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In the 1660s, a French traveller named Jean de Thevenot visited the kingdom of Golconda and wrote: “The capital city of this kingdom is called Bhagnagar; the Persians call it Hyderabad; it is 14 or 15 leagues from Bijapur.”
About 20 years before him, a more famous French traveller, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, had passed through the kingdom and noted:
“Bhagnagar is the name of the capital town of this kingdom, but it is commonly called Golconda, from the name of the fortress which is only 2 coss distant from it.... Bhagnagar...was commenced by the great-grandfather of the king who reigns at present, at the request of one of his wives whom he loved passionately…”
Is it possible that Hyderabad was never called Bhagnagar or Bhagyanagar, and yet 350 or 370 years ago travellers to the city heard this name, and were convinced it was the proper name they ought to record in their chronicles?
Quibbles Against It
Opponents of the Bhagyanagar theory say these travellers probably meant ‘Baghnagar’ not ‘Bhagnagar’ as Hyderabad was a city of gardens (bagh), but how could all of them have mixed up the sounds ‘bh’ and ‘gh’?
It occurs again in the memoir of the Abbé Carré, who visited Hyderabad six or seven years after Thevenot: “I also visited the large town of Bhagnagar, where I went about more freely, as it is a very spacious town, situated in flat country, watered by a fine river…”
Even if we grant that all the Frenchmen spelt ‘Baghnagar’ wrong, how could Aqil Khan Razi, a contemporary of Aurangzeb and a scholar or Persian, have mixed up the sounds in his Waqiat-i-Alamgiri, an account of the wars between Aurangzeb and his brothers? Razi wrote: “It was not till the prince had reached Bhagnagar that Qutub-l-Mulk learnt of the real state of affairs.”
And A Weak Assault
It is clear that through the 17th century, at least, Bhagnagar was a widely used name for Hyderabad. And stronger ‘evidence’ might be found in the writing of the man who denied the Bhagnagar idea most stoutly.
In his book ‘Muhammad-Quli Qutb Shah, founder of Haidarabad', Professor Haroon Khan Sherwani says that Faizi, the Mughal court’s agent in the Deccan during 1591-94 (late in Akbar’s reign), sent this dispatch: “Ahmad Quli is steeped in Sh’ism, and has built a city, Bhagnagar by name, after Bhagmati, the old prostitute who has been his mistress for a long time.”
To dismiss the Bhagmati-Bhagnagar legend as fiction, we must now presume that Faizi misled the Mughal court. He deliberately gave a false name to the city and also spun the yarn of Baghmati. And he did this right after the city’s founding when the right name and legend would have reached Agra from other sources also.
Was Faizi bent on career suicide, or worse? Sherwani thinks he was prejudiced against the Shia sultans of Golconda. He says the Bhagmati-Bhagnagar legend is false because these name do not occur in the semi-official history of the Golconda sultans compiled under Quli Qutub Shah’s successor.
But all such histories tell sanitised stories. It would have obviously left out embarrassing details of the previous king’s drinking and philandering.
Sherwani also says coins struck at Hyderabad in 1603 bear the name Hyderabad, not Bhagnagar. No coin minted at Bhagnagar has been found. But again, it is well known that Muhammad-Quli Qutb Shah renamed the city seven years after its founding. That would be in 1596 or 1598, depending on whether you take 1589 or 1591 as the founding year.
City of Fortune
In his 1927 book ‘Landmarks of the Deccan’, Syed Ali Asgar Bilgrami gives another reason to believe that Hyderabad was first called Bhagnagar. “Seven years after the completion of the city, ‘Farkhunda Bunyad’ became its chronogrammatic epithet,” he writes. This Persian name means “city of fortune”, which is a literal translation of Bhagnagar/Bhagyanagar.
While these excerpts support the belief that Hyderabad was once called Bhagnagar or Bhagyanagar, they do not in any way prove the existence of Bhagmati. However, the January 1943 issue of the journal ‘Islamic Culture’ “published under the authority of H.E.H. The Nizam’s Government” says:
“It is a pity that no local evidence comes to explain with any useful information the life of Bhagmati. The complete poetical works of Sultan Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, which have recently been published under the patronage of Nawab Salar Jang Bahadur, do not bear any reference to her name except to that of a mistress of the name of Haidar Mahal. No doubt, there is a mention of Shahr-i-Haidar which literally can be interpreted as Hyderabad and it was perhaps named after that mistress who had been styled as Haidar Mahal in his poetry.”
So the story about Bhagmati being conferred the title Haidar Mahal might have a grain of truth. It just might.
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