| Popis: |
South Asia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries witnessed considerable inflow of people through the western half of the Indian Ocean which originated from the Arabian peninsula and the east coast of Africa, as well as the Iranian Plateau. People from the latter, consisted mainly of Iranians and Turks, more remarkably than the others contributed to the politics and culture of Deccan not only in the Muslim kingdoms of the Bahmanis and its successors but also the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar. As mercenary soldiers or servants in royal household, the Turks, mainly of diaspora from northwestern Iran resulted from struggles among the Turkman confederations of the Qara Qoyunlu and the Aq Qoyunlu leading to the advent of the Safavids, dominated over the later Bahmani kingdom, leading to the establishment of the successor Muslim kingdoms of the Barīd Šāhīs, the Ādil Šāhīs and the Quṭb Šāhīs. Exploring through the Portuguese and Persian sources, the present paper aims to elucidate various types of narratives of the origin and lineage of the Quṭb Šāhīs. It reveals that many of the narratives assign the origin of the dynasty to the Qara Qoyunlu and the official history of the origin seems the have been generated in the course of the late sixteenth century to the early seventeenth century under the Qutb Šāhīs. Although they contain too many fanciful stories and contradictory details to be historically authentic, the narratives reflect aspects of the pre-modern Deccan society, in which the stories were of convincing historicity against the backdrop of successive migration of the Turks over the Indian Ocean. The other cases of the Qara Qoyunlu lineage as found in the queen of the Nizām Šāhīs and the Mughal noble 'Abd al-Raḥīm can be interpreted in a wider context of the history of South Asia, which has ever attracted little scholarly attention. |
