GOLCONDA

Sultan Quli was a Qara Qoyunlu Turcoman noble born in Hamadan around 1470, who came south as a young man to enter the service of the Bahmani sultan Muhammad Shah III. He rose through the cavalry, distinguished himself in campaigns against Vijayanagara, was given the title Qutb-ul-Mulk ("pole-star of the kingdom") around 1490, and was appointed governor of Telangana in 1496 with his seat at the small fort of Mankal. As the Bahmani state collapsed, Sultan Quli held the eastern Deccan together by sheer prestige; in 1518, on hearing of the murder of the last effective Bahmani sultan, he proclaimed independence at Golconda and founded the dynasty that would bear his old title — the Qutb Shahis.

He ruled for an extraordinary forty-five years, dying at the age of ninety-nine in 1543 — assassinated, the chronicles claim, in his bed at the morning prayer, on the orders of his own son Jamshid. He had spent those decades remaking the rubble fort. The mud walls were rebuilt in dressed granite, the circuit extended around the entire base of the hill (eleven kilometres in all, with eight gates and eighty-seven bastions), and a planned town of mosques, bazaars and noble houses was laid out on the level ground to the west and south. By his death the citadel was already what English traders, half a century later, would call "the strongest place in all the East."

The dynasty he founded would last seven sultans and one hundred and sixty-nine years. Each contributed his own building — Ibrahim's reservoirs, Muhammad Quli's parade ground, Abdullah's audience hall, Tana Shah's gardens — but the spine of the fortress, and the protocol of its court, were Sultan Quli's work.

From at least the fourth century BCE until the discovery of Brazilian alluvials in 1725, the only commercially exploited diamond fields on earth were the gravel beds of the Krishna and Penner rivers — chiefly at Kollur, Paritala, Atkur, Wajra Karur and Banaganapalle — all within four hundred kilometres of Golconda. The fort gave its name to the trade. Every diamond, no matter where mined, was brought up to Golconda to be weighed, cleaved, sold and registered; and the term "a Golconda diamond" came to mean simply a diamond of the first water.

The trade was an imperial monopoly. The Qutb Shahis took an octroi at the gates, a percentage on cut and uncut stones, and a right of first refusal on any stone above twenty ratis (about 2.4 g). In 1645 the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, on the second of his six journeys to India, was admitted to the mines. His Six Voyages (Paris, 1676) records that 60,000 men, women and children worked the Kollur diggings under one master, that the stones were paid for in cowries, that the pit-works went down twelve to fourteen feet, and that the largest diamond he saw in Mir Jumla's hands weighed 793 carats rough — almost certainly the same stone that became the Koh-i-Noor.

The diamonds left the Deccan along the great caravan-route to the Coromandel coast, embarked at Masulipatnam, and travelled on Dutch and Armenian ships to Surat, Hormuz and (from the 1660s) directly to Amsterdam. The whole edifice of European jewellery, from the Crown of England to the Crown of France, ultimately rested on this single piece of Telangana gravel.

The end came in the reign of Abul Hasan Qutb Shah, popularly called Tana Shah ("the dapper king") — a former dervish raised to the throne in 1672 because no closer male heir existed, and a generous patron of poets, painters and the brilliant Brahmin chief minister Akkanna and his brother Madanna. He had the misfortune of ruling beside Aurangzeb, who in 1685 had crushed Bijapur and now turned east. Mughal armies under prince Muazzam invested Golconda in January 1687.

The siege ran for eight months. The garrison, commanded by the Persian general Abdul Razzaq Lari, had laid up enough rice for two years; the great walls were unbreached by mining, by elephant-charge or by the European siege-cannon Aurangzeb had brought south. The Mughals lost more men to cholera in the camp than to fire from the ramparts. By August they were starving, the rains had washed out their lines, and Aurangzeb was on the verge of withdrawing.

It ended, as such sieges often did, by treason. On the night of 21 September 1687, an Afghan officer of the garrison named Sarandaz Khan — bribed, by the most reliable accounts, with the sum of one lakh of hons and the promise of a Mughal command — opened the small Khanjari Gate at the eastern wall and admitted a Mughal storming party. By dawn the citadel was Aurangzeb's. Tana Shah was found in his prayer-chamber, calmly finishing his morning fajr; he was sent in chains to Daulatabad, where he was kept in honourable confinement until his death in 1699 and buried at Khuldabad. Abdul Razzaq survived seventy wounds and was, characteristically, given a Mughal command. The Qutb Shahi dynasty ended.

Aurangzeb's victory broke the city. The court moved out, the diamond market migrated to Hyderabad, the bazaars within the walls fell silent within a decade. By 1700 Golconda was a garrison town; by 1750 a granary; by 1800, in the words of an English traveller, "an immense empty stone, with goats upon it." The Asaf Jahi Nizams kept the citadel as a high-security strongroom and state prison — the seventh Nizam stored portions of his bullion reserve here as late as the 1940s — but the city around the hill thinned to a village.

What survived survived because of the granite. Eleven kilometres of ten-metre wall, eighty-seven bastions, eight gates, an entire complex of cisterns, mosques and audience halls — all of it cut from the same hill it stands on, fitted without mortar, and almost impossible to take apart. The Archaeological Survey of India took the fort under its protection in 1951, and the Telangana government, with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, finished the most thorough restoration of the necropolis in 2023. The acoustic clap at Fateh Darwaza is now the single most-recorded sound on the Indian heritage circuit.

Today the fort is reachable by metro from Hyderabad; the Light and Sound show in the evening is narrated, fittingly, in Dakhni. From the Bala Hisar pavilion at the summit you see, on a clear morning, both the dome of the Charminar five miles east and the granite-cut tomb of Muhammad Quli — the city he founded, and the dynasty he buried his uncle in — at almost the same angle, almost the same height.