17-05-2025
Capital gains: Tour the lost cities of Gaur and Pandua in West Bengal
In the late 18th century, Henry Creighton, a Scotsman assigned to an indigo factory in Malda, Bengal, stumbled upon the ruins of the lost city of Gaur.
They had been taken over by the jungle, which sheltered 'a variety of wild creatures, bears, buffaloes, deer, wild hogs, snakes, monkies, peacocks, and the common domestic fowl, rendered wild for want of an owner,' he would later write, in his book, The Ruins of Gour (1817).
With little else by way of entertainment in Malda, he began to keenly explore these ruins. He recreated some in paintings and sketches, and created a topographical map of the lost city. It was 'not less than fifteen miles in length (extending along the old bank of the Ganges) and from two to three in breadth,' he noted.
The publication of his illustrated book led a trickle of curious Europeans to visit this outpost of the empire, leaving behind paintings and descriptions of their own.
The ruins would turn out to be the remains of two cities, Gaur and Pandua. The name Gaur was derived from Gauda, a kingdom mentioned in Buddhist texts as far back as the 6th century. Two grand cities stood in this kingdom, those early volumes note.
Pandua, the second, would serve as the capital of the Bengal Sultanate from 1339 to 1450. The capital then shifted to Gaur until, over a century later, in 1565, it was sacked by Sher Shah Suri. Gaur, however, rebounded.
Manuel de Faria e Sousa, a Portuguese historian who visited a few decades later, described it as a well-planned settlement with trees lining the streets and its boundaries marked by high mud walls. Earlier Chinese visitors describe the region, in its heyday, as rich and 'civilised'. The rulers presented visiting ambassadors with gifts of gold basins, gold girdles, gold flagons, gold bowls, they note.
Today, Gaur and Pandua are sleepy towns on the edges of Malda, a district most famous for its mangoes. Amid the mango trees, of which there are thousands, are the ruins that Creighton described. The Archaeological Survey of India has forced the forest back out.
Layers of time are visible in the structures that remain.
Stone was in short supply in this part of Bengal, for instance, but fine alluvial clay was not, so most of the buildings from the Sultanate period are made of brick. The Adina Masjid is an exception. This large stone structure is modelled on the arched-and-pillared mosques of the Sassanian period (3rd to 7th centuries CE), including structures such as the Taq-i Kisra in Iraq and the Grand Mosque of Damascus, now in Syria.
Inside the mosque is a large central courtyard and a badshah-ka-takht or private worship area for the royal family. The mihrab, the niche facing Mecca, bears the pattern of a hanging lamp, said to represent the Surah An-Nur (Chapter of Light) in the Quran, a motif repeated in several buildings in the area.
The Eklakhi Mausoleum dates even further back, to the early years of the Bengal Sultanate, and is built in a more indigenous style. At first glance, it resembles a Bengal temple, with its brick facade, terracotta embellishment, and a curved cornice that is a vestige of the region's traditional thatched-roof design. The dome and glazed bricks on the façade (which sadly do not remain) would have distinguished it from a temple.
The mausoleum is said to hold the remains of Jalaluddin Muhammad Shah, son of Raja Ganesha, who briefly established Hindu rule during the Sultanate period, only for his son to convert to Islam.
Glazed bricks in yellow, green, white and blue are the highlight of the ancient architecture. With many lost to time, vandalism and the elements, the Lotton Mosque in Gaur now features some of the best examples of such brick, including an unusual mosaic star on the floor. Like the Eklakhi Mausoleum, this mosque has a single dome and a curved cornice. It must have been breath-taking when the façade was covered in the coloured bricks.
The Firoz Minar, a five-storey tower built in the 15th century, is all that remains of the Habshi dynasty. It was built by Firuz Shah, considered the founder of this short-lived era of Ethiopian slave rulers, within the Bengal Sultanate.
Finally, there are the remains of the royal citadel of Gaur, once a vast, whitewashed palace with flat roofs, its pillars decorated with motifs of flowers and animals, carved out of brass. Suri's army set it on fire in 1565. All that remains today are parts of the brick platform on which the palace was built, and evenly spaced circular holes where the columns once stood. The site is still littered with shards of brick and glazed tile.
A portion of a blue-and-white mosaic floor survives, in the north-west corner. Nearby is a section of 66-ft-high wall known as the Baisgazi Wall (from Baees Gaz or 22 yards), which would have surrounded the palace.
There are few tourists in Gaur and Pandua, which is no surprise given that the government of West Bengal has done little to promote the sites. What little infrastructure exists in Malda has grown up around the fruit-export industry.
There is an upside to this. In a world where tourist attractions bustle with people all eager to recreate the same viral Reel, the peace and quiet of these sites is a welcome relief; a reminder that parts of the ancient world are still out there, waiting to be rediscovered.
