BY GOVIND KRISHNAN V
PHOTOGRAPHS BY HARSHA VADLAMANI
A kilometre to the northwest of Hyderabad’s iconic Golconda Fort, which once held the Kohinoor and Hope diamonds,
BY GOVIND KRISHNAN V
PHOTOGRAPHS BY HARSHA VADLAMANI
A kilometre to the northwest of Hyderabad’s iconic Golconda Fort, which once held the Kohinoor and Hope diamonds, is a vast necropolis few tourists to the fort have heard of. A blue arch over a gateway proclaims “Qutb Shahi Tombs”. When Yoshowant Purohit arrived four years ago, there was no sign to tell visitors that the entire dynasty of Hyderabad’s founding kings rested in the 108-acre complex. Purohit, a conservation architect, came from Delhi as part of an ambitious project to restore the Qutb Shahi tomb complex and make it worthy of World Heritage Site listing. On his first day driving to work, Purohit had trouble locating the tombs. Local people hadn’t even heard of the Qutb Shahis; the monuments were known simply as the “saat maqbare”—the seven tombs.
These seven tombs belong to the seven kings who ruled Golconda before the Nizams of the erstwhile Hyderabad state. The last of the seven emerges first. The two-storeyed tomb of Abdullah Qutb Shah (1626-72), which rises 137 feet, has a massive dome guarded by minarets and 28 open arches at its entrance.
Almost tucked away on one side the tomb of Abu Hasan Tana Shah, the last Qutb Shahi (they ruled for 171 years) remains unfinished—a testament to the march of time that brings to naught the plans of monarchs and men. Unplastered red bricks grown black over three centuries enclose two basalt graves and rise 27 feet where, instead of an ornate dome, a cavernous mouth opens to the skies. Graffiti and love messages are scratched into the decaying plaster of the inner walls. The birds taking wing over the open roof and the foliage growing out of the wall give the place an air of doom. The last of the Qutb Shahis died in exile, as a prisoner in Daulatabad. Tana Shah’s fate was sealed when the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb marched south in 1687, laying waste to Hyderabad after a bloody siege of eight months. It was a turning point in the history of the Deccan. The commander of the attacking army was the father of Nizam-ul-Mulk, who became Viceroy of the Deccan and eventually independent ruler of Golconda when the Mughal Empire disintegrated.
The saat maqbare Purohit saw in 2012 was in neglect. In many monuments the edges had broken off, seeping water had ruined structures, and most of the decoration and ornamentation was damaged. Algae and rain had blackened the facades. In 2013, the wall of a large stepwell (Bade Baoli) collapsed in heavy rain. Investigations revealed that most of the stucco work and ornamentation on the monuments had been added in the 19th century when a renovation was carried out under Salar Jung I, prime minister of Hyderabad. Worse, concrete had been used extensively in the 20th century, damaging the buildings made with lime mortar.
The Qutb Shahi restoration is the most ambitious heritage conservation project undertaken in India. The sheer size of the necropolis is staggering—it has 72 historical structures, 40 tombs, 23 mosques, several stepwells and a hamaam (bathhouse). A public-private partnership between the department of Archaeology and Museums of Andhra Pradesh (now Telangana), and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, the project is slated for completion in 2023.
“The trust worked on Humayun’s tomb in Delhi and was looking to undertake a major conservation project in south India. We considered several sites, but the Qutb Shahi tomb complex is unique, probably the only necropolis in the world with an entire dynasty buried within it. We approached the state government and after an architectural documentation and topographical assessment of the site, we signed an MoU in 2013,” says Ratish Nanda, India CEO of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture.
The MoU tasked the Aga Khan Trust with the work, under the department of archaeology’s supervision. Besides preservation and structural restoration, it aims to restore the monuments where feasible to the way they were constructed in the 16th and 17th centuries. This means not only figuring out form and architectural details, but also using material originally used in the construction. The landscape around the tombs would also be restored. The total cost was estimated at Rs 100 crore.
Nanda assembled a multi-disciplinary team to draw up a conservation plan—specialist architects, civil engineers, archaeologists