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The Dark Gate, the Dungeons, the royal escape route and more: survey of Tughluqabad, second interim report

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Mehrdad Shokoohy  and
Natalie H. Shokoohy
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Extract

Tughluqabad, situated 18 kilometres south-east of New Delhi, is the oldest surviving sultanate town in India. It was built by Sultan Ghiyāth al-dīn Tughluq between 1320 and 1323, and its well preserved walls, its street layout and the remains of its buildings provide us with the earliest existing example of Indo-Muslim urban planning and its architectural components. The town was designed by Ahmad b. Ayāz, an Anatolian architect and a nobleman of the Tughluq court, who was responsible for the design of many of the early Tughluq buildings1 and who was later raised to the rank of Grand Vizier at the time of Muhammad b. Tughluq (1325–51), but was put to death by Fīrūz Shāh Tughluq (1351–88) in the early days of his reign.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 62 , Issue 3 , October 1999 , pp. 423 - 461
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1999

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References

1 Muḥammad, b. ՙAbd'ullāh called Ibn Baṭṭūta, Tuḥfat al-nuẓẓār fī gharā' ib al-amṣār wa ՙaja'ib al-asfār, ed. Harb, Talal (Beirut, 1987), 432, 461Google Scholar; al-dīn Barnī, Ḍiyā', Tārīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī (Calcutta: Bibliotheca Indica, Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1862), 452–453Google Scholar. Ghiyāth al-dīn Tughluq himself was originally from a Turkish tribe of Khurāsān (in the words of Ibn Baṭṭūta (p. 458) the mountainous region between Sind and Turkistan, i.e. modern Afghanistan), and most of his life was spent as the governor of Mūltān, a former Ghaznavid province the Muslim architecture of which was linked mainly with Khurāsān rather than India.

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