Maḥmūd Gāvān

Abstract

Maḥmūd Gāvān (b. c. 1411–d. 1481) was the principal political figure in the Central Indian sultanate of the Bahmanis (1347–1527) in the second half of the 15th century. Born in Gilan into a family of rank, his early life is little documented, but Shams al-Dīn al-Sakhāwī’s (d. 1497) al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ places him in Cairo in 1439–1440, and later in Syria, for reasons of study. In the 1450s, Gāvān arrived in India and accepted a position in the Bahmani sultanate. He would serve four successive sultans—Aḥmad II, Humāyūn Shāh, Niẓām al-Dīn Aḥmad III, and Muḥammad III—rising through the ranks. His career was marked by successful conquests, administrative reforms, and a regency during the reigns of Aḥmad III and Muḥammad III. In addition to his position as de facto ruler, Gāvān’s significance lies in his activities in commerce, patronage of architecture, and literature. His widely used title malik al-tujjār (prince of merchants), granted by Humāyūn Shāh, and legal records in Bursa that mention him as the sponsor of several trading missions are evidence of Gāvān’s involvement in long-distance trade. Today, his madrasa in Bidar, the Bahmani capital after 1430, is still testimony to his cosmopolitan outlook. Probably constructed with the help of migrant craftsmen and imported building plans, it is strikingly Central Asian in its architecture and decoration. Similarly, Gāvān’s inshāʾ works, Riyāḍ al-inshāʾ and Manāẓir al-inshāʾ, communicate in their style and conception with literary traditions in the wider Islamic world, and were the product of concrete interactions with people from Cairo to Samarqand. Riyāḍ al-inshāʾ is a collection of correspondence that features letters to Gāvān’s family members, to scholars, and to rulers and their retinues in Indian, Mamluk, Ottoman, Timurid, Aq Quyunlu, and Gilani lands. Manāẓir al-inshāʾ is a treatise on the principles of inshāʾ that builds on centuries of ideas on letter writing in Arabic and Persian. Further demonstrating his attention to a variety of Islamicate texts, impressions of Gāvān’s seal on manuscripts give an idea of the kind of books that were in his possession and that he might have perused. In 1481, Gāvān’s rivals at the court conspired to accuse him of treachery and he was killed on orders of the sultan. The works by his secretary ʿAbd al-Karīm Nīmdihī (d. c. 1501), an inshāʾ collection entitled Kanz al-maʿānī and a chronicle known as Ṭabaqāt-i Maḥmūd Shāhī, are important first-hand sources on Gāvān’s life and death. In present-day scholarship, Gāvān is often discussed as a prime example of larger historical processes, such as transregional migration and the integration of South Asia in the Persianate world.