Bijapur

• 1. Introduction

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  Bijapur stands 519 kilometres northwest of Bengaluru, inside the Deccan Peninsula, and its story stretches from the Stone Age to a cricket franchise. The city carries two names: the ancient Vijayapura, meaning "city of victory," and the more familiar Bijapur, pressed into service by centuries of rulers who each left something behind. A fort wall six miles in circumference still rings part of the city. Its ninety-six bastions, built to heights between thirty and fifty feet, once sheltered a population estimated at between half a million and a million people at the height of the Bijapur Sultanate in the early seventeenth century. What happened to that city? Who built it, who dismantled it, and what survived? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. From Stone Age to Sultanate

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  Evidence found in the Bijapur district reveals habitation going back to the Stone Age, making it one of the historically richest districts in Karnataka. The Western Chalukyas held the region from roughly 535 to 757. The Rashtrakutas then ruled from 757 to 973, followed by a Kalachuri and Hoysala period running through to around 1200. The Devagiri Yadavas governed from 1185 until the Muslim conquest of Devagiri in 1312. Each transition left the city in new hands while retaining the name Vijayapura.

  Alauddin Khalji, the Sultan of Delhi, brought the first significant Islamic influence towards the end of the thirteenth century. In 1347 the Bahmani Sultanate absorbed the region outright, dividing it into provinces called tarafs, with Bijapur as the capital of one such province. The province's reach extended into parts of present-day North Karnataka and south and west of Maharashtra, including the Konkan coast, and the city functioned as a centre for overseas trade. Bahmani authority began to erode by 1490, the year five successor dynasties emerged from its breakup.

• 3. The Adil Shahi Era

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  In 1518 the Bahmani Sultanate formally split into five states known collectively as the Deccan sultanates. The Adil Shahi dynasty took Bijapur as its capital and ruled it from 1490 to 1686. Three rulers shaped the city most profoundly: Yusuf Adil Shah, who founded the independent state; Ali Adil Shah I, who fortified the city and grew its working population; and Ibrahim Adil Shah II, whose patronage extended across architecture and culture.

  The physical record of that era is still visible. The Bijapur Fort, completed by the Adilshahi Sultans in 1566, is encircled by a wall six miles around. That wall rises to between thirty and fifty feet and is reinforced by ninety-six massive bastions of varied designs, with ten additional bastions at the gateways. A curtained battlement wall roughly ten feet high runs between the bastions. A moat thirty to forty feet broad surrounds the whole structure. The citadel inside, a mile in circuit, was built of particularly massive materials and once held a ditch one hundred yards wide, formerly filled with water. Beyond the walls, the Bara Kaman, Jama Masjid, and Gol Gumbaz stand as further testimony to the Sultanate's ambition.

• 4. Mughal Conquest and Decline

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  The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb conquered Bijapur from the Adil Shahis in 1686, having already converted it into a Mughal subah two years before the final military takeover. What followed was not just a change of rulers but a demographic catastrophe. Disease and other natural events in the wake of the Mughal conquest produced large-scale death and significantly reduced the population of a city that had recently held hundreds of thousands of people.

  Mughal rule lasted until 1723. The following year, the Nizam of Hyderabad established his independence in the Deccan and drew Bijapur into his domain. That arrangement proved brief. By 1760 the Maratha Confederacy had taken the city, and in 1818 the British defeated the Peshwa in the Third Anglo-Maratha War, bringing Bijapur under the authority of the British East India Company. The British then assigned it to the Maratha princely state of Satara. When Satara's line of succession failed in 1848, formal British rule began. For decades the district headquarters sat at Kaladagi; Bijapur was made headquarters only in 1885.

• 5. Sufis and Sacred Spaces

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  Sufi activity in the Bijapur region began during the reign of Qutbuddin Aibak, when Shaikh Haji Roomi became the first Sufi to arrive in Bijapur with his companions. Among the earliest documented figures is Sufi Sarmast, who came to the Deccan from Arabia in the thirteenth century. According to the Tazkiraye Auliyae Dakkan, a biographical record of Deccan saints compiled by Abdul Jabbar Mulkapuri in 1912-1913, Sarmast arrived when Islam had no visible presence in the region. His following numbered over seven hundred companions, pupils, disciples, and soldiers. He settled in Sagar in Solapur district, where a conflict with a local raja named Kumara Rama ended with the raja's death at the hand of his own daughter. Sarmast died in the year A.H. 680, which corresponds to 1281 A.D.

  By the time Ibrahim Zubairi compiled his Rouzatul Auliyae Beejapore in 1895, the city held more than thirty tombs or dargahs and more than three hundred khankahs, which were Islamic missionary schools. The Sufi presence in Bijapur is categorised by scholars into three chronological phases: before the Bahmani and Adil Shahi dynasties, during the Adil Shahi period, and after its fall. Sufi figures within those phases functioned variously as warriors, social reformers, scholars, poets, and writers, drawing followers from spiritual chains including the Qadiri, Chishti, Suharwardi, Naqshbandi, Shuttari, and Haidari orders.

• 6. Modern City, Ancient Ground

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  Bijapur was declared a municipal corporation in 2013, and in October 2014 the central government approved restoring its ancient name: officially, as of the 1st of November 2014, the city became Vijayapura again. The 2011 census counted a population of 326,360, making it roughly the ninth largest city in Karnataka, with a literacy rate of 83.43 percent, higher than the national average of 74 percent. Kannada is the primary language, spoken as a first language by 51.43 percent of residents; Urdu follows at 34.35 percent, reflecting the long history of the Sultans' court.

  The city sits at an average elevation of 606 metres, with a semi-arid climate. Summer temperatures between April and May reach 40 to 42 degrees Celsius. Winter runs from November to January with temperatures between 15 and 20 degrees Celsius, and average annual rainfall stands at 552.8 millimetres across 37.2 rainy days. The Krishna river, the district's most important waterway, runs approximately 125 miles through it, and a dam built at Almatti crosses it. Karnataka State Women's University, established in Bijapur in 2003 as the only university in Karnataka exclusively for women's education, affiliates seventy women's colleges across twelve districts of North Karnataka, a fact that marks how far the city has travelled from the era when armies battled at its gates.