
surrounding the decline of Mughal rule in the Deccan after the death of the
Emperor Aurangzeb in 1707. The following decades saw the emergence of several
new states in the Deccan, including the Maratha kingdom of the Peshwas based at
Poona and the Nizam’s State, based first at nearby Aurangabad and, after 1763, at
Hyderabad. By the second half of the eighteenth century, therefore, political power
that gave priority to the patronage of brahminical Hinduism was once again a
possibility, and the eighteenth-century Maratha kingdoms deliberately sought to
re-invent a tradition of Hindu kingship linked to the earlier kingdoms of the
Yadavas in the Deccan.8 The revival of earlier rituals of kingship, patronage of
Sanskrit learning and temple-building formed an important part of this
renaissance. Surrounded by the lingering hint of the first Nizam’s betrayal of
the Mughal emperor in establishing a state of his own in former Mughal territory,
the emergence of Hyderabad state witnessed corresponding attempts to tie the
young polity to an earlier Muslim history in the region. The patronage of sufi

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 THE DAULATABAD NARRATIVE LANDSCAPE

shrines, the writing of dynastic histories of the Nizams and the maintenance of
Mughal court culture all played a part in this process.9
As the towering topographic fact of the landscape, Daulatabad fort has played a
fertile role in the historical imagination of the inhabitants of the surrounding towns
and countryside. Amid the bifurcation of the region’s political and cultural history
during the eighteenth century, different readings of the meaning of this fortress
and its surrounding landscape were elaborated in accounts of the history and
sacred geography of Daulatabad and its hinterland. Drawing on earlier literary
and/or oral traditions from the region, three accounts of Daulatabad’s history and
geography are examined in this article. Two of them describe a clearly Muslim
vision of Daulatabad’s past, while a third pictures Daulatabad as part of a Hindu
sacred history and landscape. These initial differences are amplified in other ways.
The Islamic narratives are literary accounts composed in Persian; the first written
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around 1748 by Ghulam ‘Ali Azad Bilgrami (d. 1786), one of the Deccan’s
leading litterateurs, and the second composed around 1775 by an otherwise
unknown Muslim pilgrim to the region known as Khaksar-e-Sabzawari. The
Hindu narrative, by contrast, is an on-the-spot translation of a Marathi oral history
(bakhar) of Daulatabad recounted by Ganga Ram, an otherwise unknown resident
of the region, to a British surveyor in 1806 and preserved in the latter’s papers.
Ganga Ram’s narrative dates from the tail end of a period of renascent Hindu rule
in the Deccan instrumental in forming a new understanding of Maratha Hindu
identity. Yet there are also important parallels and crossovers between the
accounts. All three place the fortress of Daulatabad within a wider Hindu/Muslim
sacred geography within the region, and were composed in the neighbouring city
of Aurangabad.10 The narratives all look back to the period directly before or after
the ‘Muslim’ conquest of the Deccan five centuries earlier, in this way formulating
histories of one period of cultural change in the midst of another.
Despite the considerable overlapping between religious traditions in the Deccan,
and the emergence there at certain social levels of a religious idiom owing much to
both traditions but belonging to neither, the terms Hindu and Muslim are used
deliberately in this article. Their use aims to reflect something of the sense of the
narrators whose stories of Daulatabad are discussed here, for all three narrators
have a clear sense of the religious differences that underlie their respective
narrative claims to the fortress. Bilgrami showed his affiliation to an expressly
Muslim high cultural tradition throughout his many writings; indeed, in many
ways, he may be seen as a twilight figure attempting to uphold the connectedness
of India to Islam as Mughal imperial power evaporated and that of the Marathas
rose during his own years of writing. In his extensive use of conversion motifs in
his pilgrimage guide to the Daulatabad region, Sabzawari is no less conscious of
the existence of formal boundaries between Islam and, at least, its other. As his
name suggests, he may himself have been an immigrant from Sabzawar in Iran
rather than a product of India itself. Ganga Ram’s narrative shows all of the
preoccupations of the brahminical class, placing the prestige of the brahmin and
his rituals at the centre-stage of his history of Daulatabad. It is in this sense that
the term ‘Hinduism’ is used throughout this article; that is, in reference to the

23
 NILE GREEN

brahminical Hinduism that was promoted in the region by the rise of the Maratha
states under Shivaji and his successors. It is further significant that both of the
conceptions of religion represented by our sources are tied to embodied
representatives of authority; to sufis or brahmins, respectively. These representa-
tives are, of course, figures whose authority has been contested from within the
plurality of religious movements concealed within the easy nomenclature of both
‘Hinduism’ and ‘Islam’. This background of internal controversy, along with the
shared reliance on state patronage upon which both sufis and brahmins depended
in the Deccan, renders the comparison between these different source materials all
the more compelling.

A landscape of sufis and sultans

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The first account examined in this article is the Persian Rawzat al-awliya (Garden
of the Saints) of Azad Bilgrami (d. 1786).11 Written in Aurangabad in 1748 upon
the death of Nizam al-Mulk, founder of Hyderabad state, Rawzat al-awliya
presents the sacred history of Daulatabad’s neighbouring hilltop town of
Khuldabad.12 Khuldabad was a major centre of pilgrimage in the Deccan since
it contained the shrines of a large number of medieval sufi saints.13 Also buried in
the shrines were the remains of many of the region’s Muslim rulers, including
Aurangzeb and Nizam al-Mulk. Since Khuldabad lies only a short distance from
the fortress at Daulatabad, Bilgrami placed his account of the town into a wider
background of Muslim religious and political history that focuses on Daulatabad
as the earliest Muslim political centre in the Deccan.
Bilgrami describes a well-known tradition that the great Chishti sufi of Delhi,
Nizam al-din Awliya (d. 1325), sent two of his disciples, the brothers Burhan al-
din Gharib (d. 1337) and Muntajib al-din (d. 1309), to Daulatabad after its initial
conquest in 1296.14 He notes that it is traditionally claimed that 700 followers
accompanied each of the brothers on their separate journeys to Daulatabad, their
purpose being to spread their teachings (irshad dadan) among the people of the
region. Here, Bilgrami evokes the image of an army of prayer (lashkar-e-du‘a)
that, while long associated with Daulatabad in particular, is nonetheless
widespread in the Muslim folklore of South Asia. In Kashmir, for example, the
image is associated with the arrival of the sufi ‘Ali Hamadani (d. 1389) with 700
sayyids and the subsequent conversion of Kashmir to Islam.15 What is notable
about Bilgrami’s description of the sufis’ arrival in the Deccan is his emphasis on
the notion that Burhan al-din was granted the complete spiritual jurisdiction
(khilafat) of the Deccan region by his master in Delhi before he set off for
Daulatabad.16 Implicit in the narrative is the imagery of a subconquest for, just as
‘Ala’ al-din Khalji had first assumed political control of the Deccan from his base
in Delhi, so would Burhan al-din assume spiritual control of the very same
southern domains in similarly setting out from Delhi for Daulatabad. Just as
Bilgrami also describes Muhammad bin Tughluq abandoning his capital of Delhi
and transporting its population southwards to turn Daulatabad into his new capital,
so too does he relate the settling of the Deccan by the wider circle of Nizam

24
 THE DAULATABAD NARRATIVE LANDSCAPE

al-din’s followers after their master’s death in 1325.17 As both a political and
spiritual domain, Delhi was presented as having been re-created in the Deccan.
Bilgrami is certainly interested in political events at Daulatabad during the
period in question, and he weaves these into the structure of his wider narrative of
the sufi saints of Khuldabad. The fortress of Daulatabad looms large in Rawzat
al-awliya, and Bilgrami recounts how Muhammad bin Tughluq had only chosen it
as his capital after examining all of his advisors about the best place to locate the
capital for his newly extended state.18 Bilgrami tells us how Muhammad bin
Tughluq personally renamed Deogiri as Daulatabad, and beautified his new capital
by building many fine new edifices there, as well as gardens and pools at the
summit of its hill and a moat encircling its walls below. At no point in his
narrative, however, does Bilgrami speak of an earlier history of Daulatabad or of
its conquest from the Yadava dynasty. Indeed, the only act of destruction he
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details (and bewails) is Muhammad bin Tughluq’s abandonment of his old capital
of Delhi in his enthusiasm for his new centre at Daulatabad.
In Bilgrami’s Rawzat al-awliya, we see a clear reflection of a local geography of
political and religious power divided between the sultans of Daulatabad and the
sufis of nearby Khuldabad.19 A variety of sufis did settle in Daulatabad itself, as
we know from the presence there of the shrines of such saints as Pir Lotan and Pir
Khajinda.20 Bilgrami also mentions the early sufi, Jalal al-din Ganj-e-Rawan, a
semi-legendary figure even at this time, whose shrine cult he describes. However,
more important for Bilgrami were those sufis who settled in Khuldabad in the
fourteenth century, but whose shrines had been patronised by the great and goodly
in his own lifetime.21 Bilgrami’s history is then one of both sultans and sufis, the
classic twin poles of Muslim historical memory in pre-modern South Asia. Yet, for
Bilgrami, the central focus of rivalry in the Daulatabad region is not one between a
victorious Muslim sultan and a vanquished Hindu raja. Rather, the competition
and antagonism that he details is that between the victorious sultan Muhammad
bin Tughluq and the great sufi Burhan al-din, who refuses either to meet the sultan
or accept the lavish gifts that he sends. As testified to by the splendour and pomp
of their shrines, themselves popularly termed as a ‘[royal] court’22 (dargah) in an
ambiguous rivalry-cum-imitation of princely centres, for Bilgrami it is ultimately
the remembrance of saintly deeds that outshines the memory of the bravery of
kings.
Between Daulatabad and Khuldabad, the two pre-eminent hilltop sites in the
region, it is at Khuldabad that Bilgrami locates the sacred centre of the Deccan.
Yet the rivalry he presents between Daulatabad and Khuldabad is not so much one
between Hindu and Muslim holy sites. On the contrary, his sensitive descriptions
in Rawzat al-awliya of the Hindu cave sculptures and temples cut into the western
side of the hill on which Khuldabad is situated show that it is not a Hindu
geography that he sees the sufis as contesting.23 Rather, his account of the arrival
of the sufis alongside the conquering armies of the Delhi sultans challenges
political and military claims to the Deccan’s conquest that are no less Muslim than
himself and the sufis whose lives he chronicles. In championing the claim of
Khuldabad over Daulatabad as the true centre of the Deccan and the true source of

25
 NILE GREEN

its Muslim tradition, Bilgrami is undermining the claims of political power

as such, as well as those Indo-Persian poets and historians such as Amir Khusraw
(d. 1325) and Firishta (d. 1623) who had earlier championed the claims of
Muhammad bin Tughluq and Daulatabad as keys to Muslim power in the region.24
For Bilgrami, it is not the Daulatabad of the sultans that deserves the epithet of
Qubbat al-Islam (‘shelter/dome of Islam’) that was given to it by its medieval
conquerors, but rather the Khuldabad of the sufi saints.
The story of Daulatabad in Rawzat al-awliya is one of the rivalry of Muslim
sultans and saints rather than of Hindu and Muslim kings. It is a history tied to the
landscape and ultimately verified by architecture, for the ultimate victory of the
saints over the sultans is to be witnessed in the burial of numerous rulers of
Daulatabad within the shrines of the sufis of Khuldabad.25 Amid this inter-Muslim
rivalry of saint and sultan, what is perhaps most remarkable is that, for Bilgrami,
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Hinduism seems inconceivable as a challenge to the cultural framework in which

he is operating. Looking at the topography of hills, forts and shrines in the region
of Daulatabad, Bilgrami sees everywhere mnemonic clues alerting him to an
Islamic past, an age of victorious sultans but still greater sufis, the memory of
whose deeds is written into the landscape around him. As he further elaborated in
his Arabic work Subhat al-marjan (The Coral Rosary),26 as the place of Adam’s
fall to earth the landscape of India had been an integral part of the sacred history of
the prophets and saints of Islam since the dawn of time.
Many of Bilgrami’s sentiments are echoed in another Persian account of the
sacred Muslim geography of the Daulatabad region. Simply entitled Sawanih
(Occurrences), the text was written a few decades after Rawzat al-awliya by an
otherwise unknown pilgrim by the name of Khaksar-e-Sabzawari, who visited the
region in 1775–76.27 Like Bilgrami, Sabzawari describes the sufi shrines of
Khuldabad, as well as that of Mu’min ‘Arif (d. ca.1200?) near to the fort of
Daulatabad. However, for Sabzawari the shrines themselves are of the greatest
interest, the proof of the glory of the saints and the reason for his journey. For
much of his account Sabzawari is happy to use the older name of Deogiri (Persian:
Deogir) rather than the royal epithet of Daulatabad, and he stretches the
geographical limits of the place name to also include Khuldabad. Although
primarily a visitor to the shrines of the saints, Sabzawari also was clearly dazzled
by the sight of Daulatabad fort, which he praises on several occasions as a
unique and wonderful castle, ‘whose mountain stands like a tower in the sky’.28
Nonetheless, like Bilgrami, for Sabzawari the region gains its primary importance
from the vast number of Muslim saints (awliya) lying buried there, and he repeats
the tradition that 1400 saints lie interred in the Daulatabad region. They have, he
says, ‘lit up the earth of the Deccan like the sky’,29 a metaphor reflecting
Bilgrami’s union of heaven and earth in the guise of a saintly garden.
Sufis and sultans crop up again together, as in Sabzawari’s description of
Muhammad bin Tughluq sending Zayn al-din Shirazi and Kamal al-din Samanah
from Delhi to Daulatabad, and the sultan then nominating Zayn as the first judge
(qadi) of Daulatabad. While he provides information on the same shrines
described by Bilgrami, Sabzawari also speaks of a number of semi-legendary

26
 THE DAULATABAD NARRATIVE LANDSCAPE

saints who were responsible for bringing Islam to the region even before the
conquests of the Delhi Sultans and the migration of Burhan al-din from Delhi.
Drawing presumably on oral traditions already present in the region, he describes
Sayyid Yusuf al-Husayni as the first to bring Islam to the region and so rid
Daulatabad of infidelity (kufr).30 The early saints Mu’min ‘Arif and Jalal al-din
Ganj-e-Rawan feature in similar roles, praised in inflated terms for the miraculous
feats by which they converted the region to Islam.31 But, if Sabzawari’s is clearly a
Muslim Deccan freed from an earlier age of ‘ignorance’ by the coming of the
sufis, he nonetheless describes numerous yogis as being present at the shrines in
Khuldabad. Whatever the rhetoric of infidelity and conversion, Sabzawari’s own
descriptions of religious custom in the region thus show that such black and white
notions of religious identity belonged more to the realm of language than practice.
Yet, for Sabzawari, Daulatabad remains part of an overwhelmingly Muslim
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landscape, defined not only by the shrines of the sufi saints but also by the
mausoleums of the earlier Muslim sultans and notables of North India and the
Deccan (which he describes as lit up at festival times for the scenic enjoyment of
pilgrims).

A landscape of brahmins and rajas

The next and most colourful local account of the history of Daulatabad shows a
reading of its landscape quite distinct from that presented by Bilgrami and
Sabzawari, while, in narrative terms, at the same time showing important structural
similarities with the two Persian accounts. In this account Daulatabad (referred to
as Deogiri) evokes an unmistakably Hindu and, more specifically, a brahminical
history peopled with wise rajas and brahmins whose traces are as visible on the
landscape that the narrative evokes as the signs left by the sultans and sufis of
Bilgrami and Sabzawari. This account is found in a series of Marathi oral
narratives recounted in Aurangabad in January 1806 by Ganga Ram to the local
assistants of Superintendent of the Mysore Survey Major Colin Mackenzie.32
While nothing is known about Ram himself, both the tenor of his narrative and the
investigative customs of British surveyors suggest him to have been an educated
Maratha brahmin resident of Aurangabad.33
If Bilgrami and Sabzawari’s accounts form a local history for Persian-reading
Muslims in the Deccan, Ram’s narrative belongs rather to an oral tradition of local
history pertaining to a local Marathi-speaking Hindu audience. In reference to the
tradition of Maratha chronicles that evolved during the eighteenth century,
Mackenzie’s assistant termed Ram’s narrative a bakhar (‘bakhyr’), and it is clearly
this tradition upon which Ram draws. Ram’s presentation of the history of
Daulatabad fort ties it into a history that is dominated by powerful brahmins and
righteous rajas rather than the sufis and sultans of the Persian accounts of the
region’s historical geography. Yet there are important parallels between
the traditions, not least in the etymological origins of the Marathi term bakhar
in the Persian ‘news reports’ (khabar) collected by Mughal administrators in the
Deccan. Like Bilgrami’s work, Ram’s history is concerned with questions of

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 NILE GREEN

aetiology. But, while Bilgrami is concerned with the origins of Islam in the
Deccan and the question of its attribution to either a military or mystic influx from
the north, Ram is concerned with a distinctly Hindu historical genesis for the
surrounding landscape based on the original foundation and construction of
Daulatabad at the hands of a Hindu ruler and an accompanying holy man.
Like that of Bilgrami, Ram’s narrative relates to a basic set of factually
historical personages. The principal period of reference is to the reign of the
Yadava ruler of Daulatabad, Ramachandra (1270–1311), who Ram calls Ram
Raja, and the skills of his brahminical minister Hemadri (fl. 1260–1309), to whom
he refers by his popular name Hamanda Punt.34 Correspondingly, some of the
events that Ram narrates, such as the conquest of Daulatabad or the invention of
the old Marathi (Modi) script by Hemadri, are of a historical or semi-historical
nature. As we have noted, Ram’s narrative belongs somewhere between the
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folktale and the Marathi bakhar tradition.35 As Ronald Inden has written with
regard to Hindu historiography, ‘these texts were themselves not read simply as
disorderly collections of legends, myths and folktales . . . [but] listeners took one
of these, in a recent recension, as a body of knowledge suitable for the times and
circumstances in which he or she lived’.36 Indeed, Ram’s account of Daulatabad’s
foundation by Raja and Punt actually contradicts the written medieval chronicle of
the latter, in which Punt claimed that Bhillama V (1185–93) had founded the
fortress. What Ram’s account does give, however, is a rich insight into the sacred
history and topography of Daulatabad as understood by a Maratha resident of the
region in the first years of the nineteenth century, when the fortress was still under
Muslim control.
Ganga Ram’s story of the origins of Daulatabad describes the fortunes of a
shepherd boy called Ram who lived on the bare hill upon which the fortress was
later built.37 Ram begins by describing how the shepherd Ram, tending to his herd
one day, saw one of his goats eagerly eating the leaves from a golden tree. The boy
paid little attention to the matter until the evening when he noticed that the dung of
this goat had taken the form of golden nuggets, which he then hastily collected.
(Here Ram’s visual references to his surroundings begin, for such golden trees still
form a common part of the flora of the region.) Some time later, the shepherd was
befriended by a wandering holy man of the gosain (Urdu/Hindi gosain, gosai
baba) tradition. As a possessor himself of the 32 natural signs of perfection
according to Sanskrit tradition, the gosain was delighted to recognise the same
qualities in the shepherd boy. The reason for this delight was that he required
another such ‘perfect’ person to perform the dark alchemical operation that was his
secret design.38 After a year’s plotting, the gosain boiled a cauldron of oil and
prepared a jar full of other ingredients before luring the boy to a cave in the hill of
Daulatabad where he had placed them. Persuading his new friend to walk three
times around the cauldron, he was about to throw the boy into the boiling oil when
the latter suspected the trick, turned on his false friend and managed to throw him
into the oil instead. Admiring the double trick in classic folktale fashion, the
gosain advised the shepherd to throw in the contents of the jar as well, and upon
doing so the boy saw the oil and the gosain both transform into liquid gold.

28
 THE DAULATABAD NARRATIVE LANDSCAPE

The gold shortly assumed the form of a cult statue, and, whenever Ram broke off a
part of the statue, the missing golden part mysteriously grew back by the following
morning.39 Furnished with this wealth, the boy decided to found a kingdom and
asked a holy man living a reclusive life of austerity in another cave on the hill of
Daulatabad to be his chief minister. This holy man was none other than Punt, the
famous brahmin who, unlike the treacherous gosain, is the hero of the story and
the figure whose religious authority Ram’s narrative reinforces. Together, Punt
and the shepherd boy used the gold to form a great army and conquer the whole of
the Deccan. As their capital, they founded the fortress of Daulatabad on the hill
that had previously been their wild home of cave and pasture, building the citadel
(chota kot) and the surrounding outer fortress (maha kot), and peopling a city
there. When the construction of the fort was complete, a throne with an umbrella
was erected over the shepherd boy and he was set on the throne and given the title
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of Ram Raja. Clearly, the possession of a castle is seen as the fundamental

requirement of kingship.
Ram’s narrative relates to a Hindu cultural world, drawing on popular Hindu
religious practice to present a statue in a cave as a source of good fortune and the
wisdom of a cave-dwelling ascetic brahmin as capable of founding a kingdom. At
a more mundane level, the golden dung, which the shepherd boy’s mother later
continued to collect as the basis of her family’s wealth, has clear parallels in
village economic life.
Yet such traditions of royal genesis and state formation also were sometimes
recounted by Muslim historians, and Ram’s contemporary Mir Husayn ‘Ali Kirmani
(d. after 1810) included similar traditions uniting a yogi, brahmin and dynastic
founder in his Persian history of the southern Deccan.40 We also see in Ram’s story a
mirroring of the claims made by Bilgrami for Muhammad bin Tughluq as having
constructed the buildings of the fortress and populated it by transferring the
population of Delhi southwards to the Deccan. This interplay of traditions is also
reflected in that one of the earliest descriptions to be written in India of the
alchemical ritual described by Ram is to be found in the Tarikh al-Hind of the
Muslim savant al-Biruni (d. ca.1050).41 Al-Biruni’s description of the practices of
Hindu alchemists almost mirrors Ram’s episode in the cave exactly, while another
of al-Biruni’s alchemical tales describes a siddha (‘perfected’ ascetic) turning to
gold in a fire before having his self-replenishing fingers repeatedly broken off.42
Ram’s motif of dynastic shepherd origins was by no means unique and, in his
own lifetime, the Maratha Holkar rulers of Indore were similarly regarded as
descendants of shepherds. Local histories written in the southern Deccan only a
few years earlier also show parallels in the origins ascribed to the Beda Nayakas.
The founders of several leading Nayaka families were described as having tended
to herds of cattle, while underground temples and a cave-dwelling holy man were
also associated with them.43 The story of Ram Raja also belongs to a wider
tradition of associating the etymology of hills, and subsequently forts, with
shepherds. The fortress of Gingee was popularly held to have been fortified by the
chief of the local shepherd community who subsequently founded the Kone
dynasty (1190–1330). In the Deccan, similar legends are connected to the forts

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at Bhongir, Gavilgad and Golkonda, whose etymology is popularly regarded as

meaning the ‘shepherd’s hill’. In an appropriate reflection of Ram’s story, the
Yadava rulers of Deogiri were themselves termed ‘shepherd kings’ (gauli raj) in
the northern Deccan in the nineteenth century.44 What we see here are the traces of
a political economy of kingship combining the qualities of the shepherd, the sacred
associations of herding cattle and the possession of a fortified hilltop as the basis
of state formation.
To return to Ram’s narrative—in the second half of his account, the brahmin
Punt becomes the central character rather than the shepherd king Ram Raja. As in
Bilgrami’s narrative, the focus shifts between a political figure (sultan/raja) and a
religious figure (sufi/brahmin). In this section, Punt is supernaturally carried off to
Sri Lanka at night while sleeping in his bed. He wakes up at the court of King
Vibishana, where he is surrounded by the terrifying figures of the king’s rakshakas
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(supernatural guardians) and informed of the king’s grave illness.45 Punt manages
to cure Vibishana by observing that the illness was caused by the king’s failure to
keep the brahmins in his kingdom happy. As a reward for his advice, Punt was
allowed to return to Daulatabad with the two things with which he is usually
credited in the folklore of the region with inventing or introducing to the Deccan;
namely, the Modi script and the 18 types of grain. He was also given a gift of the
purest gold. On his return to Daulatabad, Punt was subsequently able to found
several towns and a great number of temples with this gold. Ram concludes his
history by declaring that Ram Raja ruled for a very long time and that Daulatabad
became renowned through his and Punt’s deeds, even though before them it was
only known as a hill.
While Ram’s account of the holy man and the king is a classic example of a
story type known well in Indian folklore, it serves to bring into sharper relief the
impact of Bilgrami’s story of Burhan al-din’s refusal to counsel Muhammad bin
Tughluq for, in Indian narrative traditions, the religious are invariably expected to
be the advisors of kings. Yet, in a reflection of Bilgrami’s and Sabzawari’s picture
of the presence of the hundreds of sufis resting at peace around Daulatabad as the
true source of the Deccan’s well-being and prosperity, Ram instead posits the
presence of happy brahmins as the necessary ingredient in successful statehood.
Structurally, then, the narrators offer a parallel model of the holy man as both
delimiter of royal excess and supernatural protector of the state at large.
Like Bilgrami and Sabzawari’s accounts, Ram’s narrative clearly relates to a
wider oral historical tradition in the Deccan. This is most clear in his description of
Punt’s temple-building project, for scores of early (generally Yadava period)
mortar-less temples exist all over the Deccan whose construction is attributed by
their client communities to the famous brahmin.46 As in the case of Bilgrami’s
history and Sabzawari’s pilgrimage account, there is a physical core in Ram’s
narrative that relates to the religious uses of the landscape. For, just as the Persian
narratives reflect a vibrant devotional tradition associated with the region’s many
sufi shrines, so in presenting Daulatabad as a Hindu holy site (of Punt’s cave
retreat and the destination of the wandering gosain) before it was a fort does
Ram’s history reflect Hindu cult practice in the region.47 There are numerous

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Yadava period rock-cut caves at Daulatabad associated with Hindu worship,

several of which (like that in Ram’s narrative) contain cult images. Daulatabad,
however, had never ceased to be a centre of regional Hindu pilgrimage throughout
its centuries of Muslim rule, and it was against the background of this ongoing
tradition that Ram recounted the site’s history in 1806.
Except perhaps for a brief period, Hindu and Muslim occupation had always
overlapped in Daulatabad. The North African traveller Ibn Battuta (d. 1368) left a
tantalising description of the lifestyles of Daulatabad’s wealthy (Hindu) merchants
in the middle of the fourteenth century.48 Naturally, these residents developed
shrines at Daulatabad that post-dated the conquests of the Delhi sultans and the
subsequent immigration of Muslims from northern India. In a striking parallel to
Ram’s description of Punt dwelling in a cave, at the foot of Daulatabad’s hill is a
cave containing the burial or commemorative edifice (samadhi) of the sixteenth-
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century sant Janardhan Swami, preceptor of the great Maratha sant Eknath
(d. 1599) and, by tradition, the chief minister and advisor to a governor of
Daulatabad.49 During the period of Muslim rule, Daulatabad also remained
important as a centre for gosains, and a series of such ascetics were associated
with the site.50 Among them was the gosain Manpuri Prasad (d.c. 1730?) who
remains closely connected in the region’s oral tradition to his sufi companion Shah
Nur Hammami (d. 1692), whose shrine in Aurangabad Sabzawari described as
being visited by all of the people of the city.51 At Prasad’s lodge (math) at
Daulatabad, two early paintings of Prasad and Shah Nur hang side by side.52 In his
many poems, Prasad was keen to stress the essential unity of Muslims and Hindus,
and in one poem he called Daulatabad the ‘alphabet of the Deccan’ where Hindus
and Muslims (vir aur mir) together maintain a vigil over the gates of the fort.
Notably, Prasad here uses a vocabulary more suggestive of different social groups
than monolithic religious groups. Suitably, local tradition also refers to a gosain
with the strikingly Persianate name of Daulatgiri who served as the governor
(qal‘adar) of Daulatabad. It must be borne in mind, however, that these sant and
gosain traditions were far from identical with the brahminical Hindu religiosity
offered by Ram; indeed, in an historical sense, his narrative may be seen to reflect
certain shifts in the world of Hindu religiosity in the Deccan that had emerged
from the political struggles of the eighteenth century.

Parallel histories, shared landscapes

While Ram clearly drew on pre-existing styles of narrative expression drawn from
the bakhar, epic (itihasa) and folkloric traditions, in comparing him with Bilgrami
and Sabzawari we must be aware of the nuances within his version of Hindu—or,
more specifically, brahminical—religious tradition. Ideologically, Ram’s story is
no more a subaltern history than Bilgrami’s tales of the sufis. The former’s history
contains a strongly brahminical vision that centres around the figure of the
brahmin hero Punt, and is most explicitly seen in the latter’s advice to King
Vibishana to make the protection of the brahmins in his kingdom a priority.53
Indeed, in a second narrative,54 Ram described Punt as personally installing Ram

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Raja as king; a clear reference to the brahminical rituals of kingship that had been
re-invented in the Maratha kingdoms in the Deccan during the eighteenth cen-
tury. This Maratha context is of great importance, since it is conceivable that the
Ram Raja of Ram’s story was an elision of the Yadava Ramachandra usually
associated with Punt (Hemadri) and Raja Ram, the later son and heir of the great
Maratha ruler Shivaji. Since Shivaji was himself frequently celebrated in oral epics
during this period, the memory of this Raja Ram (r. 1689–1700) may have played a
part in Ram’s rendition of the Daulatabad region’s history a century after his death.55
Past and present politics were clearly a base ingredient in all of the narratives.
These elements in Ram’s narrative present a vivid parallel with the account
Bilgrami gives of the evolution of the dynasty of the Faruqi sultans that had earlier
ruled over Khandesh in the northern Deccan.56 In this account, the conqueror of
Khandesh, Malik Raja (d. 1398), is presented as a disciple of the Khuldabad sufi
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Zayn al-din, who gives him the classic sufi insignia of cloak (khirqa) and licence
(ijaza). After making the Hindu raja of Khandesh submit, the victorious Malik
Raja passed on these insignia to his descendants, each of whom were initiated as
sufis before they acceded to the throne. Like Ram’s narrative, Bilgrami’s universe
is one that demands that rulers must not only be strong, but also come as close to
their spiritual advisors as possible. In this way, kings and saints equally dominate
the political imagination of both narrators.
Despite their differences, all three accounts share a fundamentally similar
picture of how the world operates. All three emphasise the centrality of the king
and holy man in the historical genesis of the Daulatabad region. We see the same
narrative template; albeit with different figures (the sufi or the brahmin) made to fit
self-consciously Hindu and Muslim histories. However, the most important
commonality between the accounts is that they are all concerned with explaining
the same local landscape. As pre-modern local histories of the same places, all
three accounts form narrative quests within two different cultural traditions for the
historical origins of the topographic facts of the same landscape. Despite the
decades that divided them, all three narrators from their common vantage point in
Aurangabad were struck by the inescapable topographic fact of Daulatabad fort
and the cave temples and sufi shrines connected to it. For Bilgrami and Ram, it
was the formidable landmark of the fortress that provided a common narrative
anchor and inspiration, with the claim of the fortress’s foundation or conquest
lending their different heroes a very visible and tangible trophy. As control of the
fortress had always proven the decisive factor in the politics of the region, so did
power over the imaginary Daulatabad of narrative prove the key to symbolic
control of the hinterland that comprised its surrounding sacred geography.
Symbolic dominion over the fortress lent proof of supremacy to either the sufi or
the brahmin, and so by extension to the networks of shrines and temples associated
with the Khuldabad sufis and Punt in the surrounding region. Other features of
local geography and topography also were important to the narrators. A local
audience would have immediately recognised the references to the golden trees of
the region, the hermit caves that are scattered around the fort, and the local rivalry
of Khuldabad and Daulatabad as neighbouring hill settlements with different

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claims to primacy. What are presented in the histories are narrative maps showing
the same landscape being read differently.

Conclusion
A focus upon the common facts of topography brings us to the buildings that stand
at the centre of these rival narrative geographies. Ram’s story of Daulatabad is
ultimately the story of Punt, a figure who has for centuries been renowned as the
builder of the stone temples that form the most venerated sites of scores of towns
and villages in the Deccan. Ram’s story is on one level a history of Daulatabad
fort. However, through the common point of reference provided by the figure of
Punt, it also provides an aetiology for a sacred landscape of village temples
stretching throughout the Deccan, whose source is presented by Ram as being
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Daulatabad.57
In this sense, Ram’s narrative is an act of the spiritual centralisation of a
fragmented sacred Hindu geography made during an age of renascent Hindu
political, cultural and religious power in the Deccan. For, while he was telling his
story to Mackenzie’s assistants, the rulers of the neighbouring Maratha kingdoms
were patronising new temples that would connect with the earlier Hindu history of
the region that formed Ram’s inspiration. Only a few years earlier, Ahilyabai
Holkar of Indore (1765–95) had patronised the construction of the first major
temple built at nearby Ellora for centuries, possibly along with another to the
popular Maratha deity Khandoba in Aurangabad’s outlying village of Satara. In a
process that was the inverse of Ram’s narratology, past and present were here
being mediated through the manipulation of the landscape itself.
For their part, Bilgrami and Sabzawari provided a parallel aetiology for the
scores of Muslim shrines that map out the Deccan’s sacred Muslim geography.
Their narratives centralised a dispersed geography of sufi shrines around the
location of their purported fons et origo at Daulatabad/Khuldabad. They were
writing the story of the first sufis to come to the Deccan, and of the shrines that the
followers of Burhan al-din chose to build at Khuldabad rather than Daulatabad. In
so doing, they made a claim for the spiritual precedence of Khuldabad over not
only Daulatabad, but over a wider sacred geography of Muslim shrines scattered
throughout the Deccan.
The narratives of Bilgrami, Sabzawari and Ram all rely on the symbolic cachet
of kingship. Just as the reputation of Punt was bolstered by his association with
Ram Raja, so was the authority of the Khuldabad sufis enhanced by the burial in
their shrines of a series of Muslim kings. It is for this reason that the royal fortress
must be alternatively founded or rejected by the brahmin or sufi. Composed during
a period that witnessed a profound re-organisation of Hindu and Muslim political
power and sacred space in the Deccan, the narratives show how symbolic
hegemony over the region’s primary fortress was deemed a prerequisite for the
expression of religious authority. The three narrators each looked to the past to
construct aetiological claims for control of Daulatabad fort and the landscape that
surrounded it by blurring the boundaries of the geographies of royal and

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religious figures, of narrative and physical landscape, and of past and present
encounters.
Given the political background against which all three of our sources narrate
their stories of Daulatabad, it is important that we do not gloss over the ways in
which this political context added urgency to the rival claims that Bilgrami/
Sabzawari and Ram represented. Bilgrami, in particular, wrote as a representative
of a Muslim high culture that had flourished under the patronage of the Mughals
and their early Asaf Jah successors, but that was mortally threatened during his
lifetime by the rise of the Marathas who raided Aurangabad repeatedly throughout
the eighteenth century. Bilgrami’s vision of the principal rivalry of sultan and sufi,
his complimentary words on the sculptures at Ellora and the broader cultural
values of the literary world he represented (which counted Hindu bureaucrats
among its prominent Persian writers) all demonstrate that his vision was not a
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communalist one in the modern sense. Yet, as a representative of a social system

that he and many of his contemporaries clearly regarded as under threat from the
Marathas, it is important that we do not ignore the hostility that he at times
directed towards the Marathas and their brahminical representatives, if not towards
Hindus at large.58 In his discussion of the rise of the Marathas, Bilgrami praised
their military prowess while bemoaning their determination to strip the Deccan’s
zamindars (landowning elite) of their status and income, and, by implication, ruin
the economic foundations of the cultured class to which he and the representatives
of the region’s sufi shrines belonged. Tellingly, he revealed his concern that the
aim of the Marathas was to make the brahmins of the Konkan the ‘rulers of the
world’.59
In direct contrast to Bilgrami’s panegyric to the sufis (whose shrines were
maintained by land-grants and the largesse of a sympathetic class of notables) is
Ram’s defence of the religious and geographical claims of the brahminical class.
But, as a class that gained renewed status and patronage during the eighteenth
century, the brahmins—supported by the Marathas—had their rivals and
detractors. Ironically, Bilgrami voiced his criticism of the Konkani brahmins by
inverting the value of the language of mendicancy that had for centuries been used
to praise the sufis, berating the brahmins for the ‘begging’ (gada’i) craft and nature
that he claimed enabled them to acquire such large sources of income.60 His
remark suggests that we must neither discount nor misconstrue the nature of this
antagonism, for ultimately we are looking at the narrative expression of a
competition for limited resources between different religious specialists (sufis/
brahmins) rendered as rivals through perceived (if not always actual) differences in
the patterns of patronage of the rival regional polities of the Marathas and the
Mughals/Nizams. In this way, political rivalries found religious expression.
In the teaching of South Asia’s religious traditions, the fact that the same Indian
landscape is capable of projecting profoundly different meanings according to the
religious identity of the observer and their re-interpretation and re-imagination of
the historical past reminds us of the ultimate inseparability of Hindu and Muslim
South Asia. For centuries, both religious groups (in their many distinct parts) have
shared not only the same landscape, but also many of the same narrative structures

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and motifs, as well as political preoccupations and cultic centres. It is therefore

vital that we recognise and, indeed, stress the co-existence and, at times,
contention of these different readings of the meanings of the Indian landscape, not
least in the face of modern hegemonic claims to a brahminical Hindu reading of
the geographical face of India. Local histories, particularly when joined to the
relatively firm anchorage of topographic and architectural landmarks, are among
the most important means of claiming belonging by siting a community presence
in a given spot through historical time. Confronted with attempts to eradicate this
multiple past, whether through programmes of ethnic cleansing or the no less
sinister attempts to destroy the ‘anchoring’ architecture of ancient shrines and
mosques,61 it is surely the duty of scholarship to point to the plurality of the voices
of the Indian past and their diverse readings of the meanings of India’s landscape.
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Notes and references

1. For architectural studies of the fortress and its surroundings, see R.A. Ansari, ‘Medieval Daulatabad
Complex: A Cultural Study’, PhD dissertation (Aurangabad: Marathwada University, 1983); and M.S. Mate
and T.V. Pathy (eds), Daulatabad: A Report on the Archaeological Investigations (Pune/Aurangabad:
Deccan College/Marathwada University, 1992).
2. See P. Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999); and O.P. Verma, The Yadavas and Their Times (Nagpur: Vidarbha Samshodhan Mandal,
1970).
3. For the sake of convenience, the name Daulatabad is used throughout the article.
4. See G. Bordonove, Le Roman du Mont Saint-Michel: douze siècles de foi, d’art et d’histoire (Paris:
R. Laffont, 1966).
5. See M.K. Dhavalikar, Ellora (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
6. See A.M. Husain, The Rise and Fall of Muhammad Bin Tughluq (Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyyat-i Delli, 1972);
and Jackson, op cit, Ref 2.
7. On re-figuring Hindu and Muslim identities in pre-modern South Asia, see R.M. Eaton, ‘Temple desecration
and Indo-Muslim states’, in D. Gilmartin and B.B. Lawrence (eds), Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking
Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000), pp 246–281;
and C. Talbot, ‘Inscribing the other, inscribing the self: Hindu–Muslim identities in pre-colonial India’,
Comparative Studies in History and Society, Vol 37, No 4, 1995, pp 692–722.
8. On these transformations, see H. Kotani, ‘Kingship, state and local society in the seventeenth-to-nineteenth
century Deccan with special reference to ritual functions’, in N. Karashima (ed), Kingship in Indian History
(Delhi: Manohar, 1999), pp 237–271. On the evolution of the Maratha kingdoms more generally, see
S. Gordon, Marathas, Marauders, and State Formation in Eighteenth Century India (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1994); and A.R. Kulkarni, The Marathas (Delhi: Books & Books, 1996).
9. See N.S. Green, The Sufis Saints of Awrangabad: Narratives, Contexts, Identities, PhD dissertation (London:
University of London, 2002).
10. Aurangabad lies 13 kilometres from the fort. By the seventeenth century, its population had overtaken that of
Daulatabad and, from this period, Daulatabad served as Aurangabad’s guardian fortress.
11. Ghulam ‘Ali Azad Bilgrami, Rawzat al-awliya (Delhi: Liberty Art Press, 1416/1996) [Persian]. On Bilgrami,

see M. Siddiqi, ‘Azād Belgrāmı̄’, in Ehsan Yarshater (ed), Encyclopaedia Iranica (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1982).
12. Although this date is widely acknowledged, Carl Ernst has also convincingly argued for a date of 1152/1739.
See C.W. Ernst, Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History, and Politics at a South Asian Sufis Center (New York:
State University of New York Press, 1992), p 281.
13. On the Khuldabad sufis, see Ernst, op cit, Ref 12.
14. Bilgrami, op cit, Ref 11, p 78.
15. On this figure, see F.M. Hassnain, Shah Hamadan of Kashmir (Srinagar: Gulshan, 2001).
16. Shortly before Bilgrami’s birth the same process re-occurred when Shah Kalim Allah (d. 1729) of Delhi
granted his disciple Nizam al-din Awrangabadi (d. 1729) wilayat of the Deccan. Nizam al-din was also
associated with Bilgrami’s patron, Nizam al-Mulk. A shrine was constructed around his tomb in Aurangabad.

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17. Bilgrami, op cit, Ref 11, p 79. See also N.B. Roy, ‘The transfer of capital from Delhi to Daulatabad’, Journal
of Indian History, Vol 20, 1941, pp 159–180.
18. Bilgrami, op cit, Ref 11, pp 79–80.
19. Such neighbouring bipolar situating of royal and sufis centres was common in the Deccan, seen most vividly
at the subsequent centres of Bijapur and Firuzabad.
20. Forty-six such tombs and mausoleums have been recorded within the walls of Daulatabad. See Ansari, op cit,
Ref 1, p 618.
21. On revenue and land grants to the Khuldabad shrines by both Muslim and Hindu notables during this period,
see C.W. Ernst, ‘Royal policy and patronage of Sufis shrines in Mughal revenue documents from
Khuldabad’, in A.R. Kulkarni, M.A. Nayeem and T.R. de Souza (eds), Medieval Deccan History:
Commemoration Volume in Honour of P.M. Joshi (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1996), pp 76–91. Ansari,
op cit, Ref 1 also includes an appendix of photocopies of original manuscripts of many such grants, dealing
with donations from, inter alia, Aurangzeb and the Maratha ruler Shahu. On such Maratha patronage of
Muslim religious institutions elsewhere in the Deccan, see S. Gordon, ‘Maratha patronage of Muslim
institutions in Burhanpur and Khandesh’, in Gilmartin and Lawrence, op cit, Ref 7, pp 327–338.
22. Bilgrami, personally preferred the more neutral maqbara (grave).
23. Ibid, p 74. Bilgrami describes the size and carving of the temples at Ellora, calling it a spectacular place that
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well deserves visiting.

24. Amir Khusraw, like Bilgrami a companion of dervishes and kings, had written his Miftah al-futuh (Key to the
Conquests) and Tughluqnama (Book of the Tughluqs) in praise of the victories of the Tughluq rulers. See
S. Sharma, ‘Amir Khusraw and the genre of historical narratives in verse’, Comparative Studies of South
Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol 22, Nos 1–2, 2002, pp 112–118.
25. Correspondingly, three of the governors (qal’adars) of Daulatabad fort were buried in the shrine of
Baha al-din Ansari (d. 1515), a short distance away from the fort.
26. On this text, see C.W. Ernst, ‘India as a sacred Islamic Land’, in D.S. Lopez (ed), Religions of India in
Practice (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1995), pp 556–563.
27. Khaksar Sabzawari, Sawanih (: Asiatic Society of Bengal, Curzon Collection, ms 85 [Persian]). The author is
grateful to Carl Ernst for sending a photocopy of this manuscript.
28. Sabzawari, op cit, Ref 27, folio 2l.
29. Sabzawari, op cit, Ref 27, folio 3l.
30. On these themes in an earlier period, see A. Ahmad, ‘Epic and counter-epic in medieval India’, Journal of the
American Oriental Society, Vol 83, 1963, pp 470–476.
31. Sabzawari’s presentation of these figures has also been discussed in Ernst, op cit, Ref 12, pp 164–165.
32. Ganga Ram’s narratives were translated into English by Mackenzie’s assistant (munshi), Suba Rao Brahmin,
and are preserved among the latter’s papers in the Oriental and India Office Collections (London: Oriental
and India Office Collections, Mackenzie Collection, general, Vol XLV). No original Marathi version of this
oral narrative is known to be extant. Mackenzie later became a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal
and was the first Surveyor General of India. On Mackenzie’s career, see Sir Alexander Johnston,
‘Biographical sketch of the literary career of the late Colonel Colin Mackenzie’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society, Vol 1, 1834, pp 333–364.
33. The manuscript of the translation shows admirable attempts at ethnographic precision; it contains the
date and location of the original narration and its subsequent translation, and includes ambiguous
Marathi words in the text. Unfortunately, there is no room to discuss the issues surrounding the collection of
such data by colonial investigators. On their techniques, see C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information:
Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997).
34. See R.G. Bhandarkar, Early History of the Deccan (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1983),
pp 75–92. Hemadri was also the author of numerous dharmashashtra texts, including the famous
Caturvarga-cintamani. The author is grateful to Anne Feldhaus for providing initial information on this
figure.
35. Several bakhars dealt with the period of Ramachandra and Hemadri, including the Mahikavatici Bakhar, one
of the earliest examples of the genre. On this and other literary counterparts to Ganga Ram’s oral history, see
C. Talbot, ‘The story of Prataparudra: Hindu historiography on the Deccan frontier’, in Gilmartin and
Lawrence (eds), op cit, Ref 7, pp 282–299; and S.G. Tulpule, Classical Marathi Literature: From the
Beginnings to A.D. 1818 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1979).
36. See R. Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p 233.
37. Ganga Ram, ‘The Legendary Story of Ram-Rajah of Davageery, Now Called Dowlatabad’ (London: Oriental
and India Office Collections, Mackenzie Collection, General, Vol XLV).
38. Such alchemical references crop up constantly with reference to both Muslim and Hindu holy men in the
textual and oral traditions of the region. On Yadava patronage of alchemy at Daulatabad, see D.G. White,

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The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996),
pp 112–114.
39. An interesting parallel is found in a folktale relating to the cave of Amarnath and its natural ice lingam in the
Kashmir Himalaya. A folktale attached to the cave claims that a Muslim shepherd, Buta Malik, was given a
sack of coal by a saint while he was wandering in the mountains. When he returned home, Malik found that
the coal had turned into gold. He then hurried back to thank the saint but instead found a cave and the
lingams. Muslim shepherds still show the way to pilgrims to the cave and part of the donations are given to
the ‘descendants’ of Buta Malik.
40. See Meer Husain Ali Kirmani, Tazkirath-ul-Bilad wal Hukkam, trans. S.A. Shariff (Mysore: Aftab-e-
Karnataka Press, 1996), pp 35–43.
41. See Alberuni, Alberuni’s India, trans. E.C. Sachau (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), pp 191–192.
42. Ibid, p 192.
43. See N. Ota, ‘Bēda Nāyakas and their historical narratives in Karnataka during the post-Vijayanagara period’,
in Karashima, op cit, Ref 8, pp 237–271.
44. See W.W. Hunter et al., Imperial Gazetteer of India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908–1931), Vol 15, p 230.
45. In the Ramayana, Vibishana is the brother of the demon king Ravana and a diplomat rather than a king.
46. On so-called Hemadpanti temples, see O.P. Verma, Survey of Hemadpanti Temples from Maharashtra
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(Nagpur: n.p., 1973).

47. Modern archaeologists have suggested that Daulatabad was a pilgrimage centre (tirth) before it was a turned
into a fortress by the Yadavas. An earlier assumption of such primacy was seized upon at the end of the
Nizam’s rule in 1948 when a cult image was placed in Daulatabad’s medieval Friday mosque to transform it
into a temple. See Ansari, op cit, Ref 1, p 412; and Mate and Pathy, op cit, Ref 1, pp 23–25.
48. Ibn Battuta, Travels in Asia and Africa, trans. H.A.R. Gibb (Rawalpindi: Services Book Club, 1985),
pp 225–226.
49. Ansari, op cit, Ref 1, p 593.
50. B. Talang, Aurangabad ki Hindi Santwani (Allahabad: n.p., 1961), pp 75–79.
51. Sabzawari, op cit, Ref 27, folio 37l.
52. On the oral tradition of these two figures, see N.S. Green, ‘Oral competition narratives of Muslim and Hindu
saints in the Deccan’, Asian Folklore Studies, Vol 63, No 2, 2004, pp 221–242.
53. The same theme recurs in a similar narrative that Mackenzie and his assistants collected in nearby
Ahmadnagar, subsequently entitled ‘History of Hamanda Punt’ in Mackenzie’s papers (London: Oriental and
India Office Collections Mackenzie Collection, General, Vol. XLV).
54. ‘An Account of Dowlatabad, Anciently Called Devageery’, manuscript (London: Oriental and India Office
Collections Mackenzie Collection, General, Vol XLV). On these rituals, see Kotani, op cit, Ref 8.
55. On Raja Ram, see Kulkarni, op cit, Ref 22, pp 64–68. See also J.W. Laine, ‘Śivājı̄ as epic hero’, in
G.D. Sontheimer (ed), Folk Culture, Folk Religion and Oral Traditions as a Component in Maharashtrian
Culture (Delhi: Manohar, 1995), pp 1–24; and J.W. Laine and S.S. Bahulkar, The Epic of Shivaji: A
Translation and Study of Kavindra Paramananda’s Sivabharata (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2001).
56. Bilgrami, op cit, Ref 11, pp 102–103. On this dynasty, see P.M. Joshi, ‘Khāndēsh’, in H.K Sherwani and
P.M. Joshi (eds), History of Medieval Deccan (1295–1724) (Hyderabad: Government of Andhra Pradesh,
1973–74), Vol 1, pp 491–516.
57. On a comparable interweaving of Hindu narrative and sacred space in Bengal, see P. Ghosh, ‘Tales, tanks and
temples: the creation of a sacred centre in seventeenth century Bengal’, Asian Folklore Studies, Vol 61, No 2,
2002, pp 193–222.
58. This is borne out in another of Bilgrami’s works, Khazana-ye-‘amira (1763), in which he wove a
political history of his own times into an account of the poets of his and earlier ages. See Ghulam ‘Ali Azad
Bilgrami, Khazana-ye-‘Amira (Lucknow: Nawal Kishawr, 1287/1871 [Persian]). On the rise of the Marathas,
see pp 39–49.
59. Ibid, pp 45, 47.
60. Ibid, p 48.
61. Y.S. Sikand, ‘Another Ayodhya in the making? The Baba Budhangiri Dargah controversy in South India’,
Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol 20, No 2, 2000, pp 211–227.

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