Page:Historic Landmarks of the Deccan.djvu/13

 INTRODUCTORY.

PROPOSE to give in this introductory chapter an outline of the history of the Deccan, slight indeed, but sufficient to supply the links necessary to connect the following accounts of places famous in story. Incidents fully described in the following chapters will here receive but slight notice, while important crises or events without a knowledge of which the history of southern India cannot be fully understood, but which are not part of the local history of any of the places of which accounts appear hereafter, will be more fully described.

The period which this sketch will embrace begins in 1294, in which year the Muhammadans first appeared in the Deccan. Our knowledge of the Deccan before this period is chiefly confined to the dry bones of history and has been most admirably summarised by Dr. Bhandarkar in his scholarly work.* This knowledge is not likely to be expanded otherwise than by the labours of the epigraphist and the numismatist, who have still much to do in the Deccan, for the mediæval Hindu failed conspicuously as a historian.

An account of Ala-ud-din Khalji's daring raid into the Deccan will be found in the following chapter. At the time when he surprised Devagiri or Deogir, then the northernmost kingdom of that part of India which had not been either overrun or threatened by Muhammadan invaders, three kingdoms existed in the Deccan and the Peninsula. Immediately to the south of the Satpuras lay Deogir, which was probably bounded on the south-east by the line which divides the ethnographical divisions of Maharashtra and Telingana, that is to say, a line running in a south-westerly direction from a point near the south-eastern corner of Berar towards Gulbarga. The western limit of this kingdom has not been ascertained, but it may have extended at times to the sea, though it is probable that the petty chiefs of the Konkan and the Western Ghats maintained, as a rule, a rude independence. The kingdom of Warangal or Telingana adjoined Deogir on the south-east, extended