Sultanate of Bijapur

One of the five Deccan sultanates that replaced the Bahmani kingdom, and the one whose court produced the most. Yusuf Adil Shah, of disputed origin but probably a Turkic or Persian slave-officer, declared independence at Bijapur in 1490 as the Bahmani state disintegrated. The Adil Shahi dynasty then ruled for nearly two centuries, kept in permanent tension between Shia and Sunni factions, Persian immigrants and Deccani-born nobles, and the demands of a Hindu majority whose Marathi-speaking gentry supplied much of the administration. Bijapur joined the other sultanates in destroying Vijayanagara at Talikota in 1565, removing the barrier to their expansion south and, in the long run, removing their own buffer against the Mughals. The court became a major centre of Deccani painting and of Dakhni, an early literary form of Urdu, and Ibrahim Adil Shah II wrote songs invoking Saraswati alongside the Prophet. The Gol Gumbaz, the tomb of Muhammad Adil Shah completed in 1656, has one of the largest unsupported domes in the world and a whispering gallery. Shivaji's Maratha rising began as a revolt against Bijapuri authority, and the sultanate's general Afzal Khan was killed by him in 1659. Aurangzeb besieged and took the city in 1686. The conquest overextended the Mughals fatally. The Malik-e-Maidan, one of the largest cast bronze cannon ever made, still sits on the city walls. Bijapur's water supply ran through an engineered system of underground conduits. The Ibrahim Rauza tomb is sometimes called the Taj of the Deccan. The city is now in Karnataka and renamed Vijayapura.

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