The Fortress of Golconda

Golconda, near the later city of Hyderabad on the Deccan plateau, was the fortress-capital of the Qutb Shahi sultanate, one of the Muslim sultanates that ruled the south of the Indian peninsula in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries after the breakup of the older Bahmani kingdom. The fortress is a great citadel of grey granite climbing a steep rock hill: rings of massive walls and bastions step up from a fortified lower town to the palaces and audience halls on the summit, the whole forming a fortified city rather than a single keep. Among its celebrated features are a monumental gateway studded with iron spikes to break the charge of war-elephants, and the fort's acoustics, by which, it is said, a hand-clap at a point near the entrance carries clearly up to the highest pavilion, a means of warning and signal. Above all, Golconda was famous for diamonds: the kingdom controlled the great diamond-bearing regions of the southern Deccan, and its markets were the principal emporium through which the world's diamonds passed, some of the most famous stones in history among them, so that the very name became a byword for fabulous wealth. The Qutb Shahi rulers, a cultured Persianate Shia dynasty, also founded the nearby city of Hyderabad with its great gateway-mosque, before the sultanate was finally absorbed by the Mughals in the later seventeenth century. This scene depicts the citadel and its trade: the granite fortress rising in concentric walls to its summit, the spiked gateway, and the diamond merchants of the market below, a stronghold of the southern Indo-Islamic world in the dry Deccan uplands.