Tombeau de Ghiyath al-Din Tughluq

Ghiyath al-Din Tughluq ruled from 1320 to 1325 as the first sultan of the Tughluq dynasty, which took over the Delhi Sultanate from the Khaljis¹. In 1321 he founded Tughlaqabad, the fourth city of Delhi, a stone fortress on a rocky height^3,4. Archnet says he built his tomb during his lifetime, as a small fortress in an artificial lake outside the city’s southern wall, joined to the fort by a raised causeway^1,4. Alexander Cunningham of the Archaeological Survey thought instead that his son Muhammad built it⁴. In 1325, returning from a successful campaign in Bengal, the sultan was killed at Afghanpur when a pavilion put up in three days collapsed after a feast^1,3.

The chronicler Barani blamed a thunderbolt; Ibn Battuta claimed the pavilion was built to fall when elephants were paraded past, an account the ASI’s 1922 list judged not very reliable³. A popular legend has the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya, with whom the sultan was at odds, foretelling his end with the words “Delhi is still far off”^3,4. The sultan was carried to his tomb that night and buried there³. His son Muhammad bin Tughluq, who died at Thatta in 1351, was brought back to lie beside him, although the 1959-62 survey considered his grave open to debate^1,2,3. Firoz Shah Tughluq later gave the mausoleum, which he called Dar al-Aman (“abode of peace”), doors of sandalwood³.

The tomb stands inside an irregular pentagonal enclosure with battlemented walls, bastions at the angles and rows of small vaulted rooms along the inner face, so that the whole reads as a small fort^1,2,3. A high red sandstone gateway and a flight of steps lead in from the causeway, which Cunningham gives as 600 feet long on 27 arches and Archnet as 229 metres on 26 arched piers^1,3,4. The tomb is square, about 18.7 to 18.9 metres a side, and its red sandstone walls slope inward at about 75 degrees; they are 11½ feet thick at the base and 4 feet at the top^1,2,4. The doorways on the north, south and east sit in tall pointed horseshoe arches of white marble with a spearhead fringe, each topped by a small arched opening filled with a marble lattice screen; the west wall holds the mihrab^1,3,4.

Colour does most of the decorative work: bands and borders of white marble and a few panels of black marble set against the red stone, with a band of upright marble slabs around the base of the dome⁴. The white marble dome rises from a low octagonal drum and ends in a red sandstone finial shaped as a vase and melon (kalash and amalaka), a form Archnet relates to the Hindu temples of the Delhi region^1,3. In a bastion north of the gate stands the small octagonal tomb of Zafar Khan, a young commander; its inscription says the sultan built the Dar al-Aman for him, and the ASI’s 1922 list took it to be the oldest tomb in the enclosure^2,3. James Fergusson, quoted by Cunningham, called the whole “a picture of a warrior’s tomb unrivalled anywhere”⁴.

The single chamber measures about 11.7 metres a side inside^1,4. Red sandstone faces the lower walls and white marble the upper surfaces leading to the dome, which rests on squinches across the corners; the floor is paved with red sandstone^1,2. Apart from the marble-clad mihrab in the west wall, the interior is plain¹. Three plastered graves lie in a row: the central one is taken to be that of Ghiyath al-Din, and the other two are assigned to his wife Makhduma-i Jahan and to Muhammad bin Tughluq^1,2,3.