Person · Bahmani minister & scholar · India
Maḥmūd Gāwān
A Persian horse-trader from Gilan who arrived in the Deccan as a merchant, rose to be chief minister of the Bahmani sultanate, reorganised its provinces and its army, took Goa and the Konkan, and built at Bidar a madrasa on the Central Asian plan with a library of three thousand manuscripts and free board for its students.
- Date
- 1411–1481
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 17.920, 77.530
Worth knowing
He was executed in 1481 at seventy-eight on a forged letter produced by the Deccani faction at court, and the sultan is said to have regretted it immediately; the Bahmani state broke up within twenty years. Part of his madrasa was destroyed when lightning struck its powder store under Aurangzeb, who was using it as a magazine.
About the place
Placed at Bidar, the Bahmani capital he governed from and where his madrasa stands, half-ruined. He was born at Gilan in Iran.
Connections (2)
- Teaching lineageSamarkand
Mahmud Gawan's madrasa at Bidar was built on the Central Asian plan — a courtyard with lecture halls, student cells, a library and a minaret, faced in glazed tile — and the model is the Timurid madrasa of Samarkand and Bukhara. He corresponded with Jami and Persian scholars, recruited teachers from Iran and Central Asia, and endowed free board. It is the clearest piece of evidence that the Deccan sultanates were a western edge of the Persianate world rather than a province of India.
- CampaignOld Goa
Gawan took Goa from Vijayanagara for the Bahmanis in 1472, which gave the sultanate its Arabian Sea outlet and its horse trade — Persian and Arab cavalry mounts, the one import the Deccan states could not do without. The Portuguese took the same port from the Adil Shahis thirty-eight years later for exactly the same reason, and the horse trade is most of why the Estado da India was viable at all.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Mahmud Gawan”. Ferishta, Tarikh-i Ferishta; Richard Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan (2005); George Michell and Mark Zebrowski, Architecture and Art of the Deccan Sultanates (1999).
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