Assess the contribution of Firoz Shah Bahamani and Mahmud Gawan in the field of education.

Answer:

The Bahmani Sultanate produced two outstanding patrons of learning, Sultan Firoz Shah Bahmani and the minister Mahmud Gawan. Between them they made the Deccan a centre of scholarship that attracted scholars from across the Islamic world.

Firoz Shah Bahmani

• He ruled from 1397 to 1422 and was himself a scholar of wide learning.
• He was versed in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Kannada, Marathi and Telugu.
• He studied botany, geometry, logic, natural science and the Quran.
• He built an observatory near Daulatabad for astronomical study.
• He invited scholars, poets and administrators from Persia and Iraq.
• He encouraged the study of the sciences alongside religious learning.

Mahmud Gawan

• A Persian merchant-scholar, he served as prime minister from 1466 to 1481.
• He founded the great madrasa at Bidar in 1472, still standing in part.
• The building had lecture halls, a mosque, a library and quarters for students and teachers.
• Its library is said to have held some three thousand manuscripts.
• Instruction was free, covering theology, law, mathematics, astronomy and philosophy.
• He corresponded with scholars across the Islamic world and wrote works on prose style.
• Teachers were drawn from Persia and Arabia to staff it.

The building and its fate

• The madrasa was three storeys high, faced with coloured tiles in Persian style.
• It was damaged by an explosion of stored gunpowder in the seventeenth century.
• Its surviving portions remain among the finest monuments at Bidar.

Their wider significance

• They made Bidar and Gulbarga centres of learning in the Deccan.
• Persian language and Islamic sciences were firmly established in the region.
• Their patronage extended to Dakhani, contributing to its literary development.
• Gawan's execution in 1481 on a forged charge began the Bahmani decline.

Firoz Shah Bahmani and Mahmud Gawan therefore made an outstanding contribution to education in medieval India, the one through personal scholarship and patronage, the other through an institution of the first rank. As historians of the Deccan observe, the Bidar madrasa was among the finest educational foundations of its age anywhere in the Islamic world.