Bhagamati ( Hyder Mahal), also known as Bhagyawati,
Popular narrative
Bhagmati was born in 'Chichlam' (a location yet to be identified with certainty) to a
Hindu family; she was a local
nautch-girl.
Qutb Shah met her whilst out for a ride, fell so deeply in love that he constructed the
Purana pul bridge to ensure he could meet with her regularly, and entered into a marriage.
He founded a city at her birth-place and named it Bhaganagar or Bhāgyanagar in her honor.
After she converted to
Islam and adopted the title
Hyder Mahal, the city was renamed
Hyderabad.
Scholarly debates
That
Purana pul was completed in 1578 after 2 years of construction; Qutb Shah (b:1566) was romancing Bhagmati as young as ten years.
Furthermore, no tomb was built over her last remains unlike other leading female figures of the court; no inscription or coin of that period mentions her name.
The chroniclers who mentioned of her were either from North of the Sultanate, who did not visit Hyderabad or foreigners, who arrived long after her death; contemporary Deccani sources including Qutb Shah himself don't mention of her at all.
The conferral of 'Hyder', an immensely sacred Islamic attribute on a nautch-girl has been doubted as well.
All these cast significant doubts on the authenticity of Bhagmati's existence.
Some however assert that the historicity of multiple sources can't be rejected as hearsay due to their foreign nature, sources exist in that the State Museum in Public Gardens has a portrait of her commissioned around 1750, and that her conspicuous absence from Deccani sources were a result of damnatio memoriae.
