The Ferozabad Fort, which was built with minute care to accommodate every wish of the royals of the Bahmani dynasty by Feroze Shah Bahmani in the early 15th Century to replace the then Gulbarga as his kingdom’s capital on the banks of the Bhima, 20 km away from today’s Kalaburagi, is a vast expanse of ruins now.
The heavily-fortified capital covered on all sides by six-inch thick walls covering hundreds of acres, once housed a beautiful palace with living areas underground and above the ground and also the royal kitchen. The bathrooms were on the banks of the river. There is also an artistically-built mosque in more than two acres of land, indicating the fact that a large population lived inside the fort.
Many are not aware of the existence of such a beautiful, archeologically important site of yesteryear, and neither the Archaeological Survey of India nor the State Archaeology Department have taken steps to declare it a monument to protect it from encroachments and wilful damage of what is left in the fort.
What is left in the Juma Masjid, considered to be one of the biggest in the State, is four beautifully designed walls with inner chambers. Though the roof and the arches supporting them have collapsed, some of the collapsed structures with artistic designs are still intact. The area which was used for prayers in the mosque is now used to cultivate red gram by encroachers.
Some of the ruins inside the fort point to the fact that the fort housed a royal pleasure resort in the palace zone with numerous dilapidated residential structures for Feroze Shah Bahmani’s queens and female retinues. The bathrooms were roofed with domes and pyramidal vaults, the earliest examples of a bath house in the Deccan.
Senior artist Rehman Patel said that these buildings in the fort were the visual expression of Feroze Shah’s desire to replicate in the Deccan the glories of the past kingdoms in the parts of the Islamic world. Among the Bahmani royals who forged the Deccan’s idiosyncratic cultural identity, Feroze Shah Bahmani figures prominently. The sultan was celebrated for his literary, theological and philosophical knowledge.
It was during his reign that new architectural expressions of power appeared, some inspired by Persian literary sources. The different arches and walls of the Juma Masjid contain different patterns of beautiful floral design in Stucco work.
According to historians, although the Ferozabad fort was constructed to be the new capital of the Bahmani dynasty, the idea of shifting to the new capital was given up after repeated floods in the Bhima and the flood waters entering the fort and living areas within the fort. Interestingly, the fort walls and other buildings have been constructed with locally available limestone slabs. Huge boulders of black stone and burnt bricks have been used sparingly in the constructions within the fort.
