Claim examined

Was Hyderabad originally called Bhagyanagar, and renamed by Muslim rulers?

Open the 1687 English Thévenot at Part III, page 94 and the sentence reads: "The Capital City of this Kingdom is called Bagnagar, the Persians call it Aider-abad." Two names, one city, seventy-five years after its foundation. Now open William Methwold, who had lived at Masulipatam and was printed in 1626, and the same city has two names again — but they are Golchonda and Hidraband, and Bāgnagar is not among them. That is the shape of the real problem. Hyderabad was laid out new in 1591 by Muhammad Qulī Quṭb Shāh, beside the existing village of Chichlam and a bridge his father had thrown across the Mūsī thirteen years earlier; it carried a Persian official name from the start, and in Mughal, Dutch, English and French report a second name whose earliest surviving explanations derive it not from a goddess but from a courtesan. What the claim gets right, what it gets wrong, and what nobody can yet settle are three different lists, and this page keeps them apart.

The claim, as it circulates

Hyderabad's original name was Bhagyanagar — "city of fortune," or the city of the goddess Bhagyalakshmi — and Muslim rulers renamed it Hyderabad, erasing the older Indic name.

Contested

The name and the renaming are attested; the goddess is not; and the middle term is genuinely disputed. Persian chronicles from the 1590s, an anonymous Dutch relation of 1614, and English and French travellers down to 1667 all know the city as Bhāgnagar or Bāgnagar, and both Firishta and the anonymous Qutb Shahi-era history John Briggs translated say the ruler called it Bhāgnagar first and changed it to Haidarābād afterwards — so "original name" and "renamed" are the period sources' own words, not a modern invention, and William Foster's Hakluyt note of 1921 says the same in almost the claim's own phrasing. Three things cut the other way. The city was founded new in 1591 by the same ruler in whose reign both names arose, so the conquest framing the claim usually carries has nothing to attach to. Whether Bhāgnagar was ever the official name is genuinely unsettled — Sherwani's coins, Deccan chronicles and the founder's own Dakhni verse point away from it, and William Methwold, who lived in the kingdom and was printed in 1626, gives its two names as Golchonda and Hidraband without mentioning Bāgnagar at all. And the derivation from the goddess Bhagyalakshmi has no period attestation that surfaced in the sources consulted here, which do not include the Telugu, Marathi or Dutch VOC material, and which rest for Telugu on a negative report Sherwani himself limited to his own knowledge in 1967 without systematic archive search. On the meaning the claim is stronger than sceptics allow: bhāg is the ordinary vernacular reflex of Sanskrit bhāgya, "Bhagyanagar" is a Sanskritised respelling of the same word rather than a different name, and "city of fortune" is what V. Ball's 1889 footnote and Narendra Luther's reading of the court's own chronogram both make of it — against which stands the earliest surviving explanation of all, which derives the name from a woman the Mughal sources call a prostitute.

Draft. This entry is an unreviewed first draft. It has not yet been checked by a subject reviewer — see sources and method.

What is true here

The part of the claim the record does support, stated before the part it does not.

The name Bhāgnagar is genuinely attested from within a few years of the founding, in five source traditions, one of them Indic-language, and it kept being used for a century — this is not a modern invention.: Niẓām-ud-dīn Aḥmad's Ṭabaqāt-i Akbarī, written to 1002 A.H./1594, says the sultan "having laid the foundation of a city, called it Bhāgnagar" ⁵. Firishta, writing at Bijapur in 1018/1609, uses the name ⁹. William Finch, in India 1608–11, names the Golconda king's "chiefe citie" as Braganadar, which William Foster identified as Bhāgnagar ¹⁷. The anonymous Dutch relation written in the latter part of 1614 — attributed by W. H. Moreland to Pieter Gielisz. van Ravesteyn of the Nizampatam factory — records that every April "the prostitutes of the whole kingdom have to travel to Bāgnagar," and Moreland's footnote identifies it: "I.e., Hyderābād, the new capital of Golconda" ¹⁹. Thévenot in 1666–67 and Tavernier in the 1640s–60s both use Bagnagar/Bhágnagar as the ordinary name of the place ¹¹⁶, and Sherwani adds Bernier using it twice in 1667 ¹⁵. The fifth tradition is Marathi and is set out immediately below ²⁰. Sherwani, the historian most hostile to the legend attached to the name, concedes the point flatly: "it must be confessed that the European travellers who came to the Deccan in the seventeenth century have certainly mentioned 'Bāgnagar' as the capital of the kingdom" ¹⁵.
The Marathi gap is now closed, and the closing strengthens the name-attestation leg — a 1697 Marathi source knows the Qutb Shahi capital by no other name.: Krishnaji Anant Sabhasad, a servant and contemporary of Shivaji writing in Marathi at Jinji in 1697, calls the Qutb Shahi capital and kingdom Bhaganagar and calls it nothing else. In Surendranath Sen's University of Calcutta translation of 1920 the name occurs eighteen times across the volume — on Shivaji's return route in 1666 ("he came through Gondawana, Bhaganagar and Bijapur to Rajgad"), for the 1677 embassy ("the Raje proceeded to Bhaganagar, marching stage by stage with his army"; "he spent a month at Bhaganagar"), for the ruler ("Tana Shah, the Badshah of Bhaganagar"), for the state ("the kingdom of Bhaganagar"), and inside Shivaji's own reported words ("I came to Bhaganagar for an interview with the Kutub Shah") ²⁰. The forms Hyderabad and Haidarabad do not occur anywhere in the volume. This is a fifth source tradition alongside the Mughal, Bijapuri, English, Dutch and French material already on this page, it is the only Indic-language one, and it is wholly independent of Firishta. Three limits are recorded with it, and they are the limits this page imposes on the European witnesses too. The bakhar is of 1697, a century after the founding, so it attests currency and not priority. The spelling is Sen's romanisation of the Marathi and no one has collated it against the Marathi original — the same caveat this page attaches to Moreland's macron in "Bāgnagar". And Sen glosses the name as "Golconda", so in this tradition Bhaganagar names the kingdom and its seat broadly rather than the 1591 foundation specifically. Within those limits the flat denial that the city was ever called Bhagnagar is now harder to hold than it was before.
A fourth explanatory tradition, in a new language, and it is not the goddess either — the page's narrow negative survives a genuine test.: Sen's editorial note on the name reports a distinct etymology: "So called, according to later chroniclers, aftar [after] Bhagtf, a Brahman lady, who had offered a dish to the founder of the city when the latter was very hungry and tired. In return she prayed that the city should be named after her" ²¹. Two things must be said about it in the same breath. First, its status: this is a 1920 editor reporting what "later chroniclers" say, which is exactly the status this page assigns to Foster's 1921 and Ball's 1889 glosses — an editorial commonplace resting on later sources, not a seventeenth-century Marathi witness. The bakhar itself offers no etymology at all. It is admitted here on the same terms as Foster and Ball and on no better ones. Second, its direction: it derives the name from a named woman. Counting it in, the explanatory traditions now number four — the Mughal courtesan, the Bijapuri courtesan, Tavernier's garden-or-wife-called-Nagar, and Sen's Brahman lady — and not one of the four derives the name from the goddess Bhagyalakshmi. Opening a language this page had never opened produced another woman and no deity.
The claim's own wording — that Bhāgnagar was the original name and was afterwards changed — is what the period sources say, and what the standard scholarly editions of them say. This is the concession that costs this page most.: Firishta, in Sherwani's translation from the Persian: "He called it Bhāgnagar at first but later he was sorry for what he had done and changed the name to Haidarabad" ⁹. Jonathan Scott's 1794 English has "but being afterwards ashamed of his amour, he changed it to Hyderabad" ². The anonymous Persian history of Muhammad Qulī that Briggs translated — a work he judged to have been "written about the time Ferishta lived" — states that the city "was called Bhagnuggur (after his favourite mistress Bhagmutty); but after her death he ordered it to be called Hydrabad, although for many years it retained its original name" ⁴. And Foster's editorial footnote of 1921, in the Hakluyt series, glosses Finch's Braganadar as "Bhāgnagar, the original name of the city of Hyderabad" ¹⁷. Read literally, without the conquest implication it usually carries, the claim's first and third components are the sources' own statements and not a modern retrofit.
Firishta himself says the old name survived alongside the new one — the two names were concurrent, not cleanly sequential, for at least a generation.: Briggs's 1829 rendering of Firishta: "this city has since received the name of Hydurabad, although one part of it still retains the former name of Bhagnuggur" ³. The anonymous chronicle agrees that the old name held "for many years" ⁴. Thévenot in 1666–67 records the split by speech community rather than by period: Bagnagar is what the place is called, Aider-abad is what the Persians call it ¹. Methwold in 1626 records a split too, but a different one — natives say Golchonda, Moors and Persians say Hidraband, and Bāgnagar does not appear ¹⁸. Seventy years after Methwold, a Marathi bakhar still knows the capital only as Bhaganagar ²⁰. The usage was plural and unstable, which is what one would expect of a young city with a chancery name and a street name.
"City of fortune" is the default lexical reading of the vernacular form, and "Bhagyanagar" is a Sanskritised respelling of the same word rather than a different name. The dichotomy this page previously drew — bhāg belongs to a woman, therefore not to bhāgya — was a philological error and is withdrawn.: Bhāg is the ordinary tadbhava reflex of Sanskrit bhāgya in Dakhni, Hindavi and Marathi: fortune, share, luck, as in bhāgwān, badbhāgī, bhāg jāgnā. The founder's own usage is on record in Sherwani's own footnote, quoting the Kullīyāt's editor Zore: "The Sultan has used the word bhag in a number of his poems, but the word has been used in all these places in its literary meaning, i.e. for 'share' or 'fortune' and this connotation fits well with the context" ¹¹. V. Ball's editorial footnote glosses the city's name the same way: "Bhágnagar, or the Fortunate City" ¹⁶. And Bhāgmatī is itself a name built on that root. "Derived from a woman, therefore not from fortune" is not an available inference when the woman's own name runs through the same etymon. Requiring attestation of the exact string "Bhagyanagar" while accepting Bagnagar, Braganadar, Bhaugnuggur and Bhagnuggur as the same name would be a standard applied to one side only, and it is not applied here. What survives as a negative finding is much narrower: no period source derives the city's name from the goddess Bhagyalakshmi.
If Sherwani is right that Bhāgmatī never existed, that helps the claim rather than hurting it — and this page had failed to say so.: The demolition is Sherwani's own: no ode to Bhāgmatī among the seventeen mistresses the sultan names in the Kullīyāt ¹¹; no contemporary Telugu attestation, on his knowledge in 1967 ¹⁴; the Māhnāmah of 1225/1810 already calling the story "utterly baseless" ¹³; the decisive Faizī sentence missing from one of two manuscripts ⁸; and the woman's name reading three different ways across witnesses of the Ṭabaqāt ⁵. Grant all of it, and the courtesan derivation becomes a hostile Mughal back-formation from a name that was already in use — which leaves the ordinary lexical value of bhāg in sole possession of the field. The claim under examination does not need Bhāgmatī and is strengthened if she is fiction. That reconstruction is set out below as a position in its own right.
The dominant scholarly counter-etymology — that Bhāgnagar is bāgh-nagar, "city of gardens" — is looser than it is usually presented, though it is not the misreading this page previously alleged.: Sherwani prints Tavernier accurately, in a block quotation: "Bagnagar was founded by the grandfather of the present king. Here the king had very fair gardens…. Bagnagar or the Garden of Nagar." He then glosses it: "Tavernier thus asserts that 'Bagnagar' stands for the City of Gardens or Bāghnagar (urdu) because the new capital was replete with gardens and groves" ¹⁵. That is a loose paraphrase — Tavernier's own gloss is the Garden of Nagar, after a wife he calls Nagar, singular and a person — but it is not a suppression, and the passage does show that a bāgh reading of the first element was in circulation in the seventeenth century. Sherwani supports it with a genuinely early Persian witness, Rafi'ud-dīn Shīrāzī writing sixty years before Tavernier that "the whole city is just one large garden" ¹⁵. Against that, Ball's own footnote on the very page Sherwani draws from reads the name the other way — "Bhágnagar, or the Fortunate City… Bagh, a distinct word, means garden" ¹⁶. Two careful editors, two readings, neither decisive.
The -nagar suffix was in the founder's own vocabulary, applied to the Persian name — so an Indic-form name for the city is not intrinsically alien to the court.: Sherwani's index of the three places where the new capital appears in Muhammad Qulī's own Kullīyāt lists them as "'My City'; Kulliyat, poems, page 6. 'City of Haidar', ibid., Ghazals, p. 177. 'Haidarnagar', ibid., Poems, p. 324" ¹². The sultan wrote Haidarnagar himself. What he never wrote, on Sherwani's count, was Bhāgnagar. The mint register points the same way about the register's tolerance rather than about this city's name: the attested Qutb Shahi mint names include the fully Indic Mukundnagar and Golkonda under the epithet Mohammad Nagar ²⁴.

The ground in 1591: a foundation, not a capture — and not an empty plain either

Hyderabad was a foundation, not a conquest, and that is the single fact that does most damage to the claim as it usually circulates. But the ground was not empty, and this page said it was. Sherwani's account — still the standard narrative reconstruction — has Muhammad Qulī Quṭb Shāh laying out the city in 999/1591 on the plain south of the Mūsī, where his father had already thrown a bridge across the river in 1578, and where the Muslim divine Shāh Chirāgh "had already made his home in the predominantly Brahmin locality of Chichlam where he was later buried and where grew the great necropolis named after Mir Mu'min." There was also already a road: "a road running from Golkonda eastward as far as Masulipaṭam and the east coast towns of the kingdom, and this road was made to intersect a new road running north and south at the place where the Chārmīnār now stands." The order was to prepare plans for a city that would be "unequalled the world over and would be the replica of paradise itself"; it was built on a gridiron in the form of a giant double cross, and the Chārmīnār at the crossing was completed in 1000/1592 ⁶. Moreland's editorial note of 1931 gives the foundation year as 1589 ¹⁸, and the Hadā'iqu's-Salāṭīn of 1092/1681 gives 1004/1595, "which is probably the date of the completion of the scheme of construction" ¹¹. The dates in circulation span 1589 to 1595.

So there was a village, a river crossing, a trunk road and a resident population on the site. What there was not is an earlier name for the city. Chichlam is a village toponym adjacent to a new foundation, and no source on any side of this dispute — including the sources most favourable to the claim — gives Chichlam, or anything else, as the city's own earlier name. What follows from this is narrower than the sweeping version this page carried before. It is not that nothing was there. It is that the claim's usual framing — an older Indic city displaced by incoming Muslim rulers — has nothing to attach to, because both contested names arise inside the reign of the man who built the place, between roughly 1591 and 1608. Read literally, though, the claim as quoted at the head of this page says only that the original name was Bhagyanagar and that it was afterwards changed to Hyderabad. That much is precisely what Firishta and the Briggs appendix say happened, and this page no longer refutes a conquest that the claim as worded does not assert.

The period sources agree on why the move was made and disagree on the year. Firishta says "the climate of Golkonda had become so bad that it had been telling on the health of its inhabitants" ⁹. Scott's Firishta has "The air of Golconda not agreeing with his constitution" ²; Briggs's has "as the air of Golconda had become impure and unhealthy" ³. The anonymous chronicle in Briggs's appendix is the most specific and dates the decision to 998 A.H.: "on account of the confined situation of Golconda, which from many causes, particularly the want of water, became extremely unhealthy: he accordingly fixed on a spot situated at the distance of five coss from his former capital, on the banks of the river Moosy" ⁴. Distances given for the new site range from Firishta's four kroh through five coss to Scott's and Briggs's "eight miles"; Moreland puts the new city five miles east of Golconda ¹⁸.

The three earliest witnesses — the sentence that may not be in the manuscript, and the standard being applied

Everything in the Bhāgmatī–Bhāgnagar tradition descends, on the sceptical reading, from three Persian texts of the 1590s and 1600s. It is worth setting out exactly what each says, because the popular version of the claim is incompatible with all three of them, and because the weight they can bear has to be fixed once and applied in both directions.

The earliest is a petition of Abū'l-Faiz 'Faizī', Akbar's poet laureate and Imperial Resident in the Deccan, undated but written between 999/1591 and 1002/1594. Sherwani prints it: "Aḥmad Qulī (sic) is steeped in Shī'ism, and has built a city Bhāgnagar by name, after Bhāgmatī, the old prostitute (fahisha-i kuhnā) who has been his mistress for a long time (ma'shūqa-i qadim)" ⁸. Two things about this are usually left out. First, the writer had never been near the city: Sherwani states that Faizī "never set his foot beyond Ahmadnagar" ¹⁰, several hundred miles away, so the report is contemporary but second-hand. Second, and more serious, the sentence is not textually secure. Sherwani's own footnote records that he is quoting the Tabāshiru's-Subh manuscript in the Salar Jang Library, and adds: "It may be mentioned that the particular sentence quoted here is not found in the Asafiya manuscript, Insha-i Farsi, 80, which was written down at Ahmadnagar and completed on the 4th of Muharram in the fiftieth year of Akbar's reign" ⁸. The foundation stone of the whole tradition is absent from one of the two manuscripts of the collection that contains it, and is treated on this page as provisional pending collation — the same status given below to the untraced documents cited on the other side.

The second witness is Niẓām-ud-dīn Aḥmad Bakhshī's Ṭabaqāt-i Akbarī, closed at 1002 A.H. In B. De's Bibliotheca Indica translation the entire notice of the reign is four sentences: "Muhammad Qulī succeeded his father. He became the lover of a prostitute of the name of Bhāgmatī ; and having laid the foundation of a city, called it Bhāgnagar. He had one thousand horsemen, as the retainers of that woman ; and they always attended at her stirrups. He is ruling the country up to the present day which is in the year 1002 A.H." The translator's own note on the passage is dry: "Niẓām-ud-dīn does not give any account of the events of the reign ; and merely refers to a scandalous matter of a more or less personal nature" ⁵. Here too the name is unstable across manuscripts. De's second footnote reports: "One MS. calls her a زنان پاتری, the other simply زنان, while the lith. ed. has only پاتری. In the text-edition the name is بهاگ متی" ⁵. Sherwani, working from a different Persian text, read the name as "Bhāmgasi (sic)" and the descriptor as pātarē ⁹. Two editors, two readings of the woman's name.

The third is Firishta, at Bijapur, writing in 1018/1609 — the only near-contemporary chronicler working in the Deccan who mentions either name. Sherwani translates: "The Sulṭān was greatly fascinated by a prostitute (fāhishā) named Bhāgmatī… He called it Bhāgnagar at first but later he was sorry for what he had done and changed the name to Haidarabad" ⁹. Firishta's testimony carries the sequence the claim needs. It also carries a disclaimer he supplies himself: he tells his readers that a history of the Qutb Shahi house had been compiled by one Shāh Khurshāh, "but this work was not before the author of these pages when he wrote them down, and he had to be satisfied with only a short account of the great House" ¹⁰. Briggs, translating the same passage in 1829, reproduces the confession: "as I have been unable to obtain a copy of it, I am obliged to content myself with such details of the history of that dynasty as have been procurable" ³.

How independent are the three? Less than the pro-claim case usually assumes, and less than the sceptical case usually asserts. Faizī and Niẓām-ud-dīn were both Akbar's officers writing within about a year of each other, which is the weakest possible showing of independence; Firishta wrote at a rival Deccan court under Ibrāhīm 'Ādil Shāh II, and is therefore not simply a Mughal echo. Downstream, however, the dependency is explicit and documented: Sherwani notes that 'Abdu'l-Bāqī Nihāwandī (Ma'āthir-i Raḥīmī, 1025 A.H.) and Khāfī Khān (Muntakhabu'l-lubāb, after 1687) "say in so many words that they have relied on Ferishta so far as the history of the Deccan is concerned, and so they cannot be regarded as having the value of an independent authority" ⁹. Nihāwandī, indeed, garbles it so badly that he takes Bhāgnagar and Haidarābād to be two different cities founded at different ends of the reign ¹⁰.

A word now on the standard, because the same one has to hold in both directions and this page previously did not hold it. These three reports are hostile, second-hand and textually unstable. That is a reason to discount them as evidence that Bhāgmatī existed, and it is exactly as much a reason to discount them as evidence of what the name meant. A source too weak to establish the woman cannot be strong enough to establish the etymology, and the sentence this page used to run — that in every one of the earliest witnesses the name is derived from a woman, therefore not from fortune — was leaning on witnesses it had just finished dismantling. What survives their weakness is narrower and firmer: by the mid-1590s the name Bhāgnagar was current enough that two officers of Akbar's court and, fifteen years later, a chronicler at a rival Deccan court all knew it and all felt obliged to explain it. The explanations are Mughal and Bijapuri court explanations, and their unanimity is a fact about the explainers. The currency of the name is a fact about the name.

Bhāg, bāgh, and what the spellings can carry

The aspirate is the crux of the modern argument and the point on which this page's predecessor failed, so it is worth being exact — about the vernacular lexicon as well as about the scripts.

Start with the European column, in order. William Finch, the earliest English witness, in India from 1608 to 1611, wrote that the King of Golcunda's "chiefe citie is Braganadar"; the identification with Bhāgnagar is Foster's editorial note of 1921, not Finch's ¹⁷. The anonymous Dutch relation of the latter part of 1614 has "Bāgnagar," with Moreland's footnote "I.e., Hyderābād, the new capital of Golconda" — though the long ā is Moreland's romanisation, not the Dutch writer's, and the underlying text was first printed in a Dutch collection of 1644–6 ¹⁹. William Methwold, resident on the coast and printed by Purchas in 1626, does not use the name at all: "This Kingdome (as most others in India) receiveth its denomination from the chiefe city or residence of the King, called by the Natives Golchonda, by the Moores and Persians Hidraband" ¹⁸. Tavernier, in V. Ball's 1889 English, is rendered "Bhágnagar" throughout, in small capitals and with an acute accent ¹⁶. Thévenot, in the kingdom in 1666–67, has at Part III page 94, with the marginal gloss "Bagnagar. Aider-abad.": "The Capital City of this Kingdom is called Bagnagar, the Persians call it Aider-abad" ¹. Sherwani quotes the same sentence as "Bāgnagar… Aider-Abad" and adds Bernier using "Bāgnagar" twice in 1667 ¹⁵. Unaspirated across the board, from writers whose own languages have no aspirated stops.

The Marathi column has to be added to that picture now, and it does not behave like the European one. Sen's 1920 romanisation of the 1697 Sabhasad Bakhar gives "Bhaganagar", with the aspirate, eighteen times and gives no other name for the Qutb Shahi capital ²⁰. That is an Indic-language writer, in a language that distinguishes bh from b, writing the aspirate. The caveat travels with it: the aspirate here is Sen's transliteration of the Marathi and has not been collated against the manuscript, which is the same caveat this page attaches to Moreland's macron.

Methwold deserves a sentence of his own, because he is routinely cited on the pro-claim side and does not support it. He is the earliest sustained English account of the kingdom, he lived at Masulipatam, and his sentence gives the city two names that are both wrong for the claim: Golchonda for the natives, Hidraband for the Moors and Persians. Thévenot's split — vernacular Bagnagar against Persian Aider-abad — is not a stable seventeenth-century pattern but one witness's report forty years later. The passage about an annual gathering of courtesans at Bāgnagar that circulates under Methwold's name is not Methwold's: it is in the anonymous Dutch relation, and the dance it describes is "in celebration of the death of the first Moslem king," not of Bhāgmatī ¹⁹¹⁸.

Now the other column. In the Persian tradition the aspirate is routinely present. De's edition of the Ṭabaqāt gives the Persian text-edition reading as بهاگ متی, with the he that marks aspiration, and romanises Bhāgmatī ⁵. Sherwani romanises Bhāgnagar and Bhāgmatī throughout, Scott in 1794 printed Bhaugnuggur and Bhaug, Briggs in 1829 printed Bhagnuggur and Bhagmutty ⁹²³. The convenient claim that Perso-Arabic script simply cannot distinguish b from bh is not true of Indo-Persian usage, and the readings that reach us from the Persian side carry the aspirate. Rahul Shastri, who argues the case for Bhagyanagar most systematically, presses the point — "There is no way that native speakers or 'common people' could have confused 'bhag' with 'bag'" — and it is a fair hit on Sherwani ³⁴. It means the derivation from bāgh is a conjecture imposed on the Persian evidence rather than a recovery of it. It does not refute the conjecture: Sherwani has an early Persian witness of his own in Rafi'ud-dīn Shīrāzī's "the whole city is just one large garden," and Tavernier's informants plainly did read the first element as garden ¹⁵.

The dichotomy this page previously drew from the aspirate is where it went wrong, and the correction is the most consequential one on this page. It ran: the manuscripts write bhāg, bhāg belongs to a woman's name, therefore the aspirate does nothing for bhāgya. That is not an available inference. Bhāg is the ordinary vernacular reflex of Sanskrit bhāgya in Dakhni, Hindavi and Marathi — fortune, share, luck, as in bhāgwān, badbhāgī, bhāg jāgnā — and the founder's own court knew it in that sense. The Kullīyāt's editor Zore says so of the sultan's own verse, in a passage Sherwani quotes to embarrass him: "The Sultan has used the word bhag in a number of his poems, but the word has been used in all these places in its literary meaning, i.e. for 'share' or 'fortune' and this connotation fits well with the context" ¹¹. Ball's footnote glosses the city's name the same way, "Bhágnagar, or the Fortunate City" ¹⁶. And Bhāgmatī is itself "fortunate lady," built on the same root — so even on the courtesan reading the name runs through bhāgya. It follows that "Bhagyanagar" is not a different name from Bhāgnagar but a Sanskritising respelling of the same word, of the kind that turns a vernacular form into a tatsama one. Demanding a period attestation of the exact string "Bhagyanagar" while treating Bagnagar, Braganadar, Bhaugnuggur and Bhagnuggur as one name would be a standard applied to one side only. This page does not apply it. What remains as a negative finding, and it is a much narrower one than this page made before, is that no period source derives the city's name from the goddess Bhagyalakshmi.

The silence on the Qutb Shahi side, and what it does and does not prove

Against the Mughal, Dutch, English, French and Marathi testimony stands a body of negative evidence from inside the kingdom, and it is substantial.

Coinage first, with the two figures kept apart, because they are on different scales and the page previously let them sit together. Sherwani's survey of Muhammad Qulī's own coins finds four types: an undated one, one bearing only the date '89, one dated 991/1583 with the mint name "Dāru's-Salṭanat Kolkunda," and one dated 1012/1603-4 with "Dāru's-Salṭanat Haidarabad." "Up to the present, no coins have been unearthed bearing dates other than these" — a sentence written in 1967, and now rechecked against later numismatic publication, with results in both directions set out in the paragraph that follows ⁷. Sherwani's footnote then reports a published count from Abdul Wali Khan's catalogue: of 202 Qutb Shahi coins listed, 50 belong to the Golkonda mint and "all the remaining 152 belong to the Haidarabad mint" ¹³. Those 202 are dynasty-wide, running down to 1687. They are not 152 coins of Muhammad Qulī's reign, and they are one early-twentieth-century catalogue of one corpus in which much Qutb Shahi copper is undated and carries no mint name at all. The same discount is owed to figures on both sides of this argument, and is applied here in both directions: a count drawn from a single catalogue is evidence of what that catalogue holds, whichever way it points, and neither the 202 nor any rival tally can be treated as a census of what was struck. What the coins do carry at reign level is that a Haidarābād mint is striking by 1012/1603, which is enough on its own to sink the specific story that the name was changed in 1017/1608 ¹².

What they do not carry is any evidence at all from the years in dispute, and this page previously let the silence pass for a full register. The numismatic leg of the sceptical case can now be assessed properly, and the result cuts both ways at once. Take Sherwani's own list first: an undated type, one bearing only '89, one dated 991/1583 from the Golkonda mint, and one dated 1012/1603-4 from the Haidarabad mint ⁷. There is nothing in it between 1583 and 1603. A 2022 doctoral survey of Deccan sultanate coin legends adds three dates and does not close the gap: the Golconda copper with the warning couplet is reported at 1583, 1584 and 1586, and the Hyderabad-mint type "were minted in 1603 and 1608" ²³. So there is no dated Qutb Shahi coin at all between 1586 and 1603 — that is, none from the foundation year of 1591 and none from the whole period before the reported change of name. The register is not a full ledger in which Bhāgnagar fails to appear; it is empty. And it is empty for a structural reason a peer-reviewed article makes explicit: the sultanates that succeeded the Bahmani kingdom "did not strike their own coins for almost a century after they had declared sovereign status", and the handful of pre-Muhammad-Quli Qutb Shahi issues are "extremely rare", suggesting "that these coins were not meant for circulation, but were novelty issues" ²². A dynasty that had barely begun minting, with a blank two decades across the years in dispute, is a weak witness to what the city was not called. Now the other direction, because the same evidence has to be reported whichever way it points. The negative itself is no longer a 1967 statement: the 2022 survey works through the whole published Qutb Shahi series and the string 'bhag' does not occur anywhere in it ²⁴. Sherwani's strongest single item has survived sixty years of further publication. It is confirmed and it is worth much less than he made of it, and this page previously reported neither half.

The sultan's own writing next. Muhammad Qulī's Kullīyāt runs to a large body of Dakhni verse in which, on Sherwani's account, he names seventeen mistresses "by real or pet names, each of whom has odes ranging from one to five composed by the Sulṭān. And yet there is not one ode in favour of Bhāgmatī who is supposed to have been the most favoured of all!" ¹¹. Manu S. Pillai reports the same in the same terms: "Muhammad Quli, who catalogued the names of his 17 beloved ladies, himself evidently makes no mention of Bhagmati, and in the Kulliyat, the city he founded is always referred to as Hyderabad" ³⁵ — though Sherwani's own index of the three passages gives them as "My City," "City of Haidar" and "Haidarnagar," which is not quite the same thing as Hyderabad throughout ¹². One further correction is owed on the sceptical side, at exactly its weight and no more: the Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a Golconda painting of about 1650, "Wedding Procession of Sultan Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah", whose own published catalogue says that "The pair is thought to be Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah (r. 1580–1612) and Bhagmati, Golconda's legendary lovers" and reports no inscription naming her ²⁸. It is a real mid-seventeenth-century court object with a traditional rather than a documentary identification. It does not touch the five things the sceptical sentence quoted on this page actually denies — manuscript, stone inscription, grave, coin, Kullīyāt ³⁶ — and it is not evidence that Bhāgmatī existed; it does mean that any wider absolute of the form "no image of her exists" should not be repeated unqualified.

The Deccan chronicles next. The semi-official Tārīkh-i Muhammad Quṭb Shāh, completed 1017/1608, describes the new capital, the Chārmīnār, the fourteen thousand shops, the hospitals and squares — and does not mention Bhāgmatī or Bhāgnagar. Nor does the Hadīqatu's-Salāṭīn of 1054/1644, nor Bustāmī's Hadā'iqu's-Salāṭīn of 1092/1681 ¹⁰¹¹. That negative is the load-bearing one in Sherwani's case, and it is now under a specific and unresolved challenge, set out in the open questions below. Sherwani also disposes of the suppression hypothesis on its own terms: if the peshwā Mīr Mu'min had wanted the courtesan written out, "why was it necessary for him to wait for a change of names for two decades?" ¹¹.

How much does this silence carry? Chanceries, mints and court chronicles record official nomenclature; they are exactly the registers in which a vernacular by-name would be invisible, and Thévenot's sentence describes precisely that split ¹. Sherwani himself concludes in those terms: "while the common people called the city 'Bagnagar', the ruling aristocracy and government officers (i.e. those who carried on their official correspondence in Persian) called it Haidarabad" ¹⁵. Applying that principle consistently costs this page two of its own arguments, and they are surrendered here.

"No Bhāgnagar mint" is a chancery register by definition and cannot be both discounted as a register and cited as a finding. That defence has to be run at its true strength and not above it, and this page previously ran it above. The 2022 survey lists the attested Qutb Shahi mint names as "Golkonda: Dar-ul-Sultanate, Golkonda: Mohammad Nagar, Hyderabad, Dar-ul-Sultanate (Shahr), Ibrahimpattan, and Mukundnagar" ²⁴. Mukundnagar is a fully Indic toponym and it is on the coins; Muhammadnagar is a Persian name in an Indic compound, and the founder wrote Haidarnagar in his own verse ¹². The Qutb Shahi mint register was therefore not closed to Indic-form place-names, and this page cannot say that such a name would have been invisible in it as a matter of course. The defence is narrower than that and should be stated narrowly: what a mint register records is the official name of the striking city, so a second, unofficial name for the same city has no place to appear in it. Mukundnagar is a different town, not an alternative name for the capital. The register argument survives in that reduced form; it does not survive in the form the page previously used. And the Archaeological Survey's statement that it holds no information on the city having been named Bhagyanagar is institutional silence from an agency with no remit over toponymy at all — it is used below only for the Chārminār structure, where the ASI does have remit.

But the Kullīyāt is not a chancery document. It is intimate, indiscreet verse in the vernacular by the man who built the city, and if a Bhāgmatī existed and the city bore her name in the street, her absence from it is the hardest single fact for the Bhāgmatī romance to absorb. That is not the same as the hardest fact for the claim under examination, and this page previously conflated the two. The claim does not need Bhāgmatī. If she never existed — and Sherwani's own apparatus is the best case that she did not — then the derivation of the city's name from a courtesan is a hostile Mughal back-formation from a name that was already current in the street, and the ordinary lexical value of bhāg is left in sole possession of the field. That reconstruction is supported by this page's own evidence, it is what an informed defender of the claim actually holds, and it is set out below as a position in its own right rather than left unstated.

From Bhāgnagar to Bhagyanagar to Bhagyalakshmi

The claim under examination does not use the form the sources use. Every seventeenth-century attestation traced above is short: Bhāgnagar, Bāgnagar, Bagnagar, Bhágnagar, Bhaugnuggur, Bhagnuggur, Braganadar, and in Marathi Bhaganagar. The Sanskritised Bhagyanagar, with the -ya-, does not appear in that record, and no period attestation of it surfaced in any language reached here. That is a finding about orthography rather than about the word. As set out above, bhāg and bhāgya are the same lexical item in two registers, and the absence of the tatsama spelling from a Persian, Dutch, English, French and Marathi record is close to what one would predict whether or not speakers of Telugu and Dakhni understood the name as "city of fortune." The honest statement is that the modern campaign spelling is modern; the modern campaign meaning may not be.

On Telugu and Sanskrit the negative report is explicit, comes from the scholar with the best access to the material, and is limited by its own author in terms that travel with it everywhere on this page: "Lastly, to the present author's knowledge, no contemporary Telugu work contains the names either of Bhāgmatī or of Bhāgnagar" ¹⁴. To the present author's knowledge, in 1967, without a systematic search of the Andhra Pradesh Oriental Manuscripts Library or the Telangana State Archives. Sherwani then reports the one near miss: a palm-leaf Sanskrit manuscript in Telugu characters by Sarangu Tamayya, karnam of Golkonda, in which the author "calls himself a resident of 'Bhāgīratīpaṭṭanam'. Even in the manuscript the name, Bhāgnagar is not mentioned" ¹⁴. Bhāgīratī is a woman's name, and Sherwani suggests it may point to a wife of Ibrāhīm Quṭb Shāh rather than to the city's name at all. What it is not is Bhāgyanagaram. A deliberate search for a pre-twentieth-century Telugu attestation was run again for this revision and produced nothing older than a film lyric of 1972 ³⁷.

The goddess derivation is a separate proposition from the Bhāgmatī story and rests on the shrine at the south-eastern foot of the Chārminār. Here the documentary position is unfavourable, and the reporting has to be attributed exactly because it is the material evidence on the point. The Archaeological Survey's own words are on record and this page previously used a paraphrase of them. Replying to a Right to Information application in 2021, the ASI stated: "The Bhagyalakshmi Temple came into existence after taking over of Hyderabad by the Govt. of India adjacent to South Eastern minaret of the Centrally Protected Monument. No records are available in this office about the Chilla adjacent to Charminar (sic)". Answering an earlier application of December 2012 it had stated that "the construction of temple adjacent to the south eastern minar of the Charminar has considered by the Archaeological Survey of India as an unauthorised construction (sic)". The correspondence runs back further than this page said: in December 1968 the Superintending Archaeologist M. Idrisullah wrote to the Commissioner of the Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad seeking help in removing "unauthorised brick construction on the south-eastern side of the monument, Charminar, which has abutted and to some extent encroached into the monument itself"; the May 1977 letter this page previously treated as the start of the series is a later item in it ²⁶. Dated photographs from two archives point the same way: The Hindu holds images of 1957 and 1962 showing no structure and of 1990 and 1994 showing it, and the Aga Khan Visual Archive at MIT holds one of 1986 ²⁷. All of this is inside the agency's statutory remit over a protected monument, and it is factual about a structure and about nothing else. The Siasat report remains on this page for the 2012 High Court proceeding and for the ASI's statement about the city's naming, which is outside its remit and is given no weight here ³⁸. The ASI's silence on toponymy is given no weight for the same reason Qutb Shahi chancery silence is discounted above. What does carry is the narrower architectural point: no evidence places a Bhagyalakshmi shrine at the Chārminār in 1591, and the earliest secure material evidence for the present structure is of the twentieth century.

The transmission of the romance in the other direction is easier to date, and Sherwani dates it with unusual bite. After Āsaf Jāh I, he writes, "the erotic part of the story came to have a special appeal to the chroniclers. Quite against the old adage that a rolling stone gathers no moss, much moss was gathered round the small sneering sentence of Faizī, and soon the sentence grew into a paragraph, the paragraph into a section, and the section into chapters at the hands of the courtesan's panegyrists." Bhāgmatī was identified with the Haidar Mahal of the poems, made the mother of Hayāt Bakhshī Begam, given a tomb — all, on Sherwani's showing, without material evidence, and the tomb identification contradicted by the inscription on the only female grave in the chamber ¹³¹⁴¹². It is worth noting that the counter-current is as old as the current: the Māhnāmah of 1225/1810, quoting Mun'im Khān Hamdānī's Sawāniḥ-i Dakan, records the story and rejects it — "But the whole of the story is utterly baseless" ¹³.

A dossier of further attestations of Bhāgnagar circulates in the public argument and was assembled in one place by the Deccan Chronicle in February 2023: Finch; a 1601 reference in Yazdani's Antiquities of Bidar; a Shah Jahan letter printed in Islamic Culture in April 1934; a 1067 A.H./1656 manuscript notice; the 1708 Shah 'Alam coin legend "Farkhunda Buniyad-i-Hyderabad"; a 1951 statement by the Osmania vice-chancellor that the city "was originally named 'Bhagnagar'"; a report of Bernier quoting a letter of the Golconda vazir Mir Jumla to Aurangzeb asking him to attack Bhagnagar; a report of Thomas William Beale's Oriental Biographical Dictionary (1881) quoting Khafi Khan that after Bhagmati's death the name was changed to Haidarabad "but that in the vernacular language of the people it continued to be 'Bhagnagar'"; and, most consequentially, a sentence attributed to the Tarikh-i Sultan Muhammad Kutbshahi that the sultan "built Bhagnagar or Haidarabad" ³⁷. This page's earlier summary of that dossier omitted the last three items, including the one that bears hardest on the authority this page leans on most; they are restored here, and the Tarikh-i sentence is carried at the newspaper's report only, unverified in any edition, and is now an open question below. That dossier is largely sound on Bhāgnagar, which is the proposition it actually supports. None of it is evidence for the goddess.

Where the argument now stands

Four findings survive on the documents.

First, the city was built new in 1591 and both names belong to its builder's reign ⁶. Anyone defending the claim has to abandon the conquest framing that usually travels with it — but only that framing. The claim as quoted at the head of this page does not say conqueror, and read as written its first and third components are what Firishta, the anonymous Qutb Shahi-era appendix and Foster's Hakluyt footnote all say ⁹⁴¹⁷. This page previously refuted a stronger claim of its own authorship and no longer does.

Second, Bhāgnagar was a real name that the city really carried: in Mughal report from the 1590s, in Deccan report from 1609, in English report from 1608–11, in Dutch report from 1614, in French report to 1667, and in Marathi report of 1697 ⁵⁹¹⁷¹⁹¹²⁰. Anyone denying the claim has to concede this, and the flat denial that Hyderabad "was never Bhagnagar" is not supportable — it is least supportable against the Marathi witness, who is writing in an Indic language and uses no other name. Against it stands one significant counter-witness who is rarely cited on this side: Methwold, who lived in the kingdom, printed in 1626, and gives the two names as Golchonda and Hidraband ¹⁸.

Third, the earliest surviving explanations of the name are hostile Mughal and Bijapuri ones deriving it from a woman the sources call a prostitute: Faizī's fahisha-i kuhnā, the Ṭabaqāt's pātarē, Firishta's fāhishā ⁸⁹. That is a fact about the explainers, and it is stated here at exactly the weight those explainers can bear — which, given that the same page dismantles their independence, their access and their textual security, is not much. Whether the woman existed is genuinely open, and if she did not, the derivation from her is a back-formation and the claim is helped rather than hurt.

Fourth, what actually fails. The goddess Bhagyalakshmi appears in none of the period sources traced here, in any language — and that now includes Marathi, where the one Indic-language tradition demonstrably using the name derives it, in its 1920 editor's report of later chroniclers, from a Brahman lady and not from a deity ²¹. Four explanatory traditions are now on this page and not one of them is the goddess. No specialist historian of the Qutb Shahi period was traced holding that derivation in print. The Sanskritised spelling is modern. Everything else is contested between competent readings of real evidence: Foster and Ball on one side saying original name and Fortunate City, Sabhasad's bakhar behind them, Sherwani on the other with the coins, the chronicles and the Kullīyāt, and Methwold sitting awkwardly for both. This page does not think the documents currently settle it, and says so rather than picking a side and dressing the pick as a finding.

The pages themselves

Where the source is out of copyright and a scan exists, the page carrying the quoted passage is reproduced here, so the reader can check the transcription rather than take it on trust.

Page 94 of Part III of the 1687 English Thévenot, with the marginal note 'Bagnagar. Aider-abad.' beside the sentence naming the capital. — Jean de Thévenot, The Travels of Monsieur de Thevenot into the Levant. In Three Parts. Viz. Into I. Turkey. II. Persia. III. The East-Indies, trans. Archibald Lovell (London: printed by H. Clark for H. Faithorne, J. Adamson, C. Skegnes and T. Newborough, 1687), Part III, ch. IV, p. 94., Part III, p. 94 (archive.org leaf n651)

Page 409 of Scott's 1794 Ferishta, opening the section on Sultan Mahummud Koolli Koottub Shaw. — Muhammad Qāsim Hindūshāh Astarābādī 'Firishta', Ferishta's History of Dekkan from the First Mahummedan Conquests, trans. Jonathan Scott (Shrewsbury: J. and W. Eddowes, 1794), vol. I, p. 409., vol. I, p. 409 (archive.org leaf n426)

Page 335 of volume III of Briggs's Firishta, carrying the Bhagmutty and Bhagnuggur passage. — Muhammad Qāsim Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India till the Year A.D. 1612, trans. John Briggs (1829; Calcutta: R. Cambray & Co., 1910 reprint), vol. III, pp. 321, 335., vol. III, p. 335 (archive.org leaf n359); Firishta's disclaimer at p. 321

Page 451 of Briggs's appendix, giving the foundation of the new city and the post-mortem change of name. — John Briggs (trans.), 'Appendix to the History of the Kings of Golconda' — an anonymous Persian 'History of Mahomed Koolly Kootb Shah', in History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India (Calcutta: R. Cambray & Co., 1910 reprint), vol. III, unnumbered page preceding p. 339 (appendix half-title and prefatory notice) and p. 451., vol. III, p. 451 (archive.org leaf n475); prefatory notice on the unnumbered page at leaf n361 (printed p. 339 is leaf n363 and opens the 'Sooltan Koolly Kootb Shah' section)

Page 151 of V. Ball's 1889 Tavernier, with the 'Garden of Nagar' gloss and Ball's footnote glossing the name 'the Fortunate City'. — Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India, trans. V. Ball (London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1889), vol. I, ch. X, p. 151 and n. 1., vol. I, p. 151 (archive.org leaf n229)

Page 131 of Foster's Early Travels in India, with Finch's 'Braganadar' and Foster's footnote identifying it as Bhāgnagar. — William Foster (ed.), Early Travels in India 1583–1619 (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), 'William Finch, 1608–11', p. 131 and n. 5; also p. 182., p. 131, n. 5 (archive.org leaf n160)

How the claim travelled

A claim’s history of telling is separate from its truth. This traces the telling.

Earliest attestation: A petition of Abū'l-Faiz 'Faizī' (1547–95), Akbar's poet laureate and Imperial Resident in the Deccan, undated but written between 999/1591 and 1002/1594, preserved in the collection variously titled Inshā-i Faizī, Tabāshiru's-Subh and Latīfa-i Faizī: "Aḥmad Qulī (sic) is steeped in Shī'ism, and has built a city Bhāgnagar by name, after Bhāgmatī, the old prostitute (fahisha-i kuhnā) who has been his mistress for a long time (ma'shūqa-i qadim)." Sherwani quotes it from the Salar Jang manuscript Nathr Farsi 31 and records that the sentence is absent from the Asafiya manuscript Inshā-i Farsi 80. Faizī was resident at Ahmadnagar and Burhanpur and, on Sherwani's statement, never travelled further south, so the report is contemporary but second-hand ⁸¹⁰. Because the decisive sentence is missing from one of the two manuscripts of the collection that carries it, this page treats it as provisional pending a published collation — the same status it gives to the untraced 1637 and c. 1670 documents cited on the other side of the dispute, and to Luther's 1992–93 article which no one involved in this page has been able to read, and for the same reason: a document whose text is insecure, a document whose location is untraced and an article no one has opened are all claims awaiting confirmation, and it would be an asymmetric standard to enthrone one and quarantine the others.
First embellishment: Niẓām-ud-dīn Aḥmad's Ṭabaqāt-i Akbarī (1002/1594) adds the thousand horsemen attending the woman's stirrups ⁵. Firishta (1018/1609) adds the motive and the sequence — remorse, then the change of name to Haidarābād — neither of which is in Faizī, and simultaneously reports that part of the city still bore the old name ⁹³. The anonymous Persian history of Muhammad Qulī translated in Briggs's appendix supplies a different trigger: the change came after Bhāgmatī's death ⁴. Two Mughal compilers, Nihāwandī (1025 A.H.) and Khāfī Khān, avow that they follow Firishta on the Deccan and are not independent witnesses ⁹. The full romance — Bhāgmatī identified with the Haidar Mahal of the poems, made the mother of Hayāt Bakhshī Begam, given a tomb, made the motive for the Purānā Pul and the city itself — Sherwani dates to after Āsaf Jāh I and largely to the Kullīyāt editor Muhīuddīn Qādrī Zore, whose identifications he calls "a series of pure presumptions" ¹³¹¹. By about 1650 the romance had reached the Golconda painting studio: the Metropolitan Museum's "Wedding Procession of Sultan Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah", commissioned under 'Abdullāh Quṭb Shāh, is traditionally read as the sultan bringing home Bhāgmatī, though the Museum's own catalogue hedges it as "thought to be" and reports no inscription ²⁸. Running alongside the courtesan tradition from the seventeenth century onward is a garden tradition — Rafi'ud-dīn Shīrāzī's "the whole city is just one large garden," Tavernier's informants glossing the first element as bāgh — which is a separate line of transmission and not a derivative of the first ¹⁵¹⁶. A fourth and later line runs through the Marathi chroniclers, where Sen's 1920 note reports the name derived from a Brahman lady who fed the founder ²¹. The Sanskritised spelling "Bhagyanagar" and the derivation from the goddess Bhagyalakshmi form a further layer for which no period attestation was found here.
Why it took this shape: Each layer is intelligible in its own setting and none requires bad faith. The earliest witness wrote from a court preparing the annexation of the Deccan sultanates and does not grant the Deccan rulers royal titles at all; Sherwani reads his phrasing as court invective, which is a judgement about tone rather than proof of falsity ¹⁰. The Asaf Jahi-era elaboration served literary and courtly taste, and the counter-tradition ran alongside it: the Māhnāmah of 1225/1810, compiled at the instance of the court singer Māhlaqā Bāi Chanda, dismissed the story as "utterly baseless" at the height of its popularity ¹³. The modern argument carries political investment on both sides and it is recorded here on both. Renaming Hyderabad as Bhagyanagar has been an explicit electoral proposition, raised by the Uttar Pradesh chief minister during the 2020 GHMC campaign with reference to Ayodhya and Prayagraj and answered in the same register by the sitting Hyderabad MP ³⁷; and the sceptical case has a setting of its own — Sherwani published in Hyderabad in 1967, two decades after 1948, the Deccan Heritage Trust and The Siasat Daily are participants in the same public dispute rather than neutral registries, and the senior serving academic holding the sceptical position directs a research centre named for Sherwani and publishes in Siasat ³⁶³⁸³³. None of these observations is an argument about the seventeenth century and none is used as one here.
Where the scholarship now stands: On the founding facts there is no dispute: a new city, 1591 by Sherwani's reckoning and 1589 by Moreland's, built by Muhammad Qulī Quṭb Shāh on the plain beside the village of Chichlam, an existing bridge of 1578 and an existing Golkonda–Masulipaṭam road, with the Chārmīnār completed 1000/1592 ⁶¹⁸. On the name, Sherwani's position — Haidarābād from the outset, Bhāgnagar a vernacular form of bāgh-nagar, Bhāgmatī a legend — has been dominant since 1967 and is followed in the public argument by Mohd Safiullah of the Deccan Heritage Trust and by Manu S. Pillai ³⁶³⁵. Narendra Luther holds that Bhāgmatī was historical and writes that the city's chronogrammatic title "was Farkhunda Buniyad which in Persian means 'of fortunate foundation' – the equivalent of the name Bhagnagar" ³⁹; his scholarly statement of the case is an article of 1992–93 that no one working on this page has read ³². Rahul Shastri argues from the same chronogram and from the bh/b distinction for the priority of Bhagyanagar, in an advocacy essay rather than peer-reviewed scholarship ³⁴. My own reading of the sources adds three things, cutting in different directions. Against Sherwani's solution: he quotes Tavernier's "Bagnagar or the Garden of Nagar" accurately in a block quotation and then glosses it as "the City of Gardens," silently discarding Tavernier's own derivation from a woman called Nagar and leaning instead on the adjacent "Here the king had very fair gardens" — a loose paraphrase rather than the misreading this page previously alleged, and one that still leaves a genuine seventeenth-century bāgh reading in evidence alongside Rafi'ud-dīn Shīrāzī's "the whole city is just one large garden"; he also cites a different Tavernier edition (his p. 132, "grandfather") from Ball's vol. I p. 151 ("great-grandfather") ¹⁵¹⁶. Also against Sherwani, and newly: his numismatic negative is confirmed to 2022 but the register it rests on is empty of dated coins from 1586 to 1603, and the dynasty had barely begun minting at all ²³²⁴²². Against the claim: William Methwold, the earliest sustained English account of the kingdom, printed in 1626 by a man who had lived on the coast, gives the city's two names as Golchonda and Hidraband and does not mention Bāgnagar at all — a speech-community split running opposite to Thévenot's ¹⁸. And the annual courtesan gathering routinely cited from "Methwold" in the pro-claim literature is not Methwold's: it is in the anonymous Dutch relation of late 1614, it does use the name Bāgnagar, and the dance it describes commemorates the death of the first Muslim king, not Bhāgmatī ¹⁹. Newly on the claim's side, and the largest single addition this page has taken: the Marathi Sabhasad Bakhar of 1697, in Sen's University of Calcutta translation, knows the Qutb Shahi capital as Bhaganagar and by no other name ²⁰.

Where historians differ

Bhāgmatī never existed; the city was Haidarābād from its foundation; "Bhāgnagar" is a popular corruption of Bāghnagar, "city of gardens." The whole tradition descends from one hostile Mughal sentence that later writers copied and inflated. — H. K. Sherwani, Muhammad-Qulī Quṭb Shāh, Founder of Haidarabad (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1967), Appendix II, pp. 135–146. Followed in public argument by Mohd Safiullah of the Deccan Heritage Trust and by Manu S. Pillai, and held by the senior serving academic in the field, Salma Ahmed Farooqui, Professor and Director of the H. K. Sherwani Centre for Deccan Studies at Maulana Azad National Urdu University [farooqui-2022-charminar]. Sherwani wrote and published in Hyderabad two decades after 1948; Safiullah and The Siasat Daily are participants in the present public dispute; and Farooqui's centre is named for Sherwani and she publishes in Siasat. All three are noted for the same reason Shastri's advocacy status is noted below, and with the same effect on the argument, which is none.
No Bhāgnagar mint among the surviving coins, against a Haidarābād mint striking by 1012/1603; the Tārīkh-i Muhammad Quṭb Shāh (1017/1608) and two later Deccan chronicles silent on both names; the Kullīyāt naming seventeen mistresses and not Bhāgmatī, and naming the city three times and never as Bhāgnagar; no contemporary Telugu work carrying either name, on his own knowledge in 1967; Faizī's polemical register and his never having travelled south of Ahmadnagar; and, for the garden etymology, Tavernier's informants plus Rafi'ud-dīn Shīrāzī's "the whole city is just one large garden" sixty years earlier ⁷¹¹¹²¹⁴¹⁰¹⁵. Two of those legs have moved since 1967, in opposite directions. The numismatic and epigraphic negatives are confirmed to 2022 — a doctoral survey of Deccan sultanate coin legends and of the published Qutb Shahi inscriptions contains no occurrence of the string 'bhag' anywhere ²⁴²⁵ — while the coin register turns out to hold no dated Qutb Shahi issue at all between 1586 and 1603, and the dynasty had barely begun minting ²³²². The chronicle negative is under a specific unresolved challenge set out in the open questions below.
Bhāgnagar was "the original name of the city of Hyderabad," and it means "the Fortunate City." — William Foster, Early Travels in India 1583–1619 (Oxford, 1921), p. 131 n. 5; and V. Ball, in his annotation of Tavernier's Travels in India (London, 1889), vol. I, p. 151 n. 1. Two editors in the Hakluyt tradition, stating in footnotes both propositions the claim advances.
Neither shows his working, and this page does not treat an editorial gloss as equivalent to a period source. The likeliest genealogy is Briggs's 1829 Firishta, which was the standard English text of the Deccan chronicles for the whole nineteenth century and which prints the naming, the renaming and the survival of the old name in one paragraph ³¹⁷¹⁶. That makes the Foster and Ball glosses a nineteenth-century commonplace — but a commonplace resting on a translated period source rather than on invention, which is why they are recorded here as a position and not dismissed as one. Ball's gloss is also the more interesting of the two, since it reads the first element as fortune while the author he is editing reads it as garden, on the same page. Sen's Marathi note of 1920 is the same kind of object and is admitted at the same status and no higher ²¹.
Bhāgmatī was historical and Bhāgnagar was a real name of the city; the Persian chronogrammatic title Farkhunda Buniyād, "of fortunate foundation," is the court's own equivalent of the vernacular name. — Narendra Luther. His scholarly statement of the case is 'On the Historicity of Bhagmati', Research Journal of the Salar Jung Museum 29–30 (1992–93), which he cites as such in his own book and which an H-Net reviewer faulted him for not drawing into it [hnet-2014-luther-review][luther-1993-historicity]; his book-length treatment is Hyderabad: A Biography (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006; 2012). Neither has been read for this page, and Luther's position is quoted below only from a short online essay of his own [luther-2006]. That is a weakness in this page and it is named as one: the principal named opponent of the position this page leans on most heavily is represented here by its weakest available version.
The persistence of the name in usage across Mughal, English, French and Marathi material; and the chronogram, of which Luther writes in his own words that the city's "chronogrammatic title which yields the year of its completion, was Farkhunda Buniyad which in Persian means 'of fortunate foundation' – the equivalent of the name Bhagnagar" ³⁹. The equation is Luther's, not an inference attributed to him. What is not established, by him or here, is when the epithet first attaches to the city — the earliest instance traced is a Shah 'Alam coin legend of 1708, a century after the founding, which is why this sits in the open questions below. Sherwani's rebuttal is not to this argument but to the Bhāgmatī identification, and the two men are in part arguing past each other.
Bhagyanagar was the people's name for the city, displaced in official usage; native speakers of Deccani and Telugu could not have confused bhāg with bāgh, so the garden etymology fails; farkhunda in the court's own chronogram translates the sense of bhāgya. — Rahul A. Shastri, president of Samvit Kendra, "Bhagyanagar, The People's Hyderabad That Refuses To Die" (Swarajya, 25 November 2018; also on the CSIS India site).
The phonemic distinction between bhag and bag; the semantic match between farkhunda and bhāgya; and a compilation of the seventeenth-century attestations of Bhāgnagar ³⁴. This is an advocacy essay rather than peer-reviewed scholarship, and no published specialist reply to it was traced. Its phonemic point is a real hit on Sherwani, for reasons set out above, and its lexical point about bhāg and bhāgya is correct and is conceded on this page. Two qualifications: Shastri writes "Bhagyamati" where the manuscripts and their editors write Bhāgmatī, which quietly imports the -ya- into the woman's name as well as the city's; and his citation of Methwold does not survive checking — the passage he wants is in the anonymous Dutch relation, and Methwold himself does not use the name at all ¹⁸¹⁹.
The name Bhāgnagar is genuine and the courtesan is the folk-etymology, not the other way round: Bhāgmatī is a Mughal invention, and the hostile derivation was back-formed from a vernacular name already in use whose ordinary sense was "city of fortune." — Not traced to a named historian in print. It is the strongest reconstruction available to a defender of the claim, it is what this page's own evidence supports, and it is stated here on this page's responsibility rather than attributed to anyone who has not published it.
Sherwani's own negative apparatus on Bhāgmatī — the seventeen odes without her, the absent Telugu attestation, the three divergent manuscript readings of her name, the Faizī sentence missing from the Asafiya manuscript ¹¹¹⁴⁵⁸; the Māhnāmah of 1225/1810 rejecting the romance as "utterly baseless" ¹³; the lexical value of bhāg as the vernacular reflex of bhāgya, attested in the founder's own verse on Zore's reading and in Ball's gloss ¹¹¹⁶; and the currency of the name in a Marathi source outside the Persian tradition altogether ²⁰. Its weakness is that it explains the name's origin by a word rather than by a document, and no document has yet been produced in which anyone before the nineteenth century says the city was named for good fortune.
Two names ran in parallel across different speech communities rather than in sequence — a vernacular name in the street and a Persianate name in the chancery, on the coinage and in court verse. — H. K. Sherwani, in the concluding section of the same appendix, pp. 145–146 — this is the sceptic's own formulation, not a compromise imposed from outside.
Thévenot's sentence of 1666–67 distinguishing the two by user rather than by date; Firishta's own statement that part of the city still bore the older name; the anonymous chronicle's "although for many years it retained its original name"; and a Marathi bakhar of 1697 that uses the vernacular name exclusively while the chancery and the mint use the Persian one ¹³⁴¹⁵²⁰. The difficulty for it is Methwold, who reports a split by speech community forty years before Thévenot and gets a different pair of names out of it entirely ¹⁸. A second qualification is owed: the chancery half of the argument cannot be run at full strength, because the mint register does admit Indic-form toponyms such as Mukundnagar ²⁴.
"Bhagyanagar" derives from the goddess Bhagyalakshmi, whose shrine stands at the foot of the Chārminār. — No specialist historian of the Qutb Shahi period was traced holding this position in print; it circulates in devotional and campaign literature. Rahul Shastri gestures at it by suggesting Bhāgmatī served as a devadasi at a Bhagyalakshmi temple, but does not produce period evidence for the shrine [shastri-2018].
Against it: none of the earliest witnesses derives the city's name from a deity, and no period attestation of the derivation surfaced in any language reached here. The Archaeological Survey has stated in its own words that "The Bhagyalakshmi Temple came into existence after taking over of Hyderabad by the Govt. of India", that it holds no records of the chilla, and that the structure is unauthorised construction; its correspondence about it begins in December 1968 ²⁶, and dated photographs in The Hindu's archive and in the Aga Khan Visual Archive at MIT show no structure in 1957 and 1962 and a structure in 1986, 1990 and 1994 ²⁷. Those bear on the physical structure at the monument, which is within the agency's remit. Its reported statement about the city's naming is not, and is given no weight ³⁸. A further test was run and it failed: the Marathi tradition, the one Indic-language tradition demonstrably using the name, also has an etymology, and it too is a woman — a Brahman lady who fed the founder — not a deity ²¹.
A record of what a deliberate search for counter-evidence did not find: no pre-twentieth-century Telugu attestation of the name, no Bhāgnagar mint, no Bhāgnagar inscription, no foundation inscription on the Chārminār in any language, no peer-reviewed defence of Bhagnagar-priority by a specialist historian of the period, and no worked Dutch VOC corpus. — Not a position held by a named scholar. It is this page's own report of searches run and failed, stated on this page's responsibility because a negative result honestly reported is worth more than a padded counter-case. Four of the five substantive negatives run against the claim this page examines, and they are printed at the same prominence as the findings that run for it.
A note on what this page could not find, recorded because a negative result honestly reported is worth more than a padded counter-case. A deliberate search for counter-evidence to the sceptical position produced very little. There is no pre-twentieth-century Telugu attestation of Bhagyanagaram or Bhaganagaram: the best any pro-claim source offers is a 1972 Telugu film lyric, 'Vinara Andhra Kumara Bhagyanagara Gadha' from Vichitra Bandham, offered by the Deccan Chronicle as evidence that Telugu speakers used the name 'for ages' ³⁷, and a film song of 1972 is not a period attestation. There is no Bhāgnagar mint, now confirmed to 2022 rather than 1967 ²⁴. There is no Bhāgnagar inscription in the published epigraphic record — Epigraphia Indo-Moslemica for 1915–16 and 1925–26 and the Epigraphia Indica Arabic and Persian Supplement for 1966, the corpora worked through by the 2022 survey, which finds Muhammad Qulī's inscriptions naming Hyderabad and never Bhāgnagar ²⁵ — and there is no foundation inscription on the Chārminār at all, in any language, naming anything: "nowhere on the monument is this fact inscribed nor is the year of construction directly given in any record either" ³³. No peer-reviewed defence of Bhagnagar-priority by a specialist historian of the period was traced, beyond Luther's 1992–93 article, which no one has been able to read. And the Dutch VOC corpus remains unworked. Four of those five negatives run against the claim and are stated here in full.

What this page cannot settle

Sherwani reports that the decisive Faizī sentence is present in the Salar Jang manuscript Tabāshiru's-Subh (Nathr Farsi 31) but absent from the Asafiya manuscript Inshā-i Farsi 80. A collation of all surviving manuscripts of Faizī's letters would establish whether the sentence is authorial or an interpolation — the single most consequential unanswered question on this page, and the reason the sentence is marked provisional above rather than treated as settled.
Does the Tārīkh-i Sultān Muhammad Qutb Shāh contain the sentence attributed to it? The Deccan Chronicle dossier this page already cites carries an item this page's summary of that dossier left out: that in the Tarikh-i Sultan Muhammad Kutbshahi, dated there to 1617, the anonymous author wrote of "Abu al-Fath Sultan Muhammad Kuli Kutb Shah, who built Bhagnagar or Haidarabad and transferred his capital from Gulkundah, to the newly-erected city" ³⁷. If that is a translation of the chronicle's own prose, then Sherwani's central negative — that the semi-official Qutb Shahi chronicle mentions neither Bhāgnagar nor Bhāgmatī — is false, and the balance of this page shifts materially toward the claim's literal wording. Three things make the question sharp and answerable. The dating is unstable across the authorities: Sherwani works from 1017/1608, the Deccan Chronicle says 1617, and Salma Ahmed Farooqui, Director of the H. K. Sherwani Centre for Deccan Studies, writes that the work "was compiled under the order of Sultan Muhammad Qutb Shah in 1616 and is housed in the Salar Jung Museum library" ³³ — so two different recensions, or two different works, may be in play. The sentence could not be verified in any edition: it was not found in two archive.org scans of Elliot and Dowson, and every occurrence traced runs back to the same 2023 newspaper article and its reprints. And its phrasing — third-person, relative-clause, biographical-summary — reads more like an English manuscript-catalogue entry describing the chronicle than like a translation of the chronicle's narrative; testing that against Rieu, Ethé, Ivanow and Storey is a day's work and would settle it. This displaces the question about a current numismatic survey, which is now answered, and it is the single most consequential unanswered question on this page after the Faizī collation.
What do the Persian manuscripts of the Ṭabaqāt-i Akbarī and the Gulshan-i Ibrāhīmī actually write, letter by letter? B. De reports the printed text-edition of the Ṭabaqāt as بهاگ متی, with the aspirate, but also records three divergent manuscript readings of the woman's name. A published collation of the orthography — بهاگ against باگ — across witnesses would settle the b/bh dispute on evidence rather than on the habits of modern romanisers. The same is now owed to the Marathi: Sen's 'Bhaganagar' is his romanisation and has not been collated against the manuscript of the Sabhasad Bakhar.
Is there any pre-twentieth-century attestation of the exact form 'Bhagyanagar' or 'Bhāgyanagaram', in Telugu, Sanskrit, Marathi or Persian? Sherwani's negative report on contemporary Telugu material is nearly sixty years old, is limited by its own author to his own knowledge, and was made without systematic search of the Andhra Pradesh Oriental Manuscripts Library or the Telangana State Archives. A renewed search for this revision produced nothing older than a film lyric of 1972. Note that a negative result here would not by itself defeat the claim, since the tatsama spelling and the vernacular spelling are the same word.
Answered, and the answer went both ways. A 2022 doctoral survey of Deccan sultanate coin legends and epigraphy at Maulana Azad National Urdu University contains no occurrence of the string 'bhag' anywhere in its text, and its list of attested Qutb Shahi mint names — Golkonda Dar-ul-Sultanate, Golkonda Mohammad Nagar, Hyderabad, Dar-ul-Sultanate (Shahr), Ibrahimpattan, Mukundnagar — does not include it ²⁴. Sherwani's negative survives sixty years of further publication. What the same survey also shows is that the register is empty for the years in dispute: the Golconda types are dated 1583, 1584 and 1586 and the Hyderabad types 1603 and 1608, so there is no dated Qutb Shahi coin at all between 1586 and 1603 ²³, and a peer-reviewed article establishes that the post-Bahmani sultanates 'did not strike their own coins for almost a century after they had declared sovereign status' ²². The remaining coin question is narrower and worth stating as such: is there any undated or mint-less Qutb Shahi copper that a die-study could place between 1586 and 1603, and does Goron and Goenka's Qutb Shahi section (pp. 332–339) add any type Abdul Wali Khan's 1961 catalogue lacks?
The 1637 succession document naming 'Zaheeruddin, Qazi of Bhagnagar' and the c. 1670 Ghorpade letter with 'Bhagnuggur' are cited repeatedly in the pro-Bhagnagar literature, but no archive, fonds or accession reference for either was traced. If they exist as described, they would be the best evidence that the name was in local administrative and diplomatic use, and they should be published with their shelfmarks. They are held here to the same provisional standard as the Faizī sentence and as Luther's 1992–93 article, not a stricter one.
When does 'Farkhunda Buniyād' first attach to the Hyderabad mint name? The earliest instance traced is a Shah 'Alam coin of 1708 — a century after the founding. If the epithet can be shown on a Qutb Shahi issue, Luther's and Shastri's chronogram argument gains a great deal; if it cannot, it is a later Mughal formula and the argument loses its footing.
What is the earliest photographic, municipal or survey record of any structure at the south-eastern foot of the Chārminār? The ASI's own correspondence begins in December 1968, when Superintending Archaeologist M. Idrisullah wrote to the Commissioner of the Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad about 'unauthorised brick construction on the south-eastern side of the monument, Charminar' ²⁶; The Hindu's own archive holds photographs of 1957 and 1962 showing no structure and of 1990 and 1994 showing it, and the Aga Khan Visual Archive at MIT holds one of 1986 ²⁷; Survey of India sheets and Hyderabad municipal records of the 1930s–50s would date the shrine independently of the contested photographs.
What does the Dutch original of the anonymous 1614 relation actually spell, in the collection of 1644–6 from which Moreland worked? The macron in his 'Bāgnagar' is his own romanisation. And do the Dutch VOC records of the Golconda factory in the Nationaal Archief use the name consistently, and do they preserve any indigenous document in which the Qutb Shahi court itself uses it? This is the largest seventeenth-century corpus on the question that neither side of the debate has worked through.
Read chapter 6 of Eaton and Wagoner. Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India's Deccan Plateau, 1300–1600 contains a chapter titled 'Qutub Shahi Warangal and the Foundation of Hyderabad' ³⁰. Its argument, as Eaton states it in a separate essay, is that the design and layout of Hyderabad "had been inspired not by some idealized model of an 'Islamic city' or by actual cities like Herat, Samarqand or Isfahan, as is conventionally thought, but by the layout of Warangal, the former Kakatiya capital" ²⁹. That bears on the plausibility question this page circles repeatedly — whether an Indic-register name for the new city would have been alien to this court — and it is the most authoritative published treatment of the foundation. Neither the researcher who found it nor this adjudication could read the chapter: the Internet Archive copy is lending-restricted and search-inside is disabled. Nothing about the city's NAME is attributed to these authors here, and nothing should be until the physical chapter is read. Anyone repairing this page should get it.
What this page is still worse at than it should be, stated here so that a reader meets it rather than discovers it. (a) Sherwani carries roughly forty per cent of this page's weight and is cited from a monograph read at page level; his principal named opponent, Narendra Luther, is cited only from a short online essay, while Luther's scholarly article of 1992–93 and his Oxford book are both listed unconsulted ³⁹³²³¹. That is a standard applied to one side. It is a defect of sourcing rather than of argument, and it is fixable by anyone with library access rather than by further reasoning. (b) This page cites the Deccan Chronicle dossier and previously summarised it while omitting the one item in it — the Tārīkh-i Sultān Muhammad Qutb Shāh sentence — that would falsify Sherwani's central negative if genuine. The omission is now repaired ³⁷, but a page that quarantines the 1637 qazi document for want of a shelfmark and then drops an adverse item from a source it does cite was applying its scepticism unevenly, however inadvertently. (c) The chancery-register defence was previously run at full strength in one direction only, without disclosing either that the register admits Indic-form toponyms such as Mukundnagar or that it is empty of dated coins for 1586–1603; it is now run at the reduced strength the evidence supports ²⁴²³. (d) The leading Oxford monograph on Deccan urban foundation was excluded on a scope inference that does not hold, while a blog post, an advocacy essay and two participant newspapers were admitted with disclosures; disclosure was the right instrument and should have been used there too ³⁰. (e) One asymmetry was proposed against this page and refused: Sen's 1920 editorial note on the Marathi name was offered as the Marathi tradition's own etymology, and it is a 1920 editor reporting 'later chroniclers' — the same kind of evidentiary object as Foster's 1921 and Ball's 1889 glosses, which this page declines to treat as period evidence. It is admitted here at that status and no higher ²¹.

Connected to

associated withHyderabad — The city whose name is at issue: founded 1591 (Moreland's note gives 1589), attested in the seventeenth century under Haidarābād, Bhāgnagar/Bāgnagar, in Marathi as Bhaganagar, and, in Methwold, Golchonda.
associated withMuhammad Quli Qutb Shah — Founder of the city in 1591. Both contested names arise within his reign; his own Dakhni Kullīyāt names the city three times, as 'My City', 'City of Haidar' and 'Haidarnagar', never as Bhāgnagar.
associated withQutb Shahi Dynasty — The dynasty whose mints, chronicles and chancery record Haidarābād; a Haidarābād mint is striking by 1012/1603 and no Bhāgnagar mint is known — a chancery register, discounted here as one, and one that holds no dated coin at all between 1586 and 1603.
preceded byGolconda — The congested predecessor capital some four to five coss away, whose water shortage and bad air the period sources give as the reason for the move; still the name Methwold gives for the city in 1626, and the gloss Sen gives for Marathi 'Bhaganagar' in 1920.
associated withCharminar — Completed 1000/1592 at the crossing of the new city's principal axes, where a new north–south road was made to intersect the existing Golkonda–Masulipaṭam road; it carries no foundation inscription in any language, and the modern Bhagyalakshmi derivation rests on a shrine at its south-eastern foot whose present structure the ASI treats as twentieth-century and unauthorised.
associated withBijapur (Vijayapura) — Where Firishta wrote the Gulshan-i Ibrāhīmī in 1018/1609 — the only near-contemporary Deccan chronicle to carry either Bhāgmatī or Bhāgnagar.
associated withIbrahim Adil Shah II — Firishta's patron; his court is the setting from which the only Deccan-side account of the naming and renaming comes.
associated withDakhni — The language of Muhammad Qulī's Kullīyāt, the single most intimate body of evidence on the question, the place where Bhāgmatī is conspicuously absent, and the register in which bhāg carries its ordinary sense of fortune.
associated withNizam Shahi Dynasty — Ahmadnagar, where Faizī was Imperial Resident when he wrote the earliest surviving report of the name — and beyond which, on Sherwani's statement, he never travelled.
associated withshivaji — The Sabhasad Bakhar of 1697, written by his servant and contemporary Krishnaji Anant Sabhasad, is the only Indic-language source on this page and calls the Qutb Shahi capital Bhaganagar throughout, including inside Shivaji's own reported words about his 1677 embassy.

Citations

Every quotation is given verbatim with its page, and linked to the copy it was read from. Spelling and diacritics are those of the source — where they look wrong, that is the evidence, not an error. Tier A: academic or peer-reviewed. Tier B: archival, contemporary or reference. Tier C: journalism or popular history, never load-bearing on its own.

1AJean de Thévenot, The Travels of Monsieur de Thevenot into the Levant. In Three Parts. Viz. Into I. Turkey. II. Persia. III. The East-Indies, trans. Archibald Lovell (London: printed by H. Clark for H. Faithorne, J. Adamson, C. Skegnes and T. Newborough, 1687), Part III, ch. IV, p. 94., Part III, p. 94 (archive.org leaf n651) (1687)
The Capital City of this Kingdom is called Bagnagar, the Persians call it Aider-abad [long ſ transcribed as s in 'Perſians'; the original italicises Bagnagar, Perſians and Aider-abad]
Fetchedsource
Page 94 of Part III of the 1687 English Thévenot, with the marginal note 'Bagnagar. Aider-abad.' beside the sentence naming the capital. — Wellcome Collection copy, Internet Archive (b30325870). Public Domain Mark / public domain (published 1687). Full scan.
2AMuhammad Qāsim Hindūshāh Astarābādī 'Firishta', Ferishta's History of Dekkan from the First Mahummedan Conquests, trans. Jonathan Scott (Shrewsbury: J. and W. Eddowes, 1794), vol. I, p. 409., vol. I, p. 409 (archive.org leaf n426) (1794)
The air of Golconda not agreeing with his constitution, he founded a city at about eight miles distance, which he called Bhaugnuggur, after his mistress Bhaug, a celebrated courtezan; but being afterwards ashamed of his amour, he changed it to Hyderabad. [long ſ transcribed as s]
Fetchedsource
Page 409 of Scott's 1794 Ferishta, opening the section on Sultan Mahummud Koolli Koottub Shaw. — Internet Archive (ferishtashistory01firi). Public domain (published 1794). Full scan.
3AMuhammad Qāsim Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India till the Year A.D. 1612, trans. John Briggs (1829; Calcutta: R. Cambray & Co., 1910 reprint), vol. III, pp. 321, 335., vol. III, p. 335 (archive.org leaf n359); Firishta's disclaimer at p. 321 (1910)
In the beginning of the reign of Mahomed Koolly Kootb Shah, that young Prince became enamoured of a public singer of the name of Bhagmutty, to whom he assigned one thousand cavalry as an escort for her attendance ; and as the air of Golconda had become impure and unhealthy, he built a magnificent city at the distance of eight miles, which he called Bhagnuggur, after his favourite mistress ; but this city has since received the name of Hydurabad, although one part of it still retains the former name of Bhagnuggur.
Fetchedsource
Page 335 of volume III of Briggs's Firishta, carrying the Bhagmutty and Bhagnuggur passage. — Internet Archive (historyofriseofm03feri_0). Public domain (published 1910; translation 1829). Full scan.
4AJohn Briggs (trans.), 'Appendix to the History of the Kings of Golconda' — an anonymous Persian 'History of Mahomed Koolly Kootb Shah', in History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India (Calcutta: R. Cambray & Co., 1910 reprint), vol. III, unnumbered page preceding p. 339 (appendix half-title and prefatory notice) and p. 451., vol. III, p. 451 (archive.org leaf n475); prefatory notice on the unnumbered page at leaf n361 (printed p. 339 is leaf n363 and opens the 'Sooltan Koolly Kootb Shah' section) (1910)
In the year 998 the King determined to remove the seat of his government, on account of the confined situation of Golconda, which from many causes, particularly the want of water, became extremely unhealthy: he accordingly fixed on a spot situated at the distance of five coss from his former capital, on the banks of the river Moosy, where he laid the foundation of a new city, which was called Bhagnuggur (after his favourite mistress Bhagmutty); but after her death he ordered it to be called Hydrabad, although for many years it retained its original name. || [prefatory notice, unnumbered page:] written about the time Ferishta lived
Fetchedsource
Page 451 of Briggs's appendix, giving the foundation of the new city and the post-mortem change of name. — Internet Archive (historyofriseofm03feri_0). Public domain (published 1910). Full scan.
5AKhwājah Niẓām-ud-dīn Aḥmad, The Tabaqāt-i-Akbarī, trans. B. De, completed by Baini Prashad, Bibliotheca Indica (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1939), vol. III, p. 171 and nn. 1–2., vol. III, p. 171 (archive.org leaf n221) (1939)
Muhammad Qulī succeeded his father. He became the lover of a prostitute of the name of Bhāgmatī ; and having laid the foundation of a city, called it Bhāgnagar. He had one thousand horsemen, as the retainers of that woman ; and they always attended at her stirrups. He is ruling the country up to the present day which is in the year 1002 A.H., and in the 38th year of the Ilāhī era : i.c., for a period of nine years. || n.1: Niẓām-ud-dīn does not give any account of the events of the reign ; and merely refers to a scandalous matter of a more or less personal nature. … || n.2: One MS. calls her a زنان پاتری, the other simply زنان, while the lith. ed. has only پاتری. In the text-edition the name is بهاگ متی
Fetchedsource
6AHaroon Khan Sherwani, Muhammad-Qulī Quṭb Shāh, Founder of Haidarabad (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1967), ch. 'Foundation of Haidarabad', p. 14., p. 14 (archive.org leaf n32; leaf-to-page offset in this part of the volume is 18, rising to 22 by Appendix II because of unnumbered plates) (1967)
In 999/1591 the plans for the construction of the new capital were ready… The Sulṭān must have been aware of the area lying south of the Mūsī as there was already a bridge on the river constructed by his father in 1578… We learn that the Muslim divine, Shāh Chirāgh, had already made his home in the predominantly Brahmin locality of Chichlam where he was later buried and where grew the great necropolis named after Mir Mu'min… the Sultān ordered architects and masons to prepare the plans of a city which would be "unequalled the world over and would be the replica of paradise itself"… The new city was built on the gridiron system in the form of a giant double cross. There was already a road running from Golkonda eastward as far as Masulipaṭam and the east coast towns of the kingdom, and this road was made to intersect a new road running north and south at the place where the Chārmīnār now stands. The Chārmīnār was completed in 1000/1592.
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7AHaroon Khan Sherwani, Muhammad-Qulī Quṭb Shāh, Founder of Haidarabad (1967), section 'Coinage', p. 70., p. 70 (archive.org leaf n92) (1967)
the second bears the date 991/1583 with the name of the mint, "Dāru's-Salṭanat Kolkunda" while the third bears the date 1012/1603-4 with "Dāru's-Salṭanat Haidarabad". Up to the present, no coins have been unearthed bearing dates other than these. [statement current as of 1967; not rechecked here against later numismatic publication]
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8AHaroon Khan Sherwani, Muhammad-Qulī Quṭb Shāh, Founder of Haidarabad (1967), Appendix II, 'The Bhagmati Legend', p. 135 and n. 1., p. 135 (archive.org leaf n157) (1967)
"Aḥmad Qulī (sic) is steeped in Shī'ism, and has built a city Bhāgnagar by name, after Bhāgmatī, the old prostitute (fahisha-i kuhnā) who has been his mistress for a long time (ma'shūqa-i qadim)". || n.1: The references in this paper are from Tabāshiru's-Subh in the Salar Jang Library, MSS., Nathr Farsi, 31. It may be mentioned that the particular sentence quoted here is not found in the Asafiya manuscript, Insha-i Farsi, 80, which was written down at Ahmadnagar and completed on the 4th of Muharram in the fiftieth year of Akbar's reign.
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9AHaroon Khan Sherwani, Muhammad-Qulī Quṭb Shāh, Founder of Haidarabad (1967), Appendix II, pp. 136–137., pp. 136–137 (archive.org leaves n158–n159; the final sentence quoted here runs on to p. 137) (1967)
"Muḥammad 'Alī (sic) Quṭbu'l-Mulk, son of Ibrāhīm, succeeded his father. He became so enamoured of a Hindu prostitute (pātarē) Bhāmgasi (sic) by name that he founded a city which he called Bhāgnagar after her…" … "The Sulṭān was greatly fascinated by a prostitute (fāhishā) named Bhāgmatī… He called it Bhāgnagar at first but later he was sorry for what he had done and changed the name to Haidarabad." … Both of them say in so many words that they have relied on Ferishta so far as the history of the Deccan is concerned, and so they cannot be regarded as having the value of an independent authority.
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10AHaroon Khan Sherwani, Muhammad-Qulī Quṭb Shāh, Founder of Haidarabad (1967), Appendix II, pp. 137–140., pp. 137–140 (archive.org leaves n159–n162) (1967)
He never set his foot beyond Ahmadnagar… [Firishta:] "But this work was not before the author of these pages when he wrote them down, and he had to be satisfied with only a short account of the great House." … There is not an allusion to Bhāgmatī or Bhāgnagar in this work at all.
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11AHaroon Khan Sherwani, Muhammad-Qulī Quṭb Shāh, Founder of Haidarabad (1967), Appendix II, p. 141 and nn. 13–14., p. 141 (archive.org leaf n163); the Hadā'iqu's-Salāṭīn foundation-year statement is at n. 13, the Zore quotation at n. 14 (1967)
He gives us a list of seventeen of his mistresses by real or pet names, each of whom has odes ranging from one to five composed by the Sulṭān. And yet there is not one ode in favour of Bhāgmatī who is supposed to have been the most favoured of all! || n.14 [quoting Zore, Introduction, p. 80]: "The Sultan has used the word bhag in a number of his poems, but the word has been used in all these places in its literary meaning, i.e. for 'share' or 'fortune' and this connotation fits well with the context."
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12AHaroon Khan Sherwani, Muhammad-Qulī Quṭb Shāh, Founder of Haidarabad (1967), Appendix II, pp. 142–143 and n. 16., p. 142 (archive.org leaf n164); the inference that the 1017/1608 renaming story cannot stand runs on to p. 143 (1967)
In the same way, while the new capital is mentioned three times in the Kullīyāt not once is it called Bhāgnagar. … While there are coins in the Haidarabad Museum which were struck at the 'Dāru's-Sulṭānat, Haidarabad' in 1012/1603 there is not one coin which was struck at 'Bhāgnagar'. || n.16: 'My City'; Kulliyat, poems, page 6. 'City of Haidar', ibid., Ghazals, p. 177. 'Haidarnagar', ibid., Poems, p. 324.
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13AHaroon Khan Sherwani, Muhammad-Qulī Quṭb Shāh, Founder of Haidarabad (1967), Appendix II, pp. 143–144 and n. 17., p. 143 (archive.org leaf n165); the 'rolling stone' sentence completes on p. 144 (1967)
"Khwāja Mun'īm Khān Hamdāni says in his book, the Sawāniḥ-i Dakan that Bhāgmati was the name of a Hindu prostitute and Sulṭān Muhammad-Qulī Quṭb Shāh was enamoured of her…. But the whole of the story is utterly baseless." … Quite against the old adage that a rolling stone gathers no moss, much moss was gathered round the small sneering sentence of Faizī || n.17: Abdul Wali Khan, Qutub Shahi Coins, pp. 2-21; out of 202 coins listed 50 belong to Golkonda mint, and all the remaining 152 belong to the Haidarabad mint.
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14AHaroon Khan Sherwani, Muhammad-Qulī Quṭb Shāh, Founder of Haidarabad (1967), Appendix II, p. 144., p. 144 (archive.org leaf n166) (1967)
Lastly, to the present author's knowledge, no contemporary Telugu work contains the names either of Bhāgmatī or of Bhāgnagar. An interesting palm leaf Sanskrit manuscript in Telugu characters has recently been brought to light by Dr. Rama Raju… he calls himself a resident of 'Bhāgīratīpaṭṭanam'. Even in the manuscript the name, Bhāgnagar is not mentioned.
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15AHaroon Khan Sherwani, Muhammad-Qulī Quṭb Shāh, Founder of Haidarabad (1967), Appendix II, 'The Solution', p. 145 and nn. 22–25., p. 145 (archive.org leaf n167) (1967)
In spite of all this, it must be confessed that the European travellers who came to the Deccan in the seventeenth century have certainly mentioned 'Bāgnagar' as the capital of the kingdom. François Bernier who visited Haidarabad in 1667 speaks of 'Bāgnagar' twice. In the same way Thèvenot, who was in Haidarabad a year previous to this, gives the name of Golkonda to the kingdom but says: "The capital city of this kingdom is called Bāgnagar; the Persians call it Aider-Abad". In other words, while the common people called the city 'Bagnagar', the ruling aristocracy and government officers (i.e. those who carried on their official correspondence in Persian) called it Haidarabad. … If, however, we turn to Tavernier the mystery would be solved. For he says: "Bagnagar was founded by the grandfather of the present king. Here the king had very fair gardens…. Bagnagar or the Garden of Nagar". Tavernier thus asserts that 'Bagnagar' stands for the City of Gardens or Bāghnagar (urdu) because the new capital was replete with gardens and groves. In a way he repeats what Rafi'ud-dīn Shīrāzī had said sixty years previously, that "the whole city is just one large garden". || n.24: Tavernier, p. 132. n.25: Tadh., fol. 61 b. [Sherwani's own accentuation retained, including 'Thèvenot' and his alternation between 'Bāgnagar' and 'Bagnagar']
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16AJean-Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India, trans. V. Ball (London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1889), vol. I, ch. X, p. 151 and n. 1., vol. I, p. 151 (archive.org leaf n229) (1889)
BHÁGNAGAR is then the town which they commonly call GOLCONDA, and it was commenced by the great-grandfather of the King who reigns at present, at the request of one of his wives whom he loved passionately, and whose name was NAGAR… and desired that it should bear the name of his wife, calling it BHÁGNAGAR, i.e. the Garden of NAGAR. || n.1: Bhágnagar, or the Fortunate City, was so called by Kutab Sháh Muhammad Kuli after a favourite mistress, whose name was, however, Bhágmaṭi, not, as stated by our author, Nagar, which merely signifies town… By the Persians, according to Thevenot, it was already called Haidarábád, and is so generally now. Bagh, a distinct word, means garden. [Ball sets proper names in small capitals and uses an acute accent throughout: Bhágnagar, Bhágmaṭi]
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Page 151 of V. Ball's 1889 Tavernier, with the 'Garden of Nagar' gloss and Ball's footnote glossing the name 'the Fortunate City'. — Internet Archive (travelsinindia01tavegoog). Public domain (published 1889). Full scan.
17AWilliam Foster (ed.), Early Travels in India 1583–1619 (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), 'William Finch, 1608–11', p. 131 and n. 5; also p. 182., p. 131, n. 5 (archive.org leaf n160) (1921)
the King of Golcunda (whose chiefe citie is Braganadar 5) || n.5: Bhāgnagar, the original name of the city of Hyderabad, the present capital of the Nizām's dominions. [Foster's macron pattern reproduced exactly: Bhāgnagar and Nizām carry macrons, Hyderabad does not]
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Page 131 of Foster's Early Travels in India, with Finch's 'Braganadar' and Foster's footnote identifying it as Bhāgnagar. — Internet Archive (earlytravelsinin00fostuoft). Public domain (published 1921). Full scan.
18AW. H. Moreland (ed.), Relations of Golconda in the Early Seventeenth Century, Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser., vol. 66 (London, 1931), 'Methwold's Relation' (first printed in Purchas, 1626), p. 8 and n. 4., p. 8 (archive.org leaf n56) (1931)
This Kingdome (as most others in India) receiveth its denomination from the chiefe city or residence of the King, called by the Natives Golchonda,4 by the Moores and Persians Hidraband, distant from Musulipatnam eight and twentie Gentive leagues, every such league contayning nine English miles, and in the common course of travel ten dayes journey. || n.4: Golconda was the original capital of the dynasty; Hyderābād, 5 miles east, was founded in the year 1589. [Read from the page image, not from OCR; the Internet Archive text layer misreads 'Kingdome' as 'ICingdome' and 'twentie' as 'nventie'. No facsimile is declared for this volume: the fetchUrl returns a real image but a 1931 publication is not confirmably public domain.]
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19AW. H. Moreland (ed.), Relations of Golconda in the Early Seventeenth Century, Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser., vol. 66 (London, 1931), 'The Anonymous Relation' — a Dutch account written in the latter part of 1614, attributed by Moreland to Pieter Gielisz. van Ravesteyn of the Nizampatam factory and first printed in a Dutch collection of voyages of 1644–6 — p. 72 and n. 2., p. 72 (archive.org leaf n118); Moreland's dating and attribution at pp. xxvi and xli–xlii (1931)
In the country of the Moslems, who do not accept this practice, there is no custom of dancing in the pagodas, but every year in the month of April the prostitutes of the whole kingdom have to travel to Bāgnagar,2 whither they are summoned by a Maldaer3 (a sort of tipstaff), to dance in celebration of the death of the first Moslem king, a thing which seems to me very strange. || n.2: I.e., Hyderābād, the new capital of Golconda. [Read from the page image. The macron in 'Bāgnagar' is Moreland's romanisation, not necessarily the Dutch original's spelling. No facsimile declared, as above.]
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20ASurendranath Sen (trans.), Siva Chhatrapati: being a translation of Sabhasad Bakhar with extracts from Chitnis and Sivadigvijya, with notes (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1920), Extracts and Documents Relating to Maratha History, vol. I. The Sabhasad Bakhar was written in Marathi at Jinji in 1697 by Krishnaji Anant Sabhasad, a servant and contemporary of Shivaji., pp. 72, 120, 124 of the printed translation; eighteen occurrences of 'Bhaganagar' across the volume, and zero occurrences of 'Hyderabad', 'Haidarabad' or 'Hydrabad' (1920)
he came through Gondawana,90 Bhaganagar91 and Bijapur to Raj gad || the Sultan of Bhaganagar used to pay a tribute annually || the Raje decided to have the interview arranged, by writing about it to Prahlad Pant who was his envoy at Bhaganagar. Tana Shah, the Badshah of Bhaganagar, entertained in his mind a strong suspicion || Then with the aim that the two should meet, the Raje proceeded to Bhaganagar, marching stage by stage with his army. A strict warning was issued after (he) had entered the Bhaganagar territory. || After this the principal officers of Bhaganagar entertained the Raje as (their) guest. In this manner he spent a month at Bhaganagar. || the kingdom of Bhaganagar lay on the Maharaja's way to Karnatak || However, I came to Bhaganagar for an interview with the Kutub Shah for some diplomatic reasons, from there I came to Karnatak. [Quoted from the Internet Archive text layer of the 1920 printing, verified by direct grep of the full downloaded file; the OCR renders 'Rajgad' as 'Raj gad' and drops Sen's diacritics, and both are reproduced here as the text layer gives them. 'Bhaganagar' is Sen's romanisation of the Marathi and has not been collated against the Marathi original.]
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21ASurendranath Sen (trans.), Siva Chhatrapati (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1920), editorial note 91, printed at the foot of p. 72., note 91, foot of p. 72 (1920)
91 Golconda. So called, according to later chroniclers, aftar Bhagtf, a Brahman lady, who had offered a dish to the founder of the city when the latter was very hungry and tired. In return she prayed that the city should be named after her. There is another story about the name Golconda. ['aftar' is an OCR corruption of 'after'; 'Bhagtf' is an OCR corruption of the woman's name, probably Bhagu, and should not be printed as a name until checked against the page image. The final sentence reads 'the name Golconda' in the text layer, not 'the name Bhaganagar' — Sen has glossed Bhaganagar as Golconda in his first word and is closing by pointing at the separate Golla-konda story. This is a 1920 editor reporting 'later chroniclers', not a seventeenth-century Marathi witness, and is admitted on the same terms as Foster's and Ball's glosses.]
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22APushkar Sohoni, 'The Non-issue of Coinage: The Monetary Policies of the Post-Bahmani Sultanates', Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 28, no. 4 (October 2018), pp. 645–659. DOI 10.1017/S1356186318000214. The author is at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune., abstract; nn. 14, 34, 35 (2018)
Yet, the sultanates of the Deccan that succeeded the Bahmani kingdom did not strike their own coins for almost a century after they had declared sovereign status. || n.14: The exceptions are the singular coin issues of the Golconda kings, Jamshid Qutb Shah (1543-50) and Subhan Quli Qutb Shah (1550). These are extremely rare and the coin attributed to the latter is based on an uncertain reading of a single coin. Only one type of rare issue can be attributed to the next king, Ibrahim Qutb Shah (1550-80), even though he ruled for 30 years, suggesting that these coins were not meant for circulation, but were novelty issues. || n.34: Goron and Goenka, Coins of the Indian Sultanates, p. 332: "Qutb ul Mulk declared independence in 1518, upon the death of Mahmud Bahman Shah . . . Jamshid Qutb Shah (1543-50) is the first ruler to have coins minted. There are two types, both rare in their occurrence. Ibrahim Quli Qutb Shah (1550-80) has only one coin type". || n.35: … the coins of Jamshid Qutb Shah and Subhan Quli Qutb Shah have been catalogued as such in Khan, Mohammad Abdul Wali, Qutub Shahi Coins in the Andhra Pradesh Government Museum (Hyderabad, 1961) [Abstract and reference list read in full from Cambridge Core; the article body is behind access control and was not read. The author's name, absent from an earlier attempt at this page, was confirmed against the Crossref record for the DOI.]
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23BShagufta Parveen, 'Coinage of Deccan Sultanate: Coin Legends and Epigraphic Evidence', PhD thesis, Department of History, Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad, May 2022, supervised by Dr Danish Moin., pp. 166–167 (2022)
The coinage of Qutub Shahi in real sense starts with the rule of Muhammad Quli Qutub Shah. … All the copper coins were issued from Golconda and Hyderabad mints. … The reported dates for the type under discussion are 1583, 1584 and 1586. || Coins with the name of ruler and mint: Another category of copper coins bear name of ruler on obverse and mint on the reverse. They were all struck at Hyderabad with much better graving comparable to first category. They were minted in 1603 and 1608 and were issued in the weight standard of 17-18 gms. The legend is inscribed as Muhammad Quli Qutub Shah Abul Muzaffar … on the obverse and Zarb Darul Sultanate Hyderabad (mint, capital of the kingdom, Hyderabad) on the reverse. [Extracted with pdftotext from the repository PDF and verified by direct grep; the thesis's own spelling 'Qutub' is retained.]
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24BShagufta Parveen, 'Coinage of Deccan Sultanate: Coin Legends and Epigraphic Evidence' (MANUU, 2022), 'Coinage', p. 163., p. 163 (2022)
These coins were struck from different mints often with their epithets such as Golkonda: Dar-ul- Sultanate, Golkonda: Mohammad Nagar, Hyderabad, Dar-ul-Sultanate (Shahr), Ibrahimpattan, and Mukundnagar. [A case-insensitive search of the entire extracted text of the thesis for the string 'bhag' returns zero occurrences — verified independently here, not taken on report.]
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25BShagufta Parveen, 'Coinage of Deccan Sultanate: Coin Legends and Epigraphic Evidence' (MANUU, 2022), 'Muhammad Quli Qutub Shah', pp. 263–265, drawing on Ghulam Yazdani (ed.), Epigraphia Indo-Moslemica 1915–16 and 1925–26, and Epigraphia Indica: Arabic and Persian Supplement 1966., pp. 263–265 (2022)
The study includes five inscriptions Muhammad Quli Qutub Shah found in various places such as Tombs, Mughalpura, Khazana Building, Bala Hisar Fort etc. … The second inscription was recorded from Khazana Building Golconda, it was in Persian, and in Nastaliq calligraphy. It contains a farman of Muhammad Quli Qutub Shah, recording the grant of 30 bighas of land to a saint family. … The third inscription is recorded from Bala Hisar fort of Medak. … The epigraph records that the bastion of Medak was completed in the month of Rabi I, 1011 (August-September 1602), during the reign of Muhammad Quli Qutub Shah
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26BSyed Mohammed, 'Bhagyalakshmi temple came into existence after merger of Hyderabad with India: ASI', The Hindu, published 17 February 2021, updated 18 February 2021., online edition (2021)
“The Bhagyalakshmi Temple came into existence after taking over of Hyderabad by the Govt. of India adjacent to South Eastern minaret of the Centrally Protected Monument. No records are available in this office about the Chilla adjacent to Charminar (sic),” the ASI response reads. In its response, the ASI stated that the Charminar was declared a Centrally protected monument under the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act of 1904. || A separate but similar RTI query was filed in December 2012. The RTI applicant, S.Q. Masood who is an independent activist, sought to know the ‘status’ of the temple. In its response, the ASI stated, “As per the AMASR Act 1958, Rules 1959, AMSR Act, 2010 (Amendment and Validation) the construction of temple adjacent to the south eastern minar of the Charminar has considered by the Archaeological Survey of India as an unauthorised construction (sic).” || Official records show that in December 1968, ASI Superintending Archaeologist (SA) M. Idrisullah wrote to the Commissioner of erstwhile Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad, seeking its assistance in the removal of ‘unauthorised brick construction on the south-eastern side of the monument, Charminar, which has abutted and to some extent encroached into the monument itself’. || Similarly in May 1977, the then SA wrote to the Inspector General of Police reiterating that a complaint against an individual was sent to the Commissioner of Police in connection with ‘forcible’ entry into the ‘fenced area of the protected monument namely Charminar’. [The 2021 RTI was filed by YouRTI.in, whose Mohammed Akram is quoted; the 2012 one by S. Q. Masood. Fetched and read in full.]
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27B'A note on the Charminar photograph', The Hindu, 21 November 2012 — the newspaper's editorial note responding to readers who questioned the photograph published with A. Srivathsan, 'As protests roil Charminar, Hyderabad's heritage slowly vanishes', 20 November 2012., online edition (2012)
In fact, it is a B&W photograph that was colour-touched by a studio in Hyderabad — a common practice in the pre-colour photography era. Before publishing the photograph, The Hindu independently verified its authenticity with another untouched copy of the same photo. … We are now able to present four additional photographs from The Hindu’s own archives that confirm the temple is a recent structure. Two photographs — one shot in 1957 and the other in 1962 — show no temple structure. The 1990 photo with the policemen in the foreground has the temple structure and the same can be seen in the 1994 picture as well. To view a 1986 photograph, which also shows the temple, please visit the following link of the Aga Khan Visual Archive, MIT Libraries’ collections, United States. [Disclosure, applied here as this page applies it to Siasat: this is a newspaper certifying its own archive against a public challenge, and is an interested party in that narrow sense. The 1986 photograph it points to is in an independent collection at MIT. The claim circulating elsewhere that the ASI supplied its own photographs of 1959, 1980 and 2003 with an RTI reply is not in this article or in the 2021 one, and is not carried here.]
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28BJohn Guy and Navina Najat Haidar (org.), Indian Skies: The Howard Hodgkin Collection of Indian Court Painting, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, published in conjunction with the exhibition of 6 February – 9 June 2024, entry to fig. 24., entry to fig. 24 (2024)
The painting Wedding Procession of Sultan Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah is one of the Deccan’s most romantically charged visions (fig. 24). The pair is thought to be Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah (r. 1580–1612) and Bhagmati, Golconda’s legendary lovers. [The Metropolitan Museum holds this painting as object 2022.200, an illustrated album leaf, opaque watercolour and gold on paper, Golconda, ca. 1650, Howard Hodgkin Collection, accessioned 2022 — accession number, date, place and credit line verified against the Museum's collection API. The word 'Bhagmati' occurs exactly once in the whole Bulletin, in the hedged form quoted. The Museum's record reports no inscription. The identification of the couple is traditional, not documentary, and the Museum says so in its own words.]
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29BRichard M. Eaton, 'Contested histories: the Deccan, 1300–1600', Seminar 653 (2014)., online essay, unpaginated (2014)
the design and layout of Hyderabad, founded by Sultan Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah of Golconda in 1591 and today one of India's premier cities, had been inspired not by some idealized model of an 'Islamic city' or by actual cities like Herat, Samarqand or Isfahan, as is conventionally thought, but by the layout of Warangal, the former Kakatiya capital.
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30ARichard M. Eaton and Phillip B. Wagoner, Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India's Deccan Plateau, 1300–1600 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014; paperback 2017), Part 3, 'Warangal and the Kakatiya Legacy', chapter 6., chapter 6 — table of contents verified; chapter text not read (2014)
[From the publisher's table of contents, fetched verbatim:] 3. Warangal and the Kakatiya Legacy — Chapter 5 Shitab Khan and the Restoration of Kakatiya Cults and Temples — Chapter 6 Qutub Shahi Warangal and the Foundation of Hyderabad. [The chapter itself could not be obtained: the Internet Archive copy is lending-restricted and search-inside is disabled. No sentence about the city's name is attributed to these authors on this page.]
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31BSamantha Christiansen (Marywood University), review of Narendra Luther, Hyderabad: A Biography (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), H-Urban, H-Net Reviews, August 2014., online review, including Note [1] (2014)
The book vacillates between historical fiction and narrative history and is far more successful in the historical fiction realm than in the historical argument. … The origin of the city is depicted through the love story of the sultan Mohammed Quli and a poor villager, Baghmati. The story is a good example of effective historical fiction (even if at times the dialogue is a bit clumsy), but scholarly analysis is left to a few sentences in the endnote identifying that there is some scholarly debate over the story as fictional or not. … Given Luther’s own scholarly work on the debate, it would have benefited this work for him to share his argument and analysis directly.[1] || Note [1]. Luther cites Narendra Luther, “On the Historicity of Bhagmati,” Research Journal of the Salar Jung Museum 29-30 (1992-93), on page 395. [The edition reviewed is the 2012 OUP printing, xi + 433 pp., ISBN 978-0-19-809027-4 — not the 2006 printing listed in this page's furtherReading.]
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32BNarendra Luther, 'On the Historicity of Bhagmati', Research Journal of the Salar Jung Museum 29–30 (1992–93)., whole article — not obtained (1993)
[Article text not obtained; no digitised run of this journal was reached. The citation is recorded at second hand from Note [1] of the H-Net review of Luther's Hyderabad: A Biography, which reports Luther citing it at p. 395 of his own book. Carried here as a bibliographic pointer only, at exactly the status this page gives the untraced 1637 qazi document and the c. 1670 Ghorpade letter: a claim awaiting confirmation. No content is attributed to it.]
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33CSalma Ahmed Farooqui, 'Are the dates of foundation of Charminar and Hyderabad the same? Maybe not', The Siasat Daily, 6 August 2022. The author is Professor and Director of the H. K. Sherwani Centre for Deccan Studies, Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad., online column, unpaginated (2022)
nowhere on the monument is this fact inscribed nor is the year of construction directly given in any record either. || the Tarikh-i-Muhammad Qutb Shah, the official chronicle of the Qutb Shahi dynasty, gives the date of 1000 A.H./1592 A.D. for the laying of the foundation of Hyderabad when in the same year the famous edifice of the Charminar was supposed to have been constructed. … It was compiled under the order of Sultan Muhammad Qutb Shah in 1616 and is housed in the Salar Jung Museum library. [Two disclosures, recorded on the same terms this page applies to Shastri and to Safiullah, and with the same effect on the argument, which is none: the author's centre is named for Sherwani, and The Siasat Daily is a participant in the present public dispute. Note also that the 1616 compilation date does not agree with the 1017/1608 Sherwani works from.]
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34CRahul A. Shastri (President, Samvit Kendra), 'Bhagyanagar, The People's Hyderabad That Refuses To Die', Swarajya, 25 November 2018; reposted on the CSIS India site., online essay, unpaginated (2018)
Unlike Europeans, speakers of indigenous languages as well as Persian know the difference between 'bha' and 'ba'. There is no way that native speakers or 'common people' could have confused 'bhag' with 'bag'. [Shastri writes 'Bhagyamati' throughout where the manuscripts and their editors write Bhāgmatī; his citation of 'the annual event described in the "Relations of Golkonda" c 1614 CE' refers to the anonymous Dutch relation, not to Methwold]
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35CManu S. Pillai, 'A Hyderabadi conundrum', Mint Lounge, 16 November 2018 (author's archived copy)., online column, unpaginated (2018)
and while coins record both Hyderabad and Golconda, no mention occurs of Bhagnagar. Indeed, Muhammad Quli, who catalogued the names of his 17 beloved ladies, himself evidently makes no mention of Bhagmati, and in the Kulliyat, the city he founded is always referred to as Hyderabad.
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36CC. R. Gowri Shanker, 'Bhagmati is fiction and not fact: Experts', Deccan Chronicle, 11 September 2016., online edition (2016)
She simply doesn't exist. There is no manuscript, no stone inscription, no grave, no coins, no mention in Quli Qutb Shah's poems Kulliyat. — Dr Mohd Safiullah, honorary managing trustee, Deccan Heritage Trust
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37CS. Umamaheshwar, 'Hyderabad was Bhagnagar, but politicians still differ', Deccan Chronicle, 5 February 2023., online edition (2023)
[Yogi Adityanath, Uttar Pradesh chief minister, quoted in the article as having said during the 2020 GHMC election campaign:] we renamed Faizabad as Ayodhya and Allahabad as Prayagraj after BJP came into power in Uttar Pradesh. Then why can't Hyderabad be renamed as Bhagyanagar? || [the MIM's reply, quoted separately in the same article:] Your entire generation will end but Hyderabad's name will remain Hyderabad, the elections are between Hyderabad and Bhagyanagar || [the article also lists a dossier of Bhāgnagar attestations: Finch; a 1601 reference in Yazdani's Antiquities of Bidar; a Shah Jahan letter printed in Islamic Culture, April 1934; a 1067 A.H./1656 manuscript notice; the 1708 coin legend 'Farkhunda Buniyad-i-Hyderabad'; and a 1951 statement by the Osmania vice-chancellor that the city 'was originally named Bhagnagar'. Three further items in the same dossier were previously omitted from this summary and are restored here, the first because it bears directly on Sherwani's central negative:] In Tarikh-i Sultan Muhammad Kutbshahi (1617 AD), its author, who remained anonymous, mentioned that "Abu al-Fath Sultan Muhammad Kuli Kutb Shah, who built Bhagnagar or Haidarabad and transferred his capital from Gulkundah, to the newly-erected city..." || [Bernier is reported as quoting a letter of the Golconda vazir Mir Jumla to Aurangzeb asking him to attack Bhagnagar; and Thomas William Beale, The Oriental Biographical Dictionary (1881), is reported as quoting Khafi Khan to the effect] that sometime after the death of Bhagmati, the name of 'Bhagnagar' was changed to Haidarabad, but that in the vernacular language of the people it continued to be 'Bhagnagar'. || [the article also offers, as evidence of Telugu usage 'for ages', a 1972 film song:] a song in Akkinenni Nageswara Rao's movie Vichitra Bandham, released in 1972, featured a song, Vinara Andhra Kumara Bhagyanagara Gadha, on the history of Bhagyanagar written by the lyricist Aatreya. [The Tarikh-i quotation could not be verified in any edition and is carried here as the newspaper's report only. A film lyric of 1972 is not a period attestation and is recorded as what it is.]
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38CYunus Lasania, 'Hyderabad: Is the Bhagyalaxmi temple at Charminar expanding?', The Siasat Daily, 20 October 2022., online edition (2022)
[The article does not quote the Archaeological Survey of India directly. Reporting the ASI's reply to a Right to Information application filed by the activist Robin Zacheus, Lasania writes that the ASI had] no information on Hyderabad being named Bhagyanagar [and] no details of historical records of the Bhagyalaxmi temple. [Separately, the activist S. Q. Masood is quoted in the article describing the 2012 High Court matter as having settled that the structure] should not expand any further. [The article also reports ASI letters about the structure from 1977 and an ASI characterisation of it as unauthorised construction.]
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39CNarendra Luther, 'A multi-faceted prince', Narendra Luther Archives, 12 December 2006., online essay, unpaginated (2006)
In 1591 he founded the new city 6 kilometers from Golconda across the river Musi and after his beloved, called it Bhagnagar. Its chronogrammatic title which yields the year of its completion, was Farkhunda Buniyad which in Persian means 'of fortunate foundation' – the equivalent of the name Bhagnagar.
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