Ibrahim Adil Shah playing Tambur called Atish means Fire along with other court musicians

Ibrahim Adilshah II, the fifth king of the Adil Shahi dynasty is known in the Indian history as "Jagadguru Badshah." He tried to bring in cultural harmony, between the Shiyas and the Sunnis (sects within Islamic religion) and between Hindus and Muslims through music. He was a great lover of music, played musical instruments, sang and composed praises of Hindu deities Saraswati and Ganapati. He wrote the book Kitab-E-Navras (Book of Nine Rasas) in Dakhani. It is a collection of 59 poems and 17 couplets. According to his court-poet Zuhuri, he wrote it to introduce the theory of nine Rasas, which occupies most important place in Indian aesthetics, to acquaint people who were only brought up in Persian ethos.

One of the most artistic and eclectic regional sultans was Ibrahim Adil Shah II of Bijapur, who ruled between 1580 and 1627. He was a highly accomplished musician, poet and composer. His Kitab-i Nauras is a collection of his dhrupad songs in various ragas. According to the well-known poet Zuhuri, who wrote a preface to the work, the sultan’s purpose in compiling the songs was to inform the Muslim nobility about the profound quality of Indian aesthetics. Ibrahim Adil Shah’s love for music is perhaps best illustrated in the paintings where he is portrayed playing various musical instruments. In the best-known portrait the left-handed sultan, wearing a typical Hindu rosary round his neck, plays his favorite tambur ‘Moti Khan’. [slide 10] Three musicians assist him by clapping their hands to accent the rhythm. Zuhuri reports that:

when the Sultan took the [tambur] and sat in a posture of playing on it, his courtiers bowed down before it, made obeisance and paid a respectful homage to it.

This wonderful five-stringed tambur is not a regular long-necked lute and has a shape very different from the Persian-style tanbur. The large wooden pear-shaped body, flat in the front, has a central sound-hole in the soundboard. Clearly, the sultan’s unique instrument was designed by (or for) him and built by a master instrument maker. He was a lyrical poet and a writer of epics and plays. Ibrahim Adil Shah was the moving spirit behind the famous Ragamala painting.

The musical syncretism achieved by Ibrahim Adil Shah II and other Deccani sultans is beautifully represented in an extraordinary painting, which appears in an illustrated manuscript of Zuhuri’s poem Sakinama. [slide 11] This text was compiled in 1685, seventy years after the poet died. In the miniature we see a real or imaginary ensemble consisting of twelve musicians playing Persian and Indian musical instruments. There are only three indigenous instruments: a sarangi-like bowed lute, a dholak and a bin. The foreign instruments are the kamancha, rabab, qanun, daf, chang, musiqar (or panpipes), nay and tanbur. The musical bowls may be either Persian (saz-i kasat) or Indian (jaltarang).

This painting raises several questions. Was this a typical performance configuration? Or did the artist depict this remarkable ‘cross-cultural’ ensemble because he wanted to emphasize the musical eclecticism in the Deccan? In any case, panpipes rarely appear in Indian paintings, and musical bowls are even more singular. To my knowledge, this is one of the few Indian paintings showing such an instrument. The presence of the harp is also puzzling. In the thirteenth century it was the foremost Indo-Persian instrument, but by the mid seventeenth century it is rarely seen in Indian paintings, and when portrayed it usually refers to an episode from history or a legend. Perhaps the continuing reference to the harp in Indo-Persian poetry is a key to its appearance here.

arly South Indian dialect of Urdu) marasi. Although Persian marasi of Muhtasham Kashani were still recited, the Adil Shahi and Qutb Shahi rulers felt the need to render the Karbala tragedy in the language of common Muslims. In the Adil Shahi and Qutb Shahi kingdom of Deccan, marasi flourished, especially under the patronage of Ali Adil Shah and Muhammad Quli Qutb Shahmarsiya writers themselves, and poets such as Ashraf Biyabani. Urdu marasi written during this period are still popular in South Indian villages. One such marsiya expresses the pathos of the moment when Imam Hussain's loved ones bid him farewell:
Farewell, O King of martyrs, (Alwidayu)
Farewell, O Ruler of both worlds,
..................................
Mustafa [the Prophet] mourns for you in Paradise,
like Yaqub mourned in the aftermath of his separation with Yusuf.[11]
The Yaqub-Yusuf motif,[12] which by no means is restricted to marsiya, recurs over and over in this genre since the son of Imam Hussain, Ali Akbar, was supposedly as handsome as the Qu'ranic Yusuf, and since the Imam's distress after the martyrdom of his son was analogous to Yaqub's sorrow after his son parted from him. The North Indian marsiya writers used similar motifs and metaphors when the centre of Urdu literature moved to the North after the kingdoms of the Deccan were annexed by the Mughals.
As Mughal power began to wane in the aftermath of the rule of Aurangzeb (1706), other autonomous Muslim powers sprung up in India. The Navabs of Avadh, Twelver Shi'is and patrons of Urdu literature and poetry, provided auspices for the sublimation of the marsiya genre in North India.

URDU POETRY
Urdu was ordered to be used as an official language by Ibrahim Adil Shah II of Bijapur (1580-1672) and was in use In Golcunda also at the time of Abdullab Qutb Shah (1626-1672). The language was known in the Deccan as Hindavi or Deccani right up to the dissolution of Adil Shahi kingdom in 1686 and the Qutb Shahi kingdom a year later.
URDU POETRY can be broadly divided into three eras. The first period was that when Urdu had the Hindu imprint on it. There are several hundred poets belonging to that period, and the prominent names include Quli Qutab Shah (1580-1611), Hassan Shauki, Ali Adil Shah Sani Shahi, and Shahi Bejapuri. In that period, Urdu was called "Rekh'tah" (Dialect of women). These earliest poets followed the style of Hindu poetry where a woman's feelings were expressed in a woman's idiom. I am using the term Hindu instead of Hindi because while Muslims also inhabited the Sub-continent (Hindustan) at that time, the poetry predominantly reflected the Hindu way of life, bearing their religious teachings and culture.

Like any other movement, feminism bears a variety of ideas. There is no single feminist ideology. The divisions commonly accepted among feminist ideologies do not make the views of these feminist poetesses different or contradictory. There are infinite similarities in different feminist assertions. The fundamental and basic ideas and concepts are shared among all of them. The definition that covers all feminist beliefs and attitudes, as given by David B. is as follows.