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CHANDERĪ UNDER MALWĀ SULTĀNS. Prof. A. H. Nizami, Rewa
The disintegration of the Tughluq Empire and its extinction at the hands of Timur in 1398, had led to the independent rule of a number of provincial dynasties including that of Malwa where Dilawar Khan, had founded the strong and virile kingdom of Mandogarh. Two inscriptions of Prince Qadr Khan (Ghori) dated 1416 and 1420 have been found in Chanderi and Sivapuri respectively and Muhammad Bihamad Khani, the author of the History of Erachh and Kalpi refers to the usurpation of Paniyargarh, a suburb of Jatara, by Qadr Khan's officer, Qazi Junaid and with a view to recover the thana, a military expedition had to be sent by Sultan Qadir Shah of Kalpi. Qazi Khan Badr Muhammad of Delhi who calls himself Dharwal, author of a lexicon, the "Adatul Fudala”, who came to the court of Qadr Khan, the governor of Chanderi from Jaunpur in 1419, pays tribute to the governor for his patronage of poets and scholars there and records the titles of the princely governor as Khan-i-Aazam, Khaqan-i-Muazzam Masnad-i-Aali Qadr Khan ibn Dilawar Khan. It is not clear whether Qadr Khan was holding the gubernatorial office since the days of his father or whether Alp Khan, the heir-apparent, was responsible for this appointment on coming to the throne himself as Sultan Hoshang Shah. Thus Bundelkhand in the fifteenth century was being administered from two centres namely Chanderi under the direct rule of the Malwa Sultan and Kalpi, where the Malikzada Turks held sway in the country horizontally extending from Bhander to Mahoba roughly corresponding to the Jhansi Division (without Lalitpur district) of Uttar Pradesh and the districts of Datia, Tikamgarh, Chhatarpur and Panna (without Pawai Tahsil) of Madhya Pradesh. Chanderi Division of the Malwa Sultanate extended vertically from Shivapuri and Deogarh in the north to Damoh (then including Sagar district) upto the source of the river Kyan. In Garhā near modern Jabalpur, had been founded in the beginning of the fifteenth century a new seat of power by the Rāj Gonds, the nucleus of a kingdom destined to develop in the first quarter of the next century as a powerful political centre under Raja Amhanadas alias Sangram Sah who had the audacity to occupy such places of Malwa State as Damoh, Mariado and Hatta, counted important 'garhs' among the fifty two forts of the Gond ruler whose Chandela daughter-in-law, the Regent Rāni Durgavati, is known to have inflicted a shameful defeat on Sultan Bayazid alias Baz Bahadur of Malwa. 1. I am indebted for this information to my esteemed friend, Dr. Ziyauddin
Desai, Director of Arabic and Persian Epigraphy, extracted for my use from the 'Urdu' Magazine of Pakistan Vol. 43 No. 4 (October, 1967).
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