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From Defended Settlements to Fortified Strongholds:

Responses to Gunpowder in the Early Modern Deccan
a
Pushkar Sohoni
a
University of Pennsylvania
Published online: 02 Apr 2015.

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To cite this article: Pushkar Sohoni (2015) From Defended Settlements to Fortified Strongholds: Responses to Gunpowder in
the Early Modern Deccan, South Asian Studies, 31:1, 111-126, DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2015.1008818
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 South Asian Studies, 2015
Vol. 31, No. 1, 111–126, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2015.1008818

From Defended Settlements to Fortified Strongholds:

Responses to Gunpowder in the Early Modern Deccan
Pushkar Sohoni*
University of Pennsylvania

Architectural responses to improved gunpowder technologies reached a conclusion in the sixteenth-century Deccan.
Instead of constructing heavier defences, most urban settlements were disaggregated into military and administrative
strongholds vis-à-vis civilian and mercantile cities by the seventeenth century. Changing economic and social
conditions allowed for this separation of urban functions. The response to military revolutions was therefore not at
the scale of individual buildings, but instead reconfigured the pattern of settlements in the region.
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Keywords: Deccan; fortification; settlement patterns; early modern; defensive architecture; architectural history

Introduction same problems as readings of historical texts, in that

The early use of gunpowder and the approximate dates
for the advent and dispersal of related technologies are
reasonably well known in South Asia, but the impact of
these events on architecture has not been adequately
studied.1 The study of fortifications is an important
tool in understanding the dispersal and reception of
gunpowder technologies. Yet, there are few comprehen-
sive or regional studies on fortifications in South Asia.
Barring some research by Jean Deloche and Klaus
Rötzer,2 there is almost no analysis of the development
of military architecture as a response to fast-changing
war technologies. The continuous occupation of many
of fortified settlements and fortresses until at least the
nineteenth century has meant that historical accretions
and associations of later rulers (or sometimes very early
ones) are often erroneously and disproportionately mis-
understood without any study of the phased construc-
tion of these sites. This paper will examine some of the
changes in architecture and planning in the Deccan, as
impacted by the rapidly changing military technology
during the sixteenth century. The evidence suggests that
as early as the fifteenth century the attitudes towards
gunpowder technologies and related architectural inno-
vations between the Bahmani sultanate (and its succes-
sor states in the sixteenth century) and the kingdom of
Vijayanagara were already quite divergent, as reflected
in the fortifications.
Architecture and settlement patterns are better
indices of changes in military technology than literary
sources, if they can be recovered adequately and sensi-
tively. Of course, architectural studies often face the
layers of subsequent additions, accretions, and modifi-
cations have to be recognized and imagined away,
before uncovering the reality of any given point in
time. However, the real advantage lies in the raison
d’être of the military architecture, which is necessarily
utilitarian, whereas literary sources can only provide
images and projections of military processes and pro-
ducts, as imagined and viewed within their cultural
contexts.
Michael Roberts relied on gunpowder and drilled,
disciplined armies as the key factors in his argument for
the European military revolution and its role in defeat-
ing Asian armies. 3 Geoffrey Parker extended this argu-
ment by including fortifications, particularly the
artillery fortress and the trace italienne,4 in this dis-
course, stating that most of Asia was ‘unable to adopt
western military technology’, while the Islamic gun-
powder empires were ‘unable to adapt it’.5 Countering
these, Jeremy Black made several key observations,
pointing out the fallacy of not recognizing local and
specific conditions that shaped modes of warfare.6
For all the paradigms of European military technol-
ogies overcoming Asian states in the early modern
period, there is little comparative work on the architec-
turally constructed responses to such technological
advances. The fundamental difference between Asia
and Europe was not dictated solely by weaponry or
firepower (usually the two diagnostic indicators of mili-
tary superiority of European powers), but by attitudes
towards warfare and combat, which changed signifi-
cantly in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries.

*Email: sohoni@pobox.upenn.edu

© 2015 The British Association for South Asian Studies

 112 Pushkar Sohoni
Perhaps it would be speculative to say that most
battles in South Asia were almost ritually enacted,
with the minimum loss of lives, and with large nego-
tiated settlements.7 This is not to say that all engage-
ments were of this nature, but historic chronicles would
suggest it for many encounters.8 Most of the migrant
landless warrior bands who offered their services to the
highest bidder could be easily wooed with the entice-
ment of titles and wealth. The tropes of corrupt generals
and court nobles who defected, commanders whose
loyalties could readily be purchased, and easily demor-
alized and confused troops all have a particular valence
when assessed against two factors: (i) the militaries of
the early modern period were largely made up of part-
time cultivators, who were enlisted to provide numbers
and, if any combat actually took place, almost as a
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reserve after the front-lines of professional soldiers
were exhausted; (ii) the individual city governors, fort
commanders, and other local power-holders exercised
relative autonomy to ensure better prospects for
themselves.
This independence of local landed elites has been
investigated by Stewart Gordon in his work on the
Marathas,9 but two examples here, Khan Jahan Deccani,
the governor of Parenda, and the family of the Jadhavs of
Sindkhed Raja will elaborate the argument for the Deccan
in the sixteenth century. Khan Jahan Deccani was the
governor of Parenda under the Bahmani kings. As the
Bahmani control of territory was undermined by the new
emergent sultanates, Khan Jahan Deccani was wooed by
Burhan Nizam Shah I (r. 1510–53) of the Ahmadnagar
kingdom.10 Burhan Nizam Shah promised to confirm
Khan Jahan as the governor of the eleven districts that
he had held in trust for the Bahmanis.11 Khan Jahan’s
brother, Zain Khan, who had been the governor of
Sholapur under the Bahmanis, contested that claim and
felt entitled to half those districts. To that effect, Zain
Khan went to the court of Bidar (nominally ruled by the
Bahmanis but controlled by Amir Barid Shah) to get his
claim confirmed sometime around 1511 CE. Yusuf Adil
Shah (1459–1511, who had been establishing his own
kingdom in Bijapur) had not been supportive of Zain
Khan’s claims, but upon the latter’s death the Bijapur
regent Kamal Khan marched upon Khan Jahan and com-
pelled him to concede his brother’s claim. Khan Jahan
Deccani is a classic case of the semi-autonomous feuda-
tory mode in which most appointed fort commanders and
regional governors behaved, and were appeased, patron-
ized, or supported by several royal families, alongside
whom they behaved as independent quasi-vassals.
Khan Jahan and his son were appointees of the
Nizam Shahs, but the son, at a later convenient moment,
defected to the Adil Shahs. Later on, a different Adil
Shahi commander of the fort received a huge considera-
tion from the Mughals, and turned the fort over to
them.12 A similar case can be seen with the Jadhavs of
Sindkhed Raja (the family of Shivaji Bhonsale’s
mother), who were in the employ of the Nizam Shahs.
They were an old elite landed family and held their fief
in the northern Deccan at Sindkhed Raja (in Buldhana
district today) and had served at the court of the Nizam
Shahs for a long time. During the reign of Burhan
Nizam Shah III (1610–31) under the regency of Malik
Ambar (d. 1626), the Jadhavs had a falling out with the
ruling dynasty13 and defected to the Mughals, where
they were received with a mansab of 2400 zat and
15000 sawar.14 Backing the winning horse (no pun
intended) often guaranteed the same, if not greater,
power, rank, and status. Naturally, the technologies of
war were supplanted with the technologies of negotia-
tion over a century. Military moves were limited to
simple field strategies such as maintaining the centre
and two flanks; military architecture was limited to
simple construction relatively unchanged from the
early seventeenth century onwards.
For the Deccan, there seems to have been a
sequence of factors and events that were important,
and they are expounded in this paper as follows: (a)
gunpowder was not taken up as easily as might appear
from literary sources because it was thought to under-
mine soldierly values of courage and valor; (b) its
uptake and upkeep was dependent on immigrants from
the larger Islamic world; (c) the Bahmanis and their
successors were better than Vijayanagara at this,
because they were able to attract a steady stream of
skilled foreign manpower; and (d) by the seventeenth
century, architectural innovation had halted and king-
doms preferred to set up strongholds in geographically
impregnable places and set up towns near those, rather
than fortify the town itself and defend it. It is the last
phase of these developments that is of most concern.
The response to fast-changing gunpowder technologies
was not architectural (at the scale of fortification), but at
a much larger scale as it completely changed the urban
settlement patterns of the region.
Changes in settlement patterns in lieu of
architectural innovation
The late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries demon-
strate the changing architectural responses of the Deccan
to gunpowder technology, changes that would stagnate by
the end of the sixteenth century. The eventual settlement
of the frontier between the various states in the sixteenth
century Deccan, as elaborated by Richard Eaton and
Philip Wagoner in their study of fortifications and shift-
ing frontiers, is a plausible model to explain the eventual
settlement of boundaries;15 a pax pulveris pyrii of sorts.
They explain the settlement of frontiers based on the

number of times that a fort changed hands in combat.
Eaton and Wagoner argue that due to the design and
construction of new types of bastions, with cavaliers
for the emplacement of guns, interstate conflict was
lessened and frontiers became stabilized.16 A lack of
architectural innovation to correspond with rapidly evol-
ving gunpowder technologies was compensated by new
modes of urban settlements, warfare, and administration.
The kingdom of Vijayanagara was not a threat to the
Deccan sultanates following the battle of Talikota in
1565. The Mughals, with their large forces, had the
capacity to carry out long duration sieges, on account
of having full-time soldiers as opposed to the part-time
cultivators that made up the bulk of the Deccan armies.17
Thus, architectural innovations were replaced by
strategies of fort location, on hilltops, controlling passes
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and gorges. Fortified urban settlements became redun-
dant, and walls around towns for defensive reasons
disappeared from the Deccan.18 This resulted in a com-
plete paradigm shift that would shape the history of the
region. The defensively walled urban settlements were
disaggregated into two different networks, (i) the mili-
tary and administrative versus (ii) the civilian and mer-
cantile. By the beginning of the seventeenth century,
there was an increasing emphasis on abandoning the
city when confronted by superior firepower.19 The
royal court and the treasury, if they were present in
the urban area, were evacuated and sought refuge in
one of the many fortified strongholds in the countryside.
In the seventeenth century, city enceintes became nom-
inal and symbolic, and were not really being used for a
military function anymore.
The retreat to the fortified stronghold on higher
ground is further evidence in the architectural fate of
the earlier city centres as well. For example, while
armament technology kept pace (or was perhaps a step
behind) with the strides in gun-making in Europe and
the Middle East (British and Portuguese companies
along with mercenaries and renegades from all across
Eurasia were the vectors for this transmission), from the
seventeenth century onwards military architecture did
not keep up with the developments in assault and siege
technologies. There are very few instances where archi-
tectural principles derived from Vauban or later
European military theorists were embodied in the for-
tifications. For example, the angular fortified towers
that provided flanking fire against invaders were not
built by any South Asian power, except the Portuguese
on the coast (Figure 1).20
In keeping with this trend, Mughal city walls in the
Deccan, built in the seventeenth century and later, were
only nominally defensive, as seen at Ellichpur,
Burhanpur, and Aurangabad. The ineffectiveness of for-
tifications against siege artillery and mining eventually
changed the way in which mercantile cities, political
South Asian Studies 113
capitals, and fortified strongholds were spatially disag-
gregated and separated from each other. The basic pat-
tern seems to have involved the defensible urban
settlements being transformed into no more than a series
of fortified garrisons and administrative centres by the
establishment of a new undefended urban settlement at a
short distance. This can be seen in the establishment of
Ahmadnagar fort distinct from Ahmadnagar city
(c. 1500), Hyderabad from Golconda (1589), Nauraspur
from Bijapur (c. 1599), and Aurangabad (Khadki) from
Daulatabad (1615). The pattern is also consistent with
the fate of a city like Burhanpur, which, though founded
earlier, became an important urban centre only in the
seventeenth century, as its neighbouring fort of
Asirgarh became the important stronghold along a con-
trolling route between Hindustan and the Deccan, ser-
ving only military and administrative functions.
Similarly, Mandu ceased to be a significant urban settle-
ment after the mid-seventeenth century, being instead
superseded by urban, mercantile, and civilian settle-
ments, leading to the rise of Dhar and Maheshwar by
the eighteenth century.21
By the end of the sixteenth century, having thicker
walls as a defence mechanism had become redundant
because of their ineffectiveness against improved siege
artillery and mining techniques. In the seventeenth cen-
tury, this pattern was accelerated by the rebellious ten-
dencies of the Maratha state and the semi-permanent
presence of Aurangzeb in the Deccan, both of which
caused more significant changes in the location and
functions of forts and urban settlements than most
scholars have noted to date. While Eaton has argued
that the hilly terrain of the Deccan (as opposed to the
flat plains of the north) required a heavy reliance on
gunpowder rather than just cavalry charges, there has
long been disagreement with this view. For example,
hill terrain could be easily overcome by other means of
warfare such as fast and light cavalry charges combined
with guerrilla tactics, as used by Malik Ambar and the
Marathas. Likewise, the rise of hill forts and their
importance in the new state formations and administra-
tion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have
quite clearly been delineated by Stewart Gordon.22 Hill
plateaus were natural stages for rebellion, resistance,
and proclamation of regional sovereignty.23
Yet these views do little to explain the case of many
of the Deccan forts, in which the advantage of elevation
was missing, particularly in those on the Deccan pla-
teau, as opposed to the Western Ghats. However, this
development is perfectly in line with the new pattern of
separating military fortified garrisons from urban set-
tlements and the rise of fortified strongholds to form a
network distinct from the network of urban settlements,
that became the trend by the end of the sixteenth cen-
tury and in the early seventeenth, with the rise of the
 114 Pushkar Sohoni
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1. The angular fortified bastions that provided flanking fire against invaders (trace italienne) were not built by any South Asian
power, except the Portuguese in their coastal forts, as seen in the plan of Fort Aguada, Goa (top) and in the walls of the fort of
Revadanda (bottom).

Mughals and then the Marathas in the Deccan. It is
therefore more plausible that these kingdoms and poli-
ties chose not to adapt newer gunpowder technologies.
Instead of ‘adapting’ or ‘adopting’ newer ‘advances’ and
‘technologies’, the kingdoms in the Deccan chose
instead to change urban settlement patterns, thus affect-
ing the mode of warfare.
Conscious choices were made on the basis of a
century of experience of battles in which gunpowder
technologies only seemed to get better. If military archi-
tecture did not keep pace with these developments it is
only because there was little perceived value in invest-
ing in such architectural innovation. As opposed to
Europe, where the construction of fortification was dri-
ven by a theoretical discourse, most forts in the Deccan
were constructed by traditional masons, whose training
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was through gesture and practice, leaving little room for
quick innovation. To understand why a change in set-
tlement patterns was preferred to a constant upgrading
of architectural defences, the history of fortifications in
the region needs to be reviewed. The regional history of
gunpowder technologies and their deployment did
inform architectural and urban choices, along with the
specificity of geographic conditions in the Deccan.
History of gunpowder and fortifications in the
Deccan
The early references to gunpowder in South Asia sug-
gest that by 1300 gunpowder was possibly used in the
siege of Ranthambore against Alauddin Khilji.24 He
was advised by his court noble Ala ul-Mulk to rebuild
the forts located in the path of the Mongols and to add
moats to them as a means of resistance to gunpowder.
There is mention of gunpowder devices that required
the besiegers’ proximity to the fort walls, a possible
allusion to either mining or rockets.25 In the Deccan,
the Karkhana-i Atishbazi was referred to as the back-
bone of the Bahmani army, sometime as early as
1366.26 By the seventeenth century, literary fascination
and engagement with firearms is seen in vernacular
sources,27 but social acceptance28 of weapons that
threatened to displace the values of valour and bravery
and the role of the cavalry was much slower, and the
deployment of artillery and guns was underplayed, an
argument that has been made for other places and
periods.29
The use of gunpowder was possibly adopted by the
Bahmanis as early as the fourteenth century when they
seceded from the Delhi sultanate. However, the earliest
reference in the Deccan using mines is only in 1472
under Mahmud Gawan (for the Bahmanis) in the siege
of Belgaum. 30 The use of artillery and firearms is well
attested by the end of the fifteenth century. 31 By then,
South Asian Studies 115
not only were the Bahmanis using mines as seen in
historical accounts, but had internalized the use of gun-
powder in their defensive architecture to protect against
mining. The characteristic defences for all forts under
the Bahmanis included a natural barrier on one or more
sides (e.g. a lake or a valley), walls with stone revet-
ments, and high flanking towers, features that do not
necessarily imply the use of gunpowder against them.
But parapets with merlons for musketry and artillery,
the presence of a fausse braye (a second line of ramparts
parallel to the first one), gateway fortifications and
ditches are indications of preparations for resisting
mine attacks. 32 In the forts of Parenda, Kandhar, Ausa,
Sholapur, Gulbarga, and Bidar, defences were upgraded
in the late Bahmani period (fifteenth century) to resist
gunpowder in the form of mines and arms (Figure 2). 33
The Bahmani kingdom had the distinct advantage of
having forged strong cultural and trading routes, and
thereby channels for importing émigrés, ideas, and
expertise in artillery, mining, and military architecture
from the western Indian Ocean world. As a result, they
were up-to-date with the military architecture needed to
counter such assaults, and they updated their fortifica-
tions accordingly. For example, under Mahmud Gawan,
almost all the Bahmani forts were reinforced with a
fausse braye, a feature lacking in Vijayanagara fortifica-
tions. All the forts added towers with defenders and
defences at two levels.34 This trend of updating fortifi-
cations to counter the evolving uses of gunpowder con-
tinued under the Bahmani successor kingdoms for at
least half a century, before Portuguese control of the
seas and the competing centres of patronage in Safavid,
Ottoman, and Mughal domains deprived the Deccan of
human resources in this technological race. 35
As with the Bahmanis, their successor states, the
Adil Shahs, Nizam Shahs, and Qutb Shahs also adopted
round towers, with better structural strength and limited
vulnerability to blind spots. 36 Occasionally, towers with
multiple rounded profiles can be observed, but more as
an aberration than the norm, as seen in Ahmadnagar,
Naldurg, and Golconda (Figure 3). 37 The defensive
improvements of the post-Bahmani kingdoms in the
sixteenth century include cavaliers for gun mounting,
thicker revetments for protection against projectiles and
sappers, and the greater projections of towers for flank-
ing fire. The height of towers and walls kept increasing
in the course of the sixteenth century. After the mid-
sixteenth century, a glacis along with a chemin couvert
and counterscarping were increasingly used, as seen in
the forts of Ahmadnagar, Daulatabad, Dharur, Ausa and
Kandahar, Sholapur, and Parenda (Figure 4). 38 The forts
of Ahmadnagar and Belgaum were built along round
plans (Figure 5). By the end of the sixteenth century,
walls were not being thickened further to resist cannon.
The moat became important to prevent mining, and a
 116 Pushkar Sohoni
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2. At the forts of Parenda, Kandhar, Solapur, and Ausa (clockwise from top left to bottom left) defences were upgraded in the late
Bahmani period (fifteenth century) to resist gunpowder in the form of mines and arms, particularly with the fausse braye and the ditch.
constructed glacis prevented cannon-shot from hitting
the walls, in addition to protecting the soldiers on the
counter-scarp. Strangely, none of these developments
are seen in the forts that are credited solely to the
kingdom of Vijayanagara.
In Vijayanagara, the patterns of fortification and
urban settlements are different, as described by
Sinopoli and Morrison:39
Outcrops provided raw materials for construction of
imposing fortification walls, towers, bastions, and gate-
ways in and around the city. The city has been defined as
an area contained within a ten-square-kilometer area
ringed by massive walls. Within this urban core, elites
similarly walled off smaller enclosures. A small number of
heavily fortified gates guarded entry points. Platforms and
small chambers typically associated with gates, served as
stations for soldiers and toll collectors who monitored
movement of people and goods in and out. The walls
contain numerous narrow openings that would allow for
a slow controlled movement of people.
Most of the walls in Vijayanagara were built to shape
human behaviour more than for defensive purposes.40
Even with defensive walls, the height and thickness
vary significantly. Almost all the towers and bastions
are square (round ones are considered to be much later
additions).41 The towers were not usually higher than
the walls, another feature that suggests the lack of
architectural preparation against gunpowder sieges.
They were only observation posts, given their ineffec-
tiveness and lack of critical numbers, in addition to
being spaced far apart.42 As Robert Brubaker has
observed, they were ‘a dramatic visual expression of
the power of the state. . . and facilitated the maintenance
of public order’,43 and were not really defensive works
against any significant military aggression (Figure 6).
The battle of Talikota in 1565 was a defining
moments in the history of the Deccan, as it transformed
the regional balance of power. Until this battle, shifting
alliances, grievances, and wars between the kingdoms

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3. Polygonal towers can be observed, but more as aberrations than the norm, as seen in the fort of Ahmadnagar.
of Ahmadnagar, Bijapur, Golkonda, and Vijayanagara
were common. In-keeping with this pattern, the sulta-
nates of Ahmadnagar, Golkonda and Bijapur jointly
waged war on the armies of Vijayanagara.
Unfortunately, the earlier history of fickle alliances is
often forgotten with works like Robert Sewell’s
Forgotten Empire, which glorified this battle as a heroic
resistance by the ‘last Hindu bastion’ (an architectural
metaphor!) against the Islamic kingdoms of the
Deccan.44 The difference in the reception of gunpowder
and related architecture is sometimes seen as an exten-
sion of this imagined divide, leading to mistaken his-
tories of ‘Muslim’ and ‘Hindu’ technology. Yet, without
agreeing with this sectarian dichotomy, there was cer-
tainly a difference between the kings of Vijayanagara
and the Bahmani sultans in the accommodation of gun-
powder-related war technologies in the fifteenth century,
a trend that continued with the post-Bahmani sultanates
in the sixteenth.
Of course, no simplistic causal relationships should
be assumed. For example, the demise of Vijayanagara
South Asian Studies 117
in the late sixteenth century was not necessarily due to
inferior field artillery or lack of fortifications that were
inadequate to combat gunpowder assaults.45 In fact,
Vijayanagara was one of the first polities to embrace
gunpowder technology. However, it lacked the steady
stream of émigrés with expertise in gun-casting and
gunnery. By the end of the fifteenth century, all the
players in the Deccan had cannon and gunners for
field warfare, usually hired experts or mercenaries.46
But the kingdom of Vijayanagara did not keep pace
with the advances in military architecture.
Richard Eaton has made a case for the battle of
Raichur (1520) as the pivotal point for reception of
gunpowder technology in the Deccan and South India,
arguing that the non-decisive role of cannon fitted on
the battlements of the fort played a role in shaping
attitudes to gunpowder.47 The outcome of this battle,
he argued, led to a phase of vigorous experimentation
with gunpowder by the forces of the Bijapur sultanate,
while Vijayanagara remained complacent and non-
innovative as they did not see the value of gunpowder
 118 Pushkar Sohoni
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4. After the mid-sixteenth century, a glacis along with a chemin couvert and counterscarping were increasingly used, as seen at
Daulatabad, where the glacis can be seen beyond the ditch or moat of the western walls of the Ambarkot line of fortifications.
in siege warfare. This battle, Eaton suggested, was the
factor that led to different receptions of gunpowder
technology, putting Vijayanagara at a disadvantage
vis-à-vis the sultanate of Bijapur, which embraced it.
However, I contend that this battle was not a sin-
gular event that shaped attitudes in the whole region.
Two questions remain unanswered with this emphasis
on the battle of Raichur. First, how did other sulta-
nates, such as Ahmadnagar and Gujarat, become criti-
cally responsive to changes in military technology
much along the same lines as Bijapur, when they
were not party to the battle of Raichur? The second
question concerns the architectural record, which sug-
gests an earlier divergence in attitudes towards gun-
powder, as seen in the varying attitudes of the Bahmani
and Vijayanagara kingdoms already in the fifteenth
century. While it is true that gunpowder was used by
both these polities in the 1360s as per Ferishta’s
account,48 the similarity ends there. There are no sig-
nificant improvements in military architecture by the
kingdom of Vijayanagara to resist gunpowder, in the
manner of the Bahmanis and the post-Bahmani sulta-
nates. It is therefore important to understand the socio-
historical context in which the attitudes to gunpowder
in the Deccan were formulated. Social and political
exigencies of the region and period shaped these
developments, and need to be studied as the back-
ground to the later functional division of civilian and
military settlements. The history of gunpowder tech-
nology in the Deccan is part of the narrative, and the
social history of the reception of gunpowder becomes
important in understanding why changing settlement
patterns were preferred to the constant upgrading of
architectural defences.
In the medieval and early modern periods in South
Asia, the evidence for the role of gunpowder technology
and its impact cannot be completely gleaned from the
Persian literature, which often tends to supply dry (and
sometimes exaggerated) numbers, and is heavily
couched in literary forms and tropes not always
 South Asian Studies 119
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5. The forts of Ahmadnagar (top) and Belgaum (bottom) were laid out as round plans.
 120 Pushkar Sohoni
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6. In Vijayanagara, most of the towers were not usually higher than the walls, and were primarily observation posts, not really
defensive works against any significant military aggression. Photographs by Robert Brubaker.

representative of the realities on the ground. Scholarly
interpretations of literary sources, particularly in mat-
ters of fast-changing technologies like firearms, have
been subject to corrections and criticisms.49 Persian
sources valorise conventional arms and hand-to-hand
combat. For example, gunpowder (‫( )وتبار‬and its
munasibat (semantic congruity) or tanasub-based exten-
sions) are used in Persian lyric poetry but not as fre-
quently as sword-related metaphors. The much older
poetic currency of sword- and dagger-related metaphors
for the beloved was favoured over the limited usage of
gunpowder metaphors, with their general subordination
to metaphors of hand-to-hand combat.50 However, on
the ground the reality was different, and this can be
partly corroborated through the study of guns, architec-
ture, and changing settlement patterns.
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Through an examination of literary sources, the
North Indian reception of firearms and artillery can be
adequately understood because of the association with a
Turco-Mongol continuum (and by extension the
Persianate cosmopolis), whereas the history of the
southern part of the subcontinent cannot be completely
recovered under the same rubric.51 Analyses of the
assimilation of gunpowder technology in South India
(including the later Vijayanagara dynasties and their
contemporary and feudatory Nayakas) suggest that it
was slow and uneven. Yet, the incorporation of gun-
powder, muskets and cannons into the literary imagina-
tion was visible in Telugu, Tamil and Sanskrit works by
only the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries.52 What then of the Deccan, the plateau that
straddles North and South India?
In the late medieval and early modern periods in the
Deccan, there were two common loci for the use of
gunpowder, field battles and siege warfare. In field bat-
tles, all the sides employed large and small guns. In
siege warfare, gunpowder was used by the besiegers
for mining and creating breaches; the besiegers and
the defenders both used guns, mobile and fixed respec-
tively. In battles that were centred on a fortified loca-
tion, guns and gunpowder were used in multiple ways.
In the sixteenth century, most of the Deccan was
controlled by the sultanates of Ahmadnagar, Bijapur,
and Golconda. The Portuguese and the Mughals were
on the horizon, but their military and political impact had
not yet been realised. The vectors for the transmission of
military knowledge were by both land and sea. Middle
Eastern and Central Asian developments in war technol-
ogies came to the Deccan largely through groups of
émigrés over the course of the fifteenth and the sixteenth
centuries. The courts in the Deccan received a consider-
able influx of people from Central Asia and Iran. The
extension of generous patronage by these courts ampli-
fied the attraction of the Deccan for scholars, literati,
poets, adventurers, and others. This flow of migrants
South Asian Studies 121
intensified in the early and mid-sixteenth century as the
kingdoms of the post-Timurids had not completely sta-
bilized as centres of patronage; large numbers of artists
and craftsmen migrated to western India in search of
patronage, usually south by the sea routes. The assimila-
tion and reception of new gunpowder technologies and
the corresponding architectural innovations by the sulta-
nates of the Deccan ceased by the late sixteenth century,
as the flow of learned immigrants became a trickle. The
stabilized Mughal and Safavid empires had now become
the magnets for men of letters, and the kingdoms and
polities in the Deccan received very few experts in new
war technologies. The large migrations from the Middle
East to the Deccan in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries eventually came to comprise large numbers of
mercenary and renegade soldiers from either ‘Afghan’
regions or the Hadramaut.53 These immigrant groups
were not the innovative or informed men-of-letters and
were not theoretically cognizant or technically trained in
the art of war, their services now being limited only to
providing war bands.
The shortage of high literati or military émigrés
resulted in social mobility for groups like the Marathas
and the Habshis, leading to new social formations and
hierarchies. Their regional roots and limited exposure to
gunpowder technology across the larger world of the
Indian Ocean caused them to move away from new
experiments and innovations in fortification. Underlying
the pattern I am suggesting to have been at work, there-
fore, the lack of real innovation in military architecture
from the late sixteenth century onwards seems to have
stemmed from this change, and led to an abandonment of
city walls as a defensive mechanism. While it is true that
the Mughals and some of the other polities continued to
build walls until the eighteenth century, these were largely
for non-military reasons (Figure 7).54 Other synchronous
events, such as the mutually conflicting requirements of
catering to urban expansion and providing urban
defences, accelerated this process of abandoning defen-
sive city walls in favour of separate military and admin-
istrative strongholds.
From changing settlement patterns to a new
economic geography of the post-sixteenth-century
Deccan
In conclusion, it is undeniable that the Deccan under the
Bahmani and post-Bahmani sultans embraced gunpowder
technologies much more than most of South India under
the Vijayanagara kings through most of the sixteenth
century. Equally undeniable is that neither cultural factors
nor singular events can completely explain this diver-
gence in attitudes towards gunpowder technologies that
first became evident in the fifteenth century. Certainly, the
 122 Pushkar Sohoni
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7. The Mughals continued to build walls and gates for cities, but these were largely symbolic and ceremonial, as seen in the Rangeen
Darvaza in Aurangabad.
more vigorous cultural and mercantile connections of the
sultanates with the wider world of the Indian Ocean and its
role in the transmission of technology are some of the key
factors for this difference.
Likewise, under the Bahmanis and the post-
Bahmani kingdoms, both factors contributed to the
role of architectural innovation as a key component of
military strategy during the fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries, with a familiarity of the changes in siege
artillery and siege techniques. By the end of the six-
teenth century, architectural innovation halted. The logi-
cal conclusion to bigger and thicker walls had been
reached, and, as I have sought to demonstrate, the
response to newer and more powerful siege weapons
increasingly tended towards a change in settlement pat-
terns. Fortified garrisons and administrative towns were
depopulated and new mercantile urban centres were
founded, usually a short distance away.
The strategy in the Deccan from the seventeenth
century onwards thus relied heavily on individual
strongholds, mutually supporting and controlling mer-
cantile routes and supply lines. This was partly a result
of the nature of local landed feudal courts that were the
building blocks of kingdoms such as the Bijapur and
Ahmadnagar. Several attempts were made to create new
groups of aristocrats in the countryside, and these
usually consisted of settling groups of émigrés with a
fortress as the centre of the courtlet. As a result, the
countryside was never clearly unprotected, but had a
network of fortified strongholds. The urban centres were
not specially protected, but were only larger nodes in
this grid of protected strongholds.
This newfound sixteenth-century pattern contrasted
not only with the divergent past of the fifteenth-century
Deccan and South India, but also with contemporary
Mughal practice. The Mughals defended at the periph-
ery of their expanding state. They defended their empire
in open battlefields, not typically at the walls of a city.55
This was not true of the Deccan, where most of the
protection was at the internal nodes in the kingdom.

Under the Mughals, city walls were more emblems of
urban identity and of revenue and traffic control. There
existed implicit problems associated with the stationing
of a garrison in a city, particularly under the Mughals,
who had professional soldiers, usually with no local
ties. Contested boundaries, Mughal expansionist poli-
cies, and multiple revenue right-holders and taxation
tenures, along with land alienation policies, made net-
works of nodal forts the key to administrative control
and territorialisation. Since systems of administration,
taxation, justice, and monetization were all already in
place, only control of the defensive node and the defec-
tion or replacement of the commander of the fort or
governor of the region was required to claim the
territory.
The administrative and state apparatus was reduced
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to a series of military islands, connected by various
outposts and small garrisons.56 This model of specia-
lized functions operating out of different fortified loca-
tions, and forming discrete defence networks, was the
norm in the Deccan, and it enabled the rise of the
Maratha kingdom. It allowed the state to concentrate
resources for fortification only in the administrative
and military centres, which were all strategically
located along passes and controlled important trade
routes. This network that they created was the basis
for territorialisation. Under the Marathas, through the
late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, this
strategy intensified. The early Maratha state did not
even pretend to protect larger urban settlements, the
king, his court, and the treasury seeking refuge in a
stronghold instead. Perhaps imbricated networks of
market towns are a much better explanation for the
nature of civilian urban settlements, as opposed to
networks modelled on military or administrative
nodes. The two diverge and do not map onto each
other. The disintegration of the state apparatus and
market networks into two separate patterns was argu-
ably one of the easy responses to improved guns and
gunpowder technologies, rather than constantly seek-
ing architectural solutions.
A number of capital cities were founded in the
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in an effort
to depopulate the fortified townships, which typically
had a citadel and multiple concentric walls containing
large civilian populations. This paradigm shift can
therefore be partially attributed to the following
factors:
(1) Cities outgrew walls, because of increases in
population, and also the rise of new kinship
groups with their own hierarchies of social and
spatial mobility that mandated urban settlement
patterns along new lines. After the great famines
in the Deccan in the early seventeenth century,
South Asian Studies 123
multiple incentives to settle new populations
were in place under the Maratha nobles, the
Adil Shahs, and also the Mughals. This enter-
prise increased the agricultural base, and there-
fore revenues.
(2) New models of revenue control and territoriali-
sation, along with the rise of mercantile capital
that was independent of the court, were impor-
tant factors in this growth of market towns. All
political powers relied on the civilian bankers,
and the objective of capturing an urban settle-
ment was now to coerce or co-opt these banking
and trading families. The royal treasury was not
in these urban settlements anymore, and was in
the fortified stronghold instead.
(3) The disaggregation of military and mercantile
networks, corresponding with the administrative
and civilian networks respectively, each with
their own nodes, was the eventual result.
Further work needs to be done using architectural evi-
dence in conjunction with historic literary sources in
order to understand the political and social implications
of gunpowder. The state models that emerged as a result
of gunpowder technologies cannot be uniformly applied in
every regional context. Jos Gommans has argued that the
period from 1400 to 1750 was a false dawn of gunpowder,
and that the real gunpowder revolution only took place
between 1750 and 1850. Architecturally, there is no resis-
tance to this claim, as older strongholds with natural
defences still remained the sites of refuge for rulers and
elites, however inadequate. The mid-eighteenth century
was too late to have military architecture catch up with
almost two centuries of missed architectural evolution,
from the theories of Vauban and the trace italienne.
Politically significant battles were now being fought
away from large urban settlements, either at the military
strongholds of political elites or on open battlefields, both
locations in military spatial networks and rarely at nodes
in the civilian mercantile networks.
Notions of European technological supremacy vis-
à-vis Asian and Islamic states are too simplistic to
explain this highly complex period and later history.
It was, after all, in 1803, at the battle of Assaye, that
the powerful Maratha artillery forces of the Scindia of
Gwalior under the command of the Hannoverian Col.
Anthony Pohlmann were routed by bayonet and
cavalry charges led by Major General Arthur
Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington).57 It was on
an open battlefield on a marching route where archi-
tectural features were absent and natural features
defined the battle, and in which superior artillery was
trumped by horses and men. Neither military technol-
ogy nor architectural innovation had a role to play in
this decisive battle.
 124 Pushkar Sohoni
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
chemin couvert: Literally meaning the ‘covered way’, it
denotes a rampart with a walkway that is shielded on one
side by the outer walls of the rampart. Though it is often
open to the sky, it covers defending personnel from enemy
fire as they move along the ramparts.
fausse braye: A second rampart lower than the primary inner
walls of the fort, usually parallel to the main inner walls, but
considerably lower. The fausse braye serves the function of
thickening the base of the walls of the fort, while also allow-
ing for a lower line of defenders to engage the invading force.
This lower line is covered by fire from the higher wall.
glacis: In military engineering, a glacis is an artificial slope
constructed outside the moat or ditch of the castle or fortress.
It is usually made of earth and serves two main functions: (i) it
provides a direct and uniform line of sight for defenders of the
fort into the assaulting force, allowing an easy sweep of the
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field with fire from the parapet wall; and (ii) the bank of earth
also prevents the walls of the fort from being directly hit by
attacking cannon fire.
trace italienne: Sometimes also known as the plan for a star
fort, this was a design template that ensured that all parts of
the outer walls of a fort could be covered by flanking fire. This
was primarily achieved through: (i) bastions that were angular
in plan and thus did not leave blind spots like round bastions
or towers; and (ii) a plan that ensured every bastion and tower
was flanked on both sides by other similar bastions. This
caused the whole fort to look like a star when viewed from
above. Such a plan also required a wide ditch so that any
attacker had to face sustained fire.
NOTES
1. For the history of gunpowder technology and its
spread, see Iqtidar Alam Khan, Gunpowder and
Firearms: Warfare in Medieval India (New Delhi:
OUP, 2004); P. K. Gode, ‘The Use of Guns and
Gunpowder in India from AD 1400 Onwards’, in
Studies in Indian Cultural History, 3 vols (Poona:
Prof. P. K. Gode Collected Works Publication
Committee, 1960), II, 1–9; P. K. Gode, ‘The
Manufacture and Use of Firearms in India’, in
Studies in Indian Cultural History, II, 10–30;
Richard Eaton, ‘India’s Military Revolution: The
View from the Early 16th c. Deccan’, in Warfare,
Religion, and Society in Indian History, ed. by
Raziuddin Aquil and Kaushik Roy (New Delhi:
Manohar, 2012), pp. 85–108.
2. Jean Deloche, Studies on Fortification in India
(Pondicherry: Institut français de Pondichéry;
Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2007);
Jean Deloche, Seni (Gingee): A Fortified City in the
Tamil Country (Pondicherry: Institut français de
Pondichéry; Paris, France: École française
d’Extrême-Orient, 2005); Jean Deloche, Four Forts
of the Deccan (Pondicherry: Institut franc̦ais de
Pondichéry; Paris: École franc̦aise d’Extrême
Orient, 2009). See also Klaus Rötzer,
‘Fortifications and Gunpowder in the Deccan,
1368–1687’, in Sultans of the South: Arts of India’s
Deccan Courts, 1323–1687, ed. by Navina Haidar
and Marika Sardar (New York: Metropolitan
Museum of Art; New Haven, CT and London:
Dist. by Yale University Press, 2011). Books such
as Sidney Toy, The Fortified Cities of India (London:
Heinemann, 1965) and Sidney Toy, The Strongholds
of India (Melbourne: W. Heinemann, 1957) were
written in the mid-twentieth century, but are not
critical studies of fortification, and mostly without
any historical context.
3. Michael Roberts, The Military Revolution,
1560–1660, an Inaugural Lecture Delivered before
the Queen’s University of Belfast (Belfast: M. Boyd,
1956).
4. See glossary at the end of the essay.
5. Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military
Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1988).
6. Jeremy Black, ‘Introduction’, in War in the Early
Modern World: 1450–1815, 2nd edn (London:
Routledge, 2004), pp. 1–24 (p. 17): ‘The wide-
spread availability of gunpowder technology
underlines the need to contextualize “technology”
in order to understand why “advances” were made
in particular societies and what factors affected
patterns and practices of military diffusion.’
7. Jos Gommans, ‘War Band and Court’, in Mughal
Warfare: Indian Frontiers and Highroads to Empire,
1500–1700 (London; New York: Routledge, 2002),
pp. 39–64. Gommans also mentions on p. 79 an
interesting tale of the ritually agreed battle between
Sher Shah Sur and Humayun, who ‘. . . had agreed
that they would fight each other only for show’ at
the battle of Chausa in 1539.
8. For example, in John Briggs, History of the Rise of
Mohammedan Power in India, 4 vols (London:
Printed for Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and
Green, 1829) – a translation of the Tarikh-i
Firishtah – there are several dozen examples
wherein settlements were negotiated before a bat-
tle even began.
9. Stewart Gordon, The Marathas: 1600–1818
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
10. G. Yazdani, ‘Parenda: An Historical Fort’, in
Report of the Archaeological Department of H.E.
H. The Nizam’s Dominions 1921–24 (Calcutta:
Baptist Mission Press, 1926), pp. 17–26.
11. Briggs, III, 21.
12. Yazdani.

13. The incident is a famous one involving another noble
family, the Khandagales, whose rampaging elephant
eventually caused a rift between Shahaji Bhonsale
(father of Shivaji) and his in-laws, the Jadhavs of
Sindkhed Raja; for details of the incident, see
Radhey Shyam, The Kingdom of Ahmadnagar
(Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, 1966), p. 274.
14. The mansab was a Mughal rank (military and civil)
at court that was not hereditary, and zat and sawar
were the numerical designations used to differenti-
ate these rank-holders or mansabdars. Roughly, the
two numbers could be understood as quantifica-
tions of personal rank and number of troops.
15. Richard M. Eaton and Philip Wagoner, Power,
Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India’s
Deccan Plateau, 1300–1600 (New Delhi: Oxford
Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 10:15 06 April 2015
University Press, 2014).
16. Ibid., pp. 273–74.
17. Gordon, The Marathas, pp. 40–41, 178.
18. There are no large walled settlements under the
Marathas, or their later Peshwa rulers. Mughals
continued to wall cities, but the effectiveness of
these walls under artillery and mining attack is
debatable.
19. This reaction to superior invading armies armed
with good artillery can be gleaned on multiple
occasions throughout the history of the sixteenth
century in Briggs’ History.
20. For the proliferation of ideas of military strate-
gists like Vauban within Europe, see Geoffrey
Parker, The Military Revolution: Military
Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
David Eltis, The Military Revolution in Sixteenth
Century Europe (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995);
European Warfare 1453–1815, ed. by Jeremy
Black (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).
21. Ernst Barnes, Dhar and Mandu (Bombay:
Society’s Library, Town Hall, 1902), p. 4 (rep-
rinted from the Bombay British Royal Asiatic
Society, vol. XXI, no. 58).
22. Richard Gordon, ‘Forts and Social Control in the
Maratha State’, Modern Asian Studies, 13.1
(February 1979), 1–17.
23. Eaton, ‘India’s Military Revolution’, 85–108.
24. Alam Khan, pp. 20–21.
25. Ibid., p. 22, referring to the Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi.
26. Ibid., p. 22, using Ferishta’s descriptions of
Mullah Daud Bidari’s writings.
27. David Shulman, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and
V. Narayan Rao, ‘The Art of War under the
Nayakas’, in Warfare and Weaponry in South Asia
1000–1800: Themes in Indian History, ed. by Jos
South Asian Studies 125
Gommans and D. H. A. Kolff (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2003), pp. 133–52 (p. 139):
‘Reworking a conventional image’ in favour of
firearms and gunpowder technology.
28. The social (non)-acceptance was limited to high
military circles at the various courts.
29. Carlo Cipolla, Guns, Sails and Empires (London:
Collins, 1965), pp. 92–93, citing D. Ayalon,
Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk
Kingdom (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1956).
30. Alam Khan, pp. 31–32.
31. Richard Eaton, ‘“Kiss My Foot”, Said the King:
Firearms, Diplomacy, and the Battle for Raichur,
1520’, Modern Asian Studies, 43.1 (January 2009),
289–313 (pp. 297–98).
32. Deloche, Studies on Fortification in India, p. 90.
33. Eaton, ‘Raichur’, p. 293: ‘In 1468 and 1469, capita-
lizing on new engineering technology imported from
North India and the middle east, Bahmani authorities
built an entirely new wall around Raichur’s old
Kakatiya fortifications, complete with an outer
moat, numerous bastions and imposing gates’.
34. Klaus Rötzer has called this kind of structure the
‘Gawani’ tower after Mahmud Gawan (personal
communication).
35. Such field observations are corroborated by Jos
Gommans, ‘Warhorse and Gunpowder in India,
1000–1850’, in War in the Early Modern World, pp.
113–14, where he argued that round towers and
massive walls are explained as a response to gun-
powder sieges in the fifteenth century, as locations
with scarps, hilltops, and forests as defensive features
became important, and that by the sixteenth century,
forts were better equipped even against cannon. It is
in this period that he asserts: ‘Forts re-emerged as the
strongholds of a new martial elite’.
36. Deloche, Studies on Fortification in India, p. 94.
37. There are three towers at Golconda, Naldurg, and
Ahmadnagar, which have a polylobed plan, but
these seem to be very late, probably from the
eighteenth century.
38. Rötzer. Ahmadnagar was the first fort to use a
glacis, and most other sites followed quickly.
39. Carla M. Sinopoli and Kathleen D. Morrison,
‘Dimensions of Imperial Control: The
Vijayanagara Capital’, American Anthropologist,
97.1 (March 1995), 89–90.
40. Robert Brubaker, ‘Cornerstones of Control: The
Infrastructure of Imperial Security at
Vijayanagara, South India’ (doctoral dissertation,
University of Michigan, 2004), pp. 79–80.
41. Ibid., p. 95.
42. Ibid., p. 96–100.
 126 Pushkar Sohoni
43. Ibid., p. 126.
44. Robert Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar):
A Contribution to the History of India (London:
Allen & Unwin, 1924).
45. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘The Kagemusha Effect:
The Portuguese, Firearms and the State in Early
Modern South Asia’, Moyen-Orient & Océan
Indien, 4 (1987), 97–123 (p. 104). There are
suggestions that negotiations and seditions
were the underlying causes for the eventual
result.
46. For details of mercenaries and renegades in South
Asia in the sixteenth century, see Maria Augusta
Lima Cruz, ‘Exiles and Renegades in Early
Sixteenth-Century Portuguese India’, Indian
Economic and Social History Review, 23.3
Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 10:15 06 April 2015
(1986), 249–62. Subrahmanyam, ‘Kagemusha’,
also mentions the European expertise that was
recruited in the sixteenth century by states in the
Deccan.
47. Eaton, ‘Raichur’, pp. 289–313.
48. Cipolla, pp. 105–06.
49. Alam Khan, p. 18, demonstrates the anachro-
nistic and erroneous historical attribution of
fifteenth- and sixteenth-century meanings to
texts dating from the thirteenth to fourteenth
centuries. See also Eaton, ‘Raichur’, pp.
296–97.
50. I am grateful to Prashant Keshavamurthy for this
discussion on the semantics of gunpowder in early
modern Persian literature. In Dehkhoda’s sanad or
authoritative example adduced for ‫باروت‬, the first
distich uses the metaphor of a spark accidentally
igniting gunpowder while the second actually
describes someone’s sword as a ‘lightning spark’
that ignites a ‘field of gunpowder’.
51. Subrahmanyam, ‘Kagemusha’, p. 99: ‘[while]. . .
north India can be treated as part of a larger
spread, embracing the Safavid imperium and
Ottoman Turkey, South India remains outside the
ambit of such a discussion’.
52. Ibid., pp. 116–21, passim.
53. See Ulrike Freitag, Indian Ocean Migrants and
State Formation in Hadhramaut: Reforming the
Homeland (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2003).
54. See Catherine Asher, ‘Delhi Walled’, in City
Walls: The Urban Enciente in Global Perspective,
ed. by James Tracy (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 247–81.
55. For a lengthy exposition of this idea, see ibid.,
p. 279.
56. M. S. Mate, ‘Urban Culture of Medieval Deccan
(1300 AD to 1650 AD)’, Bulletin of the Deccan
College Post-Graduate and Research Institute,
56–57 (1996–97), 161–217 (p. 181): ‘It is equally
interesting to note that nobility treated precaution as
a better part of valour and ensconced themselves in
their own Jagirs, although they had their mansions
in the fortified areas of the town but outside the
citadel. Numerous instances have been cited by
Feristha especially in the late Bahmani period,
when the noblemen preferred to camp outside the
fortified area of the town of Bidar.’
57. Simon Millar, Assaye 1803: Wellington’s First and
‘Bloodiest’ Victory (Oxford and New York: Osprey,
2006).