Tomb of Isa Khan Niyazi

Isa Khan Niyazi was an Afghan noble at the court of Sher Shah Sur, whose Sur dynasty (1540-1556) drove the Mughal emperor Humayun out of India in 1540^5,6. After Sher Shah’s death he served the younger son, Islam Shah, and according to the ASI’s 1919 list of Delhi monuments it was largely thanks to him that Islam Shah held the throne of Delhi against his elder brother Adil Khan⁴. A red sandstone slab over the mihrab records that this tomb, “an asylum of paradise”, was built in Islam Shah’s reign by Masnad-i Ali Isa Khan, son of Niyaz Aghwan, the chief chamberlain, in 1547-48^4,5.

The tomb is about two decades older than Humayun’s mausoleum, some 200 metres to the east, and Archnet explains its site by the nearby shrine of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya^2,5. Village huts crowded the enclosure until the Archaeological Department cleared and repaired it in 1905 and laid out a garden⁴. From 2011 the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) and the ASI, co-funded by the World Monuments Fund, replaced cement with lime plaster, rebuilt the 2.5-metre finial and restored tilework; the complex was formally opened on 18 April 2013^2,3. Left in the buffer zone when Humayun’s Tomb was inscribed in 1993, it is counted within the property in UNESCO’s 2015 statement of Outstanding Universal Value^1,8.

AKTC places the tomb in the style used for royal tombs of the Sayyid and Lodi sultans in 15th-century Delhi, and the ASI’s 1919 list compares it with the tombs of Sayyid Muhammad Shah and Sikandar Lodi^2,4. An octagonal domed chamber is ringed by a verandah with three arches on each face, steadied by sloping buttresses at the eight corners and shaded by a deep eave on heavy stone brackets^4,5. Above the battlemented parapet, eight chhatris (pillared kiosks) on red sandstone columns surround the dome, which carries a lotus finial^4,5. Archnet traces this crown of kiosks and pinnacles to Sher Shah’s tomb at Sasaram and calls the complex one of the earlier examples in South Asia of a tomb in a walled garden⁵.

The garden is an octagon about 120 metres across, enclosed by a rubble wall with battlements and round corner towers and entered through a gateway on the north^4,5. Works begun in 2011 showed that the outer garden lay about 1.2 to 1.5 metres below the inner garden around the tomb, which AKTC calls the earliest surviving sunken garden in India^2,3. On the west side stands Isa Khan’s three-bay mosque, apparently built at the same time, with a red sandstone frame round its central arch, arches outlined in green and blue tiles, and parapet merlons bearing the word lillah (“for God”)^4,6. Throughout, grey quartzite facing is set off by red sandstone, incised plaster medallions and glazed tiles⁵.

The tomb chamber is entered through a single doorway on the south⁴. Its walls are faced with dressed grey stone, and the inside of the dome is covered in incised plaster, which AKTC restored after replacing later cement plaster with lime; small arched openings in the drum let in light^3,5. Carved stone lattice screens fill the windows, and the west wall holds the mihrab with the foundation inscription above it^4,5. Six graves lie in the chamber: Isa Khan’s is probably the central one of the three on the north side, of marble and red sandstone, and the grave to its west is also of stone⁴.