GULBARGA

In 1327 the Tughluq emperor Muhammad bin Tughluq had moved his court from Delhi to Daulatabad in the Deccan — and, when the experiment failed two years later, marched the same population back. The countryside between the Krishna and the Godavari was ruined; the imperial garrisons were unpaid; and by the mid‑1340s the amirs of the Deccan plateau had had enough of distant Delhi.

In August 1347 the Turkic noble Zafar Khan — by tradition a foster-son of the Brahmin astrologer Gangu, and so afterwards styled Hasan Gangu — was proclaimed sultan in the small fort of Gulbarga by a confederation of Afghan, Turkish and Deccani officers. He took the regnal name Alauddin Bahman Shah, claiming descent from the legendary Persian king Bahman, son of Isfandiyar.

Gulbarga was a Hindu fortified town in the territory of the Kakatiyas, captured early in the fourteenth century by the Delhi armies and later held by Warangal under Raja Gulchand. Hasan rebuilt it as his capital, renamed it Ahsanabad ("the most beautiful city"), and from this small basalt eminence on the Karnataka plateau ruled an independent Muslim sovereignty that would last, in one form or another, until 1538.

Inside the south‑western quadrant of the fort stands the Jama Masjid of Gulbarga — among the most architecturally singular mosques of the medieval Islamic world, and the only large congregational mosque in India entirely covered by a roof, with no open central courtyard.

It was completed in 1367 under Muhammad Shah I, the second Bahmani sultan, and according to a long‑standing tradition recorded by the seventeenth-century chronicler Muhammad Qasim Ferishta, it was designed by an architect named Rafi‘ ibn Shams ibn Mansur of Qazwin, who had served as far afield as Andalusia. The plan — five aisles around a closed prayer hall, with sixty‑three small domes covering the roof, four corner finials, and a single great dome above the mihrab — has often been compared to the Great Mosque of Córdoba, though the comparison is loose: there are no tile pavements, no horseshoe arches, and the piers are unfluted.

The mosque measures roughly 67 by 53 metres, with the prayer hall carried on more than 250 pointed arches springing from heavy basalt piers. There is no minaret. The interior, when shutters are closed, is one of the darkest spaces of any major Indian mosque — the architect, it seems, took quite literally the early Bahmani court's preference for the cave-like Persian chahar-taq.

In 1399, fleeing the sack of Delhi by Timur, the Chishti shaikh Sayyid Muhammad Hussaini — known to all the Deccan as Khwaja Banda Nawaz Gesudaraz, "the long-haired comforter of God's servants" — arrived in Gulbarga at the personal invitation of Tajuddin Firoz Shah. He was already in his late seventies. He would live another twenty-three years, dying in Gulbarga in 1422 at the age of one hundred and one.

His twenty-three years in Gulbarga turned a frontier Bahmani capital into one of the great Sufi centres of the subcontinent. His khanqah — the lodge that became, after his death, his shrine — taught Persian and Arabic theology, the Awarif al-Ma‘arif of Suhrawardi, and the early Dakhni dialect of the bazaar; he himself wrote, late in life, a small Dakhni treatise called the Mi‘raj al-‘Ashiqin ("ascension of lovers"), the earliest substantial prose work in the language.

The dargah — a domed marble pavilion in a vast walled enclosure on the eastern outskirts — has been continuously expanded by every Deccan dynasty in turn: the Bahmanis built the original tomb, the Bijapuris added the gates, the Asaf Jahis re-tiled the dome in green and white, and the modern annual urs in the lunar month of Zulqada draws three to four hundred thousand pilgrims, making it the second-largest Sufi gathering in India after Ajmer.

After 1429 Gulbarga was a Bahmani sarkar; after 1490 it was contested between the rump Bahmani at Bidar and the rising Adil Shahis of Bijapur; in 1504 Yusuf Adil Shah seized the city and incorporated it into the Bijapur kingdom, where it remained for a century and a half. The Adil Shahi governors maintained the dargah of Banda Nawaz with great ceremony; Ibrahim Adil Shah II made the pilgrimage barefoot in 1610.

In 1656–57 Aurangzeb, then Mughal viceroy of the Deccan, reduced Bijapur's outer fortresses including Gulbarga; from 1686 the city was a Mughal subah-headquarters of the Deccan, with a Mughal kotwal in the fort. In 1724 — like Bidar, like Hyderabad — it passed peacefully into the hands of Mir Qamar-ud-Din Khan, Asaf Jah I, founder of the Hyderabad Nizamate. From that year until 1948 Gulbarga was a district of Hyderabad State; the Nizam's government endowed the dargah generously, and the seventh Nizam Mir Osman Ali Khan personally sponsored the restoration of the Jama Masjid in 1933.

At the States Reorganisation of 1956 the Kannada-speaking parts of Hyderabad State, Gulbarga among them, were transferred to the new state of Mysore (now Karnataka). The city was renamed Kalaburagi in its native form in 2014. It remains the regional capital of north-east Karnataka, with about 650,000 inhabitants and a university bearing the name of its founding sultan.