Bayana: The Sources of Mughal Architecture

• Offers a broad reinvestigation of North Indian Muslim architecture through a case study of a desert fortress
• Includes detailed maps of the sites: Bayana Town, the Garden City of Sikandra and the Vijayamandargarh or Tahangar Fort with detailed survey of its fortifications and its elaborate gate systems
• Features photographs and measured surveys of 140 monuments and epigraphic records from the 13th to the end of the 16th century including mosques, minarets, waterworks, domestic dwellings, mansions, ‘idgahs (prayer walls) and funerary edifices
• Introduces historic outlying towns and their monuments in the region such as Barambad, Dholpur, Khanwa and Nagar-Sikri (later to become Fathpur Sikri)
• Demonstrates Bayana’s cultural and historic importance in spite of its present obscurity and neglect and adds to the record of India’s disappearing historic heritage in the wake of modernisation

Bayana in Rajasthan, and its monuments, challenge the established view of the development of Muslim architecture and urban form in India. At the end of the 12th century, early conquerors took the mighty Hindu fort, building the first Muslim city below on virgin ground. They later reconfigured the fort and constructed another town within it. These two towns were the centre of an autonomous region during the 15th and 16th centuries.

Going beyond a simple study of the historic, architectural and archaeological remains, this book takes on the wider issues of how far the artistic traditions of Bayana, which developed independently from those of Delhi, later influenced north Indian architecture. It shows how these traditions were the forerunners of the Mughal architectural style, which drew many of its features from innovations developed first in Bayana.