Mosques of Jumma Musjid and Lall Durwaza.
CHRONOLOGY.
| Khoja Jehan assumes independence at Jaunpore | A.D. 1397 |
| Mubarick, his son | 1400 |
| Shems ud-dîn—Ibrahim Shah | 1401 |
| Mahmúd | 1441 |
| Husain Shah | 1451 |
| —— deposed and seeks refuge at Gaur | 1478 |
It was just two centuries after the conquest of India by the Moslems that Khoja Jehan, the Soubahdar or governor of the province in which Jaunpore is situated, assumed independence, and established a dynasty which maintained itself for nearly a century, from A.D. 1397 to about 1478, and though then reconquered by the sovereign of Delhi, still retained a sort of semi-independence till finally incorporated in the Mogul empire by the great Akbar. During this period Jaunpore was adorned by several large mosques, three of which still remain tolerably entire, and a considerable number of tombs, palaces, and other buildings, besides a fort and bridge, all of which are as remarkable specimens of their class of architecture as are to be found anywhere in India.
Although so long after the time when under Ala ud-dîn and Tugluck Shah the architecture of the capital had assumed something like completeness, it is curious to observe how imperfect the amalgamation was in the provinces at the time when the principal buildings at Jaunpore were erected. The principal parts of the mosques, such as the gateways, the great halls, and the western parts generally, are in a complete arcuate style. Wherever indeed wide openings and large internal spaces were wanted, arches and domes and radiating vaults were employed, and there is little in those parts to distinguish this architecture from that of the capitals. But in the cloisters that surround the courts, and in the galleries in the interior, short square pillars are as generally employed, with bracket capitals, horizontal architraves, and roofs formed of flat slabs, as was invariably the case in Hindu and Jaina temples. Instead of being fused together, as they afterwards became, the arcuate style of the Moslems stands here, though in juxtaposition, in such marked contrast to the trabeate style of the Hindus, that some authors have been led to suppose that the pillared parts belonged to ancient Jaina or Buddhist monuments, which had been appropriated by the Mahomedans and converted to their purposes.[509] The truth of the matter appears to be, that the greater part of the Mahomedans in the province at the time the mosques were built were Hindus converted to that religion, and who still clung to their native forms when these did not clash with their new faith; and the masons were almost certainly those whose traditions and whose taste inclined them much more to the old trabeate forms than to the newly-introduced arched style.
As we shall presently see at Gaur, on the one hand, the arched style prevailed from the first, because the builders had no other material than brick, and large openings were then impossible without arches. At Ahmedabad, on the other hand, in an essentially Jaina country, and where stone was abundant, the pillared forms were not only as commonly employed, as at Jaunpore, but were used for so long a time, that before the country was absorbed in the Mogul empire, the amalgamation between the trabeate and arcuate forms was complete.
The oldest mosque at Jaunpore is that in the fort, which we learn from an inscription on it, was completed in A.D. 1398. It is not large—barely 100 ft. north and south—and consists of a central block of masonry, with a large archway, of the usual style of the Mahomedan architecture of the period, and five openings between pillars on either hand. The front rows of these pillars are richly sculptured, and were evidently taken from some temple that existed there, or in the neighbourhood, before the Moslem occupation, but they seem to have exhausted the stock, as no other such are found in any of the mosques built subsequently.[510]
There are three great mosques still standing in the city; of these the grandest is the Jumma Musjid (Woodcuts Nos. [290], [291]), or Friday
