The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c30.s1.5

Language: English

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It was at Gaur, or Lakhnāutī, the former capital of the rich Pāla and Sena dynasts, where the Muslims established their seat of government, that their first building operations in Bengal were started. Mosques, palaces and the like they must have provided for themselves immediately after their arrival, doubtless by appropriating and, if necessary, ruthlessly despoiling the buildings of the Hindus; and before twenty years had elapsed we hear of the Sultān Ghiyās-ud-dīn (Hisām-ud-dīn ‘Iwaz) constructing raised causeways across the low marshy country to serve as military roads, and erecting a madrasah, caravansarais and other edifices at his capital. Curiously enough, however, it is not at Gaur, but at Tribenī in the Hughlī District, that the oldest remains of Muslim buildings have survived. These are the tomb and mosque of Zafar Khān Ghāzī. The former is built largely out of the materials taken from a temple of Krishna, which formerly stood on the same spot, but is now so mutilated as to have lost most of its architectural value. The neighbouring mosque is reputed to have been built, at any rate in its present form, during the reign of Sultān ‘Alā-ud-dīn Husain Shāh (1493–1518)¹. Be this date correct or not, the mosque is certainly much later than the neighbouring tomb; but framing the central mihrāb, and obviously transferred here from some older monument, is a stone border bearing an Arabic inscription which records the conquest of Southern Bengal by Zafar Khān in A.D.

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1298 during the reign of Sultān Rukn-ud-dīn Kai-kāūs. Slightly later than these remains at Tribenī is the Sālik mosque at Basīrhāt in the Twenty Four Parganas, which was founded originally in A.D. 1305, but has been completely renovated in modern times. With these unimportant exceptions, however, the history of this Bengal style is a blank until we come to the reign of Sikandar Shāh (1358–89), and by a strange coincidence the first monument that we then meet—the far-famed Ādīna *Masjid* which the Emperor erected in the new capital of Pāndua—was also the most ambitious structure of its kind ever essayed in Eastern India. In area, this *masjid* was almost as big as the Great Mosque of Damascus¹: 507½ feet from north to south by 285½ from east to west. But though it was regarded in Bengal as one of the ‘Wonders of the World,’ its design was far from being worthy of its size. Imagine an immense open quadrangle, more than twice as long as it was broad, bounded on its four sides by arched screens, every archway (and there were 88 in all visible from the court) identical with its fellows and every one surmounted by an identical dome, with nothing to relieve the monotony of the whole save a single archway which, rising higher and wider than the rest, fronted the vaulted *līwān* in the middle of the western side.

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Even the domed gateways, which usually interrupt the long lines of cloisters, are absent, the only entrances into this remarkable masjid being two small doorways in the back wall for the use of the king, a small arched opening for the public in the middle of the east side, and another public entrance, probably added as an afterthought, at the south-east corner. Imagine, too, the interior of the cloisters divided into 375 bays—five deep on the western and three deep on the other sides—each a replica of its neighbour and each roofed by a precisely similar dome, with no variation whatsoever except where a royal gallery (*bādshāh-kā-takht*) extending over eighteen bays in the northern wing of the prayer chamber is carried on ponderous pillars of Hindu pattern. Surely no place of worship was ever devised of such magnitude and with so little sense for the beautiful! Considered by themselves, the several parts and the details are admirable enough: the arcaded aisles, for instance, are dignified; the vaulted *līwān* is well proportioned and pleasing and the mihrāb is as exquisite a piece of carving as can be found in India. But no amount of perfection in its parts can compensate for the lack of organic composition and due proportion in the economy of the whole. Its design, as Cunningham rightly observed, is more suitable for a caravansarai than a mosque. It is monotonous and commonplace.

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Fortunately for the Bengal school, the experiment of building on so gigantic a scale was not afterwards repeated, and though the charge of monotony could legitimately be brought against some other members of the same group, the defect is never so glaringly apparent as it is in the Ādīna *Masjid*.