Place · Bahmani capital city · India

Gulbarga / Kalaburagi

Also known as Bandanawāz, Gulbarga, Gulbarga — Bandanawāz, Gulbarga / Kalaburagi — Bandanawāz dargah & Bahmani capital

Function

Religious institution & practice

Patron dynasty

Delhi Sultanate

Tradition

Chishti silsila; Dakhni literature

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

17.330, 76.830

Connections (7)

• Silsila lineageHazrat Nizāmuddīn Dargah, Delhi

  Gesudaraz left Delhi for the Deccan in 1398, as Timur approached, and settled at Gulbarga under Bahmani patronage — the point at which the Chishti order moved south and began producing devotional verse in Dakhni, the early form of Urdu. His shrine is the greatest Chishti centre outside the north, and the move took a Delhi-based order into a Persianate Deccan court world it then helped to shape.

• Contemporary capital withDaulatabad

  Muhammad bin Tughlaq moved Delhi's population to Daulatabad in 1327 and moved it back a few years later, and the Deccan governorate he created broke away in 1347 to become the Bahmani sultanate with its capital at Gulbarga. The fort's spiral entrance tunnel, designed so attackers could be trapped and burned in it, is the most complete piece of medieval Indian military engineering to survive.

• Successor capital ofBidar

  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.

• Silsila lineageZainuddin Shirazi Dargah, Khuldabad

  Gesūdarāz at Gulbarga and Zainuddīn Shīrāzī at Khuldābād are the Chishti order's two Deccan seats, founded when Delhi's khānqāhs were scattered south by Muhammad bin Tughluq's transfer of the capital. Each became the spiritual anchor of the sultanate that grew around it. Gesūdarāz also wrote in Dakhni, giving the emerging Deccan language one of its first literary bodies, so the order's exile produced a new literature as well as two new shrines.

• Craft tradition ofBidar bidriware

  Bidriware's blackening paste is made from soil taken from inside Bidar fort, which craftsmen hold works because of centuries of saltpetre in the ground there — so the craft cannot be practised anywhere else without carrying the earth along. The technique itself came with the Bahmani court from Persia, which is the usual pattern: a Deccan sultanate imports a skill and a local material makes it permanent.

• Shared site withBābā Budangiri

  The Chikkamagaluru cave is held by Hindus as a seat of Dattātreya and by Muslims as the dargah of Bābā Budan, with a single lineage of shrine custodians who were, until recently, Muslim and served both. That pattern — one shrine, two liturgies, a hereditary keeper — is the ordinary Deccan arrangement, and the Bahmani and post-Bahmani shrine towns like Gulbarga show the same mixed clientele. Since a campaign to reclaim the cave began in the 1990s the arrangement has been contested and policed.

• Craft tradition ofDakhnī

  Gesudaraz came from Delhi to Gulbarga in 1398 and wrote in Dakhni prose — the Miraj al-Ashiqin is attributed to him — which makes the Chishti shrine the point at which the language enters writing. The pattern holds throughout: the Deccan's vernacular was carried first by Sufis addressing a local audience and only later by courts, which is why the earliest Dakhni texts are devotional and the earliest Dakhni poets are shaikhs.

On these journeys

• Chishti silsila
• Major dargahs
• Sultanate capitals
• The Deccan and Vijayanagara
• The Deccan Sultanates

Sources

Khwaja Bandanawaz Gesudaraz, Gulbarga

• Wikipedia