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104 Petrovich

Chapter 4 Merchants, Young Heroes and Caliphs: Revisiting Maḥmūd Gāwān

Maya Petrovich

The manifold interactions between and South Asia remain insuffi- ciently explored. In particular, the presence of men in the Indian Ocean world during the high medieval and the early modern periods has invariably been defined by their appearance as ubiquitous yet shadowy rumes in Portu- guese chronicles.1 Within the Islamic framework, most analyses of western Asian men in historical India fall into one of two categories: either the “new- comers” from the western and central Islamic lands (variously called by the sources āfāqīs, i.e. “men from [distant] horizons”, or gharībān, “foreigners”, also sometimes encountered as the gharīb al-diyār) are viewed as a uniform faction juxtaposed with local Muslims (such as the daknīs), or else the Iranian diaspora is elevated into a sui generis privileged position that reduces all other immigrants to relative insignificance.2 Given such an imbalance, we might ask why yet another elucidation of Maḥmūd Gāwān’s trajectory is necessary. Details of his life have been explored in a monograph-length biography, encyclopaedic entries and several scholarly articles.3 Gāwān, as is well known, hailed from the Caspian Sea province of

1 The finer details of defining a Rumi identity will be discussed in my monograph; suffice it to say that the Rumi diasporas cannot be simply defined as exclusively Anatolian, and that they predate Ottoman clashes with the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean by centuries. 2 The point here is most certainly not to “downgrade” the formidable achievements of Persian- speaking diasporas in South Asia over a millennium but rather to expand the “magical circle” of discussions about western Asian and other migrants to the frontiers of Islamicate India, particularly in regards to military labour. For a critical engagement with Deccani sources about elite formation, see Roy S. Fischel, “Society, Space, and the State in the Deccan Sultanates, 1565-1636,” PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2012. Also see several articles in Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton (eds), Slavery & South Asian History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006). 3 For recent explorations of Maḥmūd Gāwān’s life, see Richard M. Eaton, The New Cambridge History of India I:8, A Social History of the Deccan, 1300-1761, Eight Indian Lives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 59-77; and Emma Jane Flatt, “Practicing Friendship: Epistolary Constructions of Social Intimacy in the Bahmani Sultanate,” Studies in History 33, no. 1 (2017), 61-81. Also see Emma Flatt, “Mahmud Gavan”, Encyclopaedia of Islam3 (Leiden: Brill, 2007-).

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Merchants, Young Heroes and Caliphs 105

Gilan and was not a Turk ethnically or culturally. What, then, constitutes his relevance to a volume which seeks to investigate ties between Turkish/Turkic worlds and South Asia? Why select him in this particular context, rather than an individual who would with reasonable certitude represent Anatolian dias- poras in the Indian Ocean world, such as Muṣṭafā ibn Bayrām, the nephew of Selman Reis who arrived in Gujarat in the 1530s and was promptly awarded the title of Rūmī khān? This chapter contends that a closer examination of Gāwān’s life and writ- ings offers the chance to elucidate several aspects of Turkish and Turkic pres- ence in high medieval India.4 First of all, Gāwān actively interacted with rulers of western and eastern Anatolia ( the Conqueror and Uzun Ḥasan, respectively, as well as their successors), sending merchants and em- bassies equipped with ample gifts and offers of regular commercial exchanges; his name resonated among Ottoman intellectuals into the nineteenth century because of the high value attached to his inshāʾ collection. Second, Gāwān’s ascendance took place during a period in which boundar- ies between Iran and Anatolia were by no means as sharply delineated as they later became. Gilan borders Azerbaijan, the old administrative centre of the Mongol Ilkhanate, which in its broad sense included parts of easternmost Ana- tolia, in particular the areas contested by the Qaraqoyunlu and the Aqqoyunlu confederacies. While Gāwān’s attachment to his birth region is amply attested in his correspondence, which also regularly involved members of his family,

4 Following the tradition established in Turkological ethnolinguistic literature, I use the term “Turkish” (Türkeitürkisch) for speakers of Oghuz dialects in Anatolia, Iran and Iraq, while re- serving the term “Turkic” for Central Asian Turks. This is also reminiscent of a distinction which was regularly made in Gujarati Persian sources, which invariably use “Turkī” for Central Asians and “Rūmī” for Anatolians, although sources from the Deccan, particularly in Sanskrit and Kannada, do tend to merge the two at first glance. Subtle differences between the terms yavana and turuṣka for the early modern period have not yet been explored, but they could occasionally mirror the division between “Turkī” and “Rūmī”. According to the brief analysis by Pushka Prasad, “The Turuska or Turks in Late Ancient Indian Documents,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 55 (1994), 170-5, it seems that yavana was indeed often used for western Asian Muslims and Arabs along with the more generic mleccha, whereas turuṣka initially designated Central Asians before the conversions to . Other crucial studies for the medieval period include Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya, Representing the Other? Sanskrit Sources and the Muslims (Eighth to Fourteenth Century) (New Delhi: Manohar, 1998) and the superb article by Phillip B. Wagoner, “Harihara, Bukka and the : The Delhi Sultanate in the Political Imagination of Vijayanagara,” in David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence (eds). Beyond Turk and Hindu, Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia (Gainsville, FL: The University Press of Florida, 2000), 300-26. For a related discussion, see also Finbarr Barry Flood, “Lost in Translation: Architecture, Taxonomy, and the Eastern ‘Turks’,” Muqarnas, 24 (2007), 79-115.