Architecture of India  
The Tughlaq Years - 2

The plan of this fortress-tomb is an irregular pentagon, with a bastion at each angle of its outer walls. The tomb walls are clad for the most part with red sandstone and the dome with marble. The most distinctive feature, however, are its sloping walls, about which much excited scholarly discussion has taken place. The commonly accepted view is that the tomb is an offshoot, or a descendant, of a similar contemporaneous tomb at Multan (in modern Pakistan) of Shah Rukn-i-Alam.

(Picture on Right >>>).

In the latter, the use of sun-dried brick made sloping walls a structural necessity, much like Egyptian temple pylons, but this feature was transferred unchanged to the tomb of Ghiyas-ud-Din, where stone was used for the walls.

The tomb continues the lotus-bud fringes found in the arch of the Alai Darwaza, and there are many other stylistic similarities. Another interesting feature is the presence of a structurally redundant lintel over the arched gateways. It is almost as if the indigenous craftsmen, still not trusting the true arch as a means of support, were being safe by introducing a lintel. That this lintel also introduces an element of style was incidental.

It is in this tomb that we first begin to get a hint of what would follow in the coming centuries. There is the same vocabulary - begun in the Alai Darwaza - of red sandstone cladding and white marble. The massive outer walls, made for defence, could be easily toned down to graceful perimeter guards. Today, the tomb is overrun by monkeys, hundreds of them at a time, bereft of tourists unlike the nearby Qutb, yet its importance cannot be denied, the last stand of a Sultan who was destined to die at the hands of his son. The site of Tughlaqabad is desolate, ruined and magnificent - very much like the history of the Sultanate which set the base for Muslim rule in India.

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