Mandu
Dilawar Khan Ghuri, governor of Malwa, made himself independent after Timur's sack of Delhi, and his successors moved the capital to Mandu — a plateau ringed by ravines, with a perimeter wall some thirty-seven kilometres long, on the escarpment above the Narmada valley.
What survives there is a whole city of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: the Jama Masjid, modelled on the mosque at Damascus; the Hoshang Shah tomb, the first substantial marble building in India, which Shah Jahan's architects came to study before building the Taj Mahal; the Jahaz Mahal, a long narrow pleasure palace between two lakes; and the Rupmati pavilion on the escarpment edge.
Court and legend
The Malwa court produced the Ni'matnama, a book of recipes and pleasures compiled for Sultan Ghiyath al-Din in the late fifteenth century and illustrated in a style that mixes Persian painting with Indian idiom — one of the earliest illustrated manuscripts made in the sultanates, and a rare document of what a court actually ate.
Baz Bahadur, the last independent sultan, and the singer Rupmati are the subject of a love story that became one of the standard romances of northern India, retold in Persian, Hindi and painting. The historical basis is slight and the story's afterlife enormous.
Akbar's forces took Malwa in 1561–62, and Mandu became a Mughal provincial seat before being abandoned. Its emptiness is why it survives so completely.
Further reading
- Asher, Catherine B. India Before Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2006
- Blurton, T. Richard. Hindu Art. Harvard University Press, 1993
- Davis, Richard H. Lives of Indian Images. Princeton University Press, 1997
- Elgood, Heather. Hinduism and the Religious Arts. Cassell, 1999
- Jackson, Peter. The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History. Cambridge University Press, 1999
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.