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Who is Manu Pillai?.
The following story could be apocryphal but has all the trappings of truth!.
Manu Pillai was the blue-eyed boy and Chief of Staff of Shashi Tharoor. Once he put up a note to his boss on "Boating on the River Oxus" which included a dozen sesquipedelian words--- the Boss Shashi had not heard and that was the last Pillai was heard of in Shashi's Office.
Three years ago, Manu Pillai wrote an outstanding book--"The Ivory Throne" a fascinating feast of contemporary history.It is a remarkable amalgam of history and anecdotage about Kerala society over three centuries .This book fetched for him the coveted Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar.
Pillai is back with another explosive bang !
His latest book is "Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji".The volume catapults
Deccan to the centre of our attention – where it belongs.
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'.
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.
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. He weaves a thrilling account of a historically significant and somewhat ignored area and arena in the history of South Asia . He goes beyond recounting a bland narrative of peaceful coexistence and cultural interchange between Hindus and Muslims. Concentrating on Persian and European encounters with the Sultanates, Pillai amply proves the commanding and cultural significance of the region in the early modern world.
Pillai throws a flood of light on the lacuna in the pre-Maratha histories of the Deccan. His area of study is from Alauddin Khilji's victory over the Yadavas in 1296 to the death of Aurangzeb in 1707.
The book concentrates on the four most significant Sultanates—the Bahmanis, Adil Shahis, Nizam Shahis and Qutb Shahis. We have an analysis of the origin of the Bahmani Sultanate and its rivals. Pillai explores the role of the Bahmani and Vijayanagar kingdoms capping it with a recounting of the Sultanates' collective defeat of the Vijayanagar Empire. The focus shifts thereafter to the Adil Shahi, Nizam Shahi and Qutb Shahi kingdoms, portraying the impressive players in the drama—such as : Ibrahim Adil Shah II, Malik Ambar and several of the Qutb Shahs.
Pillai does not fail to portray the cultural and religious segment of the region's history . Eloquent is the chapter 'Saraswati's Son', which focuses on Ibrahim Adil Shah II of Bijapur. Pillai is the master of the comprehensive arena of secondary literature.
Considerable importance has been given by Pillai to Hindu–Muslim relations in the Deccan, an important wing of Deccan's tortuous history. According to him while Hindu–Muslim rivalries existed, 'the world was really not perceived in terms of religious or communal divide'. Pillai not only mentions shared styles of art, architecture and dress between Hindu and Muslim dynasties but also highlights less appreciated areas of exchange between religious communities such as the shared Sufi and Virashaiva devotional site at Ahmad Shah's tomb. Pillai displays perfect comprehension the early modern Deccan as a region where interreligious differences hardly appeared as unalloyed Hindu–Muslim divide. He 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'. Pillai's analysis 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.
Persian and European encounters with the Deccan had a lot of influence on the cultural and political importance of the region.
While the names of Muhammad Qutb Shah and Ibrahim Adil Shah have slipped 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. The book underscores the need to turn 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 use of scholarship from a range of fields and his inclusion of many sources from the last ten years gives the work a distinct calibre. The book is an outstanding contribution to the literature on an important and understudied period in South Asian history from which many will benefit.
His bibliography is extensive and sophisticated, and the book is simply un-putdownable.It lists almost 150 books along with 50 articles, and the author humbly declares that like Sir Isaac Newton that he "stands on the shoulders of many generations of scholars."
According to Pillai "To know India, then, we must know the Deccan. But to tell all its tales together is a daunting proposition – the land is rich, and a thousand pages would not suffice." Instead, we get a fast-paced roller-coaster ride, exploding with "remarkable men and women who all claimed for themselves the esteem of posterity."
The praiseworthy portion of the book is the opening chapters that chronicle the Bahmani and Vijayanagar kingdoms – which has in popular lore been recast as India's holy crusade between Hinduism and Islam. There are three points here. The first is that what we today call Hindu was often recorded and recognised as "Brahmin" in those times– reflecting not just the near-hegemony of a community with control over textual records but also how underlining which communities we subconsciously refer to when we use the composite category of Hindu today.
The second is the nature of Hindu-Muslim conflict. Pillai narrates several instances where there was no so-called Hindu unity in favour of Vijayanagar, or when the Muslim rulers of Bahmani allied with Hindu kings in Andhra and Odisha. The book, however, admits some Muslim rulers did desecrate temples, and the barbarism of Hindu kings triggered wars with Muslim rulers, acknowledging that it is possible to cherry pick these incidents to re-construct a narrative of religious crusade.
The third lies in the choice of the kingdom we use to represent Hinduism today. Why does the modern right-wing use the Vijayanagar kingdom, where Brahmins had near-outright grip on power, as a example of Hindu power, but not the older and equally remarkable Kakatiya kingdom that drew its rulers from diverse communities, many of whom hailed from lower castes and called themselves sons of the soil? How different would Hinduism look today if the Kakatiyas became the model instead of the Brahmin power?
Rebel Sultans is a remarkable, daring book, worth reading again and again.
PPR
24/03/2021.
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