Place · sultanate cities · India
Sīrī & Jahānpanāh
Also known as Siri, Siri Fort, Jahanpanah, Shahpur Jat
Alauddin Khalji's Siri of about 1303, built to face the Mongols and said to be raised over the heads of eight thousand of them, and Muhammad bin Tughlaq's Jahanpanah of the 1320s, a wall thrown round the space between Siri and Qila Rai Pithora to enclose both. They are the third and fourth of Delhi's cities and they are contiguous.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 28.550, 77.220
Worth knowing
Almost nothing of Siri survives except stretches of rubble wall behind Shahpur Jat, because Sher Shah quarried it for his own city. Jahanpanah's Begumpuri mosque still stands in the middle of a residential colony, empty and enormous.
Connections (5)
- Successor capital ofTughlaqabad
Siri, Jahanpanah and Firozabad are three more of Delhi's successive cities, between the Qutb-era settlement at Mehrauli and Mughal Shahjahanabad. Each sultan built his own, usually a few kilometres from the last, and the result is not one city with layers but a scatter of walled foundations across forty square kilometres — which is why Delhi's medieval remains are distributed through the modern city rather than concentrated under it.
- Site adjacencyKashmere Gate
Kashmere Gate is where the assault on Delhi came in on 14 September 1857, after engineers blew the gate in daylight under fire, and the marks are still on the masonry. It stands in the northern wall of Shahjahanabad, the last of the sequence of cities strung across this plain from Qila Rai Pithora through Siri, Jahanpanah, Firozabad and Tughlaqabad — and the only one still lived in as a city when the siege train arrived.
- Site withinDelhi
Sīrī & Jahānpanāh 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. Sīrī & Jahānpanāh 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.
- Built byAlauddin Khilji
Alauddin Khilji built Siri Fort as his new capital at Delhi in 1303, moving the court from Mehrauli to the newer site where it could be defended against the Mongol threat — Siri is said to take its name from the Mongol prisoners' heads buried in the walls. Along with the Alai Darwaza (1311), the Hauz-i-Alai (now Hauz Khas) tank, the Siri congregational mosque and the Alai Minar, Siri Fort is the central monument of Alauddin's reign.
- Built byMuhammad bin Tughlaq
Muhammad bin Tughlaq built Jahanpanah in the 1320s as a wall thrown round the space between Alauddin Khilji's Siri and the older Qila Rai Pithora to enclose both into one city — his unified fourth Delhi before the Daulatabad experiment. The Begumpuri mosque in the middle of Jahanpanah still stands as his reign's main surviving monument at Delhi; most of the walls were quarried by Sher Shah to build his own city.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Jahanpanah”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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