Place · Bahmani fort city · India

Bidar

Date

1430 onward

Function

Authority & administration

Patron dynasty

Delhi Sultanate

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

17.925, 77.530

Worth knowing

Gawan, a Persian trader who became the Bahmani wazir, was executed in 1481 on a forged charge, and the sultanate broke into five within a generation. The madrasa's minaret was blown up when the Mughals stored gunpowder in it. Bidri, the zinc-alloy inlay with blackened ground and silver wire, is still made in the town and takes its name from it.

Connections (10)

• Successor capital ofGulbarga / Kalaburagi

  The Bahmani capital moved from Gulbarga to Bidar in 1425, and at Bidar Mahmud Gawan built a madrasa to a Persian plan with tiled façades, a library of three thousand manuscripts and free board for students — a Central Asian institution transplanted to the Deccan. Bidar is also the home of bidriware, the blackened zinc alloy inlaid with silver, which is a court craft of exactly this period.

• Successor capital ofGolconda

  Golconda was another of the five successor states, under the Qutb Shahis, who were Persian in origin and Shia in allegiance — and who, unusually, patronised Telugu as well as Persian, with one sultan writing poetry in Dakhni himself. Its wealth came from the diamond fields of the Krishna valley, which made the name Golconda a byword in Europe for riches long after the fort itself had fallen.

• Craft tradition ofBidar bidriware

  Bidriware is named for Bidar and cannot properly be made anywhere else: the blackening of the zinc alloy is done with soil taken from inside the fort, which is unusually free of sunlight and, the craftsmen say, of nitrates — nobody has fully explained why it works. Silver is inlaid into the grey metal and the piece is then blackened, so the pattern emerges white on a matt black ground.

• Power passed toBasavakalyan

  Bidar, eighty kilometres from Basavakalyan, became the Bahmani capital in 1425 and then the seat of the Barid Shahis. Its rise displaced the old Chalukya centrality of Kalyana but kept the region politically important, and Mahmud Gawan's madrasa there — Persian in plan, tiled, with a library of three thousand manuscripts — is the clearest single piece of evidence for how completely the Deccan was plugged into the Persianate world.

• Power passed toTalikota

  The four sultanates that combined at Talikota — Bijapur, Ahmednagar, Golconda and Bidar — were all fragments of the Bahmani state that had ruled from Bidar. They had fought one another for seventy years and united only against Vijayanagara, then went back to fighting one another. Bidar itself was annexed by Bijapur in 1619, fifty-four years after the victory it helped win.

• Successor capital ofBijapur (Vijayapura)

  Bidar's triple wall with gun-ports and Bijapur's ten-kilometre circuit are the Bahmani capital and the largest of its successors, and both were built for cannon earlier than most of northern India. The Malik-e-Maidan at Bijapur, a fifty-five-tonne bronze gun taken from Ahmednagar, is the physical evidence that Deccan siege warfare was an artillery problem by 1550.

• PrecursorBarkas

  The Nizam's Arab regiments repeat a Deccan pattern four centuries older. The Bahmani court at Bidar split between afaqis — the westerners, Persians, Arabs and Turks recruited from overseas — and Deccanis, the locally born, and the factional war between them wrecked the sultanate; Mahmud Gawan, an afaqi himself, was executed in 1481 on a forged charge. The logic that made foreign soldiers attractive, that they had no local faction to defect to, is exactly the logic the Nizams gave for hiring Hadhramis, and it cut the same way both times.

• Site withinNanak Jhira, Bidar

  Nanak Jhira, Bidar sits inside Bidar and forms one piece of its layered sacred, royal or civic landscape. The city carries this entry as one of the sites that make its urban fabric legible — a shrine, monument, institution or craft tradition specifically anchored at this location — and the city's broader history reads better when the stop is seen in its context rather than in isolation. The surrounding streets, markets and other heritage ensembles around it belong to the same single city.

• Site withinBahmani Rauzas, Bidar

  Bahmani Rauzas, Bidar sits inside Bidar and forms one piece of its layered sacred, royal or civic landscape. The city carries this entry as one of the sites that make its urban fabric legible — a shrine, monument, institution or craft tradition specifically anchored at this location — and the city's broader history reads better when the stop is seen in its context rather than in isolation. The surrounding streets, markets and other heritage ensembles around it belong to the same single city.

• Life routeAfanasy Nikitin

  Bidar, the Bahmani capital, was Nikitin’s main base in India for about three years (c.1471-74). He describes the Bahmani sultan Muhammad Shah III’s court, the daily military parade of twenty thousand horsemen and three hundred elephants, the markets, and the sharp contrast between the Persianate Muslim ruling class and the Hindu merchant and agrarian population — the clearest outsider snapshot of the mid-Bahmani Deccan on record.

On these journeys

• Sultanate capitals
• The Deccan and Vijayanagara
• The Deccan Sultanates
• Forts of the south & Deccan
• Afanasy Nikitin — Tver merchant in the Bahmani Deccan (1468–1474)

Sources

Wikipedia, “Bidar Fort”. Ferishta, Tārīkh-i Ferishta; George Michell and Mark Zebrowski, Architecture and Art of the Deccan Sultanates (1999).

• Wikipedia — Bidar Fort
• Wikipedia