TheIndosphere

An encyclopedia of Indian civilization.

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Bijapur

Also known as Vijayapura

Bijapur, officially Vijayapura since 2014, is a city in northern Karnataka that was the capital of the Adil Shahi sultans from 1489 to 1686, whose monuments include the Gol Gumbaz, one of the largest domes in the world.

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Foundation

There was a town at Bijapur under the Chalukyas of Kalyani, whose name, Vijayapura, "city of victory", it preserves. Under the Bahmani sultans it was a provincial seat. Around 1489, as the Bahmani kingdom broke up, its governor Yusuf Adil Khan declared his independence and founded the Adil Shahi dynasty, with Bijapur as his capital. Yusuf, according to a widely repeated story, was an Ottoman prince, though this is uncertain; he came to the Deccan from Persia.

The sultanate's capital

Bijapur was the capital of one of the strongest Deccan states for almost two centuries. The sultans fought Vijayanagara, the Portuguese at Goa and their fellow sultans, and joined the alliance that defeated Vijayanagara at Talikota in 1565. In the following century they expanded south into the Karnataka plateau and the Tamil plain. The city grew into one of the largest in India, with a walled circuit of about ten kilometres, an inner citadel and many suburbs.

Ibrahim Adil Shah II (r. 1580–1627) was a poet and musician. He wrote the Kitab-i Nauras, a book of songs in Dakhni addressed to Saraswati and to Sufi saints, and his court drew painters and musicians from many traditions. His tomb complex, the Ibrahim Rauza, with a tomb and a mosque facing each other across a platform, has a delicacy of carving and proportion that later visitors compared with the Taj Mahal.

The Gol Gumbaz

The tomb of Muhammad Adil Shah, who died in 1656, is a cube of masonry with towers at its corners, roofed by a single dome about forty-four metres across on the inside. The dome rests on intersecting arches that carry it over the square without internal supports, and it is one of the largest built before modern times. A gallery running round its base carries even a whisper from one side to the other. The Jami Masjid, begun under Ali Adil Shah I in the 1570s, and the enormous bronze gun known as the Malik-i Maidan, cast in Ahmadnagar in 1549 and brought to Bijapur as a trophy, are among the other monuments.

The Mughal conquest

Bijapur's last decades were troubled by the rise of Shivaji, who had begun his career in the sultanate's territory, and by Mughal pressure from the north. Aurangzeb besieged the city in person in 1686, and it surrendered after more than a year of siege and famine. The last sultan, Sikandar, was taken prisoner. Under the Mughals and their successors Bijapur declined rapidly, and travellers of the eighteenth century described a city of great ruins. It was part of the Bombay Presidency under British rule. The city was renamed Vijayapura in 2014.

Further reading

  • Asher, Catherine B. India Before Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2006
  • Richards, John F. The Mughal Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1993
  • Gordon, Stewart. The Marathas 1600-1818. Cambridge University Press, 1993

See also

  • Adil Shahi Sultanate of Bijapur — The Adil Shahis ruled Bijapur and the western Deccan for nearly two centuries, and built the Gol Gumbaz, whose dome is among the largest ever raised.
  • Bahmani Sultanate — The Bahmani Sultanate ruled the Deccan from 1347 to 1527, the first independent Muslim kingdom of the peninsula, and split into the five sultanates that followed it.
  • Vijayanagara Empire — Vijayanagara was the last great empire of southern India, founded on the Tungabhadra in 1336, ruling most of the peninsula for two centuries until its defeat at Talikota in 1565, and leaving the ruined city at Hampi.
  • Shivaji — Shivaji Bhonsle (1630–1680) was the founder of the Maratha Empire, crowned Chhatrapati in 1674 after building an independent state in the Deccan through decades of warfare against the Bijapur Sultanate and the Mughal Empire.
  • Aurangzeb — Aurangzeb (reigned 1658–1707), known also by his regnal title Alamgir, was the sixth Mughal emperor, under whom the empire reached its greatest territorial extent while sustained warfare in the Deccan and religiously restrictive policies strained its finances and cohesion.
  • Nizam Shahi Sultanate of Ahmadnagar — The Nizam Shahis ruled Ahmadnagar from 1490 to 1636, the Deccan sultanate that fought the Mughals longest, defended by Chand Bibi and then by Malik Ambar.

This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.