Two conventional ideas have coloured our view of Gujarat's pre-modern history: first, as in the rest of the subcontinent, that the fifteenth century, a century of transitions, was merely a twilight during which nothing noteworthy happened; and second, that the period in which the regional Muslim sultanate (and later the Mughals) ruled, brought any regional creative and political processes to an abrupt end. As the influential politician K. M. Munshi wrote, 'these developments had a negative influence onthe literature of Gujarat’ and the literary productions in this era ‘not only ignored political conditions, but provided easy ways to forget them'. This narrative of the Chaulukya-Vaghelas being the last bastions of Gujarat's ‘Hindu’ culture, before it was destroyed by 'Muslim’ domination, continues to shape the popular imagination of the region's history. Munshi's views, which portray the history of pre-modern Gujarat in terms of religious binaries rather than as a period of complex collaborations, have had a lasting impact on the region's popular imagination as well.

In this book, I have tried to provide a corrective to this surprisingly persistent view that has shaped the understanding of Gujarat's and India's pre-modern history. I have shown that periods of change and flux, which do not necessarily coincide with large empires, may be productively examined by focusing on the political and cultural processes that were at work within regional and local contexts. Literary narratives offer a particularly rich source for unpacking this history in a century of transitions in which such texts were often the only sources left behind by critical political actors like the local chieftains. While the regional sultans do have a legacy of historical documents and other material remains, literary works add of nuance to the ways in which their rule might be understood.

The regional kingdoms and sultanates that evolved in the subcontinent in the fifteenth century gave impetus to what has been called the ‘vernacular millennium', but the regional languages were not the only ones that flourished in these new courts, or beyond them. Fifteenth-century polities, as is clear in case of Gujarat, were multilingual and multicultural, promoting classical and new regional styles of literature, architecture and other cultural effusions.

In 1394, Zafar Khan, the new governor appointed by the Delhi sultan to the province of Gujarat, launched an attack on the hill fort of Idar. Idar was located on the periphery of the province, northeast of Anhilvada-Patan or Naharwala, the headquarters of the Tughluq sultans of Delhi in Gujarat. Ranmal, the ruler of the fort and its surrounding area, had challenged the new governor's claims to authority, and refused to pay the customary tribute owed to the representative from Delhi. Only a few years before this attack, in 1391, Sultan Nasir al-Din Muhammad Shah III of Delhi (r. 1390-1393) had appointed Zafar Khan, the son of Wajih al-mulk, a respected nobleman of the court, to quell a rebellion that was brewing in the capital at Anhilvada-Patan. Farhat al-mulk Rasti Khan (c. 1376-1392) was the governor of the province at that time, and had been appointed by Muhammad's predecessor, Sultan Firuz Tughluq. Rasti Khan governed the province successfully, and his hold over it increased due to the control he had over the local chieftains. Some sultanate sources go so far as to suggest that he gained the loyalty and support of these men, who held small but successful power bases all over the region.

After the death of his overlord, Firuz Shah, Rasti Khan gradually began to assert his independence over the province with support from the local chieftains. Seventeenth-century historian of Gujarat, Sikandar Manjhu, notes that Rasti Khan became rebellious; he also describes how the Delhi sultanate nobles stationed in the province complained of the tyranny of his administration. Following Manjhu, Muhammad Qasim Firishta goes further in saying that the governor had joined forces with the ‘infidel’ chieftains and even promoted idol worship. While this may have been a later attempt to tarnish his reputation, both these sources imply that the governor was displaying signs of dissent and was emboldened by local support outside of the imperial administration. His rise in the region thus posed a threat to the authority of Delhi as well as to the local Muslim nobles. Consequently, the next reigning sultan, Nasir al-Din Mahmud Shah (r. 1394-1413), decided to send another powerful man from the centre, Zafar Khan, to put an end to Rasti Khan's insubordination and revive Delhi's fortunes in Gujarat.

In the fifteenth century, the Sultanate of Gujarat emerged as the most powerful of the kingdoms that succeeded the Delhi sultanate. The regional sultans of Gujarat, sometimes referred to as the Muzzafarid or the Ahmadshahi dynasty, were erstwhile nobles of the Delhi sultanate who declared their independence in 1407 from the already dwindling authority at Delhi, and their rule in Gujarat lasted until the 1580s - over a hundred and fifty years - when the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605) defeated the last ruling sultan on the plains of Saurashtra. The Muzaffarids integrated the diverse frontier region and its different geographical and social elements. And in doing so they created a distinctive vocabulary and idiom of ‘Gujarati’ regional rule.

In c. 1407, Zafar Khan, the former noble of Delhi and governor of Gujarat, reluctantly declared himself the independent sultan of the province. While Delhi had been sacked at the hands of Timur in 1398, the prestige the former capital and its rulers commanded remained intact. Therefore, many of the regional governors of provinces such as Jaunpur, Malwa, and Gujarat did not so much revolt against their former masters as seek less confrontational means of consolidating their power. Zafar Khan, Gujarat's governor, took the title of Muzaffar Shah, laying the foundations of what was to become one of the longest-lasting regional sultanates to emerge during the fifteenth century. At the time that Zafar Khan declared himself sultan, throwing off the shackles of the moribund Delhi sultanate under Mahmud Tughlaq II (r. 1324-1351), the region had long been an imperial province, referred to both as ‘Gujarat’ or by the name of its capital, Anhilvada (or Naharwala in the Persian chronicles). The regional sultans, Muzaffar Shah and his successors, particularly Sultan Mahmud Begada (r. 1459-1511), strove to integrate different geographical, political, and societal elements of the region. By 1480, Mahmud Begada, who styled himself ‘Gujarati', had established military control over most of the territories of the modern region, as well as, at times, parts of Malwa, southern Rajasthan, and the southern coastal lands stretching almost all the way to present-day Mumbai. It was most of this territory that, with Akbar's conquest, went on to form the Mughal province or subah of Gujarat.

Three major developments preceded this regional imperium and set the stage for the political and cultural transformations that Gujarat would undergo in the fifteenth century.

Oral narratives and written works inspired by oral traditions were crucial to the process through which local Gujarati chieftains imagined and represented their political aspirations during the ferment and flux of the fifteenth century. Such works, expressed in the regional language, were one means of self-fashioning for chieftains and for their fortified kingdoms, but other artistic narrative forms proved useful as well. Two significant works in Sanskrit, one from the court of the Chauhans of Champaner and another from that the Chudasamas of Junagadh, along with a variety of inscriptions on stone, suggest that, in their quest to affirm their political and social positions in the wake of the growing imperial power of the sultans at Ahmadabad, the warrior chieftains drew on classical courtly models of kingship that had evolved all over north India from the seventh century, or post-Guptaperiod, onwards. They did this by deploying the aestheticised Sanskrit literary tradition.

This chapter focuses on these two Sanskrit narratives, both of which were composed by a poet named Gangadhara who travelled to Gujarat sometime during the mid-fifteenth century from Vijayanagara in south India. The first of these is a play entitled Gangadäsapratäpaviläsanätaka or ’the play on the glory of Gangadas'1 about the then-ruling chieftain of Champaner in northeastern Gujarat. In this composition, which follows the conventions of classical Sanskrit drama, the poet narrates the Chauhan king's campaign against, and subsequent victory over, the Ahmadabad sultan. The second work is Mandalikanrpacarita or ‘biography of king Mandalik’, a mahakavya or epic poem eulogising the Chudasama king, Mandalik, of Junagadh in the Saurashtra peninsula. In both works, Gangadhara displays his competence as a poet trained in the classical Sanskrit literary traditions, and fashions his patrons as ideal rulers in the style of older Puranic kings. Yet, in their contents and concerns, the compositions remain securely rooted in their specific spatial contexts of Champaner and Junagadh, two significant kingdoms that were located on the periphery of the Muzaffarid sultanate's heartlands, and in the historical moment of their interactions with the regional sultans who, by first half of the fifteenth century, had become the indisputable masters of the region.