Nizam Shahi Sultanate of Ahmadnagar

The frontier sultanate

Ahmadnagar was the northernmost of the Deccan sultanates and therefore the first to face Mughal expansion. Its founder Malik Ahmad was the son of a Bahmani minister who had been a Hindu brahmin captured as a boy and converted — a biography that is unremarkable for the Deccan and hard to fit into later categories.

The sultanate joined the coalition that destroyed Vijayanagara at Talikota in 1565, and spent its remaining seventy years resisting Akbar and his successors.

Chand Bibi and Malik Ambar

Chand Bibi, a princess of Ahmadnagar who had been queen of Bijapur, returned to defend her natal city when Akbar's armies besieged it in 1595. She is recorded as directing the defence in person from the walls and as repairing a breach overnight; the siege was lifted on terms. She was killed by her own troops in 1600 during the next siege, and the city fell.

Malik Ambar, an Ethiopian brought to India as a slave and risen to be regent, then held the sultanate together for two decades from a new capital, fighting the Mughals by mobile cavalry raiding rather than pitched battle — the method the Marathas would later perfect, and which he taught them. He also carried out a revenue settlement in the Deccan based on measurement and a fixed share, which the Marathas retained, and built the Khadki settlement that became Aurangabad, with a system of underground water channels still partly in use.

Ambar's career — an African slave who became the effective ruler of an Indian state and its most capable general — is among the most extraordinary in Indian history, and the Habshi or Siddi communities of western India descend from the same African presence in the Deccan.

After his death in 1626 the sultanate collapsed, and Shah Jahan annexed it in 1636. The young Shahaji Bhonsle, Shivaji's father, fought this last campaign in Nizam Shahi service.