Journey
Bengal — sultanate, delta and nawabi
Bengal has no building stone, so it built in brick and faced it — first with stone robbed from older temples, then with terracotta plaques moulded by the thousand. Three hundred years of independent sultanate, then a nawabi century, then Plassey; and the rivers moved the capitals as often as the dynasties did.
Stops (12)
- Gaur (Lakhnauti) · Gaur — the capital on a dead river
The sultanate's principal seat on an old course of the Ganges: brick mosques, gateways and a minar spread over several square kilometres of what is now farmland in Malda, with the international border running through the site. Abandoned after the river shifted and an epidemic in 1575, and quarried for two centuries afterwards.
- ʿAlāʾuddīn Ḥusain Shāh · ʿAlāʾuddīn Ḥusain Shāh — the vernacular court
The sultan under whom independent Bengal was largest, whose administration employed Hindus at the top — Rupa and Sanatana Goswami were his officers before they resigned to follow Chaitanya — and whose house's patronage produced the first Bengali Ramayana and Mahabharata. He is the reason Bengali has a literature.
- Pandua (Firozabad) · Pandua — the other capital
The twin seat forty kilometres north, occupied alternately with Gaur as the river and the dynasties moved, holding the Adina mosque and the Eklakhi tomb — the first square brick-domed tomb in Bengal and the model for everything of the kind that followed.
- Adina Mosque, Pandua · Adīna Masjid — the largest mosque in India
Sikandar Shah's mosque of 1373, a vast hypostyle hall on the Damascus model with three hundred and seventy domes, built substantially from stone robbed out of earlier Hindu and Buddhist temples — some of it still carved and visible in the walls, laid face-inward or sideways.
- Khān Jahān ʿAlī · Khān Jahān ʿAlī — clearing the delta
The governor or saint — the sources make him both — who cleared mangrove on the Sundarbans fringe, dug tanks, cut roads and built some sixty mosques. His method is how Bengal's delta was actually settled and converted: a land grant, forest clearance, a tank, a mosque, and a cultivating population that followed.
- Sixty Dome Mosque, Bagerhat · The Sixty Dome Mosque, Bagerhat
The centrepiece of Khalifatabad, with seventy-seven domes on sixty pillars despite the name, built in brick with walls two metres thick and a floor that was designed to be washed by the tank beside it. It is the largest mosque of the sultanate period outside the capitals.
- Bengal terracotta temple facing · The terracotta facing
Brick temples faced entirely in moulded plaques, tens of thousands to a building — Ramayana and Krishna scenes alongside hunts, ships, Portuguese soldiers, horses and hookahs. The curved chala roof copies the thatched bamboo hut, which is the only Indian temple form taken from vernacular housing.
- Bishnupur · Bishnupur — the Malla temples
The Malla capital's brick temples of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, faced in terracotta and roofed in the chala and ratna forms, built by a small state that had made its accommodation with the Mughals and spent the peace on architecture, music and the Dashavatar playing cards it still makes.
- Kantajew Temple, Dinajpur · Kāntajew Temple, Dinajpur
A 1752 navaratna temple in what is now Bangladesh, every surface of it faced in terracotta plaque — reckoned the finest of the type, and late enough that its panels include Company-period costume and European ships alongside the epics. Its nine towers were lost in the 1897 earthquake.
- Murshidabad · Murshidabad — the nawabi capital
Murshid Quli Khan moved the Bengal capital here in 1717, and for forty years it was the richest city the Company had ever traded in — silk, cotton, saltpetre, and the Jagat Seth banking house that financed both sides. Clive said it was as extensive, populous and rich as London.
- Katra Masjid, Murshidabad · Katra Masjid — the founder under the stairs
Murshid Quli Khan's mosque of 1723, a large brick caravanserai-mosque with corner towers, under whose entrance stairway he had himself buried so that worshippers would walk over his grave. He had been a Brahmin converted as a boy in Persia, and he built the revenue system the Company later inherited.
- Hazarduari, Murshidabad · Hazārduāri — the palace the Company built
A Greek-revival palace of 1837 designed by Duncan MacLeod of the Bengal Engineers for a Nawab Nazim who had no revenue, no army and a British Resident — a thousand doors, of which several hundred are false. It is the most complete architectural statement anywhere of what a pensioned dynasty was.