Muslim influence had begun to percolate to the South from the time of 'Ala' al-Din Khalji, and in the later years of Muhammad bin Tughlaq it was in its full tide. As a matter of fact, the Bahmani Kingdom symbolised the tough opposition that was offered to the domination of the Tughlaq rulers of the North by the Muslims who had made the Deccan their homeland.
\nThis kingdom, however, did not last for long. Born out of rebellion, it succumbed to the rebellious blows of its own powerful subjects. The fragments of this kingdom were later consolidated into the three sister kingdoms of Ahmadnagar, Bijapur and Golconda. When Timur's descendants were giving Northern India a new government and a new civilization, the above three principalities of the South were also doing the same kind of work in the peninsular part of the country. Of course, they did not command the vast resources that the Mughals possessed; but they too, in their own humble way, contributed something worthwhile to the history of the subcontinent. Their rulers have a record of their own and are worthy of our remembrance.
\nI am glad Dr. Dinesh Chandra Verma has chosen for his study one of these kingdoms. The history of Bijapur has a charm of its own, yet no scholar of eminence ever spared his busy hours to tell us the story of this important principality. A gentleman of scholarly habits, no doubt, made it the subject of his doctoral thesis many years ago at the London University, but unfortunate as it seems, that work of high erudition did not see the light of the day. Dr. Verma's work, therefore, is a virgin effort. For the present he has confined himself to the political and administrative aspects, and had tried to give us as vivid a picture as source material in Persian, Marathi, Portuguese and Russian can be made to yield. Though his is an unbroken tale of wars and strifes, occasionally it gives us a glimpse of the tangled skein of Deccan politics and the part played in it by the 'Adilshahs'.
\nSome of the rules of this dynasty were able and wise men. They have left their 'mark on the pages of history. The founder of the dynasty married a Maratha lady, and another member of this illustrious house was called 'Jagat Guru' by his non-Muslim subjects. In ways more than one the rulers of Bijapur strove to give their subjects the benefits of a civilised government and society according to the acceptable standards of the medieval age. This part of the story is more important, and more interesting too, than all the efforts that they made for keeping their enemies at arm's length, or for increasing the size of their principality at the neighbour's cost.
