The Khilji Reach into the Deccan

Under Sultan Ala al-Din Khilji (reigned 1296-1316), the Delhi Sultanate reached the height of its power and extended its reach far to the south, across the Deccan plateau and into the deep peninsula, through the great campaigns of his general Malik Kafur in the years around 1307-1311. The gateway to the south was Devagiri, a fortress crowning a steep, almost conical hill of rock that rises sheer from the Deccan plain, its sides scarped smooth and its single ascent spiralling up through the living rock, reckoned one of the strongest hill-forts in all India; the Yadava rulers of Devagiri were made tributary, and the campaigns pressed on to the rich temple-cities of the far south. The reign is recorded by the poet Amir Khusraw and by the historian Ziya al-Din Barani in the Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi. Alauddin is remembered not only for conquest but for the apparatus of a strong centralised state: to sustain a great standing army against the threat of Mongol invasion and to extend his power, he imposed a famous system of market control at Delhi, fixing by decree the prices of grain, cloth and other goods, with measures, registers and strict inspection. This scene sets the two faces of his rule side by side: the near-impregnable conical fortress of Devagiri that marked the sultanate's southward reach, and the measures and price-lists of the controlled markets that paid for its armies. It depicts the fortress and the apparatus of rule rather than a battle; the Deccan that Delhi touched here would in time become a Muslim political world of its own.