The overthrow of VijayanagarThe Adil Shahs of Bijapur

The following is an extract from the travel book A River of Life: Travels through Modern India.

Badami's sights are easily seen. I don't linger in the town. The view of the surrounding environs that I see from the window of the bus as I leave is as bleak and dispiriting as the views on the way in, a typically arid landscape, red earth thirsting for the rain, the occasional neem tree at the roadside providing a rare splash of colour. I don't have to endure it for long, as we soon reach my destination, Bijapur, sprawling and ramshackle though not without a certain gritty charm.

Bijapur, strongly Muslim in character, is billed as the Agra of the South, in deference to its Friday Mosque, one of the finest in India, and other Islamic buildings and ruins dotted about town, such as the Whispering Gallery, the walls of the citadel, Ibrahim Adil Shah's mausoleum, and the Ibrahim Rauza. Unlike other Muslim monuments in India, including those such as the Taj Mahal in Agra, that tend towards a baroque, Oriental splendour, those of Bijapur are more restrained, almost severe, impressing by virtue of their sheer size. The Gol Gumbaz, for instance, the mausoleum of Muhammad Adil Shah, possesses one of the largest free-standing domes in the world, second only to St. Peter's in Rome.

Many of the buildings in Bijapur had been financed by the wealth looted from the city of Vijayanagar. The Adil Shahs of Bijapur were the rulers of one of the five splinter states which had resulted from the break-up of an earlier kingdom, and although those states were often at war with one another, following a shifting pattern of alliances to prevent any one of them from dominating this area of the Deccan, they had united their forces to overthrow the Hindu Vijayanagar Empire at the Battle of Talikota. But defeating the Vijayanagar Empire was to be their undoing. The Vijayanagar Empire was the last and arguably the greatest of all the kingdoms of the Southern Subcontinent, and its defeat at the hands of the Adil Shahs, which occurred a mere nine years after Akbar the Great acceded to the Mughal throne, paved the way for Mughal conquest of the South. After Vijayanagar had fallen, only Bijapur and Golconda (another of the five splinter states) stood in the way of total domination by the Mughals, a fight that was finally lost a century later when Akbar's great grandson Aurangzeb, last of the great Mughals, captured Bijapur and its sister city Golconda.