The Sultan as a servant of Brahmans? : tracing the peregrinations of an early modern legend

The paper analyzes a series of legends from the Deccan region of India, which situate the Bahmani Sultan in the position of a Brahmin servant. It starts with a discussion of the intense debates between historians about the origin of the sultan, which took place in the first half of the 20th century. Drawing on these debates, it argues that the legends, as available in Persian and Marathi primary sources, reveal the personal and contemporary goals of their Muslim and mostly Brahmin authors and are directly related to their authors' contemporary ideal of the king (from a just king to a sacralized king), rather than contribute to the knowledge of his personal history as the 20th century historian would interpret them. The article, thus, both contrasts and connects early modern sensibilities and the modern search of the historical past, which bears the repercussions of the past divided into its modernly imagined Hindu and Muslim parts.