The tip came last week. “There are these maqbaras in Balapur. One of them is double-storied, like that of Jamsheed Quli Qutb Shah. They must belong to someone important. We could climb up and the decoration is largely intact,” said P N Praveen, who teaches architecture. He sent a location map. A satellite map showed a square open area with two round structures.
The location turned out to be beyond the Barkas area in Old City. Beyond the shanty town of Rohingya refugee camps is the open area where the two domes pierce the sky. If shouts and laughter echo from one side where children gather to play cricket, on another side a Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation vehicle comes to dump garbage from the surrounding areas. “I make four or five trips per day,” says the driver of the garbage tipper. When the garbage reaches a certain height, he sets the heap alight. The fire and smoke envelop the area.
The two domes are raised on a square platform. The small, low and squat, more ornate dome would easily fit into the landscape of the Qutb Shahi tombs complex at the foothills of Golconda Fort. The other one appears to be double-storied, but with something amiss with the symmetry. “It lacks a defined parapet with battlements,” says Prashant Banerjee, a conservation architect after seeing a photograph.
“These tombs belong to the Qutb Shahi era. Two Sufi saints Bhole Shah and Bhale Shah are buried here. Over time people have vandalised and removed all signs of the graves but they are buried inside the tombs,” said Muhammad Shareef, who is secretary of the Roushan Ud Dowla Masjid, that abuts the tombs. A sign painted in Telugu speaks about the property being under the care of the Waqf Board. How these two tombs slipped out of the net of the memory of the city is anybody’s guess. The tombs are from a layer of history which hasn’t got much attention from historians.
Golconda/Hyderabad has been attacked multiple times. After Aurangzeb’s final conquest, he oversaw its sack by staying put near the eastern side of Charminar. All the glorious palaces draped with glazed enamel tiles with seven colours were pulled down in the hunt for the fabled treasure.
One of the Qutb Shahi palaces was a seven-storied one which was a marvel for even a well-heeled traveller like Jean Baptiste Tavernier. Now, nothing of that era remains, save the four ceremonial arches, the Charminar and the fountain in the royal piazza. Later, Hyderabad was subjected to a series of raids by the Marathas. The sacking, the raids, the unsettled conditions meant that the once grand city and its surrounding areas slipped into a state where people were only bothered about saving their life and limb. Not surprisingly, religious and spiritual monuments survived intact and in some cases emerged grander and more powerful. But how these two tombs in Balapur, despite being associated with Sufi Saints, slipped into disuse and became a den for vagabonds remains a mystery.
