Place · Mughal terraced garden · India
Pari Mahal, Srinagar
Also known as Pari Mahal, Palace of Fairies
A seven-terraced garden on the Zabarwan range above Chashme Shahi, built by Prince Dara Shikoh around 1650 as a school of Sufi learning for his teacher Mullah Shah Badakhshi, and later used as an observatory. The terraces step down a stony slope with no running water above them, so the arcaded niches at the base of each wall were used as tanks collecting snowmelt — a dry charbagh adapted to a Himalayan hillside. From the top terrace the whole Dal Lake and the Srinagar valley lie in one frame.
- Date
- 1650–None
- Function
- Learning & scholarship
- Patron dynasty
- Mughal
- River basin
- Jhelum
- Tradition
- Dara Shikoh papers; Mughal garden historiography (Dickie, Begley); ASI Srinagar circle records.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 34.079, 74.865
Worth knowing
Pari Mahal — the Palace of Fairies — is the only Mughal garden in Kashmir built as a hilltop sulook rather than a lakeside pleasure ground. Dara Shikoh's execution by Aurangzeb in 1659 cut short his Kashmiri project of translating Hindu and Islamic metaphysics into one Sufi conversation; the garden was his working school for that effort.
Connections (2)
- Site withinSrinagar
Pari Mahal is the hilltop Sufi school and terraced garden Dara Shikoh built in 1650 above Chashme Shahi on the Zabarwan range at Srinagar's southeastern edge. From its top terrace the whole Dal Lake, the old city and the Hari Parbat fort read as one frame — the garden was chosen as a view-point over the city as much as a school within it.
- FoundedDara Shikoh
Dara Shikoh built the Pari Mahal — the Palace of Fairies — in 1650 on the Zabarwan range above Chashme Shahi at Srinagar, as a terraced garden and Sufi school for his teacher Mullah Shah Badakhshi. The seven terraces look out across the Dal Lake, the Hari Parbat fort and the old city at once; the school he founded there was his working institutional base for the Sufi-Vedantic conversations he was conducting with Qadiri shaikhs and with Brahmin pandits.