Place · madrasa & tomb complex · India
Hauz Khās
Also known as Hauz Khas, Hauz-i Alai, Hauz Khas Complex
Alauddin Khalji's royal tank, and the madrasa, mosque and tomb Firoz Shah Tughlaq built along its edge in the 1350s — an L-shaped teaching complex stepping down to the water, with his own tomb in the angle, and one of the largest madrasas of the Islamic world at the time.
- Function
- Burial and funerary
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 28.554, 77.194
Worth knowing
Timur is said to have camped here in 1398 and to have been impressed by the madrasa. The tank silted and was dry for centuries; the complex now stands at the edge of a nightlife district and is entered through a lane of boutiques and bars.
Connections (4)
- Monument relocationBairāt (Virāṭnagar)
Firuz Shah moved Ashokan pillars to his new Delhi fortress at Kotla, and other Ashokan material has travelled just as far for other reasons — the Bairat Bhabru edict, in which the emperor names the Buddhist texts he recommends to the order, was cut out of its rock in the 1840s and taken to Calcutta, where it sits in the Asiatic Society. Sultans and antiquarians moved the same objects for very different purposes.
- Monument relocationSārnāth
Firuz Shah Tughlaq had an Ashokan pillar hauled from Topra to Delhi in the 1350s, wrapped in silk and reeds and floated down the Yamuna, and set it on his palace roof — he could not read it and had scholars fail to. Six hundred years later the Republic took the lion capital from another of the same emperor's pillars for its seal. Both are appropriations of an unreadable antiquity, made for opposite reasons.
- Site withinDelhi
Hauz Khās lies within Delhi — the two sites sit about 7 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. Hauz Khās is one of the specific sites that give Delhi its layered character, and reads differently when seen as a stop within the larger city rather than as an isolated monument on an open map. The surrounding neighbourhoods, roads and other heritage ensembles belong to the same single urban fabric.
- Founded byAlauddin Khilji
Alauddin Khilji dug the Hauz-i-Alai (later Hauz Khas) reservoir in 1304 to supply the new Siri Fort capital a kilometre to the east — a square tank of some 50 hectares holding monsoon catchment for the dry months. The tank was the subcontinent's largest Islamic reservoir of its period, and the Khilji-period water body around which Firoz Shah Tughlaq would later (1350s) build his madrasa, mosque and tomb complex along the water's edge.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Hauz Khas Complex”. Alexander Cunningham’s Archaeological Survey of India Reports (1871–87); the Archaeological Survey’s conservation files.
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