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A fortress raised in the doab
Why a granite outcrop between two great rivers became the most contested ground in the south
The land between the Krishna and the Tungabhadra is the Raichur doab — a wedge of fertile black soil between two of peninsular India's largest rivers, watered enough for rice and cotton, defended on the flanks by the rivers themselves. From the Satavahanas onward every southern power has wanted it; and at its heart, on a low granite ridge in open country, the Kakatiya general Vitthala built the fortress of Rachuru in 1294, under Kakatiya Maharaja Pratapa Rudra II.
The fort is built of immense ashlar blocks of the local granite, set without mortar in the classic Kakatiya style; the earliest gateway, the Naurang Darwaza, still carries the original kalashas and the bracket-figures of Kakatiya temple architecture. A Sanskrit inscription on the inner rampart names the masons and dates the work to the Saka year 1216, śaka samvat 1294 CE — making Raichur Fort one of the few major Deccan fortifications whose foundation date is documented to the year.
Kakatiya rule ended in 1323 when Ulugh Khan, the future Muhammad bin Tughluq, took Warangal for Delhi. Raichur was absorbed into the Tughluq province of Telingana, and for two generations sat under a remote Delhi amir. When the Bahmani revolt of 1347 broke that province apart, the fortress was one of the first prizes the new sultanate seized.
A frontier against Vijayanagara
When Raichur was the southernmost field-station of the Gulbarga sultanate
For a century and a half, Raichur was the front line. To its south, across the Tungabhadra, the Vijayanagara emperors built a rival capital at Hampi in 1336. To its north, at Gulbarga and later at Bidar, the Bahmani sultans ruled. The doab between them changed hands more than a dozen times in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; the fortress that mattered each time was Raichur.
Mohammed Shah I of the Bahmanis (r. 1358–75) built a second curtain wall around the original Kakatiya enceinte, making Raichur a true do-pushta — a double-skinned fort, with an outer wall four metres thick and an inner one nearly seven. His successors raised the corner bastions and a great south-facing battery — the Top Khana — that still mounts a Persian cannon of the Bahmani court foundry, cast by Husain Ali Khan in 1450.
Under Mahmud Gawan, the great vizier of Mohammed Shah III, the fortress was inspected and re-provisioned in 1471. Gawan ordered the Daftar Bahri — the wazir's mosque and counting-house — to be built within the second enceinte, and granted endowments to the Sufi khanqahs in the town below. Both buildings stand. The fortress, in his hands, was the single most heavily-armed Bahmani garrison south of Gulbarga.
The battle that decided the Deccan
The most fully documented field battle in pre-Mughal southern India
By the second decade of the sixteenth century the Bahmani sultanate had fallen apart and the Adil Shahis of Bijapur had inherited Raichur. In May 1520 the Vijayanagara emperor Krishnadevaraya marched on the fortress with what the Portuguese chronicler Fernão Nuniz, who saw the army, called the largest force ever assembled in the south — 703,000 foot, 32,600 horse, 551 elephants, and a battery of Portuguese-trained gunners under Cristóvão de Figueiredo.
Ismail Adil Shah of Bijapur met him with a smaller army on the plain three miles north of the fort. The battle, fought on the morning of 19 May 1520, broke when Krishnadevaraya led a personal charge with his household cavalry against the Adil Shahi centre and dispersed it. The sultan's Turkish artillery commander, Salabat Khan, was killed at his guns; Ismail Adil Shah was wounded and escaped across the Krishna on a single horse, leaving his treasury and his wives in the captured camp.
The fortress capitulated three days later. Krishnadevaraya, in an act of unusual generosity, returned the captured women, and restored the Adil Shahi banners. He did not, however, return the fortress. Raichur and the doab passed to Vijayanagara, and were held there until the Battle of Talikota in 1565 ended the empire.
The doab returns to Bijapur
From Talikota to Aurangzeb: a hundred and twenty years of Adil Shahi peace
At the Battle of Talikota in January 1565 the four Deccan sultanates — Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Golconda and Bidar — combined and broke the Vijayanagara empire forever. In the partition that followed, Raichur and the doab were restored to Ali Adil Shah I of Bijapur. The fortress was repaired, the Vijayanagara nayaks in the surrounding villages were confirmed in their jagirs, and the town slowly rebuilt.
The most striking surviving Adil Shahi monument in the town is the Ek Minar ki Masjid — the one-minaret mosque, so called for its single sixty-foot cylindrical tower in the Gol Gumbaz manner. It was built around 1610 by an Adil Shahi noble, Amin-ud-Din Aali, whose epitaph in the courtyard records that he had been governor of the doab for fifteen years and had restored peace to a country "long made desolate by the hooves of armies".
Adil Shahi rule ended in 1686 when Aurangzeb's Mughal armies took Bijapur. Raichur, with the rest of the sultanate, passed to the Mughal empire and became a sarkar of the new Mughal subah of Bijapur. It would remain Mughal — on paper, at any rate — for the next thirty-eight years.
A town of saints and scholars
The Chishti and Qadiri establishments that survived every change of dynasty
Whatever flag flew over the fortress, the town below it remained a Sufi place. The earliest and most venerated dargah is that of Hazrat Pir Sailani Shah on the Yermarus road — a fourteenth-century Chishti shaykh sent south by the Gulbarga khanqah of Banda Nawaz Gisudaraz. His Persian diwan, preserved in the dargah library, is one of the earliest collections of Sufi poetry from the southern Deccan.
The Adil Shahi-period dargah of Hazrat Pir Maitri Shah Qadiri, the Daftar Bahri Mosque within the fort, and the early-Mughal Jamia Masjid of the qasba together make up what local tradition calls the Char Astana — the four sanctuaries of Raichur. The pattern is the one common to every Bahmani-successor town: a Sufi establishment older than the fort, a court mosque inside it, and a congregational mosque below.
The Asaf Jahis, who inherited Raichur in 1724, endowed all four. The records of the Dar-ul-Ifta in Hyderabad show annual grants in cash and grain to the four shrines down to the year 1948. The urs of Pir Sailani Shah, held every Muharram, still draws pilgrims from across the doab.
A southern district of the Nizams
From the founding of Hyderabad State to Operation Polo
The Aurangzeb-Mughal authority over the Deccan never really held. In 1724 Mir Qamar-ud-Din Khan, the great Mughal viceroy of the south, broke with Delhi and made the Deccan his own. Raichur, along with the whole Bijapur subah, passed into the new Hyderabad State — and would remain there for two and a quarter centuries, longer than under any earlier ruler.
Under the Asaf Jahis the fortress lost its military function and the doab settled into a long agrarian peace. Cotton, jowar and groundnut went up the new rail line to the Hyderabad mills; Persian-script revenue registers from the Dar-ul-Daftar show Raichur as the third-largest grain-shipping taluqa of the state. The town's Dakhni — softer in vowel, with a strong Telugu and Kannada substratum — became the standard literary form of the Hyderabadi countryside.
On 17 September 1948, with Operation Polo, Hyderabad State acceded to the Indian Union. Raichur passed first to the temporary military government of Major-General J.N. Chaudhuri, then to the civilian administration of the new Hyderabad State (Indian), and in 1956, with the States Reorganisation Act, to the new state of Mysore — renamed Karnataka in 1973.
A district at the seam of three languages
Where Kannada, Telugu and Dakhni Urdu still meet in every bazaar
The States Reorganisation of 1956 reassigned Raichur from Hyderabad State (Indian) to the new state of Mysore, despite the protests of the local Dakhni-speaking population, who had preferred to remain with the new Andhra Pradesh. The compromise was the Hyderabad-Karnataka region — six erstwhile Nizam districts (Raichur, Bidar, Gulbarga, Yadgir, Koppal and Bellary) given protected status under Article 371(J) of the constitution in 2012, in recognition of their distinct administrative history.
The town today is a busy tahsil headquarters of about three lakh people. The fortress, restored by the Archaeological Survey of India in stages from 1972 onward, is a protected monument; the Ek Minar ki Masjid and the Daftar Bahri are conserved by the Karnataka state department. The Sufi urs of Pir Sailani Shah, the cattle-market of Yermarus, the Friday jumma at the Jami Masjid and the Raichur Thermal Power Station — Karnataka's largest, built on the Krishna in the late 1980s — make up the rhythm of the modern doab.
Dakhni in Raichur is unmistakable. Hau for yes, nakko for no, kaiku for why, the soft Telugu lilt at the end of every sentence — it is the Dakhni of the southern marches, half Hyderabadi, half Kannada, the voice that decided the Deccan's most contested ground.
قلعۂ رائچور — جس کے درپیش دو دریا ہیں
"The fortress of Raichur —
before whom two rivers stand in attendance."
— Ferishta · Tarikh-i-Ferishta · written at Bijapur, c. 1610
From the Kakatiya Fortress to Karnataka
- 1294Vitthala, general of Pratapa Rudra II of Warangal, raises the granite fortress of Rachuru in the doab.
- 1323Tughluq conquest of Warangal; Raichur passes into the Delhi province of Telingana.
- 1347Alauddin Bahman Shah breaks from Delhi; the fortress is seized for the new Bahmani sultanate.
- c. 1370Mohammed Shah I builds the second curtain wall and the Top Khana battery; the fortress becomes a double-skinned do-pushta.
- 1471Mahmud Gawan inspects Raichur, builds the Daftar Bahri mosque inside the second enceinte and endows the Sufi establishments below.
- 1490Bahmani fragmentation; Raichur and the doab pass to the new Adil Shahi sultanate of Bijapur under Yusuf Adil Shah.
- 19 May 1520Battle of Raichur: Krishnadevaraya of Vijayanagara defeats Ismail Adil Shah; the fortress and the doab fall to Vijayanagara.
- 23 Jan 1565Battle of Talikota; the combined Deccan sultanates break Vijayanagara. Raichur restored to Ali Adil Shah I of Bijapur.
- c. 1610Amin-ud-Din Aali builds the Ek Minar ki Masjid in the qasba.
- 1686Aurangzeb's armies take Bijapur; Raichur becomes a Mughal sarkar in the new Bijapur subah.
- 1724Mir Qamar-ud-Din Khan founds the Hyderabad State; Raichur a sarkar within it for the next two and a quarter centuries.
- 1853The Doab provisionally assigned to the British under the Treaty of 1853, in part-payment of the Hyderabad Contingent.
- 1860Partial restoration to Hyderabad State; the fortress confirmed as a Hyderabad military depot.
- 1871The Madras Railway's Wadi–Raichur line opens; Raichur becomes the southern railhead of the Nizam's dominions.
- 17 Sept 1948Operation Polo concludes; Raichur accedes to the Indian Union with the rest of Hyderabad State.
- 1 Nov 1956States Reorganisation transfers Raichur from Hyderabad State (Indian) to the new state of Mysore.
- 1973Mysore is renamed Karnataka; Raichur a Kannada-Dakhni speaking district at the state's northern edge.
- 1985Construction begins on the Raichur Thermal Power Station; the largest coal-fired plant in Karnataka.
- 2012Article 371(J) inserted into the constitution; Raichur and five other former Hyderabad districts gain protected status as Hyderabad-Karnataka.