Sultanate & Deccan

The only woman to sit on the throne of Delhi. Dropped the veil, wore a tunic, rode at the head of her own army, and was deposed by nobles who could not manage any of it.

Find it on the floor: Sultanate Public Works Dept.

Introduced strict price controls on grain, cloth and horses, with inspectors, ration shops and severe penalties for short-weighing. It worked for as long as he was alive, which is the usual result.

Find it on the floor: Sultanate Public Works Dept.

Reportedly left his own son's wedding preparations to take a fort by night up a cliff face. Took the fort. Did not come back.

Find it on the floor: Sultanate Public Works Dept.

Moved the capital 1,100 km to Daulatabad and then moved it back. Issued token currency in brass that everybody promptly forged. Brilliant, educated, and possessed of catastrophically poor product-market fit.

Find it on the floor: Sultanate Public Works Dept.

Arrived from Morocco, was appointed qazi of Delhi by Tughlaq, was almost executed, was then sent as ambassador to China, and was shipwrecked on the way. Wrote it all down.

Find it on the floor: Sultanate Public Works Dept.

The entire population of Delhi was ordered to walk to the Deccan. Some years later they were ordered to walk back. Contemporary chroniclers were not kind about it.

Find it on the floor: Sultanate Public Works Dept.

Started in 1199, finished by successors over more than a century, and repaired after lightning strikes ever since. The tallest brick minaret in the world, and nobody agrees on who deserves the credit.

Find it on the floor: Sultanate Public Works Dept.

Woke up to find her husband gone in the night on a spiritual quest. Raised their son, ran the household, and years later, when he came back enlightened, made him come to her.

Find it on the floor: Sultanate Public Works Dept.

A sound idea — fiat currency — introduced roughly six hundred years early and without any way to stop forgery. Every household became a mint.

Find it on the floor: Sultanate Public Works Dept.

72.5 metres of fluted red sandstone and marble, the tallest brick minaret anywhere. Struck by lightning at least twice and rebuilt each time by a different dynasty with slightly different taste.

Find it on the floor: The Minaret Skyline

Built at the centre of a new city laid out on a grid, allegedly to mark the end of a plague. Now surrounded by the most concentrated bangle market on the planet.

Find it on the floor: The Minaret Skyline

Sent by Seleucus to Pataliputra, he wrote down everything he saw and quite a lot he did not, including men with ears large enough to sleep in. Still our best outside source on Mauryan India.

Find it on the floor: Hampi Bazaar

Drew a daily pocket cartoon for around fifty years, built around a small bespectacled man in a dhoti who never speaks and simply watches the country mismanage itself. Younger brother of a novelist, and by some distance the more widely read of the two.

Find it on the floor: Hampi Bazaar

The ruins of a capital of perhaps half a million people, spread over 4,000 hectares of boulders. The bazaar streets are still there. So is the aqueduct.

Find it on the floor: Hampi Bazaar

1,330 couplets on virtue, wealth and love, each exactly seven words, written with such deliberate universality that nobody has ever been able to prove which religion he belonged to. Everyone claims him. He would have found that funny.

Find it on the floor: Hampi Bazaar

Portuguese and Persian visitors both reported diamonds, rubies and pearls being sold in the Hampi bazaar in heaps, by the measure. They may have exaggerated. They may not have.

Find it on the floor: Hampi Bazaar

A shrine carved as a chariot, with stone wheels that once turned. Its musical pillars ring at different pitches when struck, which is why they are now roped off from every visitor who wants to try.

Find it on the floor: Hampi Bazaar

Threw a deliberately harmless bomb into a near-empty Assembly chamber and waited to be arrested, because he wanted the trial as a platform. Read voraciously in prison, wrote an essay explaining why he was an atheist, and was hanged at 23.

Find it on the floor: Hampi Bazaar

Sits precisely in the middle of the busiest junction with the serenity of an animal that has never once been asked to move and won.

Find it on the floor: Hampi Bazaar

Defeated at Talikota by a coalition of Deccan sultanates and looted for months. One of the most complete destructions of a great city anywhere, and the reason Hampi is ruins rather than a metro.

Find it on the floor: Hampi Bazaar

Moved from Urdu to Hindi and turned the short story toward the village, the moneylender and the tenant farmer. Wrote about rural debt with a clarity that made the British ban an early collection.

Find it on the floor: Hampi Bazaar

Every famous historical diamond — Koh-i-Noor, Hope, Regent, Orlov — came out of the alluvial deposits of the Krishna river basin. For two thousand years, India was the world's diamond supply.

Find it on the floor: The Diamond Vaults