Deccan Sultanate Architecture

The Deccan sultanates were five early modern kingdoms, Bijapur, Golkonda, Ahmadnagar, Bidar and Berar, that ruled the Deccan Plateau of India from the late fifteenth through the seventeenth century, and their architecture forms a regional variant of Indo-Islamic design. It drew on the styles of the Delhi Sultanate and later Mughal architecture, incorporating Persian and Central Asian elements, and stood apart from the Hindu temple architecture built in the same regions at the same time. The sultanates produced major fortifications, including the forts at Bidar and Golkonda, along with tombs, mosques and madrasas, most notably the Gol Gumbaz, whose dome, some forty four meters across, is the second largest built anywhere before the modern age; in 2014 a group of these monuments across Bidar, Bijapur and Hyderabad was placed on UNESCO's tentative World Heritage list as the Monuments and Forts of the Deccan Sultanate.