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The Madrasa-i Mahmud Gawan, raised in 877 AH / 1472 CE at Bidar by the great Bahmani wazir Khwaja Mahmud Gawan, was the most ambitious institution of learning the medieval Deccan ever built. Three storeys high, sheathed in turquoise and cobalt tile-work in the manner of the great madrasas of Khurasan, it stood directly within the citadel-city of Bidar — then the capital of the Bahmani Sultanate. Its faculty was drawn from Iran, Iraq and the Arab lands; its library was reputed to hold three thousand manuscripts; and its students were lodged in cells along the upper galleries. For a brief moment in the late fifteenth century it made Bidar a node of the wider Islamicate world, in regular correspondence with Shiraz, Samarkand and Herat.
The founder
Mahmud Gawan, merchant-statesman of the Deccan
Khwaja Mahmud Gilani, called Mahmud Gawan, came to the Deccan from Gilan on the Caspian as a merchant in the 1450s and rose under successive Bahmani sultans to become wazir and the effective ruler of the kingdom. A jurist, poet and patron of learning in his own right, his Persian letters — the Riyaz al-Insha — were taught for centuries as a model of chancellery prose. He raised the madrasa from his own resources, not the treasury.
The building
A tiled madrasa modelled on the great schools of Iran
Its plan followed the great four-iwan madrasas of Iran: a central courtyard, a tall portal (pishtaq) flanked by minarets, lecture-halls on the ground floor and rows of student cells on the upper storeys. The façade was clad in glazed tile-mosaic in turquoise, white and deep blue — work whose surviving fragments are still among the finest specimens of Bahmani tile-work in India. One of the corner minarets and the western range collapsed in 1696 after a powder magazine inside the building took a lightning strike during the Mughal occupation, but much of the structure survives.
Curriculum and legacy
A centre of learning whose manuscripts travelled the world
The madrasa taught the classical Islamic sciences — Quranic exegesis, hadith, jurisprudence, grammar and logic — alongside mathematics, astronomy and medicine. Its scholars produced commentaries and copied manuscripts that travelled the length of the Islamicate world. After Mahmud Gawan's execution in 1481 on a forged charge, the Bahmani state declined and the madrasa's prestige with it, but its building remained, and its memory shaped every later Deccan project for institutional learning — down to Osmania four and a half centuries later.