Collection · 6 essays · 15 entries
Bijapur Sultanate
Everything the archive holds on Bijapur Sultanate, gathered from across the map. The Atlas files a topic once, in one branch; a collection brings back together what that filing separates.
This page shows one hop. Bijapur Sultanate holds 6 essays, 15 entries and 0 claims in all, across 2 domains — 21 items, of which 7 are listed below. The rest sit inside the narrower collections. See everything on Bijapur Sultanate in one place →
Within Bijapur Sultanate
- Adil Shahi Dynasty — 1 essay · 10 entries
Essays
Entries
- DynastyAdil Shahi Dynasty — 1490 – 1686
- PersonIbrahim Adil Shah II — r. 1580 – 1627
- BuildingGol Gumbaz — completed 1656
- PlaceBijapur (Vijayapura) — Adil Shahi capital 1490 – 1686
- BookKitab-i-Nauras — c. 1600
The edge of what is written
Mapped, and begun — not yet enough behind them to stand as collections of their own:
- Yusuf Adil Shah — founder 1490 — 2 entries so far
- Ibrahim Adil Shah II 1580–1627 — 1 entry so far
- Muhammad Adil Shah 1627–1656 — 1 entry so far
- Sikandar Adil Shah 1672–1686 — the last — 1 entry so far
- Fall to Aurangzeb 1686 — 1 entry so far
What the archive does not know
Every unresolved question the sources left open across this collection, gathered in one place rather than buried at the foot of each page.
Who struck the first blow at the Shivaji–Afzal Khan meeting (10/20 November 1659, Julian vs Gregorian) remains contested across Maratha bakhars, Persian chronicles, and European letters; Jadunath Sarkar's 'preventive murder' verdict deserves a dedicated sourced treatment.
The Adil Shahi Sultanate of Bijapur: Faith, Nauras, and the Great Dome
The date of the Kitab-i-Nauras is unsettled: some scholarship suggests ca. 1582, the Met dates its folios ca. 1600 — worth resolving against Nazir Ahmad’s edition.
The Adil Shahi Sultanate of Bijapur: Faith, Nauras, and the Great Dome
The architect of the Gol Gumbaz is popularly named as Yaqut of Dabul, but the older ASI literature (Cousens) says the builder's name is unknown; this attribution needs verification before use.
The Adil Shahi Sultanate of Bijapur: Faith, Nauras, and the Great Dome
Whether the Gol Gumbaz dome is the 'second largest in the world' is a popular claim with shifting definitions (span vs area); only the ASI's measured figures were used here.
The Adil Shahi Sultanate of Bijapur: Faith, Nauras, and the Great Dome
How the dome actually stands is not established by anything read for this essay. No source opened described the structural system — whether intersecting arches, pendentives or squinches carry the hemisphere, how the thrust is resisted, or what the shell thickness is. For the building whose fame rests entirely on its dome, this is the largest gap, and it is answerable: George Michell and Mark Zebrowski's Architecture and Art of the Deccan Sultanates (1999) is cited by several sources read and was not opened.
Was Mohammed Adil Shah Shia or Sunni? One account has him a 'devout Shi'a' who placed Karbala soil in the tomb's central vault; his dynastic entry records him as Sunni. Given that his grandfather reintroduced the Shia khutba and his father reversed it, this is a real question about the dynasty and not a clerical slip.
The Bara Kaman's architect is given as Malik Sandal, who served Ibrahim Adil Shah II (d. 1627), for a building begun in 1672. Either the attribution is mistaken, the date is, or Malik Sandal's career ran extraordinarily long. Deborah Hutton's 2005 article on Bijapur's visual identity, cited by that source, would settle it.
The same page states that the Bara Kaman holds 'the tombs of Ali Adil Shah II, his wife Chand Bibi'. Chand Bibi was married to Ali Adil Shah I and died in 1600, seventy-two years before Ali Adil Shah II; his recorded wife is Khurshida Khanum. The two Alis have been conflated, and the archive does not repeat the claim.
Two women named Badi Sahiba appear in the Bijapur records read: Mohammed Adil Shah's mother is given as 'Taaj Sultana or Badi Sahiba', and the queen who secured Ali Adil Shah II's succession is 'Badi Sahiba, sister of Qutb Shah of Golkonda' — who is elsewhere named as his mother, Khadija Sultana of Golconda. Whether Badi Sahiba is a title rather than a name was not established, and if so the archive's account of Taj Sultana may be conflating two people.
Whether the whispering gallery was intended is unaddressed in every source read. The effect follows from any large hemispherical enclosure and was not described physically until the 1870s, but that does not establish that seventeenth-century builders had not observed it empirically. Whether any Persian source on the building mentions the acoustics would settle it.
The 'second largest dome in the world' claim is corrected here against a published chronology of record-holding domes. What has not been established is where the claim originated and how it entered India's UNESCO submission — whether from a colonial-era gazetteer, from a comparison with St Peter's specifically, or from a measurement convention that compares an external diameter against others' internal ones.