Kevin Standage 
About 15 km east of Bijapur, modern Vijayapura, lies one of the most unusual survivals from the Adil Shahi Sultanate. Known variously as Kumatgi, Kumatagi, Kumtagi or Kummatgi, the site is easily overshadowed by the monumental architecture of Bijapur itself. There are no enormous domes here to rival the Gol Gumbaz, nor anything comparable in scale with the Ibrahim Rauza. Instead, Kumatgi preserves something much more intimate: the remains of a royal pleasure and hunting resort organised around an artificial lake, gardens, bathing rooms, fountains, painted chambers and extraordinary water pavilions.
The surviving buildings provide a glimpse into a side of Adil Shahi court life that the great mosques and mausoleums cannot. Kumatgi was designed not for public ceremony or commemoration, but for recreation. Here members of the court could escape the heat of Bijapur, hunt beside the lake, listen to musicians, watch wrestling and polo, rest in painted apartments, and sit within buildings where water fell from ceilings and erupted from dozens of fountains.
Even more remarkably, fragments of the paintings that once decorated these rooms survive. They include scenes of polo, hunting, wrestling, musicians, noblewomen, European visitors, Persian heroes and possibly Sultan Ibrahim Adil Shah II himself in conversation with a Sufi holy man. Together with the ingenious hydraulic engineering of the buildings, they make Kumatgi one of the most fascinating, yet least visited, Adil Shahi sites in the Deccan.
A Royal Retreat Beside an Artificial Lake
Kumatgi was far more extensive than the handful of restored buildings visible today suggests. Henry Cousens, who documented the site in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, regarded it as a hunting resort frequented by the nobles of Bijapur. The large artificial lake attracted wildfowl and would have provided an ideal setting for hunting, picnics and extended stays outside the city.
The lake was only the centrepiece of a much larger designed landscape. Cousens recorded the remains of what appeared to be a small walled settlement or bazaar, together with a broad road bordered on both sides by long arcades of stabling. These presumably accommodated the large numbers of horses required by the Sultan, nobles, attendants and guards visiting the resort.
From this complex a broad road passed through a substantial gateway and continued along the edge of the lake, giving access to the various pleasure pavilions. What now seems a rather isolated collection of structures must therefore once have formed part of a busy seasonal court settlement, populated by servants, soldiers, grooms, entertainers and members of the royal household.
The surviving water buildings were ranged roughly parallel to the reservoir and its dam. A detailed study of South Asian water architecture identified several variations on essentially the same idea: a pavilion placed beside, within or surrounded by water, often combined with an internal bathing pool. The buildings ranged from simple oblong chambers to elaborate multi-level arrangements of islands, tanks, bridges and fountain pavilions.
Architecture Made from Water
It is impossible to understand Kumatgi simply by looking at the buildings as dry masonry. Water was effectively part of the architecture.
Channels, pipes, tanks, fountains and cisterns were incorporated throughout the complex. Water was drawn from the lake and raised to an elevated storage cistern, from which gravity could distribute it through the pavilions. Cousens believed that the initial lifting was accomplished manually, while later studies have reconstructed a system of vertically arranged wheels and containers associated with the water tower.
The surviving tower should therefore not be thought of simply as a watchtower. It was fundamentally part of the hydraulic installation. Once water had been raised to sufficient height, pressure and gravity could feed a network of buried and wall-mounted pipes.
The result was extraordinarily sophisticated. Rather than merely filling baths, the system was capable of producing dozens of jets, cascades and artificial showers. Water flowed through the architecture, emerged from sculpted spouts, fell into surrounding pools and was collected within floor-level cisterns. This would have cooled both the masonry and the air immediately around the buildings—a particularly effective luxury during the intense heat of the Deccan summer.
The Smaller Water Pavilions
Several stages in the development of the water pavilion can still be recognised.
One comparatively simple arrangement consists of an oblong pavilion containing an octagonal pool, positioned beside a separate water tank. Two more elaborate examples originally consisted of square pavilions standing in the centre of square pools. One was single-storeyed and the other two-storeyed, and both were crowned by the characteristic bulbous or lotus-like domical forms associated with Bijapur architecture.
An open rectangular building accompanied each of these pools, providing additional covered accommodation alongside the actual water pavilion.
The repeated use of an octagonal bath or basin is significant. Such pools occur in several Deccani palace complexes, but at Kumatgi they became integral to an entire recreational landscape. The idea was not merely to sit beside water. The occupant was surrounded by it: water beneath the pavilion, water circulating through the walls, water collecting in the roof and fountains breaking its surface all around.
The Southern Pavilion Complex
The most elaborate and best preserved arrangement stands towards the southern end of the group.
Here a large rectangular tank encloses a substantial rectangular island, approached by a short bridge from the west. The northern portion of the island carries a rectangular pavilion containing an unusually shaped lotus-form pool. On the southern half is another approximately 10m square tank, and in the middle of this smaller basin rises a second two-storeyed pavilion, approached by its own bridge from the east.
The effect is almost architectural theatre: a pavilion within a pool, itself standing upon an island within a still larger pool. The upper part of the small central building acted as a water reservoir. Openings and pipes concealed within the masonry supplied numerous external spouts. Some were given the form of birds—described in later studies as peacock-like brackets—so that water appeared to issue from sculpted creatures before falling into the surrounding basin.
When functioning, the restrained stone architecture would therefore have been animated by constant movement, reflections and sound.
The ‘Cloud Shower’
Perhaps the most ingenious feature at Kumatgi was the artificial rain shower.
A storage cistern above one of the water pavilions fed a large perforated device in the ceiling. Cousens compared it to an enormous rose from a watering can. Once released, water fell through its numerous openings into the chamber below as a broad shower.
Modern scholarship has appropriately termed this arrangement a “cloud shower” pavilion. Below the falling water was a basin or cistern in which bathers could sit. The entire chamber could therefore reproduce something resembling a sudden monsoon shower in the middle of the dry season.
This was far more than plumbing. It was a carefully orchestrated sensory experience involving cool water, moving air, splashing sound and evaporative cooling.
Persianate and Deccani literature repeatedly compares gardens and palaces with earthly paradise, and water was central to that imagery. At Kumatgi, however, the metaphor became physical. The visitor could quite literally sit beneath artificial rain while fountains played around the building.
The Painted Hall
Beside the shower pavilion stood what later scholarship identifies as a chitarsal, literally a “picture hall” or painted gallery. It may also have functioned as a khwabgah, a private sleeping or resting chamber.
This is the most culturally important building at Kumatgi because substantial fragments of its paintings survive, although now in a perilous state.
Architecturally the hall is quite different from the tall pavilion standing in the tank. Rather than relying on a single dome, its interior is organised as a sequence of low vaulted compartments, whose curved surfaces provided the setting for the paintings.
The building is essentially a long, low rectangular masonry block, with a comparatively restrained exterior. The front façade has a row of five pointed arches, producing an open, shaded frontage. Behind this brighter arcaded area the building becomes considerably more enclosed and darker.
The main painted compositions adorn the three inner vaults of the front corridor. The other seven vaults in the structure were probably also painted, but it’s likely the most complex paintings would have been reserved for the front of the building. The images depicted within the central vault are likely to be of special importance.
Their preservation is unfortunately poor. Cousens already complained that the surfaces had been scratched, written upon and blackened by smoke when he examined them more than a century ago.
Comparing the photographs I took in 2026 with the earliest surviving images of these paintings makes the extent of their deterioration strikingly clear. Many details that were once sharply legible have faded, flaked away or disappeared altogether, suggesting that the murals are continuing to decay at a worrying rate. Equally concerning is the apparent lack of sustained conservation work at the site; there seems to be little visible effort to stabilise, consolidate or protect what remains of this exceptionally fragile painted decoration.
Yet enough survives—and enough was recorded by earlier observers—to reconstruct an extraordinary decorative programme. I was able to identify most of the documented scenes during my visit, although a couple remained elusive.
Adapted from original plan by Klaus Rötzer and Kushal Kumar Kamble
Polo at Kumatgi
Among the best-known paintings is a spirited representation of polo, or chaugan.
Below : Line drawing by Henry Cousens, dated 1888, published as Plate CXIII in Bijapur and Its Architectural Remains
Mounted players lean from their horses wielding long curved sticks, apparently competing for the ball. Cousens found the scene sufficiently clear to recognise the action immediately, and the Archaeological Survey of India still specifically lists the polo scene among the important surviving paintings.
Polo was an elite Persianate sport closely associated with aristocratic horsemanship. Its presence is therefore particularly appropriate in a pleasure resort where hundreds of horses could apparently be accommodated in the nearby stables.
The picture probably does not represent a specific historical match. Rather, it celebrates the skills expected of the Adil Shahi courtly elite.
The Hunt
Another arch next to the polo scene contains a vigorous hunting scene.
Cousens could distinguish mounted hunters pursuing tigers or other large cats, leopards and deer. Hunting occupied an important place within Persian and Indian concepts of rulership: it was recreation, military training and a symbolic demonstration of the ruler’s ability to impose order upon the natural world.
This image is therefore particularly fitting at Kumatgi, which seems to have functioned partly as a hunting lodge. Around the lower parts of the hunting and polo compositions Cousens also recorded attractive painted birds, linking the narrative scenes with the wider garden landscape surrounding the pavilion.
Related
Ipswich Bus Blog 
Shaku Blog 
Dr. K. P. V. Rao's Health Blog 
Arizona Desert Swarm 
Android Authority 
The Next Hint More from Kevin Standage
