BIDAR

For seventy-two years the Bahmani Sultanate had ruled from Gulbarga — the city its founder Hasan Bahman Shah had styled Ahsanabad. By the 1420s its citadel had grown crowded, its water table had drawn down, and a long famine had emptied its districts. The ninth sultan, Ahmad Shah I Wali (r. 1422–1436), a saintly king said to be a disciple of the Sufi Khwaja Banda Nawaz, decided on a new seat — north-east, on the high basalt plateau, at the small fortified town of Bidar.

The move was made in stages between 1429 and 1432. The sultan rebuilt the old Hindu fort entirely — laying out a triangular citadel of red laterite, raising a treble moat cut into living rock, and within the walls a Solah Khamba (sixteen-pillared) congregational mosque, a Diwan-i-Khas, and the foundations of what would later be the Rangin Mahal and the Tarkash Mahal.

On the plateau outside the fort he laid out the new town in a Persian quadripartite plan, with bazaars converging on the Chaubara — a circular three-storeyed watchtower that still stands at the centre of old Bidar. The court records styled the city Muhammadabad-Bidar; the chroniclers, characteristically, kept calling it Bidar.

Mahmud Gawan (1411–1481) was a Persian merchant from Gilan who arrived in Bidar in 1453, rose to be the chief minister of the Bahmani sultanate under Muhammad Shah III, and gave the kingdom its single most ambitious decade — from the conquest of Goa in 1472 to the annexation of the Konkan and Vijayanagara's western marches.

In 1472 he founded, at his own expense, a three-storeyed madrasa in the new city — modelled on the great Khargird madrasa of Khorasan, faced in glazed turquoise, indigo and white tile, with a thirty-metre minaret at each corner and a great central iwan of intersecting arches. It held a library of 3,000 volumes, lecture halls for theology, mathematics, astronomy and medicine, and a residence for visiting scholars from Samarkand, Shiraz and Cairo.

In 1481 the Deccan nobles, jealous of his foreign rank, forged a letter to Vijayanagara in his hand. Muhammad Shah, drunk that night, ordered his execution; he was beheaded at the age of seventy-eight. He had asked only that his shroud be made from the cloth of his counting-room. The Bahmani state never recovered. The madrasa stood — until in 1696, a Mughal magazine stored inside it exploded during a thunderstorm, sheering away one minaret and half the façade. The remaining minaret still leans, blue-tiled, over the ruined courtyard.

By the 1490s the Bahmani sultanate was a fiction. The four corner provinces — Berar, Bijapur, Ahmadnagar and Golconda — had each declared themselves under their Bahmani governors. Bidar itself, with its rump revenue and the captive sultan, fell under the protectorship of Qasim Barid, the Turkish-born Mir Jumla who had risen from a slave to the highest office of state. From 1492 he ruled as amir, never quite as sultan; his successors were less circumspect.

His son Amir Barid (r. 1504–1542) and his grandson Ali Barid Shah I (r. 1542–1580) finally adopted the royal style. The dynasty that resulted — the Barid Shahis — was the smallest of the five Deccan successor states, but the most intricate in ornament. Ali Barid in particular was a scholar, a calligrapher and a connoisseur: he translated the Khamsa of Nizami into Dakhni, patronised the painter Farrukh Beg, rebuilt the Rangin Mahal, and constructed his own tomb-garden a mile west of the fort, with a great open-domed mausoleum in the Persian Charbagh manner.

Five Barid Shahi sultans followed Ali; the line was extinguished in 1619 when Ibrahim Adil Shah II of Bijapur deposed Amir Barid III and annexed the territory. The Barid Shahi tombs, eight in all, lie in a single garden west of the city — domed octagons in chunam stucco, calligraphic, almost feminine after the elephantine masses at Ashtur.

Bidriware — known across the Indian Ocean simply as Bidri — is a metalcraft developed in this city under the late Bahmani court, around the fourteenth century. Tradition gives its origin to Khwaja Moinuddin, a Persian artisan brought by Ahmad Shah Wali. The body alloy is unusual: roughly 95 parts zinc to 5 parts copper, cast cold and worked when warm. Designs are engraved into the surface, fine wire of pure silver (and sometimes gold) is hammered into the grooves, and the piece is then immersed in a paste of soil from the Bidar Fort itself — soil rich in oxidised salts that, alone in India, blackens the body alloy permanently while leaving the silver bright.

Mughal envoys took Bidri pieces home as gifts. Tavernier saw them in the bazaar in 1670 and bought a hookah-base for the queen of France. Persian inscriptions on the early pieces sometimes name the maker; the late nineteenth-century pieces, by contrast, are anonymous and almost industrial.

Bidriware received Geographical Indication protection in 2006 and is still made by hand in Siddiq Talim and the Daulat-ul-Islam quarter of the old city. The soil for the blackening paste is, by tradition, drawn only from inside the unrestored portion of the Bidar Fort itself — a chemical fact and a civic poetry both.