The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c30.s1.36

v3.c30.s1.36

What has been said above about Rājputāna and Central India is equally true of other parts of the Peninsula, where the Muslim power established itself. In the cities of Hindūstān which were subject to the Imperial Sultanate there are many edifices that help to supplement and illumine the history of the Delhi style. At Badaun, for example, in the United Provinces, the name of the Emperor Shams-ud-dīn Iltutmish is still kept alive by three monuments: the *Hauz-i-Shamsī*, the *Shamsī-‘Idgāh* and the *Jāmi‘ Masjid*, the first two of which were probably founded by him during his governorship of the Province between A.D. 1203 and 1209, and the third in 1223, twelve years after he had ascended the throne of Delhi. Besides being one of the most ancient, the *Jāmi‘ Masjid* at Badaun is also one of the largest and most massive mosques in India, measuring 280 feet from north to south and constructed up to a height of twelve feet mainly of sandstone blocks plundered from Hindu temples. But, restored and renovated as it has been from time to time, there is little except its general form that can now be ascribed to the time of Iltutmish¹. Thus, the older parts of the arcaded cloisters round the quadrangle and the tapering turrets engaged in their outside quoins are evidently part of a restoration effected in 1326 during the reign of Muhammad Shāh Tughluq while the domes over the prayer chamber were rebuilt in their present shape during the reign of Akbar, having perhaps been destroyed in the great fire which swept Badaun in 1571–72. Even the eastern gateway which is figured in Sir A. Cunningham’s report for 1875–76,¹ and which was then the one truly authentic part of the original structure still surviving, has since been dismantled, and the rest of the structure has been sadly modernised. The village of Rāprī, again, not far from Shikohābād, boasts of an imposing *‘Īdgāh* which was built in A.D. 1311 during the reign of ‘Alā-ud-dīn Khaljī; and at Fathābād in the Hissar District of the Punjab stands the well-known mosque and pillar on which the lineage of Fīrūz Shāh Tughlaq—the founder of the city—is set forth in an elaborate inscription of *Tughrā* lettering. To the reign of another Tughluq (Mahmūd Shāh II) belongs the *Jāmi‘ Masjid* at Īrich², with its highly ornate mihrab, which was originally built in A.D. 1412 but renovated in the late seventeenth century. Then, when we come to the period of the Lodīs, there is at Kālpi³ in the United Provinces the fine mausoleum known as the *Chaurāsī Gumbaz*—an arcaded structure set in the midst of a cloistered quadrangle—which is reputed to be the resting-place of one of the Lodī kings, but of which one there is no record. At Lalitpur, too, an unpretentious but pleasing example of Lodī architecture is afforded by the local *Jāmi‘ Masjid*, while at Hansi in the Hissar District of the Punjab there is the tile-enamelled tomb of ‘Alī, a structure manifestly referable to the late fifteenth century, though hitherto ascribed to the thirteenth⁴.