Sambodhi 2011 Vol 34

Author(s): Jitendra B Shah
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 46

40
M. A. Dhaky
SAMBODHI
sense they are not; for they really represent manar or minār and the builders, despite Brown's assertion to the contrary, certainly knew the purpose for which they were made. In India, the minār, like miḥrāb (and hence the pointed Sarasenic arch) had come to acquire a special significance, of a religious cognizance of Islām. That must have been soon after the famous Qutb-minār at Delhi built in the year 1200. It thus transcended the purely functional purpose, of the adhāna call summoning the faithful, as it eventually had come to be in the homeland of Islām. The minarets here proceed above maqsuras central arch and served the purpose symbolic rather than functional. That is how, in the Indian context, they first occur over the maqsură in the old mosque at Ajmer (c. 1206) where they otherwise seem to follow Qutb-minār's design.26 In Gujarāt, too, eight years earlier than the Dholkā example, the great mosque at Cambay shows a pair of minarets in an identical situation.27 Dholkā, just as Cambay examples, are not minaret proper in the sense that minārs or minarets normally are tall, monumental, and oftener functional, starting from over the mosque's base and rising skyward far above the mosque's walling. But they are for certain minarets, symbolically conceived and placed for denoting the distinctive sacred mansion of Islām, masdjid.
We may next take up Brown's other observations on these minarets. Like Burgess, Brown also calls them 'turrets' and their presence seems to him as a "notable innovation to the façade". But, as I pointed out earlier, the Cambay mosque already possesses this feature, and, a century and quarter earlier, the Ajmer mosque shows this innovation in relation to its maqsură screen standing in front of and apart from the Ibadatkhănă. There is no question of innovation, therefore, on the part of the architect of the Dholkā mosque who just seems to follow a convention previously formalized in Delhi and which must have been known and observed in Gujarāt in his own times.
Brown's second observation, that "In design these turrets are indigenous, with no definite traces of Islamic influence, but they are apparently an attempt to produce something corresponding to a minaret without, however, any exact knowledge as to what this was like...” does not seem valid if we take into account the facts as they are now known about the minār in general, some more facts revealed by the minarets themselves at Dholkā. First, the Dholkā minarets do follow the general pattern of a minaret: The minār's basic conception is clearly reflected in them. As one beholds them, he instinctively knows that they are minarets. Their form encourages this belief and their position strengthens it. Second, there is no single standardized shape for minār. Many variations developed, even in the Middle East, the home of Islām. We have there the Syrian, the Irāqi, the Palestinian, the Anatolian, the Armenian, the Egyptian, the Turk, the Afghān, the Irānian and the Moorish varieties, each rooted in and each sometimes using the architectural elements characteristic of the earlier, ancient native civilizations that flourished in those lands. In India, too, the minār, after its first introduction, took too many and varied shapes, each predictably emanating from the earlier provincial styles of Hindu architecture. The Gujarāt variety