Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah

Deccani tradition, as Mark Zebrowski reports, holds that Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah (r. 1580–1612) was as passionate a patron as his contemporary Ibrahim Adil Shah II. Few paintings of his reign survive, but they are extraordinarily fine, most of them in a lavish copy of his own Urdu poetry, the Kulliyat in the Salar Jang Museum, Hyderabad. The author holds that the quality of his poetry makes him India's first great Urdu poet and one of the finest in the early Deccani idiom. ¹

A connoisseur of architecture, he founded Hyderabad in 1591 and moved his capital there, ten kilometres from crowded Golconda fort; the city had a gridiron plan with great squares and monuments such as the Charminar, a huge triumphal arch, and the Char Kaman, four colossal gateways round a central plaza; later came mosques, caravanserais, irrigated gardens, orderly rows of shops, a medical college and a hospital that still stands. ¹

The long Deccani Urdu poem Qutb Mushtari by Wajhi, composed in 1609–10, makes the sultan himself its hero. ¹ Posthumous portraits include a Deccani one in white muslin edged with gold and a Mughal one by Hashim inscribed in Jahangir's hand "a good likeness of Sultan Muhammad Qutb al-Mulk"; the author notes how hard it is to tell portraits of Muhammad Quli from those of his successor Muhammad. ²