The Gol Gumbaz of Bijapur

The Gol Gumbaz at Bijapur, completed around 1656, is the mausoleum of Sultan Muhammad Adil Shah and one of the most remarkable buildings of Muslim India. It belongs to the Adil Shahi dynasty of Bijapur, one of the Deccan sultanates, the Muslim kingdoms that rose in the south of the peninsula after the breakup of the older Bahmani power and ruled there in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with their own courts, the Dakhni tongue, and a distinctive architecture, until they were absorbed by the Mughals. The building is severe and geometric: an enormous single hemispherical dome, among the largest dome-covered chambers ever raised, rests on a plain cube of dark stone, with a tall, slender octagonal tower of several storeys at each of the four corners, capped by its own small dome, the whole composed in a strict balance with little surface ornament. Its most famous feature lies high within, beneath the dome: a circular gallery where a whisper carries clear around the entire ring and the faintest sound is returned many times over, the celebrated whispering gallery. The tomb stands in a walled garden in the dry Deccan uplands, set apart from the northern plains in the country of the southern sultanates. This scene depicts the Gol Gumbaz and its garden, the great dome on its cube and the four corner towers, a monument of the southern Indo-Islamic world distinct from the Mughal architecture of the north.