The Lodi tombs of Delhi: Sikandar's tomb, the Bara Gumbad and Bahlul's tomb

At a glance

• The Lodi sultans (Bahlul 1451–1489, Sikandar 1489–1517, Ibrahim 1517–1526) were the first Afghan rulers of Delhi. The tombs and mosque they or their nobles left in the south of today's city are the buildings that carry their name. The history of the dynasty is in The Lodi dynasty.

• Sikandar Lodi's tomb stands in a walled garden with corner towers. Carr Stephen, who described Delhi's monuments in 1876, judged it probably built in 923 AH (1517) by Sikandar's son Ibrahim. [3]

• The Bara Gumbad, "big dome", is a gateway-like building with no grave inside. An inscription over the southern mihrab of the mosque beside it dates that mosque to 1494. [6]

• Bahlul's tomb is not in the garden but at Chirag Delhi, beside the shrine of a saint. Stephen says Sikandar had it built in 894 AH. [3] The grave of Bahlul has also been claimed for the Shish Gumbad in the garden. [6]

• The octagonal tomb in a walled compound, and the square tomb with recessed arches, were the Lodi types. Sher Shah Sur's tomb at Sasaram is a Lodi octagonal tomb enlarged to several times the width, and Humayun's tomb grew the Lodi compound into a garden. [4]

Where the tombs stand

The monuments lie in the south of New Delhi, close to the tomb of Safdar Jang. In 1876 Stephen placed the tomb of the Sayyid sultan Muhammad Shah "in the village of Khairpur", and the tomb of the Lodi noble Langar Khan "near the village of Khairpur". [3] The village is gone. Its monuments now stand in a public park four centuries younger than they are.

Stephen wrote in his introduction that the Lodis "have left no memorials of their rule in Delhi", because Bahlul lived at Siri and Sikandar moved to Agra. [3] His own chapters list many Lodi-period buildings. The sultans lived elsewhere for much of their reign, but their nobles built at Delhi, and the sultans' own tombs are the best known of the group.

Abdullah, the author of the Tarikh-i Daudi, written after 1605, says of Sikandar: "He founded masjids throughout all his dominions, and appointed a preacher, a reader, and a sweeper to each; to all of whom he gave regular stipends." [2] The Bara Gumbad mosque is the earliest dated mosque of the Delhi group.

The Sayyid tomb the Lodis copied

The earliest of the monuments is not Afghan. Muhammad Shah was the third Sayyid sultan of Delhi, the dynasty the Lodis replaced. Stephen says he died in 849 AH (1445) and was buried at Khairpur. [3] Simon Digby, in a paper of 1975, describes the southernmost of the garden's five main buildings as a domed octagonal tomb thought to be Muhammad Shah's, and gives his reign as 1435 to 1446. [5]

Stephen quotes the architectural historian James Fergusson on its plan: an octagonal room about 50 feet across, surrounded by a verandah of the same shape, each side having three pointed arches on double square columns. [3] INTACH's Delhi chapter adds the corner buttresses and the chhatris, small domed kiosks, on the roof. [6] This is the model. Stephen found Sikandar's tomb to be like it, with the difference that the small open pavilions around the central dome are missing and the dome rises more steeply. [3] INTACH makes the same comparison. [6]

Sikandar's tomb in its walled garden

Sikandar died at Agra on 7 Dhu'l-qada 923 (November 1517). [3] Stephen quotes the Tarikh-i Khan Jahan Lodi, that is Nimatullah's Makhzan-i Afghani, saying that his coffin was taken to Delhi and laid beside his father's in a garden Islam Shah Sur had enclosed. Stephen rejects that: Sikandar was not buried near his father, and the two graves cannot be put in one garden. [3] The tomb he identified as Sikandar's is a quarter of a mile from Safdar Jang's tomb, beside an old stone bridge, and he judged it "probably built" in 923 AH by Ibrahim. [3] Digby calls it a tomb "thought to be" Sikandar's, which is the same caution. [5]

The enclosure is the unusual part. Stephen, using the measurements of the surveyor Tremlett, gives it as about 264 feet square, with walls 8 feet thick and about 23 feet high, topped by a battlemented parapet. [3] The corners were octagonal towers, and only two survived in his day. [3] The entrance is a gate in the south wall, covered by a square sandstone outwork of about 66 feet by 52 feet, so that a visitor goes in by turning right and passing through an opening on its west side. At each end of the outwork's south wall stood a cupola decorated with glazed tiles on red sandstone pillars. [3] In the middle of the west wall is a small mosque whose central arch, he says, is about 65 feet high and 39 feet wide. [3]

Percy Brown, a British writer on Indian architecture, said that the tomb of Khan-i-Jahan Tilangani (died 1368 or 1369) was the last to repeat the fortified look of earlier Tughlaq tombs, "for with it the defensive idea seems to have ceased". [4] Stephen's account shows battlemented walls and corner towers at Sikandar's tomb a century and a half later.

Babur went round Delhi on 25 April 1526, five days after he killed Ibrahim at Panipat, and visited, in Annette Beveridge's translation of his words, "the tombs and gardens of Sl. Buhlul and Sl. Sikandar (Ludi)". [1] The tombs were standing, with their gardens, when the dynasty fell.

The Bara Gumbad and its mosque, 1494

The Bara Gumbad stands in the middle of the garden, a square building under a large dome, with no grave in it. INTACH's exhibit says it is "believed to be a gateway because of the absence of any grave", and calls it one of the largest Lodi-period monuments in Delhi. [6] The mosque beside it carries, over the southern mihrab, an inscription dating it to 1494, five years into Sikandar's reign. [6] INTACH describes the mosque's decoration as incised and painted limestone plaster. [6]

Brown puts the mosque first in a series of four: the mosque at the Bara Gumbad (1494), the Moth ki Masjid (about 1505), the Jamali mosque (1536) and Sher Shah's Qila-i-Kuhna mosque (about 1550). [4] He judged the 1494 mosque harshly. Its five open arches were "of unusual shape, proportions, and character", with weak curves and excessive width, and he thought its builders had "failed to achieve their object". [4] Those are Brown's judgements. His account is also of builders working out a new kind of small private mosque, and the Moth ki Masjid, ten years later, he says, shows the idea "developed into a composition of no little grace and power". [4]

Brown and Stephen disagree on the date of the Moth ki Masjid. Brown gives about 1505 and says it was built by Sikandar's prime minister. [4] Stephen gives 894 AH (1488), reading the date from an inscription on a well beside it that names "Sikandar Shah, son of Bahlol Shah Lodi". [3] He describes the mosque as 130 feet by 30, a row of five rooms under three domes "on narrow necks in the approved Lodi style". [3]

The Shish Gumbad and the question of Bahlul's grave

Across from the Bara Gumbad is the Shish Gumbad, "glass dome", named for the coloured glazed tiles that once covered it. It holds several graves that have not been identified. INTACH's exhibit says it "has been claimed to be the tomb of the first Lodi emperor Bahlol", who died in 1489. [6] Digby gave his paper of 1975 the title The Tomb of Buhlul Lodi, and it opens with the garden's group of monuments. [5]

The identification stays open. Stephen, whose account is the older, names the building at Chirag Delhi as Bahlul's. [3]

Bahlul's tomb at Chirag Delhi

Stephen says the tomb at Chirag Delhi was built in 894 AH (1488) by Sikandar, who brought his father's body from Badhouli and buried it there. [3] He gives two places for Bahlul's death, Malawi by the Tarikh-i Khan Jahan Lodi and Jalali by the Tarikh-i Daudi, and says that Nizam Khan, later Sikandar, sent the body to Delhi. [3]

The building stands outside the western wall of the shrine enclosure of Nasiruddin Chiragh Delhi, in a garden then called Judh Bagh. [3] It is 44 feet square, with three arched doors on each side, red sandstone pillars about two feet square and eight feet high, a deep stone eave, and a battlemented parapet about 18 feet above the floor. [3] Over it are five masonry domes, the middle one higher and fluted. [3] Near it Stephen noted a room 33 feet square with walls of red sandstone screens, believed to hold the graves of Bahlul's ministers. [3] In 1876 the shrine's attendants occupied the tomb. [3]

Stephen adds that Babur's visit to "the tombs and gardens" of Bahlul and Sikandar makes it likely that the barren ground around this tomb was once a garden. [3] That is his inference from Babur's words. [1]

Two tomb types and what came after them

Brown traces the octagonal tomb to Khan-i-Jahan Tilangani, a minister of Firuz Shah Tughlaq. His tomb at Delhi was the first octagonal one, with a verandah of three arches on each side, a wide projecting eave and eight cupolas on the roof, and it "was destined to influence fundamentally the style of tomb-building" for the next two centuries. [4] The Sayyid and Lodi tombs are that plan grown up. In the Delhi examples, Brown says, the middle storey was either pierced with windows or screened by a row of kiosks, and the tomb stood on a plinth. [4]

The second type is the square tomb, a single chamber with a large recessed arch on each side, smaller arched panels above and a squinch arch in each corner under the dome. Brown says it "emerges in the fifteenth century apparently unannounced" and calls most of the square tombs "rather characterless productions". [4] Stephen's description of three square tombs near the Moth ki Masjid, known by the invented names Bare Khan, Chote Khan and Kale Khan, matches it: square buildings with domes on narrow cylinders, a recessed arch on each face, and a small pavilion at each corner. [3] He dated them to about 900 AH (1494). [3]

The type kept being built after the Lodis. Stephen read an inscription at the octagonal tomb of Isa Khan which says it was built in 954 AH under Salim Shah, son of Sher Shah. [3] Brown says it is the last building to keep the sloping corner buttress of the Tughlaq age. [4] Brown also says the Afghan Sher Shah Sur brought a master builder named Aliwal Khan, trained in the imperial tradition, to build his family tombs at Sasaram in Bihar. The tomb of Sher Shah's father, Hasan Khan, built about 1535, is "a copy of a Lodi tomb of the octagonal variety", and Sher Shah's own tomb, about 1540, takes "the Lodi type as his basis" and enlarges it to a pile 250 feet wide, in five stages, 150 feet high, in the middle of a lake. [4] Brown calls it finer than any Delhi tomb and explains why: the Delhi tombs, he says, express a power in decline, and Sher Shah's was the work of a rising one. [4] Sher Shah's career is told in Sher Shah Suri.

In Humayun's tomb at Delhi, Brown says, the walled compound that had "already begun to appear in the plans of the Lodi tombs" grew into a large formal garden with the tomb in the middle and a gateway on each of four sides. [4] Brown also says the dome of the early Mughal period was of the "Lodi" type, and that the tomb of Mubarak Sayyid near Mahmudabad in Gujarat, about 1484, shows the influence of the style then favoured at Delhi under the Lodis. [4]

The park, and who looks after the buildings

The tombs reached their present setting in the 1930s. INTACH's Delhi chapter says the monuments stood in the village of Khairpur, that the villagers were moved in 1936, and that a garden of native and foreign plants was laid out around them and called Lady Willingdon Park, after the wife of the Viceroy. After 1947 it was renamed Lodi Garden, and in 1968 it was redesigned by the architect J. A. Stein. [6] The same exhibit gives 1931 in one place and 1936 in another for the start of the work. [6] Digby also notes the old name. [5]

INTACH's exhibit says some of the monuments are protected by the Archaeological Survey of India and others by the Delhi government's Department of Archaeology. [6] The Athpula, "eight piers", is a seven-arch bridge near Sikandar's tomb, built under Akbar by a noble called Nawab Bahadur and once known as Khairpur ka Pul. It is a Mughal work in a Lodi garden. [6]

Conservation has been argued over. The Indian Express reported in 2014 that the Archaeological Survey had taken over from INTACH the restoration of the garden's monuments, an agreement that covered four of its eight protected monuments because the funds from the Steel Authority of India fell short. The Survey called INTACH's work "not up to the mark", a government-appointed expert committee found it below the required standard, and the paper reports that flooring INTACH had laid came off within a year and that INTACH asked for more money. [7]