Journey
The Deccan and Vijayanagara
Three hundred and forty years of the plateau contested between one Hindu empire and five sultanates that had themselves split from a sixth. Raichur was Vijayanagara's high point, Talikota its end, and Aurangzeb's sieges of Bijapur and Golconda a century later swallowed the victors as thoroughly as they had swallowed the empire they destroyed.
Stops (13)
- Gulbarga / Kalaburagi · Bahmani capital 1347–1425
The Bahmani sultanate broke from Delhi in 1347 and ruled the plateau from here for eighty years. Gulbarga's Jama Masjid is roofed throughout with domes rather than open to the sky, and the Bandanawaz dargah made it the point at which Chishti Sufism entered the Deccan and began writing in Dakhni.
- Bidar · capital from 1430
The capital moved to Bidar under Ahmad Shah, and Mahmud Gawan built a madrasa here to a Persian plan with a library of three thousand manuscripts. Bidar is also where bidri inlay was developed. The sultanate fragmented into five states between 1490 and 1518, and this was the first to be swallowed.
- Raichur · 1520
Krishnadevaraya took the Raichur doab from Ismail Adil Shah with a frontal assault across the Krishna, and the campaign is described in detail by Nuniz. It is the furthest north a Vijayanagara army ever held ground, and it made every sultanate in the Deccan treat the empire as the problem to be solved.
- Hampi / Vijayanagara · 1336–1565
The Vijayanagara capital on the Tungabhadra, protected by granite hills and the river, and at its height one of the largest cities in the world. Its revenues funded temples the length of the peninsula, which is why the sack of one city in 1565 shows up in the building history of places a thousand miles away.
- Hampi Vitthala complex · 1513–1565
The Vitthala complex, with the stone chariot and the colonnade of musical piers, was going up in Krishnadevaraya's reign and after, and was never finished. Work stops mid-course: the unfinished carving is the clearest physical record anywhere in India of a court that ceased to exist in a single season.
- Talikota · 23 January 1565
Bijapur, Ahmednagar, Golconda and Bidar combined — four sultanates that had spent seventy years fighting each other — and destroyed the Vijayanagara army in an afternoon, partly through the defection of two Muslim commanders of its own. Rama Raya was killed. The capital was sacked over five months and never reoccupied.
- Penukoṇḍa · Aravidu capital 1565–1592
Tirumala Raya withdrew the treasury and the court to this hill fort two hundred kilometres south-east, and the empire continued under the Aravidu line for another century as a shrinking overlord of Nayaka governors. Penukonda is what Vijayanagara became after Talikota: a capital chosen for defensibility rather than display, with the great temple building already behind it.
- Chandragiri Fort · Aravidu capital 1592–1646
The last Vijayanagara capital, in the hills below Tirupati, from which Venkata II and his successors issued the grants the Nayakas of Madurai, Thanjavur and Gingee increasingly ignored. The 1639 grant of Madraspatnam to Francis Day was issued from here, so Fort St George exists on a Vijayanagara title. Fort St George therefore stands on a title issued from the empire's last hill capital.
- Ahmadnagar Fort · Nizam Shahi 1490–1636
The star-shaped fort at Ahmednagar was raised in 1490 by Malik Ahmad, whose Nizam Shahi state was the first of the five successors and the one Malik Ambar later ran. It was annexed by Shah Jahan in 1636, and Aurangzeb died here in 1707 at the end of his Deccan war.
- Bijapur (Vijayapura) · Adil Shahi 1490–1686
Bijapur's Gol Gumbaz carries one of the largest masonry domes ever built, on an interlocking squinch system with a whispering gallery under it, and the Ibrahim Rauza beside it is the finest small tomb in the Deccan. Aurangzeb besieged the city for fifteen months and took it in 1686. Its Malik-e-Maidan, a fifty-five-tonne bronze siege gun taken from Ahmednagar, still sits on its bastion.
- Golconda · Qutb Shahi 1518–1687
The granite fortress above Hyderabad, with an acoustic system that carries a clap from the gate to the citadel, and the diamond market of the world while Kollur and Paritala were being worked. Aurangzeb took it in 1687 by bribing an officer to open a gate after eight months of siege.
- Gingee Fort · Nayaka, Maratha, Mughal
Three fortified hills joined by walls, held by the Gingee Nayakas under Vijayanagara, then by Bijapur, then by Shivaji's general from 1677, then by the Mughals after a long siege in 1698, then by the French and the British. The fort changed hands more often than almost any other in the south.
- Aurangzeb's Tomb, Khuldabad · 1707
Aurangzeb spent his last twenty-six years in the Deccan and is buried in an open grave beside a Sufi shrine at Khuldabad, paid for by copying Qurans, with no dome over it. He took Bijapur and Golconda and destroyed both, and the Marathas he came to finish outlived him and his empire.