Indian Art and Letters

Author(s): India Society
Publisher: India Society

Page 49

Archaeological Explorations in India, 1932-33 period, which was originally adorned with fine stucco figures, and the upper a Buddhist stupa of the eighth or ninth century A.D. The only other temples with circular garbhagrihas of ancient times known to us are the Chedi temples at Chandrehe and Gurgi in the Rewa State and the Srirangam temple near Trichinopoly, though these are several centuries later in date. It may be noted that the well-known temple of Sibyl at Tivoli in Italy has the same circular plan.
A fragment of a stone sculpture of the Kushan period, which was found in the course of excavation at Rajgir, is engraved with the name of the mountain Vipula, one of the five hills that surround the city of Rajagriha and are mentioned in the Mahabharata.
Excavations at Bijai Mandal in the ancient city of Jahanpanah at old Delhi now leave no doubt as to this building having been the palace (Fig. 8) of Muhammad-bin-Tughlaq, the second king of the Tughlaq dynasty (1325-51). Sir Sayyid Ahmad's suggestion that this was a bastion of the surrounding walls of this city is no longer tenable. The building as now exposed shows the Diwan-i-Khas or Hall of Special Audience on the summit of a lofty terrace approached by broad concrete ramps, and what must have been a large pillared hall on a lower level on the north side. A feature of the former are two stone-lined wells sunk into the floor, which were covered with closefitting lids of the same material. These wells were undoubtedly meant for the storage of jewellery and other valuables, but the only objects of any value found in them were two or three gold coins of South India and a few pieces of gold thread. The structure on the lower level was about 210 feet in width and more than 300 feet in length (north and south), and bounded by solid walls on all sides The southern portion, showing the positions of ten rows of seventeen pillars each, has been exposed The rest of the structure is buried under a modern cemetery. The pillars were all of wood and have perished, but the base stones of several of them have survived in situ This hall, which may be called the Hall of Public Audience, must have been two storeys high, and therefore contained something like 600 pillars. This, in all probability, is the Thousand-pillared Hall of Muhammad-bin-Tughlaq, mentioned by Ibn-Batuta, the African Qazi, who spent several years in that king's court at Jahanpanah.
Farishta, the well-known Muhammadan historian, mentions another thousand-pillared hall, which was built by Alauddin Khalji (1295-1316) at his city of Siri, but no excavations have as yet been carried out, and it is not possible to say in what part of the city it lies buried.
These many-pillared halls of the Sultans of Delhi may have been copied from the real thousand-pillared halls like those in the Minakshi temple at
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