BIJAPUR

The Arkilla, the inner citadel, was the working heart of the Adil Shahi state. Within its half-kilometre wall stood the principal palaces and the durbar — built between 1561 and 1646 by four successive sultans, and almost all faced in the same hard black basalt that gives the city its sober, almost northern, character.

The Gagan Mahal ("Heaven Palace"), raised by Ali Adil Shah I in 1561, was the public audience hall: a single great arch some twenty metres across, behind which the sultan's throne stood elevated above the assembly. The Anand Mahal nearby was a private court for the queens. The Sat Manzil ("seven-storey palace") of Ibrahim II rose, when complete, to seven floors of receding pavilions; only five survive. And the Asar Mahal, built by Muhammad Adil Shah in 1646 and originally a hall of justice, was later set apart to house two hairs of the Prophet Muhammad's beard, brought from Bijapur's Persian and Arab embassies — a relic still kept there today.

Around the palaces clustered the sultan's stables, the elephant lines, the Naubat Khana and the Mehtar Mahal — that last a small but extravagantly carved gateway whose brackets and oriels owe nothing to Persia and everything to the Hindu architecture of Vijayanagara. The Adil Shahis were proudly hybrid in their masonry, even when they were warring with their hybrid neighbours.

Of the nine Adil Shahi sultans, none was so peculiar — or so beloved — as Ibrahim Adil Shah II (r. 1580–1627). A child of nine when he ascended the throne under regents, he came into his own at twenty and ruled for forty-seven years. He was a serious musician — an accomplished veena player who took the title Jagat Guru, "world-teacher," and addressed his book of songs first to the goddess Saraswati, only afterwards to the Prophet. The book, the Kitab-i-Nauras ("Book of Nine Sentiments"), is the great surviving treatise of Dakhni musicology, and the only major Indian book in any language entirely on the nine ragas as ethical-aesthetic states.

His court was the most plural of any in the Deccan. The poet Zuhuri came from Khurasan; the calligrapher Khalilullah from Shiraz; the painter Farrukh Beg, formerly of the Mughal atelier, settled in Bijapur and produced for him a series of sultan-portraits that survive as the masterpieces of Deccan painting. The Hindu Saraswat Brahmins of Goa held high office; the Marathi-speaking peasantry filled the army; and Telugu and Kannada were as readily heard at court as Persian.

His tomb-and-mosque, the Ibrahim Rauza, was begun by him in 1620 as a mausoleum for his queen Taj Sultana and completed posthumously around 1626. It stands in a single charbagh garden west of the city wall. The two buildings face each other across a long water-channel, their bulbous black domes rising on lacelike stucco pedestals; every surface is carved with calligraphy in floral relief, every cornice with hanging stalactites of stucco. It has been called the prototype, in plan and refinement, of the Taj Mahal — which postdates it by roughly twenty years.

The Adil Shahis were, by a clear measure, the most successful of the post-Bahmani dynasties. They outlasted the Nizam Shahis of Ahmadnagar by nearly a century, the Imad Shahis of Berar by almost two; they incorporated Bidar and the Barid Shahis into their own state in 1619; and at their height, under Muhammad Adil Shah, they ruled from the Konkan coast at Karwar to the Krishna river and from the Sahyadri to the modern boundary of Andhra Pradesh.

Their religious history was unusually mobile. Yusuf I, an Iranian, made the state officially Shi'a — the only major South Asian sultanate so to declare itself. Ibrahim I, a generation later, switched it back to Sunni rite under pressure from his Deccan nobility, which he then balanced by drawing the Marathas, the Saraswat Brahmins and the Habshi Africans into high office. Ibrahim II famously prayed in his own way, addressing songs to Saraswati and the Prophet in alternation. The Bijapuri court was, more than any in seventeenth-century India, a multi-faith state.

That plurality is what gave the dynasty its astonishing artistic output — Deccan miniature painting at its zenith under Farrukh Beg and Mir Hashim, Dakhni poetry at its zenith under Nusrati and Mulla Wajhi, the Gol Gumbaz and the Ibrahim Rauza, the Jami Masjid and the great basalt walls. Six of the nine sultans were poets in their own right; three were musicians; one, Muhammad, was the most ambitious patron of architecture South Asia produced between Akbar and Shah Jahan.

Cast in 1549 at the foundry of Ahmadnagar by the master-gunner Muhammad bin Husain Rumi, the cannon known as Malik-e-Maidan ("Lord of the Battlefield") is the largest medieval bronze cannon ever made. The barrel is 4.45 metres long, the muzzle bore 1.5 metres across, the total weight some fifty-five tonnes. The lion-mouth at the muzzle is decorated with relief, and the touch-hole carries a Persian inscription giving the date of casting, the maker's name, and a short prayer.

The gun was carried to Bijapur after the Battle of Talikota in 1565, when the four Deccan sultanates jointly defeated and dismembered the Vijayanagara empire; ten elephants and four hundred bullocks dragged it the four hundred kilometres back. It was hauled up onto the Sherza Burj ("lion's gate bastion") of the city wall, where it stands to this day on a stone platform — too large, evidently, for any other use. Tradition holds that it was fired only once after its arrival, on the orders of Ibrahim II, and that the discharge cracked the bastion below.

The Malik-e-Maidan was one of more than fifty heavy bronze guns the Adil Shahis cast or captured in the sixteenth century; the city's walls still hold a dozen of them, including the eight-metre Lamchari on the Lamcheri burj and the Aila Burj twins. They are the most complete surviving battery of pre-modern Indian artillery.