Malwa Sultanate

A landlocked plateau kingdom in central India, remembered less for its power than for its buildings and its legends. Malwa broke from Delhi in 1401, again in the collapse after Timur, and was ruled first by the Ghuri dynasty from Mandu and then by the Khaljis. Its position on the plateau between the Gangetic plain and the Deccan made it a corridor state, fought over by Gujarat, Delhi, the Rajputs and eventually the Mughals, and its history is largely a record of those pressures. Hoshang Shah moved the capital to Mandu, a natural fortress on an escarpment, and built there the first marble-clad tomb in India - the Mughals studied it, and Shah Jahan sent architects to measure it before building the Taj Mahal. Mandu's surviving palaces, the Jahaz Mahal and Hindola Mahal, are among the finest secular buildings of the Indian middle ages. The kingdom's last independent sultan, Baz Bahadur, is remembered chiefly through his romance with the singer Rupmati, a story retold in Persian and Hindi verse for centuries. Akbar's general Adham Khan took Malwa in 1561 and massacred the population of Sarangpur. Rupmati is said to have poisoned herself rather than be captured. The region was absorbed into the Mughal empire thereafter. Mandu sits on a plateau ringed by a wall some thirty-seven kilometres long. The Jami Masjid there was modelled on the great mosque of Damascus. Malwa's opium and its position on the trade road made it worth holding. Ujjain, in the region, is one of Hinduism's seven sacred cities.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history