Place · Qutb Shahi gateway-mosque · India
Chārmīnār
Also known as Charminar, Char Minar
Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah's arch of 1591, four minarets over four arches at the crossing of the two axial streets of his new city on the Musi — a gateway and a mosque on its upper floor, put at the centre of a grid plan rather than inside a citadel, because the point was to move the court out of Golconda and into an open commercial capital.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 17.362, 78.475
Worth knowing
The tradition is that it was raised where the sultan prayed for the end of a plague, and the city was first called Bhagyanagar after Bhagmati, the woman he married — both stories are recorded later, both are disputed, and both have become politically charged. The Lad Bazaar bangle market and the Mecca Masjid are within a few hundred metres.
Connections (9)
- Shared site withBhāgyanagar
The Charminar stands at the centre of the city the Bhagmati story is about, built in 1591 when Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah moved off the fort and onto the Musi plain. Whether the city was first called Bhagyanagar, and whether Bhagmati existed, is argued over and has become politically charged. What is not in dispute is that the sultan wrote Dakhni verse, some of it love poetry, and that the city was laid out as a grid around this one building.
- Traditional seat ofTaramati Bāradari
Taramati and Premamati, singers of the Qutb Shahi court, are said to lie among the royal tombs at Golconda — an unusual honour, and the kind of story that attaches to a dynasty remembered for its Dakhni poetry and its musical patronage. The baradari pavilion named for Taramati faces the fort across the valley, and the fort's famously carrying acoustics are what the legend about her voice is built on.
- Site adjacencyChichlam & the Musi crossing
Hyderabad was founded on the Musi, and the river shaped the city's plan and nearly unmade it: the flood of September 1908 killed some fifteen thousand people and destroyed much of the old city. Visvesvaraya was brought in afterwards and built the Himayat Sagar and Osman Sagar reservoirs upstream to control it. The Chichlam crossing belongs to the Bhagmati foundation story, which puts the sultan riding across this river to reach her.
- Site adjacencyQutb Shāhi Tombs, Ibrahim Bagh
The Charminar stands at the centre of the city Muhammad Quli founded on the Musi in 1591, and the dynasty's tombs are five kilometres away in a garden below the fort they had left. Between them they are the two halves of the Qutb Shahi project: a court moving out of a citadel into an open commercial capital, and a necropolis built in the shadow of the citadel it had abandoned, each sultan raising his own tomb while he lived.
- Successor capital ofGolconda
Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah laid out Hyderabad on the plain in 1591 because the fortress on the hill had run out of water and space, and the Charminar is the centre of that new plan. Golconda kept the treasury and the garrison; the court, the bazaar and the poetry moved downhill. Aurangzeb's siege of 1687 then took the fortress and left the city, which is why both survive.
- Shrine within cityHyderabadi haleem
The haleem trade concentrates in the old city around the Charminar through Ramzan, when hotels and street kitchens that sell nothing else for eleven months cook it in vats from afternoon to iftar. It is the largest seasonal food economy Hyderabad has, and it runs in the quarter Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah laid out in 1591 — so a sixteenth-century Qutb Shahi grid is the distribution network for a nineteenth-century Yemeni import, for one month a year.
- Site withinHyderabad
The Charminar stands at the exact crossroads of the two axial bazaars that Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah laid out when he moved his court from the Golconda citadel to a new open city on the Musi in 1591. The gateway is the city's founding monument — a prayer hall on its upper storey, a mosque within its arches, and the only object inside the city plan that predates every other building around it. Everything within a kilometre of the Charminar is the oldest layer of Hyderabad.
- Architect ofMir Momin Astrabadi
The Charminar's four-arch four-minaret design is traditionally and in the main scholarly accounts attributed to Mir Momin Astrabadi, the Iranian émigré prime minister of Sultan Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah who also designed the Hyderabad city plan. The monument stands at the exact centre of the orthogonal bazaar grid he laid out, as the gateway at the crossroads of the four axial streets — one architectural act realising one urban plan.
- Site adjacencyDarulshifa, Hyderabad
The Charminar of 1591 and the Darulshifa of 1595 were built by Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah four years apart as the two central public works of the new city of Hyderabad — the ceremonial gateway at the centre of the bazaar grid and the hospital four hundred metres southwest in a quarter that still bears the Darulshifa name. Both were likely designed under Mir Momin Astrabadi, so the city gate and the city hospital are one Qutb Shahi-Iranian architectural act.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Charminar”. UNESCO World Heritage Centre Tentative List submission.
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