280 THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY. somewhere near Kolhapur, and after this the king and a few of his principal nobles marched down to Dabul and enjoyed the (to them) novel amusement of sailing about up and down the coast. Within three or four years of this, how¬ ever, the Bijapur kingdom was established, and the whole Konkan passed to it. In 1508 the misfortunes of Dabul began, when it was bombarded by Almeida, the Por¬ tuguese Viceroy, who did not, however, sucoeed in taking the fort. Ferishtah says that in lf>10 Goa was ceded by the king of Bijapur to the Portuguese as the condition of their not molesting the other towns on the coast, and that they kept this treaty. The Portuguese his¬ torians, however, give a very different account; for according to themselves they were constant¬ ly marauding, and in 1522 landed and levied a contribution at Dabul. Before this, in 1515, a Persian ambassador had embarked at Dabul on his way back from Bijapur, and this is the last event of the sort I have read of in connection with the place. The Portuguese claim to have burnt every town on the coast between Srivardhan and Goa in 1548, and again in 1569, but they are discreetly silent about an event which Ferishtah records of 1571.* A Portuguese force then landed at Dabul with the intention of burning it as usual, though one would suppose that, as only two years had elapsed since the last occasion, there wonld not be much worth burning. But the governor, Khwaja Ali Shirazi, having heard of their in¬ tentions, laid an ambush and put to death 150 of them. Not many years after this, when the Portuguese had begun to be inconvenienced by the advances of the Dutch, they made peace with Bijapur, and we then hear no more of Dabulf till it was plundered by Sivaji in 1660. Its subsequent history has nothing to do with the Musalmans, and need not therefore be re¬ ferred to. Hamilton, a traveller of the beginning of the last century, mentions that the English had once a factory there, but of this I have found no confirmation. It is not difficult to understand why it was that Dabul declined in the later days of the Musalmans, and still more subsequently. So long as the Musalman capital was at Bidar
- Slioikli Zin-ud-din in the Tohfat ul mujahidin, places
it in 1577. See Tohfat, p. 174.—Ei>. t Ferishtah mentions it in the following places (Briggs’s [Octobeb, 1873. or Gulbarga, Dabul was the nearest port, and there was no need to look for another. But when independent kingdoms were established at Bijapur and Golkonda, it would be natural to look for ports further south than Dabul; and Rajapur, and especially the splendid harbour and creek of Gheria, would soon obtain the pre¬ ference. And in Maratha days Dabul was en¬ tirely eclipsed by the neighbouring town and fortressof Anjanvel,and thus, between near and distant rivals, fell into utter obscurity, as also did Chaul. Grant Duff says that in 1697 Dabul was granted in inam to the Sirke family, and a greater proof of its decay is that some of the present Hindu inhabitants are said to have grants, dated in the last century, of some of the best sites in the town, described as waste ground. As showing the obscurity it has now fallen into, I may mention that Thornton’s Gazetteer of India does not even contain tlip name of Dabul, though, as not a single word is said about the ancient greatness or the ruins of Gulbarga, this is, perhaps, not surprising. On the other hand, in a map of India published with Ormc’s Historical Fragments in 1782, Dabul is marked conspicuously, while I find several lines given to it in a small Gazetteer of the Eastern Hemisphere published at Boston, U. S. in 1808. So much for history, and from that wo pass into the region of tradition and conjecture. The Muhammadan inhabitants of the present day are so poor that there is not very much to be got from them, but they say that there were formerly 360 mosques in the town—a purely mythical number of course— and profess to be able to show tho sites of nearly a hundred: and wherever foundations for new houses are dug, remains of Muhammadan buildings are pretty sure to be turned up. The following account of the large mosque on the shore, was given by Ghuliim Qalieb Badar, one of the chief Muhammadan inhabitants, to Mr. G. Vidal, C.S.;— “ The mosk at Dfibhol, in the Diipuli taluqa of the Ratn&giri Zilla, dates from the reign of Mahmud Adil Sh&h of Bijapur, and was built in A. Hej. 1070 (a.d. 1659-60) by the king’s daughter—the princess ’Aayshah BIbl, or, as she was commonly called, the M& Qaheba. “The princess had conceived a wish to visit the holy shrine at Mekkali before she came of age, translation),—vol. I. p. 379 ,* vol. II. pp. 295,350, 413,483-4, 511, 542-3; vol. III. pp. 7, 48, 345, 5U7,513; vol. IV. pp. 71, 533, 530, 640.—Ed.
