Who's the king of the castle? brahmins, sufis and the narrative landscape of Daulatabad

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.