A History of India, Third Edition

RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES AND MILITARY FEUDALISM

which were literally established on the ruins of flourishing Hindu
kingdoms. Muslim historians, by contrast, have drawn attention to the fact
that these sultanates produced an admirable blend of Indian and Persian
culture in art and architecture—indeed, Anastasy Nikitin’s report praised
Bijapur as the most magnificent city of India.
These sultanates certainly contributed to the further development of
India’s regional cultures. In this context we should also mention the
sultanates of Bengal (1338–1576), Malwa (1401–1531), Gujarat (1403–
1572/3), and Kashmir (1346–1568). Some of these sultanates made
important contributions to the development of the regional languages. The
sultans of Bijapur recognised Marathi as a language in which business
could be transacted, a sultan of Bengal commissioned the poet Krittibas to
translate the Ramayana into Bengali—a translation of great literary merit.
Around 1500 the Muslim governor of Chittagong similarly commissioned
his court poet, Kavindra Parameshvara, to translate the Mahabharata into
Bengali. The sweeping conquest of India by Islamic rulers, epitomised by
the farflung military campaigns of the Delhi sultans, was thus in direct
contrast to the regionalistic aspect of the above-mentioned ventures. The
coexistence of Islamic rule with Hindu rule in this period added a further
dimension to this regionalisation.
The mighty Hindu contemporaries of the sultanate of Delhi were the
realm of the Gajapatis (‘Lords of Elephants’) of Orissa, and the empire of
Vijayanagar (‘City of Victory’) in the south. The Gajapatis had controlled
the east coast from the mouth of the Ganges to the mouth of the Godaveri
from the thirteenth century onwards. In the fifteenth century they
temporarily extended their sway down the coast, almost reaching as far as
Tiruchirappalli to the south of Madras. From the fourteenth to the
sixteenth centuries, the empire of Vijayanagar encompassed nearly all of
southern India to the south of the Tungabhadra and Krishna rivers. The
existence of these two Hindu states led to an uncontested preservation of
Hindu institutions and customs in eastern and southern India quite in
contrast to the areas of northern and western India, which had come under
Muslim influence in the thirteenth century.

The Gajapatis of Orissa

The history of the late medieval regional kingdom of Orissa begins with
King Anantavarman Chodaganga. He belonged to the Ganga dynasty of
Kalinganagara and in c. 1112 conquered the fertile Mahanadi delta of
central Orissa from the Somavamsha king. Ten years later, following the
death of the last great Pala king of Bengal, Rampala, Anantavarman
extended his sway all the way up to present-day Calcutta in the north and
to the mouth of the Godaveri in the south. When he tried to expand his
realm to the west—into the interior of the country—he was stopped by the