Ibrahim Rauza

Ibrahim Adil Shah II, sixth sultan of the Adil Shahi dynasty, came to the throne of Bijapur in 1580 and died in 1627^1,2. His funerary complex stands just west of the old city, beyond the Makka (Mecca) Darwaza^1,3. Henry Cousens, who surveyed Bijapur for the Archaeological Survey of India, thought the work had been in progress for most of Ibrahim’s reign¹. The ASI dates the building to 1626 from a chronogram over the north door^2,3. The inscriptions present it as the mausoleum of his queen Taj Sultana, but the king died first and was buried in it^1,3. A chronogram at the south door gives 1043 AH (1633-34) for her death¹.

The six cenotaphs in the chamber carry no names; local tradition identifies Taj Sultana, Ibrahim’s mother Haji Badi Sahiba, Ibrahim himself, his daughter Zuhra Sultana and two of his sons, while an older British account gives a different order¹. The inscription around the south door records that Malik Sandal carried out the work and that it cost one and a half lakh (150,000) huns, with 900 more added¹. Aurangzeb, who took Bijapur in 1686, had a miniature kiosk over the mosque’s pulpit removed as unorthodox¹. Cousens wrote that Ibrahim’s son Muhammad, unable to outdo this decoration, set out to dwarf it by sheer mass in his own tomb, the Gol Gumbaz¹.

The tomb and the mosque stand on a high terrace inside a walled enclosure, facing each other across a square reservoir with a fountain; the tomb is on the east side and the mosque on the west^1,3. The ASI describes the enclosure as about 400 ft square, with a tall gateway ornamented with four minarets in the middle of the north wall². A double colonnade surrounds the tomb chamber, and the dome rises from a second square above the flat roof, ringed by small minarets². A band of lotus petals encircles the base of the dome³. The deep cornices rest on long brackets of the brittle local stone; Cousens reported in 1916 that they had cracked and been rebuilt in new stone¹.

The outer walls of the tomb chamber are covered with shallow carved tracery of arabesques and interlaced texts from the Qur’an¹. Captain Sykes, who saw them in 1818, described gilded letters on a blue ground, and traces of the gilding and blue survive on the walls and on the carved verandah ceilings^1,2. Cousens found the square pillars of the inner gallery very Hindu in style¹. The mosque repeats the outline of the tomb: five arches under a deep cornice hung with stone chains, each carved from a single block, and four slender minarets with onion domes^2,3. James Fergusson, quoted by Cousens, wrote that nothing in India was so elaborately rich in ornamental detail¹.

Each side of the chamber has a teak door, carved with Arabic phrases and studded with gilded iron bosses, between two windows whose fanlights are stone screens formed of interlaced Arabic letters^1,3. The subdued light falls on a flat stone ceiling as wide as the room, made of slabs set edge to edge with no visible support; Cousens called it the architect’s chef-d’oeuvre and explained that the mortar holds the slabs together as one shell^1,2. Above it is a second chamber under the dome, reached by stairs in the thickness of the walls^1,2. The six cenotaphs stand in a row; the men’s have a ridged top and the women’s are flat¹.