Chapter XXXI: Part I: Description

Mándu, about twenty-three miles south of Dhár in Central India, is a wide waving hill-top, part of the great wall of the Vindhyan range. The hill-top is three to four miles from north to south and four to five miles from east to west. On the north, the east, and the west, Mándu is islanded from the main plateau of Málwa by valleys and ravines that circle round to its southern face, which stands 1200 feet out of the Nímár plain. The area of the hill-top is over 12,000 English acres, and, so broken is its outline, that the encircling wall is said to have a length of between thirty-seven and thirty-eight miles. Its height, 1950 feet above the sea, secures for the hill-top at all seasons the boon of fresh and cool air.

About twenty miles south of Dhár the level cultivated plateau breaks into woody glades and uplands. Two miles further the plain is cleft by two great ravines, which from their deeper and broader southern mouths 700 to 800 feet below the Dhár plateau, as they wind northwards, narrow and rise, till, to the north of Mándu hill, they shallow into a woody dip or valley about 300 yards broad and 200 feet below the south crest of Málwa. From the south crest of the Málwa plateau, across the tree tops of this wild valley, stand the cliffs of the island Mándu, their crests crowned by the great Dehli gateway and its long lofty line of flanking walls. At the foot of the sudden dip into the valley the Âlamgír or World-Guarding Gate stands sentinel. [877] Beyond the gateway, among wild reaches of rock and forest, a noble causeway with high domed tombs on either hand fills the lowest dip of the valley. From the south end of the causeway the road winds up to a second gateway, and beyond the second gateway between side walls climbs till at the crest of the slope it passes through the ruined but still lofty and beautiful Dehli or northern gateway, one of the earliest works of Diláwar Khán (A.D. 1400), the founder of Musalmán Mándu.

Close inside of the Dehli gate, on the right or west, stands the handsome Hindola Palace. The name Hindola, which is probably the title of the builder, is explained by the people as the Swingcot palace, because, like the sides of the cage of a swinging cot, the walls of the hall bulge below and narrow towards the top. Its great baronial hall and hanging windows give the Hindola palace a special merit and interest, and an air of lordly wealth and luxury still clings to the tree-covered ruins which stretch west to large underground cisterns and hot weather retreats. About a quarter of a mile south stand the notable group of the Jaház Mehel or Ship palace on the west, and the Tapela Mehel or Caldron palace on the south, with their rows of lofty pointed arches below deep stone caves, their heavy windowless upper stories, and their massive arched and domed roof chambers. These palaces are not more handsomely built than finely set. The massive ship-like length of the Jaház Mehel lies between two large tree-girt ponds, and the Tapela, across a beautiful foreground of water and ruin, looks east into the mass of tangled bush and tree which once formed part of the 130 acres of the Lál Bágh or Royal Gardens.

The flat palace roofs command the whole 12,000 acres of Mándu hill, north to the knolls and broken uplands beyond the great ravine-moat and south across the waving hill-top with its miles of glades and ridges, its scattered villages hamlets and tombs, and its gleaming groves of mangoes, khirnis, banyans, mhowras, and pipals. In the middle distance, out from the tree-tops, stand the lofty domes of Hoshang's tomb and of the great Jámá mosque. Further south lies the tree-girt hollow of the Ságar Taláv or Sea Lake, and beyond the Ságar lake a woody plateau rises about 200 feet to the southern crest, where, clear against the sky, stand the airy cupolas of the pavilion of Rúp Mati, the beautiful wife of Báz Bahádur (A.D. 1551-1561), the last Sultán of Málwa. Finally to the west, from the end of the Rúp Mati heights, rises even higher the bare nearly isolated shoulder of Songad, the citadel or inner fort of Mándu, the scene of the Gujarát Bahádur's (A.D. 1531) daring and successful surprise. This fair hill-top, beautiful from its tangled wildness and scattered ruins, is a strange contrast to Mándu, the capital of a warlike independent dynasty. During the palmy days of the fifteenth century, of the 12,000 acres of the Mándu hill-top, 560 were fields, 370 were gardens, 200 were wells, 780 were lakes and ponds, 100 were bazár roads, 1500 were dwellings, 200 were rest-houses, 260 were baths, 470 were mosques, and 334 were palaces. These allotments crowded out the wild to a narrow pittance of 1560 acres of knolls and ridges.

From the Jaház Mehel the road winds through fields and woods, gemmed with peafowl and droll with monkeys, among scattered palaces mosques and tombs, some shapely some in heaps, about a mile south to the walled enclosure of the lofty domed tomb of the establisher of Mándu's greatness, Hoshang Sháh Ghori (A.D. 1405-1432). Though the badly-fitted joinings of the marble slabs of the tomb walls are a notable contrast to the finish of the later Mughal buildings, Hoshang's tomb, in its massive simplicity and dim-lighted roughness, is a solemn and suitable resting-place for a great Pathán warrior. Along the west of the tomb enclosure runs a handsome flat-roofed colonnade. The pillars, which near the base are four-sided, pass through an eight-sided and a sixteen-sided belt into a round upper shaft. The round shaft ends in a square under-capital, each face of which is filled by a group of leafage in outline the same as the favourite Hindu Singh-múkh or horned face. Over the entwined leafy horns of this moulding, stone brackets support heavy stone beams, all Hindu in pattern. [878] Close to the east of Hoshang's tomb is Hoshang's Jámá Masjid or Great Mosque, built of blocks of red limestone. Hoshang's mosque is approached from the east through a massive domed gateway and across a quadrangle enclosed on the east north and south by wrecked colonnades of pointed arches. The west is filled by the great pointed arches of the mosque in fair repair. On the roof of the mosque from a thick undergrowth of domelets rise three lofty domes. [879]

In front of the gateway of the Great Mosque, in the centre of a masonry plinth about three feet high, stands an iron pillar about a foot in diameter at the base and twenty feet high. Close to the east of the gateway is the site of Mehmúd's (A.D. 1442) Tower of Victory, traces of which remained as late as A.D. 1840. About fifty yards further east are the ruins of a great building called the Ashrafi Mehel, said to have been a Musalmán college. To the north-east a banner marks a temple and the local state offices. South the road passes between the two lines of small houses and huts that make modern Mándu. Beyond the village, among ruins and huge swollen baobab stems, the road winds south along a downward slope to the richly-wooded lowland, where stretches to the west the wide coolness of the Ságar Taláv or Sea lake. Its broad surface covering 600 acres is green with fanlike lotus leaves, reeds, and water-grasses. Its banks are rough with brakes of tangled bush from which, in uncramped stateliness, rise lofty mhauras, mangoes, kirnis, and pípals. To the east round a smaller tank, whose banks are crowned by splendid mangoes and tamarinds, stand the domes of several handsome tombs. Of some of these domes the black masses are brightened by belts of brilliant pale and deep-blue enamel. To the north of this overflow-pool a long black wall is the back of the smaller Jámá or congregation mosque, badly ruined, but of special interest, as each of its numerous pillars shows the uninjured Hindu Singh-múkh or horned face. By a rough piece of constructive skill the original cross corners of the end cupolas have been worked into vaulted Musalmán domes. [880]

From the Sea Lake, about a mile across the waving richly-wooded plain, bounded by the southern height of the plateau, the path leads to the sacred Rewa Kund or Narbada Pool, a small shady pond lined with rich masonry, and its west side enriched by the ruins of a handsome Bath or Hammám Khánah. From the north-east corner of the Rewa Pool a broad flight of easy stairs leads thirty or forty feet up the slope on whose top stands the palace of Báz Bahádur (A.D. 1551-1561) the last independent chief of Mándu. [881] The broad easy flight of steps ends in a lofty arched gateway through which a roomy hall or passage gives entrance into a courtyard with a central masonry cistern and an enclosing double colonnade, which on the right opens into an arched balcony overlooking the Rewa Kund and garden. Within this courtyard is a second court enclosed on three sides by an arched gallery. The roof of the colonnades, which are reached by flights of easy steps, are shaded by arched pavilions topped by cupolas brightened by belts of blue enamel.

To the south of Báz Bahádur's Palace a winding path climbs the steep slope of the southern rim of Mándu to the massive pillared cupolas of Rúp Mati's palace, which, clear against the sky, are the most notable ornament of the hill-top. From a ground floor of heavy masonry walls and arched gateways stairs lead to a flat masonry terrace. At the north and south ends of the terrace stand massive heavy-eaved pavilions, whose square pillars and pointed arches support lofty deep-grooved domes. The south pavilion on the crest of the Vindhyan cliff commands a long stretch of the south face of Mándu with its guardian wall crowning the heights and hollows of the hill-top. Twelve hundred feet below spreads the dim hazy Nímár plain brightened eastwards by the gleaming coil of the Narbada. The north pavilion, through the clear fresh air of the hill-top, looks over the entire stretch of Mándu from the high shoulder of Songad in the extreme south-west across rolling tree-brightened fields, past the domes, the tangled bush, and the broad gray of the Sea Lake, to the five-domed cluster of Hoshang's mosque and tomb, on, across a sea of green tree tops, to the domed roof-chambers of the Jaház and Tapela palaces, through the Dehli gateway, and, beyond the deep cleft of the northern ravine, to the bare level and the low ranges of the Málwa plain.

From the Rewa Pool a path, along the foot of the southern height among noble solitary mhauras and khirnis, across fields and past small clusters of huts, guides to a flight of steps which lead down to a deep shady rock-cut dell where a Muhammadan chamber with great open arched front looks out across a fountained courtyard and sloping scalloped water table to the wild western slopes of Mándu. This is Nilkanth, where the emperor Akbar lodged in A.D. 1574, and which Jehángír visited in A.D. 1617. [882]

From the top of the steps that lead to the dell the hill stretches west bare and stony to the Songad or Tárápúr gateway on the narrow neck beyond which rises the broad shoulder of Songad, the lofty south-west limit of the Mándu hill-top. [883]