Pavagadh
Pavagadh is an isolated hill rising steeply from the plain east of Vadodara. Its summit holds a temple of the goddess Kalika, one of the region's major pilgrimage centres, and there are Jain temples on its slopes. From about the fourteenth century the hill and the town below it were held by a branch of the Chauhan Rajputs, the Khichis, who fortified the plateaus that step up the hillside.
Mahmud Begada's conquest
The sultans of Gujarat, ruling from Ahmedabad, attacked Champaner several times in the fifteenth century. Mahmud Shah I, called Begada (r. 1458–1511), besieged it in 1482 and took it in 1484 after a siege of about twenty months. The Rajput ruler, Jayasimha, called Patai Rawal in local tradition, was captured and executed when he refused to accept Islam, and the women of the fort are said to have committed jauhar. Mahmud renamed the town Muhammadabad and made it his capital, spending more than twenty years building it.
The sultanate city
The new city was laid out on the plain below the hill inside walls with bastions and gates. It had a citadel, the royal enclosure, streets, wells, water works and gardens. Its finest buildings are the mosques, above all the Jami Masjid, completed in 1513, with two tall minarets flanking its central entrance, a prayer hall of many domes, and carved stone balconies and windows. Other mosques, such as the Kevda and the Nagina, show the same style, which joined the arches and domes of mosque building to the carved pillars, brackets and decoration of the region's older temple tradition. Gujarati masons were among the most skilled in India, and the sultanate's buildings are a direct expression of their craft.
Humayun and the end of the capital
In 1535 the Mughal emperor Humayun invaded Gujarat and attacked Bahadur Shah, Mahmud's grandson. Champaner fell after a siege, by the most famous account when a party of Mughal soldiers climbed the cliffs at night using iron spikes driven into the rock. The Mughal hold on Gujarat did not last, but the sultans moved their capital back to Ahmedabad, and Champaner declined. By the time Gujarat was incorporated into Akbar's empire in 1573, the city was largely empty, and the jungle grew over it.
Rediscovery
Because it was not rebuilt, Champaner is one of the most complete examples of a pre-Mughal Islamic city in India. Its mosques, walls, wells and the layout of its streets have survived under forest and fields. The archaeological park, which includes the hill shrines, was listed by UNESCO in 2004. The Kalika temple on the summit remains an active place of worship and draws large crowds at the Navaratri festival.
Further reading
- Asher, Catherine B. India Before Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2006
- Talbot, Cynthia. Precolonial India in Practice. Oxford University Press, 2001
- Michell, George. The Hindu Temple: An Introduction to Its Meaning and Forms. University of Chicago Press, 1988
See also
- Gujarat Sultanate — The Gujarat Sultanate ruled the western seaboard from 1407 to 1573, founded Ahmedabad, and developed a stone architecture that fused Jain and Hindu craft traditions with Islamic form.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.