Place · Adil Shahi capital city · India
Bijapur (Vijayapura)
The Adil Shahi capital, with ten kilometres of wall around it and a building programme that produced the Gol Gumbaz, the Ibrahim Rauza and the unfinished Bara Kaman. The Gol Gumbaz's dome is among the largest ever raised in masonry, carried on an interlocking squinch system with a whispering gallery running round its base.
- Date
- 1490–1686
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- Delhi Sultanate
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 16.829, 75.710
Worth knowing
The Malik-e-Maidan, a fifty-five-tonne bronze siege gun taken as a trophy from Ahmednagar, still sits on its bastion, and the fort's water supply came through underground channels from reservoirs outside. Aurangzeb besieged the city for fifteen months and took it in 1686; Sikandar Adil Shah, the last sultan, was pensioned to Daulatabad.
Connections (8)
- CampaignTalikota
Bijapur was one of the Deccan sultanates in the coalition that destroyed the Vijayanagara army at Talikota in 1565 — the one moment the five successor states acted together. The victory removed their southern rival and opened the Karnataka country to them, but it also cleared the way for the Mughals, who absorbed Ahmadnagar within seventy years and Bijapur and Golconda within a century.
- Successor capital ofAhmadnagar Fort
Ahmadnagar and Bijapur were two of the five states the Bahmani sultanate broke into, and they fought each other as readily as they fought Vijayanagara or Delhi. Ahmadnagar's fort is where Chand Bibi held out against Akbar's armies in 1595 and where Malik Ambar, an Ethiopian-born minister who had arrived in India as a slave, later ran the state and kept the Mughals out of the Deccan for two decades.
- Architectural modelTaj Mahal
The Gol Gumbaz's dome of about forty-four metres internal diameter is the largest masonry dome raised in India and is held up by eight intersecting arches that transfer its load to the corners — a structural solution the Mughals never used. The Ibrahim Rauza's stonework in the same city is finer than anything at Agra of its date, and the argument that the Taj's designers knew Bijapur's work has been made for a century without being settled.
- CampaignAurangzeb's Tomb, Khuldabad
Aurangzeb took Bijapur in September 1686 after a fifteen-month siege conducted in person, ending the Adil Shahi line; Sikandar Adil Shah was pensioned to Daulatabad. The annexation doubled the empire's Deccan territory and its costs, and the Maratha war that followed kept the emperor in the field until he died twenty-one years later and was buried a few miles from this camp.
- CampaignRaichur
The Raichur doab between the Krishna and the Tungabhadra was the permanent frontier dispute of the Deccan, fertile and fortified and claimed by both. Krishnadevaraya took it from Ismail Adil Shah in 1520; Bijapur took it back after Talikota. Nuniz's Portuguese account of the 1520 campaign is the fullest description of a Vijayanagara army on the march that survives.
- Successor capital ofBidar
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.
- Site withinBara Kaman, Bijapur
Bara Kaman is the unfinished mausoleum of Ali Adil Shah II, standing as a row of giant arches in the heart of Bijapur. It is one of the Adil Shahi monuments of the city — together with the Gol Gumbaz, the Ibrahim Rauza, the Jama Masjid and the citadel — that make up Bijapur's layered urban fabric, and it belongs to the city rather than inside another tomb.
- Imperial administration ofAdoni / Adavani
After Vijayanagara’s decline, Adoni passed to the Bijapur Sultanate and developed a substantial Islamic architectural layer, including the Jamiya Masjid and structures commissioned by Siddi Masud Khan.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Vijayapura” and “Gol Gumbaz”. George Michell and Mark Zebrowski, Architecture and Art of the Deccan Sultanates (1999); Archaeological Survey of India, Dharwad circle records.
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