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ANTHONY WELCH

ARCHITECTURAL PATRONAGE AND THE PAST:

THE TUGHLUQSULTANS OF INDIA

Five centuries after the construction of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, Muslim armies, led by General Qutb ai-Din Aybak under the authority of the Ghurid sultan of Mghanistan, invaded northern India. With their victory in 1192 they initiated an Islamic state that by the beginning of the fourteenth century encompassed nearly all of the Indian Subcontinent, In Muslim eyes it was the beginning of the transformation of Hindustan from the Dar al-Harb into the Dar al-Islam, The change that Muslims were expected to effect was not simply the conquest of the land, the acquisition of wealth for a new ruling class, and the submission of its inhabitants to a new government. It was also incumbent upon them to try to bring the population to Islam and, as part of that process, to alter the appearance of their surroundings f(i) make them conform as much as possible with Islamic values. After five hundred years of architectural activity Islam had developed a rich aesthetic of building forms and decoration, not only in the Islamic heartland of the Middle East, but also in more distant regions, like northeastern Iran and Mghanistan, which had successfully developed indigenous Islamic styles. Thus both the vocabulary and the process of transformation were well established, and these western precedents promised a successful transition from Dar al-Harb to Dar al-Islam in India.

As one of his initial acts, the Ghurid sultan, Mu'iizz alDin ibn Sam (1173-1208) ordered the construction of a jami" masjid on the site of the defeated Rajput prince's fortress and palace in south Delhi. (It is now generally known as the Qutb Mosque or the Quwwat al-Islam Mosque.) While the mosque's plan is a standard hypostyle type with four arcades around a large rectangular central court, it differs in many details from hypostyle mosques in Islamic lands to the West (fig. 1). Its pillars came from twenty-seven Hindu and Jain temples in the Delhi region that were destroyed in the process of yielding materials for the mosque, and this process of destruction for reuse is replicated again and again as Islam expands into new regions of India over the next centuries. The original pillars were richly carved with figural

representations of Hindu and Jain images; these relief sculptures were chiseled away or covered with plaster and subsequently painted and incised with geometric and vegetable decoration. Only some four meters high, the pillars supported arcades with flat roofs and low domes: as can be judged now from the mosque's north, south, and east sides, the interior did not present an appropriately grand appearance, and an imposing fivearched stone screen was erected on the west side, the qibla, to replicate the arched arcades of mosques in Afghanistan and Iran (fig. 2): even its stone was cut to resemble the building bricks of familiar mosques to the north and west. A fourth-century iron pillar, celebrating a victory of the Hindu king Chandra Gupta II and originally topped with an image of Garuda or Vishnu, was either re-erected or left in place in front of the central arch: it was on the axis from the mosque's main (eastern) entrance to the principal mihrab. In a location that could not have been more prominent, the altered Hindu pillar obviously had significant meaning for the Muslim faithful, and it associated Islam not only with India's preceding royal traditions and victories but also with Islam's triumph over them. As Islam's Umayyad caliphs had given prominent place to Sasanian and Byzantine crowns in the Dome of the Rock, their Mu'iizzi successors in Delhi also found pertinent meaning in the emblems of the preIslamic past.

Islam's attention both to its own faithful and to the unconverted populace of the new state is evident, too, in the extensive inscriptional programs on the screen and on the mosque's greatminar (fig. 3): they warn disbelievers of the consequences of their disbelief, they promise the rewards of paradise for those true to the faith, and they repeatedly proclaim the central message and tenets of Islam.'

After 1206 the Delhi Sultanate was independent of Ghurid suzerainty, and for the next 114 years the autonomous Muslim rulers of northern India concentrated their architectural ambitions and attention on this site, which grew to include not only a vastly expanded mosque but also a madrasa, built and maintained with

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Fig. 1. Delhi. Mu'fzzi jami" Masjid (Qutb Mosque). Original sahn, late 12th century.

royal endowment, and royal tombs. A palace and governmental structures, now known only from written sources, were also constructed in the mosque's vicinity. As might be expected in this new northern Indian state, governed by Turks ruling over a population largely Hindu and engaging in regular military campaigns to expand the Dar al-Islam in India, architectural forms insistently turned toward faithful renderings of established, classic Islamic building types. The hypostyle form of the great jami" re-creates a type common throughout the contemporary Islamic world, and the imposition of an arched facade in front of the qibla confirms an essentially conservative attitude toward building in this new environment. The mosque's minar is likewise deliberate in its references to well-established minar forms in Afghanistan like the minar of Djam, built only two decades earlier in the Ghurid homeland. The mausoleum of Sultan Iletmish (1211-36), Qutb al-Dins son-in-law and the second substantial ruler of the Sultanate, is located just to the west of the jami'<s qibla and is a standard cubic and

Fig. 2. Delhi. Mu'iizzi Jamic Masjid. Iron pillar and original qibla screen, late 12th century.

domed tomb type. The rich epigraphic programs of mosque screen, minar, and tomb reinforce this conservative, orthodox, and millitant attitude and serve by their prominence to distinguish even further the new Islamic monuments from the existing Hindu and Jain architectural environment. Even later structures - such as the unfinished minar begun during the reign of cAla) al-Din Khalji (1296-1316) with a design apparently based on the earlier minar; and, on the south side, of a now expanded jami", his 1311 great gate with an exterior surface embellished by red sandstone and white marble that, like Seljuq brickwork in Iran, accentuates the main structural lines of the building (fig. 4) - are constructed so that Islam presents to its faithful, emigrating from the west and northwest, forms that are intrinsically familiar and reassuring in their emphasis on ties to the world of Islam. Building types - mosques, tombs, madrasas, and minars - as well as forms are at the same time also assertively alien to the Hindu majority, and in their strident distinctiveness from indigenous buildings, they

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Fig. 3. Delhi. Mu'iizzi jami" Masjid. Minar, late 12th-14th century.

proclaim Islam's universal aspirations and its distance from the polytheism of the subject population. Both of these themes - reassurance to the faithful and urgent appeals that non-believers accept Islam and abandon their waywardness - are constant messages in the overall inscriptional program of the entire jami". During its first decades the Sultanate was in essence a severely threatened Turkish military occupation, and its struggle to survive against Hindu opposition and recurring feuds within its own ranks was hard and constant. The architectural inscriptions help elucidate the thinking behind the often very substantial efforts made by every early Delhi sultan to obtain formal investiture (often years after they had taken power) from the Abbasid caliphs, whether in Baghdad before 1258 or in Cairo under the Mamluk sultans of Egypt: legitimacy was an overriding issue, and it found expression in multiple ways. Both Qutb al-Din and

Iletmish further stressed their western links by claiming, as had their Ghurid overlords, descent from Iran's legendary pre-Islamic heroes.

Construction crews were Hindu and surely remained so throughout the Sultanate. They had long been accustomed to work for diverse patrons - whether Jain or Shaivite or Vaishnavite, or others - and commissions from the new faith probably did not in themselves occasion particular resentment: obtaining and retaining contracts must have been the overriding concern." But the architectural vocabulary of northern India's Hindus and

. Jains was long and well established, and Islam's own welldefined traditional forms and types did not conform to it. The struggle of artisans to provide their new and demanding patrons with suitable architecture is repeatedly evident. Although arch shapes existed in the carved stone cave temple of central India, the voussoir arch was

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Fig. 4. Delhi, Alai Darwaza. Gate on the southeast side of the jami" Masjid, ca. 131l.

not part of the builders' craft, and the workers did not come to it readily. It is, in fact, not until the I3H (Alai Darwaza (fig. 4) - the gate on the south side of the jami" - that one finds incontestable evidence of the use of the voussoir. Earlier structures, like the jami'i's screen, present modified corbeled arches that testify to the success of the artisans in creating in a novel way the desired shape. Likewise, the domes over the arcades enclosing the mosque's central courtyard were an inventive solution to a new problem: they consist of carved stone caps resting on horizontal stone slabs; but, covered with plaster on the outside, they appeared to be low domes, not dissimilar in profile from the brick domes of twelfth-century Iran and Afghanistan. The minar's balconies are supported by ornate, carved brackets imitating the muqarnas of Islamic buildings to the west. Surface decoration posed less serious problems: India's ornament offered a plenitude of floral and geometric forms that, deprived of their figural associates, could supply satisfactory variations on the arabesques and abstract designs appropriate to Islam's sacred architecture. But though they struck similiar patterns overall, these elements, seen individually, were markedly different: as the Mughal emperor Babur (who also carne from Central Asia) lamented three centuries later in his memoirs, India's landscape, whether in its overall cast or in its particulars, offered little in comfortable familiarity.

The architecture of this early Turkish-dominated period is not eclectic: instead it is obsessed with imposing

an aesthetic that carried comforting meaning for the conquerors. The attempt to replicate the familiar from back home is overriding: it ignores north India's established building types and twists indigenous architectural techniques to accommodate it. The resulting torque is obvious, but not surprising: without such mimetic references the Sultanate would have appeared adrift in an all too new and unfamiliar land.

The bond between Greater Islam and India was broken with the thirteenth-century Mongol invasions and domination of Central Asia, Afghanistan, Iran, and Mesopotamia. The two states successfully resisting the Mongols - Mamluk Egypt and the Delhi Sultanate - became major centers of refuge for Muslims fleeing Mongol domination. Through immigration and some conversion the Muslim population of north India expanded in the second half of the thirteenth century, and the presence of gifted and ambitious foreigners from the west strengthened the kingdom and brought it greater Muslim diversity: refugees came from Arab lands, from Iran, and from Turkish-speaking areas of Central Asia, and they were Shiras and Sunnis of different rites. Islamic rulers and the wider Indian society took on India's traditional attitude in welcoming and assimilating individuals and even whole populations escaping danger or persecution and in giving them rapid advancement. Thus through immigration, intermarriage, and conversion, the Muslim ruling class diversified, and this diversification undermined the compactness and cohesion of the former Turkic ruling class. Separated from what it had perceived as the heartland of Islam and reinforced by this influx of Muslims as well as by the rise to wealth and power of converts from Hinduism, the new state survived the Mongol shock and went on under the energetic and ambitious military leadership of Sultan 'Ala" al-Din Khalji (1296-1316) to expand its borders until they briefly encompassed the greater part of the Indian Subcontinent. The sultan's pan-Indian aspirations required a recognition of the special situation of Islam in India: to govern more than a Muslim military enclave, a king had to function not only as the secular leader of the Muslim community, but also as the ruler of a polyglot and religiously diverse state. Thus he treated defeated Hindu opponents with deference and brought Indiaborn Muslims and Hindus into royal service."

But it is under his successors, the Tughluqs, who ruled from 1320 to 1398, that the Sultanate really came of age: rather than defining their state as an outpost of western Islam, these sultans recognized the distinctiveness of the Indian situation and accepted the political and religious

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Fig. 5.Jahanpana.Jamic Masjid (Begampur Mosque), ca. 1343). View toward the qibla.

fact of a polytheist population and a social system of castes that could not have been more distant from medieval Islam's egalitarian ideals and its celebrated, social mobility. Thus in an odd way it was the very cultural eclecticism of the fourteenth-century Sultanate with its often remarkable openness to non-Muslim culture that marked the maturation of the Islamic state in India. No longer determined to impose a classic style from the lands lying west of the Indus, the Sultanate fostered a new and distinct visual culture, and this culture's salient characteristic in the later Middle Ages was its stylistic and formal acquisitiveness and its apparent passion for experimentation without an attending instinct for synthesis. Under royal patronage so many different building types were tried that any attempt at postulating a clear stylistic evolution is elusive, except through the examination of architectural details like brackets, moldings, and capitals. It is as if the Delhi Sultanate, finally confident in its power and its legitimacy, declared that eclecticism was the mode. No longer promoting a circumscribed aesthetic, patrons opened their arms to India's traditions.

The first ruler of the Tughluq dynasty, Sultan Ghiyath alDin (1320-25), came from the old mold. An immigrant from Khurasan in northeastern Iran and the former governor of Multan in the Indus valley, he brought with him what seems to have been a well-established personal aesthetic, and his ca. 1325 tomb and the 1323 tomb of his predeceased son Zafar Khan at the citadel of Tughluqa-

bad in south Delhi have clear Iranian and Multani prototypes, as do the remains of the citadel itself.

Ghiyath al-Din vigorously expanded the Sultanate to include Bengal. His son and successor Sultan Muhammad Shah (1325-51) had been in charge of victorious military expeditions in central India, and on his accession to the throne he directed campaigns designed to bring the entire Subcontinent under his control. A~ part of this ultimately unsuccessful effort, he established a second capital in South India at Daulatabad. His mother was the daughter of a Hindu aristocrat, and throughout his reign he attempted to broaden the base of his authority by including Hindus in his administration and by emphasizing his own interest in their faith and culture: he knew Sanskrit, was well versed in Hindu scriptures, and even participated in Hindu festivals. A man celebrated for ruthlessness, intellect, and learning, he also had a keen interest in the Arab and Iranian worlds, eagerly sought investiture from and contact with the Abbasid caliph in Cairo, and possessed a keen knowledge of sharifa, fiqh, and cilm.4 The Delhi of the Muiizzi and Khaiji sultans was expanded into a larger capital area that he named jahanpana, and his great jami" (often known as the "Begampur" mosque) was constructed about 1343 under the supervision of his Iranian architect, Zahir al-Din al-Iayush (fig. 5). A multi-domed hypostyle with a large dome and iwan in the center of each of its four sides, it was the first appearance in India of the four-iwan plan, developed and widely used in medieval

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Iran." Like preceding buildings, its core is roughly cut stone and mortar; but where earlier structures had been faced with red sandstone and white marble slabs, the mosque was covered with durable stucco and painted in bright colors. The ruins of his palace to the north of the mosque reflect Hindu, rather than Muslim, influence, however, and are the first visual evidence of a continuing pattern in which the ruling Muslim aristocrats (many of them, like the sultan, with Hindu mothers and Hindu wet-nurses) accommodated easily to Hindu domestic architecture. As in his balancing act between demonstrations of Muslim piety and attentiveness to Hindu faith and customs, his patronage appeared to aim for a middle ground and turned away from the narrow replication of a restricted architectural vocabulary.

His nephew and successor Firuz Shah (1351-88) also had a Hindu mother. Corning to the throne at the age of forty-four, he requested and received formal investiture from the caliph in Cairo, as had his predecessors. Like them, he also undertook military campaigns to the east, west, and south, but unlike them he was not noticeably successful. Under his administration the empire constricted to more manageable boundaries, and he was blessed by relative peace, good harvests, and widespread prosperity throughout his long reign. More orthodox, less intellectually gifted, and more publicly pious than his uncle, he pursued policies that generally tried to embrace government according to the sharr'a and the advice of the ulama along with politic tolerance for Hindus. The historian Shams aI-Din cAfif listed the sultan's principal interests as governing, hunting, and building, and he surpassed all of his predecessors as a patron of architecture."

His patronage was multifaceted. It embraced an attention to reconstruction and restoration of damaged Islamic monuments, and in ~is memoirs he prided himself on his activity: "By the guidance of God I was led to repair and rebuild the edifices and structures of former kings and ancient nobles, which had fallen into decay, from lapse of time, giving the restoration of these buildings the priority over my [own] building works.:" Among those buildings repaired were the 1231 tomb of Iletmish's son Nasir aI-Din Mahmud, the lightning-damaged upper stories of the Mu'iizzi minar at the old Quwwat alIslam jami", and CAl a::> aI-Din Khalji's madrasa at the same site.

Despite his alleged preference for restoration, the sultan was a prolific builder. Chief among his constructions were the cities of Firuzabad (his northern expansion of the Delhi metropolis), Jaunpur, Fathabad, and Hissar;

dozens of mosques, madrasas, khanqahs, caravanserais, governmental structures, gardens, and diverse waterworks are cited by official historians; and rural retreats, probably intended for use during his hunting excursions, are still extant in what would then have been wooded areas outside the city. In construction materials he followed his uncle's lead and moved away from the more somber two-colored aesthetic of the earlier sultans: buildings of his reign are made almost entirely out of rough-cut stone and mortar, faced with stucco that was painted in bold colors.

His building program, supported by the increased revenues of a peaceful and prosperous state, was the most extensive of any Sultanate ruler, and a well-developed bureaucracy was responsible for construction throughout the Sultanate. The ministry of finance (diwan-i vizarat) oversaw all construction projects initiated by the monarch, and the actual work was under the direction of Muslim builders, two of whom are specifically cited:

Malik Ghazi Shahna "held the gold staff [of office]. cAbd al-Haq, otherwise Jahir Sundhar, was deputy and held the gold axe." A clever and qualified superintendent was appoin ted over every class of artisans."

His new capital, appropriately named Firuzabad, was situated on the banks of the Jumna river, and its citadel was begun in 1354 at the conclusion of the sultan's uneventful military campaign in Bengal. Its east side faced the Jumna. The other three sides of the irregular polygon were protected by impressive walls. The buildings within the citadel were singularly lacking in significant ornament or epigraphy," and the impressive traditions of abstract ornament and epigraphy, developed under the Mu'{zzi and Khalji sultans, seem to have been abandoned. While most of the structures in the citadel are too ruinous to be examined, the greatjami" still exists as a shell: its tall walls originally supported a multidorned arcade around a central courtyard (fig. 6).9

Such a classic hypostyle plan appears to conform to the sultan's reputation for orthodoxy. But the mosque's minar emphatically does not (fig. 7). Instead, it stands as the single most remarkable Tughluq building and the greatest oddity of Sultanate architectural history. Located to the north of the mosque and originally linked to the main entrance by a two-story causeway, the minar was a three-storied, stepped building supporting a tall, slender, stone column. The three square levels decreased in size from a base 36.3m. on a side, to a middle level 25.5m. on a side, and an upper level 16.9m. on a side, and the whole structure must have been some 20m. in height. Each terrace consisted of a series of

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Fig. 6. Firuzabad.jami" Masjid, ca. 1354.

vaulted cells surrounding a solid core in the top of which was embedded about 1.2m. of a great stone pillar that extended up for another 13m. The pillar weighed 24.5 metric tons, tapered from a base diameter of 97.5 ern. to a top diameter of 54cm. and was pale orange in color. On the top of the pillar was set a complex capital of colored stones surmounted by a gilded globe and a crescent." The entire upper surface of the third story, in which the pillar was embedded, resting on a solid core of masonry extending through the whole building, was enclosed by a railing and eight domed pavilions; at each of the four corners stood a large stone lion (fig. 8), which presumably represented the sultan who protected Islam, even though this same sultan was ignoring orthodox attitudes against the use of figural art in a sacred context. Contemporary sources give no information about the use to which the vaulted cells were put, but one can assume that the Golden Minar's function and

location necessitated a pious use for the structure. Since the sultan had already completed a massive madrasa at the Hauz Khas a few kilometers to the south, it seems most likely that the building served as a dargah or khanqah.

Its form was unlike anything else in the contemporary Muslim world, and its departure from standard minar types can only be compared in concept to the spiral minars adjoining the ninth-century Great Mosque and the Abu Dulaf Mosque of Abbasid Samarra. It is the first conscious and surely calculated departure from basic Islamic building types in the architecture of the Delhi Sultanate, and in its stepped form it recalls the cosmic mountain of Hindu temple architecture, which the Tughluqs could have easily seen in structures like the fifth-century stepped temple at Harwan, near Srinagar, It prefigures the 1574-86 Panj Mahal palace pavilion at Fathepur Sikri and the early seventeenth-century tomb

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Fig. 7. Firuzabad. Minar-i Zarrin (Golden Minar), ca. 1367. View from the west.

of Akbar at Sikandra. Its history is described in detail by Shams-i Siraj cAfif:

After Sultan Firuz returned from his expedition against Thatta [in 1367) he often made excursions in the neighborhood of Delhi. In this part of the country there were two stone columns. One was in the village of Tobra; the other in the vicinity of Mirat. These columns had stood in those places from the days of the Pandavas, but had never attracted the attention of any of the kings who sat upon the throne of Delhi, till Sultan. Firuz noticed them and with great exertion brought them away. One was erected in the palace at Firuzabad near the rnasjid-i jama': and was called the miruir-i zarrin, or golden column, and the other was erected in the hushh-i shikiir; or hunting palace."

The chronicles deal at greater length with the enormous engineering feat involved in lowering the columns from their original sites, transporting them by land and water many kilometers to Delhi, and re-erecting them there." The multistoried building was designed to support the pillar, and the chronicle goes on:

When the pillar was brought to the palace, a building was commenced for its reception near the Jamie masjid, and the most skillful architects and workmen were employed. It

was constructed of stone and mortar and consisted of several stages. After it was raised, some ornamental friezes of black and white stone were placed round it. ...

The Sirat-i Firiizshdhi makes it clear that the sultan intended that the structure should serve as a minar or mardhana: "After it had remained an object of worship of the polytheists and infidels for so many thousands of years, through the efforts of Sultan Firuz Shah and by the grace of God, it became the miniir of a place of worship for the faithful."

Thus it was evident to Firuz Shah and to those around him that the great stone "Asokan" pillars, which were to be seen in so many areas of northern India, served sacred purposes (fig. 9). While it was not known that many of them recorded official decrees of Mauryan and postMauryan governments, it was obvious that they were viewed as imposing monuments from the past. His pious transformation of this "infidel" object into a minar thus served not only a religious but also a political purpose. Here he had a clear model, however, in the first Delhi sultan's incorporation of the Iron Pillar into the sahn of the Quwwat al-Islam Mosque. Firuz Shah's veneration of his predecessors was pronounced: he not only devoted

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EAS T ELEVATION

Fig. 8. Firuzabad, Minar-i Zarrin, East elevation and cross section. \!,'

energy and expense to the restoration of their buildings, he also took care to include their names in the khutba. His reuse of Qutb al-Diri's original concept was thus also a conscious reference to the founder of the Muslim state in India."

It is apparent as well that Firuz Shah had a consuming interest in the Asokan pillars themselves. Like Timur, who wrote that "he had never seen any monument in all the numerous lands he had traversed comparable to these monoliths," Firuz Shah thought they were wondrous, exotic things, as is evident from the rapture in the verses that begin the description in the Sirat-i Firiizshdhi and that surely reflect the royal viewpoint:

How could they paint it all over with gold that it appears to the people like the golden morning!

Is it the lote-tree of paradise that the angels may have planted in this world or is it the heavenly "sidrah" that the people imagine to be a mountain?

Its foundations have been filled with iron and stone; and its trunk and branches [i.e., shaft and capital] are made of gold and corals."

He put this golden minaret next to his great mosque and let it dominate his personal landscape, visible not only

L

'j

- '.

This pillar, high as the heaven, is made of a single block of stone and tapers upward, being broad at the base and narrow at the top.

Seen from a hundred farsang5 it looks like a hillock of gold, as the Sun when it spreads its rays in the morning.

No bird - neither eagle, nor crane - can fly as high as its top, and arrows, whether Khadang or Khatal, cannot reach to its middle.

If thunder were to rage about the top of this pillar, no one could hear the sound owing to the great distance.

o God! How did they lift this heavy mountain; and in what did they fix it that it does not move from its place?

How did they carry it to the top of the building which Fig. 9. Firuzabad, Minar-i Zarrin. Asokan pillar embedded in the mi-

almost touches the heavens and place it [upright] there? nar.

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Fig. 10. Hissar.jarni" Masjid, Asokan pillar incorporated into the minar, 1356.

from within the citadel but from the city outside the walls and from boats on theJumna river. He put another adjacent to his hunting palace ofJahannuma (the kushh-i shiluir referred to in the text) on the Delhi ridge. Neither was cheap to move. Three others he established in mosques in Hissar (fig. 10), Fathabad, and Jaunpur, but in none of these instances did the pillars rest on elaborate foundations and serve as rnacdhanas.1:1 A, a conscientious ruler, anxious to establish a solid and stable Indian Sultanate, the king apparently found the elevation of these monuments of great pre-Islamic predecessors in India well worth the effort and expense. But in these other sites he did not accord the pillars such pride of place as he did in Firuzabad: the pillar there was the largest and most impressive of them all, and it and its remarkable supporting structure were obviously intended to glorify the monarch in his capital city. But where Qutb al-Din's pillar in the first jami': was truly a trophy celebrating Islam's 1192 victory in north India, Firuz Shah's was not so specific. Like most of his other military campaigns, his expedition against Thatta was not notably

successful. His recapitulation of Qutb al-Din's concept was thus general, rather than specific: even if the Tughluq sultan himself had not won a signal military victory, the acquisition of the pillars and their incorporation into a series of the sultan's buildings was his triumph over India's jahiliyya. As 'Afif reported, the sultan had a passion for building, and his most famous victories were archi tectural.

The reused Asokan pillars were conscious links to the pre-Muslim past of India and to some of its most glorious rulers, though the contemporary accounts indicate that myth and legend, not history, provided the substance for their repute. Thus the visible association between mosque and pillar only made clearer Firuz Shah's ascendancy as a Muslim and as an Indian monarch. The fact that the first Muslim ruler of India, Qutb al-Din, had established the mode for this architectural symbolism only strengthened the associations: Firuz Shah was not only linked with Islam's great past in India" and the Dar al-Islam to the west, he was also symbolically linked with India's pre-Muslim traditions.

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If this explains the function of the building and the pillar on top of it, it does not explain the building's form. It was definitely not a Muslim type, and there is nothing remotely approaching its form in the world of Islam to the west. But then, the task of supporting a pillar of this weight and height had never confronted Islamic engineers and architects before. The multistoried structure surrounding a solid core may owe at least part of its form to such purely practical considerations, as the Sirat-i Firiiz Sh.dhi strongly implies. But the basic model was surely supplied by India's indigenous tradition of the stepped temple.

The use of such local "exotica" was not without precedent, of course. In its formative years Islam had selectively adopted and adapted forms from a rich variety of cultures, and even in the mid-ninth century had used a ca. 1250 B.C ziggurat as the inspiration for the minars of the two mosques at Samarra, despite the fact that there were other, more established minar forms available. Likewise, Firuz Shah had had the splendid minar at the Quwwat al-Islam as a possible model to follow but had instead chosen to look deeply into a little understood but obviously impressive past. Like his Abbasid predecessors he deliberately made a conscious reference to the distinguished but eclipsed past, and through its architec-'''' tural forms the sultan associated himself and his state not only with the Dar al-Islam but also with the Dar alHind and its ancient and still vital culture.

University of Victoria Victoria, British Columbia

NOTES

1. For an analysis of early Sultanate epigraphy, see Anthony Welch, "Qur'an and Tomb," in F. M. Asher and G. S. Gai, eds., Indian Epigraphy: Its Bearing on the History of Art (New Delhi: Oxford University Press and American Institute of Indian Studies, 1985), pp.257-68. An article on the entire epigraphic program of the mosque complex is in preparation. The basic study of the Mu'iizzi jami? Masjid is]. A. Page, An Historical Memoir on the f2,utb: Delhi, Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India, no. 22 (Calcutta, 1926; rpt., New Delhi, 1970).

2. See R. N. Misra, "Artists ofDahala and Daksina Kosala: A Study Based on Epigraphs," in Asher and Gai, Indian npigraphy, pp.185-90, for an examination of associations of builders in the twelfth century.

3. The ulama generally opposed initiatives to include non-Muslims in government and to create policies and practices that would make it easier for non-Muslims to identify with the state. The ulama were not, however, the most powerful force for bringing about conversion to Islam. "The sufis displayed greater dynamism and awareness of the Indian situation and

sought to bridge the gulf between the Muslims and the 1I0nMuslims by throwing their khanqahs open to all sorts of people - Hindus and Muslims - and by propounding a revolutionary concept of religion which identified it with the service of mankind" (K. A. Nizami, State and Culture in Medieval India [New Delhi, 1985]. p.132). The tact that the question whether the Dar al-Hind belonged to the Dar al-Harb or the Dar alIslam remained an often debated and never resolved issue for the ulama in the medieval Sultanate.

4. One of the most important sources for his reign is the North African scholar and traveler Ibn Battuta, who resided at his court from 1334 to 1342.

5. This mosque has been published in Anthony Welch and Howard Crane, "The 'Iughluqs: Master Builders of the Delhi Sultanate," Muqamas 1 (1983): 123-66. Lisa Golombek has suggested that this jarni" should be identified with the building that so impressed Timur when he conquered and sacked Delhi in 1398 that he wanted a similar structure: "I had determined to build a Masjid-i jamiC in Samarkand, the seat of my empire, which should be without a rival in any country; so I ordered that all builders and stone-masons should be set apart for my own especial service" (Timur, Malfuzat-i Timuri, trans. in H. M. Elliot and]. Dowson, The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians, 8 vols. [Allahabad, n.d.], 3: 389-477).

6. The two most important sources for Tughluq history and the reign of Firuz Shah are Diva al-Din Barani, Ta'rikh-i Firuz Shahi (ed. S. A. Khan [Calcutta, 1860-621], and trans. in Elliot and Dawson, History of India, 3: 93-268) and Shams-i Siraj cAfif, Ta'rikh-i Finu: Shahf(Persian text, ed. M. W. Husain [Calcutta, 1890], trans. in Elliot and Dowson, ibid., 3: 374-88), which begins in 1357 where Barani ends. The sultan's own memoirs, the Futuhat-i Firuz Shah (ed. and trans. S. A. Rashid and M. A. Makhdoomi [Aligarh, n.d.], trans. in Elliot and Dowson, ibid., 3: 374-88), are an important source, not only for lists of monuments but for the expression of the sultan's own architectural attitudes. (Barani was keenly aware of the difficulties of maintaining a strictly Islamic government in India and recognized that all laws could not be in accord with the shari'ia.)

7. His second name indicates that he was a convert to Islam. For Tughluq architecture in the Delhi area, see Welch and Crane, "The Tughluqs"; Anthony Welch, "Hydraulic Architecture in Medieval India: The Tughluqs," in Environmental Design 2 (1985) 74-91; T. Yamamoto, M. Ara, and T. Tsukinowa, Delhi:

Architectural Remains of the Sultanate Period, Tokyo Daigaku, Indo Shiseki Chosa Dan, 3 vols. (1. General List of Monuments; 2. Tombs; 3. Waterworks) (Tokyo, 1968-70); R. Nath, A History of Sultanate Architecture (New Delhi, 1978); in Monuments of Delhi (New Delhi, Indian Institute of Islamic Studies, 1979); the same author has also published an abridged English translation of, and commentary on, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan's 1846 Athar al-Sanadid, the first attempt at a comprehensive presentation of Delhi's Islamic architecture. The only study of Sultanate and Mughal monuments in Hissar is Mehrdad and N. H. Shokoohy's admirable Hisar-i Firuza: Sultanate and Early Mughal Architecture in the District ofHisar, India. Monographs on Art, Archaeology, and Architecture, South Asian Series (London, 1988).

8. No record of religious inscriptions on the mosque survives, but it was significantly inscribed, for Firuz Shah reports that a domed pavilion in the mosque's court bore the entire text of

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ANTHONY WELCH

his Futuhat; the text was apparently inscribed around the pavilion's octagonal drum.

9. Two early-nineteenth-century watercolors illustrating the memoir of Sir Thomas Metcalfe in the India Office Library show the mosque and its minar in far better condition (M. M. Kaye, ed., 17w Golden Calm [New York, 1980]. p.133). Timur makes no mention of the minar, though it is hard to imagine that it would not have astonished him.

10. Ancient. symbols of divine might blessing the ruler, the globe and crescent. were to be even more widely used as metaphors of royal power by the Mughals.

11. While Timur does not specifically refer to the minar, he does express his admiration for theAsokan pillars that he saw in northern India.

12. The Sirat-i Firuzshahi (trans. by M. H. Kuraishi in]. A. Page, A Memoir on Kotla FiTOZ Shah, Delhi. Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey ofindia, no. 52 [1937]: 33-34 - Page's study is still the basic monograph on the site) was written by an unidentified author who may have been a member of t.he technical staff responsible for moving the pillar from its old to its new site. Appropriately, he credits the sultan, not only with the initial idea of moving the pillar, but. also with the technical knowledge and planning that made the move possible: "But as he was determined to remove the pillar, [the king] said, 'By the grace of the Creator, who sees and hears everything, we shall remove this lofty pillar and make a minar of it in the Jamie mosque of Firuzabad where, God willing, it shall stand as long as the world endures.' Thereupon his Majesty the King of Islam, who has been adorned and amply endowed by God with all religious and worldly virtues and with sound knowledge and perfect wisdom, himself devised ingenious plans and methods of each operation connected with this achievement." Its detailed description of the engineering is further evidence for the size and expertise of the sultan's architectural establishment.

13. Likewise, the second story of the cast entrance into the Khirki Mosque in Delhi, datable to 1351-54, repeat~ the st.ellate flanging of the great minar at the Ouwwat al-Islam mosque. That he chose to make this reference to India's first minar in the first

mosque built under his patronage and not in the minar in his citadel of Firuzabad suggests that he was well aware of the symbolic implications of the Golden Minar and that its placement in the administrative heart of the Sultanate implies a calculated reference to the political necessities ofIndia's special situation.

14. Page, Memoir on Kotla Firaz, p.33. The account in the Simt-i Finizsluihi concludes with a valuable description of the whole structure in its final state: "The King ordered that up to a height of two yards and a half the pillar should be enclosed on each side by six stones placed one above the other, each upper stone being recessed a third of a yard and the whole constructed and arranged like the pedestal of a candlestand. Thus, it would be a further support for the pillar which will be more firmly fixed and, as each upper stone will recede half a yard, it will not detract anything from the height of the monolith .... Then, at the base of the pillar, was laid the pavement of colored stones - white marble, red sandstone, and black stone, which were brought from all parts of the country. '" After this a [covered passage] was built between the mosque and the pillar which latter now stood within the outer enclosure of the mosque."

15. The Firuzabad pillar bears one of the most important Sanskrit inscriptions, listing a number of key Asokan edicts. The more damaged pillar at his hunting palace (known as the Kushk-i Shikar) was brought to Delhi around 1364 from Mirat and bears nearly identical inscriptions. The minar at the ca. 1356 mosque in Hissar incorporates an uninscribed first century A.D. sandstone pillar, 9.23m. in height, and the 3.13m. high pillar in the 1356 mosque at Fathabad is inscribed in Arabic with the genealogy of the Tughluqs (see A. B. M. Husain, 17w Manara in Indo-Muslim Architecture, Asiatic Society of Pakistan Publication no. 25 [Dacca, 1970]).

16. Of this past he was very much aware: he regularly had prayers said for his royal predecessors and even went so far as to seek out and recompense those who had suffered injuries at their hands, so that the dead kings would not suffer unduly in the hereafter.