Journey
The Deccan Sultanates
Five states out of one, on a plateau between the Mughals and Vijayanagara, running on Persian administration, Ethiopian and Central Asian soldiery, Telugu and Marathi revenue and Dakhni verse. Between them they built the largest masonry dome in India, ran the world's only diamond market, and produced a literature almost nobody now reads.
Stops (17)
- Gulbarga / Kalaburagi · Gulbarga — the Bahmani capital and the shrine
The first Bahmani seat, whose Jami Masjid is roofed entirely in domes with no open courtyard — unique in India — and whose dargah of Gesudaraz, the Chishti shaikh who came south from Delhi in 1398, is the greatest Chishti centre outside the north and the point at which Dakhni devotional writing begins.
- Dakhnī · Dakhnī — the language
Delhi's Hindavi mixed with Marathi, Telugu and Kannada, and made into a court and Sufi literary medium two centuries before Urdu was written in the north. Muhammad Quli's divan is the first collected volume of poetry in any form of Urdu, and northern prestige later buried the whole tradition.
- Bidar · Bidar — the second capital
The Bahmani capital from 1425 and then the Barid Shahi seat, with a fort whose triple moat is cut out of laterite, the tombs of both dynasties outside the walls, and the bidriware trade that blackens its zinc alloy with soil taken from inside the fort.
- Maḥmūd Gāwān · Maḥmūd Gāwān — the minister and his madrasa
A Persian horse-trader who became chief minister, reorganised the provinces and the army, took the Konkan, and built a madrasa on the Central Asian plan with a three-thousand-manuscript library and free board. Executed in 1481 on a forged letter; the state broke up within twenty years.
- Bahmani Rauzas, Bidar · The Bahmani rauzas at Bidar
Twelve domed tombs of the Bahmani sultans in a line at Ashtur outside the city, the largest of them Ahmad Shah Wali's, whose interior is painted with Persian calligraphy and gold arabesque — the best surviving Deccan sultanate painting, in a tomb that is still visited as a shrine by both communities.
- Ahmadnagar Fort · Ahmadnagar — the Nizam Shahi fort
A circular stone fort with a wet ditch, the Nizam Shahi capital, where Chand Bibi held out against Akbar's armies in 1595 and was killed by her own troops five years later — and where Malik Ambar ran the state as regent for the next two decades.
- Malik Ambar · Malik Ambar — the regent
Born in Ethiopia, sold as a boy, and by 1600 the regent who held the Mughals out of the Deccan for twenty years with light cavalry, scorched earth and a revenue system that Shivaji's administration later took over wholesale. He founded the city that became Aurangabad and built its water supply.
- Naldurg, Osmanabad · Naldurg — the fort and the weir
An Adil Shahi fort on a basalt outcrop in Osmanabad with three kilometres of wall, and below it a dam across the Bori with a chamber inside the masonry — the Pani Mahal — so that the court could sit inside the weir with the river going over the roof.
- Bijapur (Vijayapura) · Bijapur — the Adil Shahi capital
The richest of the successor states, with the Gol Gumbaz's dome among the largest ever raised, on an interlocking squinch system with a whispering gallery inside — and the Jami Masjid, the Malik-e-Maidan cannon, and a city wall ten kilometres round.
- Ibrahim Rauza, Bijapur · Ibrāhīm Rauza — the finer building
Ibrahim Adil Shah II's tomb and mosque facing each other on one plinth, in stone cut to a precision nothing else in the Deccan matches — the model, some argue, that the Taj's designers knew. He wrote Dakhni verse, played the tambur, and dedicated his book of songs to Ganesha and Saraswati.
- Bara Kaman, Bijapur · Bāra Kamān — the tomb that was stopped
Ali Adil Shah II's unfinished tomb: twelve arches standing open to the sky, meant to carry a dome larger than the Gol Gumbaz and abandoned at plinth height when he died in 1672. It is the clearest thing in India about what the Deccan wars cost the states that fought them.
- Golconda · Golconda — the fort above the diamond market
The Qutb Shahi citadel on a granite hill, with acoustics that carry a clap from the gate to the summit, water raised by a chain of Persian wheels, and below it the city that was the world's diamond market — the name became a European byword for wealth long after the fort had fallen.
- Kollur / Golconda diamond fields · Kollur — where the diamonds came from
The alluvial workings in the Krishna valley that Golconda controlled and taxed: the only significant source of large diamonds anywhere before Brazil in the 1720s. The Koh-i-Noor, the Hope, the Regent, the Darya-i-Noor and the Orlov all came out of these gravels.
- Chārmīnār · Chārmīnār — the new capital's centre
Muhammad Quli's arch of 1591 at the crossing of the two axial streets of his new city on the Musi, with a mosque on its upper floor — a gateway at the centre of a grid rather than inside a citadel, because the point was to move the court out of Golconda into an open commercial capital.
- Qutb Shāhi Tombs, Ibrahim Bagh · The Qutb Shāhi tombs
Thirty-odd domed tombs of the sultans and their families in one walled garden below the fort, each built in its occupant's lifetime, with a mortuary bath and a mosque in the same enclosure. It is the only Indian necropolis where a whole dynasty lies together in one garden.
- Mecca Masjid, Hyderabad · Mecca Masjid — the bricks from Mecca
Hyderabad's great mosque beside the Charminar, begun in 1617 and finished by Aurangzeb, whose central arch is said to hold bricks brought from Mecca. The Asaf Jahi Nizams who succeeded the Qutb Shahis are buried in a chamber along its courtyard.
- Gāwilghur · Gāwilghur — the end of it
A Gond and then Imad Shahi fort on a spur above the Berar plain, taken by Wellesley in December 1803 six weeks after Assaye in an assault up a ravine — the action that ended the Second Anglo-Maratha War in the Deccan. It is now inside a tiger reserve and reached on foot.