Person · r. 1543 – 1550

Jamsheed Quli Qutb Shah

جمشید قلی قطب شاہ

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Took the throne by having his father murdered and his brother blinded, and lies in the one Qutb Shahi tomb built of no black basalt and carrying no inscription at all.

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

The usurpation

The appendix in Briggs’s third volume states it without euphemism: the brother nominated as successor “was blinded by order of his brother Jumsheed, who murdered his father, and who subsequently usurped the throne.” Ferishta’s own narrative in the same volume tells it differently in the details — eldest son rather than third, a slave with a dagger rather than a suborned gaoler — and identically in substance.

He reigned about seven years and was disfigured for life by a wound to the face; his brothers fled the capital in fear of him. He died of a lingering disease in 1550.

A tomb that says nothing

His mausoleum is the odd one in the royal necropolis: built in 1550, the only Qutb Shahi tomb not fashioned from shining black basalt, rising in two storeys unlike the squat tombs of the other kings, and the only tomb of a Qutb Shahi ruler without any inscription. What that silence means is not recorded, and the archive does not supply a motive it cannot cite.

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