NANDED

When Alauddin Bahman Shah broke from Delhi in 1347, Nanded fell within his eastern marches. By 1366 the second Bahmani sultan Mohammed Shah I had reduced the country firmly to obedience. The fort at Kandhar — twenty kos to the south, originally a Rashtrakuta foundation — was rebuilt as a Bahmani garrison. It was from Kandhar's ramparts that the sultanate watched the long road from Devagiri to Warangal, the very road on which Nanded was a way-station.

The Bahmani sultanate fragmented at the end of the fifteenth century. Nanded passed to the new Nizam Shahi kingdom of Ahmadnagar, founded by Malik Ahmad in 1490. For nearly a century and a half it was a Nizam Shahi parganah — never large, never a capital, but never neglected. The town acquired a small Sufi establishment around the dargah of Hazrat Sayyid Sarwar Shah, a fifteenth-century Chishti saint, whose urs is still observed in the old quarter.

Shah Jahan's Deccan campaign of 1633 ended Nizam Shahi rule. Nanded, with the rest of the kingdom, passed to the Mughals — and would remain on the seam between Mughal authority and Maratha resurgence for the next century.

Guru Gobind Singh — born at Patna in 1666, founder of the Khalsa at Anandpur in 1699 — left the Punjab for the last time in 1707. He had lost his four sons in the Mughal wars; his mother and his fortress at Anandpur were behind him; he travelled with the new emperor's blessing as a free agent, attended by a small Khalsa retinue.

By August 1708 he was at Nanded, on the south bank of the Godavari, in the camp later known as Nanded Sahib. He met there the Bairagi ascetic Madho Das, baptised him into the Khalsa as Banda Singh Bahadur, and despatched him with a hukamnamah and five arrows northward to Punjab — the mission that, eighteen months later, would seize Sirhind.

On the night of 6–7 October 1708, weakened by an assassination attempt some weeks earlier, the Guru summoned his followers to his tent. He placed five paise and a coconut before the Adi Granth, bowed to the volume, and pronounced: "Sab Sikhan ko hukam hai, Guru manyo Granth" — to all Sikhs, the order is given: take the Granth as Guru. With those words he ended the line of personal Gurus that had begun two centuries earlier with Nanak. He died at Nanded on the morning of 7 October 1708. He was forty-one.

The most consequential thing the Guru did at Nanded — apart from declaring the Granth eternal Guru — was to commission Banda. Madho Das was a bairagi Vaishnava ascetic of Punjabi origin, settled at Nanded for nearly twenty years in a riverside dera with a reputation for occult powers. The encounter between him and the Guru is among the most retold scenes in Sikh tradition: the ascetic's tricks fail before the Guru's calm; he asks to be the Guru's banda, his slave, and is taken into the Khalsa instead.

Within weeks of the Guru's death the new Banda Singh Bahadur was riding north with his five arrows and his commission. The campaign that followed, between 1709 and 1715, was the first armed answer of the Khalsa to its Mughal persecutors and the first appearance of a Sikh state in the Sirhind country. It was, in every sense, made at Nanded.

Banda's old dera, on the western edge of the modern town, is still pointed out as the Banda Ghat. It is one of nine secondary historical gurdwaras in the Nanded sangat — collectively known as the nau-ghats — that mark stages of the Guru's two months on the Godavari.

When Mir Qamar-ud-Din Khan, Asaf Jah I, broke from the failing Mughal centre in 1724 and made the Deccan his hereditary nizamat, Nanded passed quietly into Hyderabad State. It would remain so for two and a quarter centuries — a Marathwada district under subadars appointed from the Char Minar, sending its grain and cotton to the Hyderabad treasury and its scholars to the Dar-ul-Uloom and the Nizam's College.

The Asaf Jahis honoured Hazur Sahib continuously. The fifth Nizam, Afzal-ud-Daula (r. 1857–1869), confirmed the gurdwara's old jagir by farman; the seventh, Mir Osman Ali Khan (r. 1911–1948), endowed a major repair of the dome in 1936 and again contributed to the rebuilding of the boundary wall. The state's Sikh subjects were a small but visible minority; the Hyderabad cavalry included a Sikh troop down to 1948.

On 17 September 1948, with Operation Polo, Hyderabad State acceded to the Indian Union. Nanded passed first into Hyderabad State (Indian) and then, with the States Reorganisation Act of 1956, into Bombay State. In 1960 it became part of the new state of Maharashtra and the cultural capital of its Marathwada region, which it remains.