The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c30.35

v3.c30.35

Muhammad bin Tughluq, the son of Ghiyās-ud-dīn, was the author of few monuments at Delhi. In the first two years of his reign he founded the small fortress of ‘Ādilābād and the city of Jahānpanāh, and on the transfer of the capital to Daulatābād he must have thrown himself wholeheartedly into the lay-out and construction of his new city, of which more will be said when we come to deal with the monuments of the Deccan. After the failure of his plans in the south, however, he seems to have lost all interest in Delhi, nay, even to have conceived a positive aversion to it, and he did nothing further to beautify or improve it. ‘Ādilābād, which was merely an outwork of the larger city of Tughluqābād and almost identical with it in style, calls for no comment. Jahānpanāh (the ‘World Refuge’) he made by linking up the walls of Old Delhi on the one side and Sīrī on the other and so enclosing the suburbs that had grown up between them. The fortifications themselves of this new city (they are some 12 yards in thickness and constructed of rough rubble in lime) are now all but level with the ground and in some places barely traceable; but an interesting object connected with them is a double-storeyed bridge of seven spans, with subsidiary arches and a tower at each end, which served as a regulator for drawing off the waters of a lake inside the walls. Then, at a little distance within the walls, there is the Bījai Maṇḍal, a terraced tower-like structure which evidently formed part of a small palace and which is noteworthy for the presence of horse-shoe arches, copied somewhat indifferently from Khaljī prototypes, as well as of intersecting vaulting which was afterwards to become a characteristic feature of Tughluq architecture. Lastly, there is, immediately below the Bījai Maṇḍal and probably of about the same age, a square nameless tomb of rough rubble and plaster, crowned by a low Byzantine-looking dome and fenestrated drum, which for beauty of proportions, both inside and out, is unsurpassed by any other example of Tughluq architecture.