Everything on Bijapur Sultanate

For two centuries a city-state on the Karnataka plateau outshone kingdoms many times its size — its kings singing to Saraswati in Dakhani verse, its painters conjuring dreamscapes, its masons raising one of the largest domes in the world. This is the record of the Adil Shahis of Bijapur, and of the legends that grew around them.

Some time in the Hijri year 895 — which begins in late 1489 and ends in late 1490 — a Persian-speaking soldier of the Bahmani court had the Friday sermon read in his own name at Bijapur and became the first of the Adil Shahi sultans, whose kingdom lasted until Aurangzeb took it in 1686. Almost everything about how he got there is disputed: three court chroniclers writing within a generation of one another gave him three different royal pedigrees, a fourth strand makes him a purchased military slave with none at all, and the epigraphic record points instead to Sava in Iran. What can be established is narrower and more interesting than the legend — a migrant who rose under the vizier Mahmud Gawan, seized a province when the empire that made him collapsed, and in 1503 made his kingdom the first Shi'i state in Indian history, then rescinded it under military pressure, then restored it.

The sixth Adil Shahi sultan of Bijapur came to the throne as a child of nine, spent his first decade as the property of his regents, and then governed for thirty-seven years a kingdom he branded with an aesthetic category. Ibrahim Adil Shah II wrote a book of Dakhni songs that calls the Prophet the preceptor of the three worlds and elsewhere names the goddess Saraswati his mother and Ganesha his father; he stamped the word nauras — the nine rasas of Indian poetics — on his coinage, his flag, his revenue department and a whole new city west of his capital. He is the standing exhibit for Deccan syncretism, and for that reason his record needs care: his own commissioned historian stopped writing before any of it happened, contemporaries denounced the devotion to Saraswati to his face, scholars still disagree over whether the songs show belief, policy or only poetics, and even the years of his reign come in two rival versions.

On 12 September 1686 a young man of about eighteen, placed on the throne of Bijapur at four and never permitted to govern, walked out of his citadel, was seated at Aurangzeb's right hand with a jewelled dagger and a pension, and went north as a prisoner for fourteen years. The Adil Shahi sultanate, which had ruled the western Deccan for nearly two centuries and built the Gol Gumbaz, became a Mughal province called Dar-ul-Zafar. The interest of 1686 lies in the mechanics rather than the pathos: a state hollowed out by factional rule before a Mughal trench was dug, a seventeen-month siege in which the besiegers starved more visibly than the besieged, a capitulation negotiated rather than stormed, and an annexation historians still cannot agree either strengthened or fatally overstretched the empire that swallowed it.

The Bijapur sultanate — builders of the Gol Gumbaz, patrons of a court culture that wrote its songbook in Dakhni rather than Persian.

The Bijapur sultan who wrote a book of songs in Dakhni, opened it with an invocation to Saraswati, and let his court call him Jagadguru.

Adil Shahi capital, and the most architecturally inventive city of the Deccan sultanates.

A sultan’s book of songs, written in Dakhni, structured on the nine rasas, and opening with an invocation to Saraswati.

A sultan set out to build a bigger tomb than his father's, died before the plaster was dry, and left the Deccan its most famous building — a grey basalt cube under a dome you can whisper across. The claim attached to it everywhere, including in India's own submission to UNESCO, is that this is the second largest dome in the world. It is not, and has not been since 1436. What it actually is turns out to be more interesting.

The tomb of Mohammed Adil Shah at Bijapur — a dome that solved its own structural problem with an idea no one had used at that scale.