Place · sultanate mosque · India
Adina Mosque, Pandua
Also known as Adina Masjid, Adina Masjid — Pandua, Adina Masjid, Pandua, Malda, Pandua, Pandua, Malda, Sikandar Shah of Bengal
The vast 1375 CE mosque at Pandua (Hazrat Pandua) in Malda district, West Bengal, built by Sikandar Shah of the Ilyas Shahi Sultanate of Bengal — the largest mosque of the medieval subcontinent when raised, at 155 metres by 90 metres with 378 prayer bays. The Adina was deliberately scaled larger than the Delhi Sultan's mosques to assert Bengali sultanate autonomy from Delhi. The mosque's barrel-vaulted and corbelled dome construction, pietra dura decoration using reused Hindu temple basalt (showing lotus medallions still visible in the mihrab wall), and the vast open courtyard set the template for Bengali Sultanate architecture. The 1897 earthquake and subsequent neglect have reduced the mosque to a ruin; the mihrab wall and the Badshah-ka-Takht survive. Protected monument.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 25.009, 88.142
Connections (4)
- Site adjacencyGaur (Lakhnauti)
Gaur and Pandua were the Bengal sultanate's twin capitals, about thirty kilometres apart, occupied alternately as the Ganges shifted and as dynasties changed. The Adina mosque at Pandua, built by Sikandar Shah in 1373, was the largest in the subcontinent — a vast hypostyle hall on the Damascus model, built substantially from stone robbed out of earlier Hindu and Buddhist temples, some of it still carved and visible in the walls.
- Architectural modelSixty Dome Mosque, Bagerhat
Two Bengal sultanate mosque programmes, one monumental and one multiplied: the Adina at Pandua, a single vast hypostyle hall meant to answer Damascus, and the Sixty Dome Mosque at Bagerhat, the centrepiece of a whole mosque city founded on the Sundarbans fringe by Khan Jahan Ali. The Adina asserts an empire; Bagerhat settles a frontier, with a saint clearing forest and building tanks and mosques as he went.
- Architectural modelDamascus
The Adina at Pandua was built in 1373 on the plan of the Great Mosque of Damascus — a vast hypostyle hall with a central nave under a barrel vault and a raised royal gallery — and at the time it was the largest mosque in the subcontinent. A Bengal sultan reaching for a Syrian Umayyad model, and building it in brick faced with stone taken out of local temples, is the clearest single statement of what that dynasty wanted to be.
- Site withinPandua (Firozabad)
Adina Mosque, Pandua sits inside Pandua (Firozabad) and forms one piece of its layered sacred, royal or civic landscape. The city carries this entry as one of the sites that make its urban fabric legible — a shrine, monument, institution or craft tradition specifically anchored at this location — and the city's broader history reads better when the stop is seen in its context rather than in isolation. The surrounding streets, markets and other heritage ensembles around it belong to the same single city.
On these journeys
Sources
History of India — Wikipedia
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