Champaner: a capital left standing

The route

• Two stops of the sixteen Champaner monuments in the site universe. The rest are enumerated and unwritten.
• Burgess measured this site in the 1890s. It has since been conserved as a World Heritage site, so every condition statement in these records describes the 1890s and not today.
• No logistics in these records have been checked by a person. Fares, hours, fees and the safety and hassle scores are deliberately empty rather than estimated. That is Phase 3's work, not a gap to be filled from a desk.

1. 1

   Jami Masjid, Champaner جامع مسجد چانپانیر

   mosque · 1 hr 15 min · 22.4859, 73.5371

   Stand here. In front of the main entrance, looking up at both minarets at once. They do not match, and the reason is a single cannon shot in 1812.

   A hundred-foot minaret, and the shot that took its top off

   What the board says: That the Jami Masjid at Champaner was built under Mahmud Begada and is part of a World Heritage site.

   Burgess, who measured it for the Archaeological Survey of Western India in the 1890s, called it 'certainly one of the finest masjids in Gujarat'. The numbers are worth carrying: 169 and a half feet by 81 inside; two minarets rising 100 feet from either side of the main entrance; and, on the floor, 172 pillars, arranged so that eleven large domes and ten smaller ones sit over the gaps between them.

   Stand in front and look at the tops of the two minarets. They do not match. Burgess records why, quoting the Bombay Gazetteer: the top of the south minar was 'shattered by a cannon shot wantonly fired at it by the tyrant Patankar, Sindia's governor in 1812'. Not a siege, not a conquest — one official, one shot, three hundred years after the mosque was finished.

   The carving stops at a particular height, and that is deliberate. The minarets are elaborately carved up to the level of the top of the central doorway and above that carry only cornices and string courses; the stairs enter them from inside the mosque. Whoever designed it knew exactly how far up a person on the ground would look.

   172 pillars on the floor, arranged so that eleven large domes and ten smaller ones sit in the gaps between them.

2. 2

   Nagina Masjid and its tomb نگینہ مسجد

   mosque · 40 min · 22.4942, 73.5303

   Stand here. At the base of a minaret, low down, where the floral niches are — and then at the ruined tomb in front, at the few arch panels whose screens survive.

   The jewel mosque, and the tomb whose screens are gone

   What the board says: That the Nagina Masjid is one of the Champaner group of mosques.

   Five or six hundred yards north of the citadel is the Nagina, the Jewel mosque, built of a very light — almost white — stone. Burgess describes it as following the plan of the Jami Masjid on a much smaller scale, with only one entrance on each side of the main one. The central dome had already fallen in when he saw it and the wall heads had been dismantled.

   The reason to walk out to it is the carving at the bottom of the minarets. Burgess thought the lower portions had been worked 'with much care and taste', with niches filled with floral designs as elegant and elaborate as any then being copied in wood from the mosques of Ahmedabad. It is a small building whose best work is at knee height.

   In front of it stands a ruined tomb that is worth as much attention as the mosque. Its screens are entirely gone — the perforated panels that once closed the spaces between the inner square of pillars — but the spandrels of several arches still hold theirs, so you can see what the whole building once was by looking at the few panels that survived. Six pillars a side, unevenly spaced, and a brick dome with bold projecting ribs over the middle.

   Five or six hundred yards north of the citadel and outside the busiest part of the site.

What is not known here

Every stop on this trail has its logistics recorded as unverified, which means this page will not show you an opening time, a fare or a safety score. That is deliberate. Nobody has walked this route or telephoned anybody for these records, and a number invented at a desk is worse than no number on precisely the questions where being wrong costs the reader something.

• The cannon-shot account reaches Burgess from the Bombay Gazetteer, which he cites; it is a report of a report and was not traced further in this research.
• Burgess's condition notes describe the 1890s. Champaner has since been conserved as a World Heritage site and the present state of both minarets is unverified.
• Burgess measured and drew what he saw in the 1890s; condition statements describe that decade and nothing since.
• Burgess describes the condition of the 1890s; the mosque and the tomb in front of it have since been conserved, and what now survives of the screens is unverified.