Mango orchards, in every direction, as far as you can see. Then a gateway rises out of them, built of tiny red bricks, sixty feet high and wide enough for elephants. There is no city behind it. There has not been one for four hundred and fifty years.
Gaur, in Malda district, on the border with Bangladesh, was the capital of Bengal for most of the four centuries before the Mughals. It had many names: Lakshmanavati under the Sena kings, Lakhnauti under the Sultans, Jannatabad, “paradise city”, under the Mughal emperor Humayun. At its height in the early 1500s, by some estimates, it was one of the most populous cities on earth.
Four centuries as a capital
1100s
The Sena kings hold Gauda, and the city is named Lakshmanavati after Lakshmanasena.
1204 onward
After Bakhtiyar Khalji’s conquest, Lakhnauti is the seat of the Delhi Sultanate’s governors of Bengal, who rebel against Delhi more than once.
1342
Ilyas Shah unites Bengal into an independent sultanate, ruling first from nearby Pandua.
1450s–1565
The capital returns to Gaur. Under the Husain Shahi sultans it reaches its height: mosques, gateways, towers, canals and palaces.
1565–1576
The capital moves to Tanda. The Mughals take Gaur, plague sweeps through it, and the shifting Ganga leaves it high and dry. It is abandoned.
What to see
- Bara Sona Masjid, the “great golden mosque”, finished in 1526, the largest monument at Gaur; it was named for the gilding that once covered its domes.
- Dakhil Darwaza, the great ceremonial gateway of red brick from the fifteenth century, through which the Sultans entered the fort.
- Firoz Minar, a slender five-storey victory tower from the late fifteenth century.
- Qadam Rasul, a mosque of 1530 that keeps a stone said to bear the footprint of the Prophet.
- Lattan Masjid, which still has some of the glazed tiles, blue, green and yellow, that once made Gaur glitter.
- Kotwali Darwaza, the old south gate of the city, which today stands at the India–Bangladesh border.
Pandua and the Adina Mosque
North of Malda town, on the other side from Gaur, is Pandua, the first capital of the independent Sultans. Its Adina Mosque, built by Sultan Sikandar Shah in the 1370s, was among the largest mosques ever built in the subcontinent, a forest of arches around a vast courtyard. Much of its roof has fallen, which only makes it more beautiful.
Ramkeli: Chaitanya and the two ministers
Near Gaur is the village of Ramkeli. In the early 1500s, the story goes, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu stopped here on his way to Vrindavan and met two brothers who served as high officials of Sultan Husain Shah. They later gave up their posts, followed him, and became Rupa and Sanatana Goswami, two of the great theologians of Bengal Vaishnavism. Ramkeli still holds a fair in their memory every year.