Deccan

The Deccan is the high plateau that fills most of peninsular India. It is shaped like an inverted triangle, running from the Satpura and Vindhya ranges in the north to the Nilgiri Hills in the south, with the Western and Eastern Ghats on either side. It averages about 600 metres above sea level and covers most of Maharashtra, Telangana, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. In Sikh history it is the country where Aurangzeb’s reign wore itself out and where the tenth Guru’s life ended.

Key moments

• 8 September 1681: Aurangzeb sets out for the Deccan. Bijapur and Golconda fall in 1686 and 1687. He never returns north, and the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism calls the second half of his reign “the fruitless attempt to conquer the Deccan”.
• After December 1705: following the evacuation of Anandpur, Guru Gobind Singh’s Persian letter, the Zafarnamah, is carried to Aurangzeb, then camping at Ahmadnagar. The emperor invited the Guru to meet him but died on 3 March 1707 (20 February in the older calendar the Encyclopaedia uses) before the meeting could happen.
• 23 July 1707: the Guru meets the new emperor, Bahadur Shah, at Agra and travels south with him, towards the Deccan, where Kam Baksh had revolted.
• Late August 1708: the camps reach Nanded on the Godavari. On 3 September the Guru meets Madho Das, who is initiated and sent to the Punjab as Banda Singh on 5 October. The Guru dies on 7 October 1708, after telling the Sikhs to accept the Guru Granth Sahib as Guru.
• 11 October 1724: Asaf Jah I, a former Mughal viceroy of the Deccan, establishes autonomous rule there and founds the Asaf Jahi dynasty, another sign of the empire’s loosening grip.

What it means today. Nanded is where the Guru passed the guruship to the Granth. In 1832 Maharaja Ranjit Singh built a two-storeyed gurdwara with a golden dome on the site, and it remains a major centre of Sikh pilgrimage, Sachkhand Sri Hazur Sahib.