There is much nervousness in academic circles these days about building episodes of this kind. There are many instances across north India of temple parts having being reused in mosque construction. Historians used to just refer to the stones as ‘spolia’ and move on. But the violent demolition in 1992 by Hindu fanatics of a mosque in Ayodhya that had been built by the Mughal emperor Babur, supposedly on the site of a demolished temple, stirred tensions in Indian society that have still not subsided. The history of Hindu-Muslim relations has itself become a battlefield, contested in the present by various political and religious parties as well as by rival schools of historians. One of the leaders of the Ayodhya temple movement was the same L.K. Advani who ten years later so valiantly recalled Prithviraj to Delhi. Nowadays, while many people believe that Muslim invaders destroyed temples in large quantities, serious historians mostly prefer to play the matter down, suggesting that religious differences in India became marked only during the period of British rule. Any account of history that points to communal divisions is liable to meet with censure in certain academic circles. One historian went so far as to list all the verifiable cases of temple destruction, in an effort to demonstrate that they were few, while running the risk of adding fuel to the fire by pointing out exactly where they were. In my view, it might be more sensible to admit that religious differences sometimes did spark violence in the past, while deploring those who invoke such moments as a model or justification for their own actions now. Some devout Hindus ask, ‘Since the Muslims destroyed so many temples, may we not rebuild just one?’ But no one would stop at one. Those who seek to redress the past allow themselves to be enslaved by it.
Reused temple columns in the aisles of the Quwwatu’l-Islam, postcard by H.A. Mirza & Sons c. 1910
An earlier response to the religiously inspired architectural aggression of Qutb-ud-din—a response that is no more satisfactory than pretending it doesn’t exist—was to turn the whole matter round and claim that the Qutb Minar was built not by Qutb-ud-din at all but by the defeated Prithviraj Chauhan. This line of thought gained adherents with the rise of Indian nationalism in the late nineteenth century. Various specious arguments were advanced to show how its features conformed to early Rajput architecture, an exercise that involved overlooking its much closer resemblance to prototypes in Afghanistan. An unlikely early proponent of the theory—writing in his youth in the 1840s and trying to be non-partisan—was Syed Ahmad Khan, later to emerge as an influential Muslim reformer and educator.
In one sense—though not in the sense they mean—those who challenge the identity of particular buildings have a point in this case. If Qutb-ud-din, by building his mosque out of dismantled temples, intended a gesture of mastery and control, then it rebounded on him as the temple columns give the mosque a decidedly Indian character. The colonnades do not look like parts of a mosque in any other country where Islam had spread. Some such thought seems to have struck Qutb-ud-din (or some think his successor) because a screen of high-pointed arches, modelled on the buildings of Seljuq Persia, was added as an afterthought across the front of the prayer hall, screening some of the columns from view. The idea seems to have been that inserting a row of pointed arches across the western side, towards which the devout faced while at prayer, would make the whole thing look less like a temple and more like a mosque.
Up to a point, it does, but even this revision was not entirely satisfactory. The arches may have the pointed outline that is distinctive of Islamic architecture worldwide, but the technology of arch construction was little known, if at all, in India at this time, and the Indian masons employed to do the job used their own traditional trabeate (post and beam) system. The arches are composed not of voussoirs (wedge-shaped pieces arranged like a fan) but of horizontal layers of stone, carved into shape. Variations in the colour of the stone make this visible even on a casual inspection from the ground. As a result, the screen may be more Islamic in appearance than the rest of the mosque, but it is still Indian in method.
Approaching the screen reveals Indian hands in another respect: it is covered in carved ornamentation. Much of it—notably the swirling organic scrolls—is derived from designs customarily used in temples; not in this case plundered from actual earlier temples but made new and adapted to a new purpose. Around the arches run Quranic inscriptions. The masons have faithfully copied a calligraphic model, but they have not been able to resist adding their own flourishes, filling every available gap with scrolling creeper and bursting bud. The Arabic letters sprout Indian flora.
This early beginning set the tenor for all subsequent sultanate and Mughal architecture. The patrons might have looked beyond India’s borders for inspiration or for building specialists, but they also engaged, willingly or by necessity, with Indian conditions: its climate, its building materials and the expertise of its craftsmen. This gives the Islamic buildings of India a distinctive aesthetic, despite their many similarities with the buildings of Persia and elsewhere. The architecture of the deserts of central and west Asia—composed of brick and tile—is translated on India’s fertile plains into an architecture of richly carved stone, worked by Indian expert hands.
The core of the Qutb complex—the courtyard and the tower begun by the conquering general, Qutb-ud-din—is surrounded by the extensions added by his successors. Even the Qutb Minar was a joint venture. Qutb-ud-din completed only the lowest storey and the remainder—up to an original total of four—was contributed by his successor, Iltutmish, in the early thirteenth century. Through the course of the fourteenth century, the tower was struck by lightning more than once. After one such episode, in 1368, Sultan Firuz Shah Tughluq dismantled the damaged top storey and replaced it with two more, raising the total to five. He introduced white marble for the first time, perhaps to make it harmonize with the Alai Darwaza, the grand gateway that stands nearby, which had been built in 1310 by Alauddin Khalji.
Even then it was not complete. An aquatint by the English topographical artists Thomas and William Daniell, based on drawings they made on site in 1789, shows a cupola on the top. The minar was again struck by lightning in 1803, the year the British took possession of Delhi, and the cupola was destroyed.
Some years later, in the 1820s, a military engineer named Robert Smith was put in charge of Delhi’s historic monuments, and he began to think about restoring them. Smith was an able draughtsman who had long been sketching Indian buildings. During a spell of leave in Britain, he met William Daniell and was evidently impressed: his own later artistic work shows the influence of the Daniells, as it is more ambitious in scale and focuses on grand architectural scenes. He took advantage of his posting in Delhi to paint large canvases of the city’s major sites including the Purana Qila and the Quwwatu’l-Islam. He lived in an apartment within the old city walls with his Indian bibi, and counted among his friends James Skinner, the founder of Skinner’s Horse, for whom he prepared the original designs for St. James’s Church at Kashmiri Gate. From time to time, Smith was called on to exercise his military skills: during the siege of Bharatpur in 1826, he laid the mine that blew the fort. But back in Delhi, his mind turned towards preservation.
It troubled him that the Qutb Minar lacked a top, so he had a stone pavilion specially designed in what he thought was an authentic period style and had it placed on the tower, surmounted in turn by a wooden canopy and a flagpole. From the outset this embellishment was controversial. Many people, from the governor general downwards, derided it, while Smith stoutly defended it. He pointed out that since no detailed records of the original survived, its appearance must be a matter of guesswork. Fair point, said his critics, but one thing we can be sure of: your guess is wrong. The traveller Fanny Parks compared the wooden canopy to a Chinese umbrella and was delighted when, during yet another storm, ‘lightning struck it off, as if indignant at the profanation’. The stone part survived a little longer but was eventually dismantled in 1848. It was then reconstructed at the edge of the lawn to the south-east of the minar,
where it remains today—a pretty but slightly forlorn and neglected little folly. With its fluted columns and curved chajjas, the pavilion’s late-Mughal style might be deemed incongruous, but the criticism is pedantic because the construction of the minar has a long history, stretching beyond any one period.
Even without Smith’s pavilion in place, the lofty grandeur of the Qutb Minar exceeds the expectations of most visitors. Emily Eden, the acerbic sister of Governor General Lord Auckland, developed a finely tuned style of put-down for most Indian things, but when she came to the Qutb Minar in 1838, she exclaimed, ‘Well of all the things I ever saw, I think this is the finest.’ She felt ashamed that she had not heard of it before and concluded, ‘I do say it is rather a pity we were so ill taught.’ As one of Delhi’s finest landmarks, it does indeed deserve to be better known outside of India.
Back in the courtyard of the Quwwatu’l-Islam mosque—and featuring in one of Smith’s paintings of the scene—is an object of greater antiquity. It predates the sultans, though it does perhaps tell us something about their ideas concerning power and history. It is an iron pillar, over twenty-three feet high, planted in front of the central arch of the prayer hall’s screen. Its unblemished shaft is surmounted by a bulbous capital and other ribbed and fluted mouldings. An inscription in Sanskrit helpfully informs us that it is a standard of Vishnu, raised on Vishnupada hill by King Chandra. The first part is easily interpreted. A high pillar is sometimes raised as a standard in front of a Hindu temple to support an image of the vehicle of the god to whom the temple is dedicated. Such pillars are still common in Kerala, for example, where they are often plated in copper or brass. In this case, a neat hole in the top of the column shows where an image of Vishnu’s vehicle—the eagle Garuda—was once attached. King Chandra has been identified as Chandragupta II (r. 375–413), making the pillar some 1600 years old—an age that causes metallurgists to marvel at the absence of rust. There is no agreement on where Vishnupada was, except that it was not in Delhi.
So this remarkable object is an imported antique, hauled to Delhi, according to bardic sources, by the Tomar Rajputs. Their veneration for it seemed to have impressed the early sultans who promptly appropriated it and set it up in the middle of their mosque. One may assume that the sultans did not see it as a standard of Vishnu, but they knew it was something old and special, and a symbol of reverence. And even though they were concerned to have their deeds recorded for posterity by wordy historians, they addressed the population around them by more visual means. Holding the column demonstrated authority.
That line of thought perhaps gave rise to the superstition that if you can stand with your back to the column, pass your arms around it and clasp your hands together, then you will live a long life. Parties of people laughing as they took their turn were once a common sight. But the pillar’s current official custodian—the Archaeological Survey of India—has unsportingly erected a protective fence to stop this harmless custom.
Behind the ruined prayer hall, to the north-west, is the tomb of the second sultan, Iltutmish (d. 1236). The form of the tomb follows a type that had long been established in west Asia: a single square hall, with entrances on the south, east and north sides but closed on the west side by a mihrab: a niche that indicates the direction of Mecca. The hall was covered by a large dome which has collapsed—like the arches of the mosque screen, it would have been built on the trabeate system which is just not strong enough for a fully rounded dome on this scale. So the hall stands open to the sky. The sarcophagus, raised on a platform, occupies the centre of the building and is laid out on a north-south axis. The sarcophagus is visually very prominent—as one might expect—which makes it all the more surprising to realize that here (as is often though not always the case) it is empty; the sarcophagus you see is a dummy and the real one lies in an underground burial chamber directly below. The head of the staircase down to the lower chamber is located just outside the building, to the north.
The essentials of this arrangement—the domed square hall, the three openings, the mihrab, the orientation, the sarcophagus and the crypt—can all be found in earlier tombs in central and west Asia. An early prototype, for example, is the tomb of Ismail the Samanid at Bukhara (c. 900). This is in fact open on all four sides; it has been suggested that it derives in turn from pre-Islamic fire temples. The fully developed form can be seen in the tomb of the Seljuq Sultan Sanjar at Merv (c. 1157). The builders of Iltutmish’s tomb have clearly imported this ready-made type. Their successors in India were to retain all the essential components, even as they elaborated them into the most complex of forms. Sometimes the hall is octagonal rather than square, but all the other components are always there, whatever else is added. A single core concept links Iltutmish’s tomb to the Taj Mahal built some four centuries later, and to every Muslim tomb in India in between.
What distinguishes Iltutmish’s tomb from its west Asian sources is the profusion of rich ornament carved in stone over almost every surface. As in the mosque, the material and its treatment are the mark of the Indian craftsman’s hand. The ornament mixes Quranic inscriptions with patterns, mouldings and motifs—like the lotus bud—that the masons were accustomed to using when carving temples.
Some other additions to the mosque—extensions to the courtyard and a new entrance to the south—date from the early fourteenth century, nearly a hundred years later (and are discussed in the next chapter). They show how the mosque founded by the first sultan continued in use for a long time under his successors. Indeed, despite the removal of the court to the other forts built by successive dynasties, the tomb of Imam Zamin, built in 1537 next to the Alai Darwaza, indicates that there was a resident imam here until the early Mughal period. After that the whole site seems to have become a graveyard, evident from the sheer number of graves all around, with some situated in places where they would be inconvenient for the people who came to pray, such as the central courtyard.
By the time Robert Smith and his critics came on the scene, the mosque had long ceased to be a place of active worship. The presence of a small formal garden with a late-Mughal-style mosque, set aside near the modern entrance to the complex, suggests that by the eighteenth century the site had become just a place for members of the court to visit. They had need of a modern mosque while visiting an antique one because the antiquity could no longer be used, only seen. Many of the Mughal emperors from Babur onwards were avid architectural tourists. They visited historic monuments out of curiosity and to pass the time, much as we do today.
From the outset, the architecture of the Delhi Sultanate was an act of syncretism and assimilation. Similar things might be said about the Delhi sultans’ approach to governance. Ethnically, they were Turkish (descended from tribes which had migrated into central Asia), but culturally they belonged to the wider Persian world, and they looked westwards for models of kingship. They assiduously read the classic Persian national epic, the Shah Nama, the ‘book of kings’. They planned their courts on the Persian model, observing Persian customs and ceremonies, such as the celebration of Nowruz, the Persian new year. But at the same time they were tolerant, even respectful, of Hindu cultural traditions, and some Hindu festivals such as Holi, in spring, were also celebrated at court. They were operating in a terrain that was on the fringes of what they considered the civilized world and adapted themselves accordingly.
A case in point is their attitude to legitimacy. They had conquered a non-Muslim land by force of arms, but they made no attempt to convert the population forcibly. On the other hand, they sought to establish their right to rule by reference to authorities in the wider Muslim world. Qutb-ud-din, even while elevating himself to sultan, requested and received symbols of kingship, including the royal parasol, from the descendants of Muhammad of Ghur. His own successors went further, obtaining the necessary legal investiture from the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad. To regard themselves as kings they needed to know that they were seen as such within Islamic law, by the highest Muslim autho
rity. But the day-to-day exercise of their power naturally meant interacting with many Indians who were not Muslims and including them in the administration. It would have been impossible, for example, to manage agriculture and taxation without local knowledge and support.
Qutb-ud-din made the transition from general to administrator with great dedication, and he was admired by contemporary chroniclers both for his piety and for his conspicuous generosity. His one diversion from work was chaugan—the precursor of polo—and it proved fatal: after serving just four years as sultan, he died in an accident while playing the game in Lahore.
He was succeeded by his son-in-law, Iltutmish (r. 1210–36), who seems to have been something of a mystic, much given to meditation and conversing with Sufi saints. But he did not neglect his duties, and considered the dispensing of justice the most important among them. Adopting a Persian custom, he ordered that anyone with a grievance should wear a particular dyed garment when attending court, so that on seeing him the sultan would immediately know there was some matter to be addressed. The famous Muslim historian and traveller Ibn Battuta adds:
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