For almost a thousand miles, the deep Godavari River snakes its way across the breadth of subcontinental India. As it descends from the Eastern Ghats towards the Bay of Bengal, it splinters and breaks into a number of tributaries to form a sprawling river basin, second in extent only to the Ganges. In the seventeenth century, the Godavari delta was an affluent commercial region of the sultanate of Golconda, a great south Indian Muslim state centred on the Deccan. The Qutb Shahi dynasty that had carved out its domain here in the early sixteenth century ruled over a culturally, politically and religiously diverse land that included a Hindu population speaking the native Telugu, governed by an Islamic Persianate elite, perhaps best illustrated by the adoption of a bi-lingual administration, with royal documents issued in both Persian and Telugu.