Cuttack: the subah nobody visits

The route

• Odisha is the thinnest region in this archive: five rows, one of them without a coordinate. Writing the one building the gazetteer treats at any length is the honest start, not a survey.
• The gazetteer's reign dates for Shah Alam do not match the usual dating and are left standing rather than silently corrected.
• 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

   Qadam-i-Rasul, Cuttack قدم رسول کٹک

   dargah · 45 min · 20.4686, 85.8792

   Stand here. In the garden, among the tombs of the shrine's former custodians, before going inside. The endowment that keeps this place is as old as the relics.

   Relics commissioned from Mecca, and the water that is given away

   What the board says: That the Qadam-i-Rasul at Cuttack enshrines footprints of the Prophet.

   The Cuttack gazetteer is candid about the building and interesting about what happens inside it. Architecturally it gives it nothing: an ordinary brick building covered with whitewash, of no special merit. Then it tells you what it is for.

   The relics were commissioned from Mecca by the Nawab Nazim Shuja-ud-din Khan, or by his son Muhammad Taqi Khan, who lies buried within the enclosure; an inscription in situ credits the building to Shuja-ud-din Muhammad Khan in the reign of Shah Alam. Inside, the footprints are kept in a basin of water, and that water is given to people visiting the shrine and used for curing diseases. The building stands in a large garden holding many tombs of former custodians, is supported by a large endowment, and the gazetteer notes it is well looked after.

   This is the only stop in this pilot and Odisha has five rows in the whole site universe. The Mughal subah of Orissa is the thinnest ground in this archive, and a building the gazetteer dismisses in a sentence is, for that reason, the most important one in the state to write up properly.

   The 1933 gazetteer gives the building no architectural merit at all and then describes exactly why people come. Both halves are true.

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 gazetteer hedges the commissioning between father and son and this record hedges with it.
• The reign dates it gives for Shah Alam (1707-12) are the gazetteer's and do not match the usual dating of Shah Alam Bahadur Shah I; the discrepancy is left standing rather than silently corrected.
• This is an active shrine with custodians and an endowment. Nothing here establishes visiting terms, and the practice of giving the water is described in a 1933 source and not confirmed as current.