What is Charminar? A monument built to create work after a plague in 1590? A city square to mark the four cardinal directions? A water tank to pump water to the 7th storey palace of the Qutb Shahi King Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah? A mosque? A madrasa? A market square?
Many of the theories are just surmises put together from information shared by travellers, some of it exaggerated and some based on evidence on the ground. Some of the theories have been dismissed outright while others survive in one form or another.
For visitors who mill around Charminar, it is just a grand monument to be gawked at and to click a few selfies.
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Those who climb the high winding staircase in one of the minarets, get a glimpse of the building with stucco work of fearsome cats and the solar lotus roundel capping the apex right above the fountain. In the morning hours and in the early evening, as sunlight streams into the monument, it is a fantastic play of light and shade with the roundel being lit up and then shaded out.
But there is more to Charminar. Another flight of stairs from the first floor takes the visitor to an open space that is clearly part of a covered mosque with the Qibla (prayer niche), five bays and marked spaces for laying out the janamaz (prayer mats). There is a covered passage between the two arches leading to the mosque. It has some exquisitely delicate vegetal patterns in incised plaster scattered all over it. The number of people who can pray at one time is limited to 40, lending itself to a theory that it might be a royal mosque. But would the king be interested in climbing the narrow staircase five times a day to pray? We never know.
A French visitor, Francois Bernier, said that water used to be pumped into the adjacent palace complex (no trace of the complex exists) from the upper storeys of Charminar. The water apparently came from a distant water body through clay pipes. People believe the lake called Jalapally is the source of water that reached the Charminar and the palaces. But no trace of pipes has been found either in Charminar or around it.
Bernier also wrote about students visiting the place for studies. So did Charminar also function as madrasa?
Historian Phillip Wagoner believes the Charminar to be a ‘chaubara’ or a city square. He uses the occurrence of similar structures in city squares in the Deccan as in Bidar in Karnataka or Warangal in Telangana or Udgir in Maharashtra for basing the theory. But instead of round city markers, the Qutb Shahi capital had arches spanning the road in the four directions.
When the capital of Qutb Shahi kingdom was shifted from Golconda to Hyderabad, around the Charminar, space was created for 14,000 shops. These shops brought the hubbub of business to the new city.
According to another French traveller Jean De Thevenot, within a few years of its construction, the Charminar came to surrounded by ‘ugly wooden shops’. A situation we can easily understand with all the fruit sellers who now bring their pushcarts close to the monument as if this is the only place people would want to buy fruit!
