The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c29.4

v3.c29.4

There was not wanting subject-matter of dispute. The subjection of the weaker governors in the four pairs of provinces into which the Bahmanī dominions had been divided by Mahmūd Gāvān, who were often supported by their powerful neighbours; the mischievous grant to Ahmadnagar by Qāsim Barīd, acting in the name of Mahmūd Bahmanī, of Sholāpur and the district surrounding it, claimed by Bījāpur; the refusal of the king of Berar to surrender peacefully Pāthrī, the ancestral home of the kings of Ahmadnagar, on whose border it lay; minor frontier disputes; and the occasional defection of members of the ‘Ādil Shāhī dynasty from the Shiah faith, reviving the old feud between Deccanis and Foreigners, with its intrigues and bloodshed, combined to banish peace from the Deccan. Even the attacks on Ahmadnagar by the Mughul emperors produced but a semblance of unity. Help came from the other kingdoms, but none put forth its full strength to avert a danger common to all. In later years, when only Golconda and Bījāpur remained to stem the tide of imperialism, sympathy between the doomed states was more cordial, but selfishness and cowardice so restricted the assistance given by the former to the latter that Aurangzīb, instead of meeting an alliance, was enabled to crush his victims singly.