Journey
Sultanate capitals
Between about 1200 and 1600 a dozen sultanates built capitals across India, and almost all of them are now empty. The buildings show what happened when Persian and Central Asian forms met Indian masons who had never built a true arch or a dome and had to be taught, and then improved on the instruction.
Stops (12)
- Qutb complex, Delhi · The Qutb complex — the first, and the borrowed stone
Delhi's earliest sultanate building, raised from the dismantled material of twenty-seven temples by the masons who had carved them, with corbelled arches because the builders did not yet know the true arch. The Qutb Minar's lower storeys are Ghurid; the fourth-century iron pillar in the courtyard is older than everything around it.
- Tughlaqabad · Tughlaqabad — a capital built and abandoned in four years
Ghiyasuddin Tughluq's fortress-city of the 1320s, with sloping rubble walls up to fifteen metres thick, built at speed and left almost immediately. Nizāmuddīn's curse on it is the story everyone tells; the water supply is the likelier explanation, and the sultan died within a year of finishing it when a pavilion collapsed on him.
- Daulatabad · Daulatabad — the capital nobody wanted
Muhammad bin Tughluq moved Delhi's entire population here in 1327 and moved it back a few years later. The fort itself is formidable — a rock scarped vertical, a moat, and a single spiral tunnel that could be filled with smoke — and the transfer scattered Delhi's Chishti khānqāhs into the Deccan permanently.
- Gulbarga / Kalaburagi · Gulbarga — the Bahmani beginning
The first Bahmani capital, whose congregational mosque is roofed over its entire courtyard rather than left open to the sky, which no other Indian mosque of the period attempts. Gesūdarāz's shrine here made the city the Deccan's spiritual centre as well as its political one, and it stayed so after the court left.
- Bidar · Bidar — the second Bahmani capital
Where the Bahmani state moved in 1430 and where Mahmud Gawan built a madrasa in the Persian manner, faced in coloured tile, that would not look out of place in Samarkand. Half of it was destroyed by an ammunition explosion. The bidriware craft comes from this court.
- Bijapur (Vijayapura) · Bijapur — the dome that should not stand
The Adil Shahi capital, whose Gol Gumbaz has the largest dome in India, carried on interlocking pendentives that push the load outward rather than on anything visible, with a whispering gallery under it. The Ibrahim Rauza nearby is the finer building and the Taj's reputed model.
- Golconda · Golconda — the fort and the diamonds
The Qutb Shahi citadel on a granite hill, with an acoustic system that carries a clap at the gate to the summit, and the trading centre through which the Kollur diamonds passed — the Koh-i-Noor, the Hope, the Regent. Hyderabad was founded below it in 1591 when the fort ran short of water.
- Mandu · Mandu — a city on a plateau
The Malwa sultanate's capital on a ridge above the Narmada valley, with the Jahaz Mahal built between two lakes so that it appears to float, and the Hoshang Shah tomb, which is the earliest marble building in India and which Shah Jahan sent his architects to study.
- Hoshang Shah · Hoshang Shah — the Malwa sultan in marble
The Ghuri sultan who made Mandu his capital and whose tomb there is India's first marble mausoleum, with a plaque recording that Shah Jahan's architects, including Ustad Hamid, came to examine it. The line from Mandu to the Taj runs through this building.
- Champaner-Pavagadh · Champaner-Pavagadh — sultanate and pīṭha on one hill
Mahmud Begada's capital below a hill carrying the Kālikā Mātā Śakti pīṭha, with mosques built in trabeate stone by Gujarati temple masons — no arches, and minarets treated like temple towers. The city was abandoned within a century and is the most complete pre-Mughal Islamic city in India.
- Ahmedabad / Karnāvatī / Āshāval · Ahmedabad — the sultanate city that kept going
Ahmad Shah's foundation of 1411, whose mosques use carved stone jālis and trabeate construction from the local temple tradition, and whose Rani Sipri mosque and tomb were built by a sultan's wife. Unlike almost every other sultanate capital it never emptied, and it is now India's first World Heritage city.
- Jaunpur Sharqi ensemble · Jaunpur — the Sharqi arch
The Sharqi sultanate's capital in the eastern Ganges plain, whose mosques put a vast pylon-like screen across the front rather than a dome above, a solution found nowhere else in India. Jaunpur was also a centre of Persian and Sufi learning, called the Shiraz of the East, and its khayal tradition claims descent from Sultan Husain Sharqi.