Carved in stone: Gujarat's rich cosmopolitan legacy in a 15th-century tomb complex

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18-05-2025

Some 8 km southwest of Ahmedabad's historic centre stands one of the oldest clusters of monuments from early modern Gujarat (c 1400s-1750 CE): the Sarkhej Roja, or mausoleum complex. The sprawling site is the resting place of Sheikh Ahmed Khattu, a well-known Sufi, who moved to Gujarat from Delhi at the turn of the 15th century.
The Sheikh – also referred to as Ganj Baksh, or the bestower of treasures – was one of the four great men called Ahmed after whom the city is named. He died in Sarkhej at the remarkable age of 111 in 1445 CE. Inside the main courtyard, 16 pillars elevate a stately structure of nine uniform domes that announces the quadrangle's main building, the Sheikh's tomb and shrine.
On its opposite side lie the burial chambers of his patrons and the complex's builders, the Muzaffarid or Gujarati sultans who ruled from c1407 to 1591 CE.
Historically, the expansive complex was not just a site of graves but also a spot that combined religious, royal, and leisure spaces. In Sarkhej, the sultans built palaces for themselves and their queens, gardens and orchards, lakes and sluice gates to regulate the flow of water between them, and several mosques.
This was an imperial leisure resort of sorts where along with the sultans, aristocrats and wealthy elites built their homes and even tombs.
The remains of many of those structures, including a 17-acre lake, survive to this day. Although many of its old structures are now gone, the precinct remains a vibrant hub of community life. On one of my recent visits, even on a weekday afternoon, there were tired visitors napping on the well-worn park benches, loving couples ambling about holding hands and groups of women picnicking while their children played at the end of a school day.
The monuments at Sarkhej impressed the French architect and urban planner Charles-Édouard Le Corbusier so much during his 1950s visit that he likened them to Athens's Acropolis.
Understandable as it may be, what our modern admiration obscures is the site's original context. In their time, structures like the ones at Sarkhej were more than physical manifestations – they were crucial elements of the Gujarati Sultanate's comprehensive imperial strategy to govern a diverse population.
This complex history – instances of which are found across the subcontinent – is reduced, again and again, to a simple story of the rise, dominance and fall of large northern empires with their capitals in Delhi. A dangerous consequence of this flattening is that it perpetuates the pernicious colonial division of India's pre-British past into the 'Hindu' or 'Muslim' periods.
The histories of the times that were in between those imperial entities provide an important antidote. However, these are hardly ever a part of mainstream ideas or school syllabi – a crucial oversight in our present divisive times.
These intervening moments between empires and the kingdoms they gave rise to often became laboratories of some of the subcontinent's greatest political innovations.
Gujarat's Muzaffarid Sultans, like the Sharqis of Jaunpur, the Khaljis (no relations of the famous Allaudin Khalji) of Malwa, or the Bahmanis of the Deccan, were precisely one of those less-known dynasties that played a crucial role in revitalising ideas of kingship and governance in early modern times.
One common strand among them, as I have frequently argued in this column, was the emergence of a uniquely Indian cosmopolitanism in regional courts and their ruling practices.
The question to ask is this: are we forcibly looking for a modern notion like cosmopolitanism in the distant past? Are we smuggling our contemporary ideals into our reading of history? The answer is no. Sarkhej and the Gujarat Sultanate, present us with a perfect example to pressure-test our assumptions about when rulers began to value cultural pluralism.
A building style for regional rulers
The best place to trace the Sarkhej monument complex's origins, is the beginnings of the very dynasty that laid its foundations. Gujarat's Muzaffarid Sultanate emerged around 1407 CE amid Delhi Sultanate's declining power. Taking advantage of the situation, Zafar Khan – then serving as Gujarat's governor under the Tughlaqs – declared his independence.
The Muzaffarids were thus sandwiched between the Delhi Sultans and the Mughals. And it was Zafar Khan who convinced Sheikh Ahmed Khattu to make Gujarat his home.
Zafar Khan's adopted royal title, Muzaffar Shah, gave the dynasty its name. For nearly two centuries, its rulers went on to fashion a coherent polity, as historian Samira Sheikh of Vanderbilt University, has written in her book Forging a Region.
Just as other parts of the subcontinent, 15th-century Gujarat was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multilingual society, requiring the sultans to adopt a pragmatic and pluralistic approach beyond military conquest to legitimise their authority.
Laying the foundations of Ahmedabad, the new capital, was the first major construction enterprise that Ahmed Shah (c 1410 to 1442), Sultan Muzaffar's grandson, undertook in 1413 (he is the second Ahmed the city is named after).
While the new city marked a break from the old regime, the sultans' architectural choices reflected precisely inclusive this vision – a preference for continuity and locally-rooted innovation.
Alka Patel, art historian at the University of California, Irvine, who has studied Gujarat's architecture from the 12th to the 16th centuries, says, 'The clear and traceable continuity from Gujarat' s temple architecture to mosques, stepwells, and urban gateways of the sultanate strongly indicates the continuation of building practices firmly rooted in the region.'
From Ahmed Shah through Mahmud Shah I, better known as Mahmud 'Begada' (r 1458 to 1511) – the most powerful years of the sultanate – saw the evolution of this regional style on a splendid scale.
But this was not simply a top-down vision. Two other categories of people played a vital role in shaping the distinctive 'Gujarati' features and tastes: sultanate elites including nobles and wealthy merchants, and their wives, as well as the local artisans who these patrons employed for their building work.
These creators and craftspeople brought their previous experience in Hindu and Jain temple construction to the buildings of the new dispensation.
The region's architectural vocabulary then is the most widely available evidence of its cosmopolitanism. Three elements of this stand out.
First, it incorporated styles that were already in use in the region. One of the earliest mosques in Ahmedabad, built for Ahmed Shah and his inner circle's personal use and tucked away today in the city's Bhadra area, as well as the Jami Mosque are instances of this. They feature temple-style pillared interiors and open courtyards rather than the domes or arches typically associated with mosques.
Second, innovative architectural ideas emerged from these distinctive repurposing efforts. While including essential Islamic architectural elements like the prayer niche (mihrab) and direction wall (qibla), Gujarati builders creatively adapted local designs.
Patel gives the example of a tomb popularly known as Ibrahim's shrine in Bhadreswar, Kachchh. The building's interior, she observes, 'follows the typology of the temple porch in its square-to-octagon transition, before culminating in an ornate concentric ceiling'. This architectural fusion became a signature feature of the region's buildings.
Third, Gujarat's sultanate architecture had a distinctive way of incorporating locally recognised decorative motifs. This was perhaps the most direct consequence of indigenous craftspeople working on these projects.
Religious and secular structures, Ahmedabad's Teen Darwaza gateway for instance, were decorated with popular patterns like leaf designs, hanging flower garlands, beaded borders, or stylised pot bases.
The most characteristic expression of this are the intricate geometric-patterned jaalis, or lattice screens that are found on monuments across the region. Readers may be familiar with the famous jaali at the 16th-century mosque in Ahmedabad of Abyssinian nobleman Sidi Saiyyed, which depicts the 'tree of life' motif with intertwining branches and leaves.
But it is at Sarkhej and in Sultan Mahmud Begada's capital, Champaner, from a century earlier, that this quintessentially Gujarati design element that evolved under the sultans truly shines. Despite different rulers contributing to it, there was a unity to this composite style that became the region's own – just like the sultans who had originally migrated to Gujarat from north India.
Linguistic virtuosity of courts and people
Sceptics could still argue that syntheses in architectural styles is too easy a place to look for signs of cosmopolitanism. Local materials and skilled artisans would simply be a practical measure especially in low-tech times like the 15th century. The patronage of scholars and texts is a riskier choice – people, unlike buildings, could turn critics. Yet we have clear evidence to show that the sultans had an ease with the harder to control innovations in language and literature.
Soon after its inception, Ahmedabad grew into a thriving city that opened its arms to intellectuals and scholars from across the world. The sultans – especially Ahmed Shah and Mahmud Begada – invited learned people from all over the subcontinent, including Sindh, Multan, and parts of the north and the Deccan, to their court and realm.
Ahmedabad and its surroundings also acquired the reputation of being places where theologians, jurists, literary figures, and Sufis from across the western Indian Ocean – Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Arabian Peninsula – could find homes and livelihoods.
Jyoti Gulati-Balachandran of Pennsylvania State University says in her book, Narrative Pasts: Texts and Community in Gujarat, that these 'learned men served as teachers, religious administrators, and spiritual preceptors in the expanding frontiers of the Gujarat Sultanate'.
Mahmud Begada's court was so well regarded as a place where scholars and scribes were welcome that a skilled poet named Ujayaraja even presented him with a long prashasti kavya, or praise poem in Sanskrit called Rajavinodamahakavya, or the great poem on the pleasures of the king.
Alternatively titled Shrimahmudasuratranacharita, or the life of Sultan Mahmud, this kavya presents Mahmud Shah's court as the goddess of learning, Sarasvati's abode – a place that is not just immensely prosperous in terms of material wealth but one that is also endowed 'with the council of the most learned of men'.
These measures to cultivate an intellectually rich court and bureaucracy were not casual gestures. For instance, the texts on stone inscriptions the rulers or their nobles issued to notify the public about administrative matters like donations of land, were often written in two or three different languages – Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit, or early forms of Gujarati.
This was not simply to ensure effective communication – hardly any regular citizens could comprehend Sanskrit. What the sultans recognised was the symbolic significance of a language like Sanskrit that had been associated with kingship in India for centuries. Such efforts established a framework of governance in which religious scholars, poets, scribes, and administrators from different backgrounds collectively participated in the sultanate's authority.
While Persian and Arabic were the primary languages that the sultans used for official business, their courts and the territories they ruled over were spaces where different groups spoke and wrote in multiple languages. Both Muslim and non-Muslim intellectuals in fact contributed to the development of vernaculars like early Gujarati and Gujari, alongside Arabic, Persian, and to an extent Sanskrit for literature and in administration.
The sultanate era was also the time when the most iconic of Gujarati poets – its ' adi kavi ' – Narasinh Mehta, composed his works.
The interaction of different people and languages led to the emergence of the early forms of the regional languages – Gujarati and the lesser-known Gujari, a Gujarati inflected form of Urdu. These were both vernaculars that the people spoke in their everyday lives as well as what scholars and spiritual men in fifteenth century wrote their books and poems in; the fifth sultan, Qutbuddin Ahmad Shah II who ruled from c 1451 to 1458, also reportedly composed poetry in Gujari.
This development of early Gujarati and Gujari dialects, says Gulati-Balachandran, was a gradual 'linguistic indigenisation' that 'signalled the assertion of a distinctive linguistic and literary identity'.
Back to Sarkhej
The cosmopolitanism of early modern India is not a contemporary projection. Gujarat's example underlines a broader pattern across these smaller regional kingdoms. This mix-and-match approach emerged from practical adaptation to ground realities.
At the time, military might alone could not sustain the control of large territories as the states' capacity for coercion was limited. A combination of a strategic use of force, cultivated loyalty, and cultural legitimacy therefore proved most effective.
The soft power of accepting and reinventing local, regional, and trans-regional elements was a crucial part of gaining authority. Evidence of this appears throughout the subcontinent.
Pluralistic societies like Gujarat were the norm in all typical political formations – big and small – at the time and puritanism could not be viable long-term. This nimbleness of rule was so widespread between the 15th and 18th centuries that it emerged as a hallmark of statecraft across India contributing directly to many a kingdoms' stability and longevity.
In fact, one could say that the Mughals' success was another iteration and expansion of these ideas – a continuity that helped establish what was once the largest and richest empires in the world.
Sarkhej itself encapsulated this integration of various social and cultural elements during sultanate rule. When Shaikh Ahmed Khattu chose to settle there on Muzaffar Shah's invitation, Sarkhej was already a significant site of indigo production. The highly valued blue dye was traded across the Indian Ocean world through Khambhat, or Cambay, Gujarat's premier port city at the time.
Sarkhej's business and spiritual potential made it a place where diverse groups of people settled – a walk around the ruins even today reveals the homes and tombs of elites of Abyssinian and Iranian origins.
And over the years, as the sultans brought in their particular governance and architectural vision, Sarkhej, like many other towns and cities in Gujarat, emerged as a place where spiritual, political, and economic realms converged and created something new.
Aparna Kapadia is a historian of South Asia at Williams College in the US. She is the author of In Praise of Kings: Rajputs, Sultans and Poets in Fifteenth-Century Gujarat.