Chauburji Masjid – Delhi

Located 740m southwest of Flagstaff Tower on Delhi’s North Ridge, Chauburji Masjid is one of a number of monuments I attempted to visit in 2023 that was securely locked up. By all accounts this has been the case for a number of years now, which is disappointing.

Scholars have placed its construction to sometime between 1354 and 1373 CE, during the reign of Firoz Shah Tughlaq, who was a prolific builder. It may have once been associated with his hunting lodge/palace which is located nearby (the remains of which are now called Pir Ghaib, or Kuskh-i-Shikar/Kushk-i-Jahan-Numa by contemporary writers). Its name translates to ‘mosque with four towers’, probably because at one time there were four domes here, of which only one now survives.

The mosque was repaired and much altered during Mughal times, and again more recently after the Uprising of 1857 when the structure was used by the British as a military battery. During Partition, the mosque was also vandalized and illegally occupied. What survives today is a double storeyed structure with a large central chamber and smaller adjoining chambers. The western-most chamber acted a prayer hall with mihrab, now in ruins.

Bashiruddin Ahmad Dehlvi, a prominent Indian Islamic scholar, historian, and writer, documents the upper floor of the mosque having eight rooms surrounding a large central chamber containing a tomb. I have also read accounts of another tomb existing in the courtyard of the mosque. Was Chauburji Masjid originally a tomb that was converted to a mosque ? Or was it a decommissioned mosque that became a tomb ? There are parallels to this elsewhere in the city, such as Teen Burji in Mohammadpur, a tomb that almost certainly has origins as a mosque.

With all the destruction and modifications the structure has been subjected to over the centuries, we will probably never know the true history of Chauburji Masjid.

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