The Bahmani Trail: Kalaburagi, Bidar and Bijapur

In 1347 the Muslim officers whom Delhi had posted to the Deccan revolted, and the man they crowned took the title Ala-ud-din Bahman Shah and made his capital at Gulbarga. In 1424 the ninth sultan moved it to Bidar. By the early sixteenth century the Bahmani kingdom had broken into five successor sultanates, of which the Adil Shahis of Bijapur were the nearest and the grandest. Those three cities are 118 and 149 km apart, all in northern Karnataka, and you can drive the whole arc in three unhurried days.

India put twelve of their monuments onto UNESCO's tentative World Heritage list in 2014 under the title "Monuments and Forts of the Deccan Sultanate" — the Gulbarga fort and the Haft Gumbaz among them, with Bidar's citadel and city walls, the Astur tombs, Bijapur's citadel, walls, Ibrahim Rouza and Gol Gumbaz, and Golconda and the Qutb Shahi tombs across the border. A tentative listing is a country saying it means to nominate something one day. This one has been sitting there for over a decade.

Day one: Kalaburagi, the first capital

Start at Gulbarga Fort, which is the beginning of the whole story and, at seventy-four acres, the largest thing in the city. Climb the Bala Hisar for the cannon and the view, go inside the Jama Masjid of 1367 for the courtyard that is not there, then take in the Haft Gumbaz — seven Bahmani royal tombs behind a wall on the east side of the city — and the Chor Gumbad, a single great dome standing alone on a rise, which echoes.

If you have the evening, the Khwaja Bande Nawaz Dargah is the other half of what the Bahmanis brought here. Gesu Daraz, a Chishti Sufi, came to Gulbarga at the invitation of Sultan Firoz Shah in about 1400, fell out with him, stayed anyway, and died here in 1422. His shrine has been the reason many more people come to this city than come for the fort.

Day two: Bidar, the second capital

Bidar is 118 km north, about two and a half hours. The capital moved here in 1424 under Ahmad Shah Wali, reportedly for the climate, and what you get is a bigger, better-preserved and far less encroached version of what you saw the day before: a red laterite citadel on a plateau edge with a rock-cut moat and painted interiors, and the ruined Mahmud Gawan madrasa in the town — a fifteenth-century Persian-style college, half of which is simply gone.

Bidar is also where bidriware comes from, the blackened zinc-alloy metalwork inlaid with silver, still made in workshops in the town. It gets attached to Kalaburagi in a lot of tourism writing; it belongs here.

Day three: Bijapur, the successor

Vijayapura — Bijapur — is 149 km from Kalaburagi, about three hours, and belongs to the Adil Shahis rather than the Bahmanis: one of the five sultanates the kingdom broke into. The Gol Gumbaz, finished in 1656, carries one of the largest masonry domes in the world and a whispering gallery under it, and is the reason most people who come to north Karnataka at all come to Vijayapura; the Ibrahim Rouza is the more beautiful building and the less visited one. If anywhere on this trail is set up for visitors, it is here.

What the trail is actually about

Two things, if you want a thread to hold on to. The first is that this is the other side of a war everybody has heard half of: the Vijayanagara empire, whose capital at Hampi fills every Karnataka itinerary, spent two centuries fighting the Bahmanis and their successors, and lost at Talikota in 1565 to a coalition of them. Hampi is the ruin of the losing side. These are the cities of the winners, and almost nobody goes.

The second is architectural. Watch what the arch does across the three days. At Gulbarga in 1367 it is being experimented with — stretched wide and low, in a mosque that roofs over its own courtyard. At Bidar it is confident. At Bijapur, three hundred years later, it is holding up a dome of that scale. You are watching one building tradition think its way from an experiment to the Gol Gumbaz, and the experiment is the thing standing in a field of ruins in Kalaburagi that nobody stops at.