Gaur and Pandua: an architecture with no stone to build in

The route

• Two stops, not a day. Gaur and Pandua hold more than a dozen protected monuments between them and this pilot writes up only the two the 1878 volume treats most fully — the rest are in the site universe and are unwritten, which is the honest state.
• Not one monument in the Gaur and Pandua group has a coordinate in the site universe, and the single coordinate offered for a place called Pandua belongs to the other Pandua, in Hooghly. Every stop here therefore carries no coordinate at all rather than a wrong one.
• Parts of the Gaur field lie close to the international border. Whether that affects access was not established and must be settled before travelling.
• 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

   Lattan (Painted) Masjid لٹن مسجد

   mosque · 40 min · no coordinate yet

   Stand here. Inside, under the single dome, where the tilework survived better than it did on the weather face.

   A mosque skinned in glazed tile, because Bengal had no stone

   What the board says: That the Lattan or Painted Mosque is a 15th-century monument of the Bengal Sultanate.

   Bengal is a delta. It has almost no building stone, and the whole architecture of the sultanate follows from that one fact: brick walls, and a skin of glazed tile where another region would have carved sandstone. The Lattan Masjid is where you can still see the skin.

   Ravenshaw's 1878 volume calls it the Lattan or Painted Mosque and says it is 'ornamented throughout with encaustic tiles of different vivid colours, admirably arranged'. He notes that the outside had worn badly by his day but that most of the interior was still intact, under one large dome.

   He quotes an earlier visitor, Major Francklin, who was more impressed by this building than by anything else at Gaur and who counted what he saw: dark blue, yellow, green and white tiles resembling marble; eight double minarets of brick encrusted with tilework; twelve divisions inside carried on black stone pillars; six centre arches in dark blue and white and six more alternating blue, white, green and yellow. Francklin's black stone pillars are the tell — the only stone in the building came from somewhere else.

   The black stone pillars inside are the exception that proves the rule: the only stone in the building came from elsewhere.

2. 2

   Qadam Rasul Masjid قدم رسول مسجد

   mosque · 30 min · no coordinate yet

   Stand here. At the gateway of the court, where the two disputed inscriptions belong — one found in place, one found lying on the ground.

   Two inscriptions, one gateway, and a disagreement about which belongs

   What the board says: That the Qadam Rasul mosque enshrines a stone bearing the footprint of the Prophet.

   The Qadam Rasul at Gaur is a reliquary building rather than a congregational one, and the interesting thing about it in the record is an argument over its own date.

   Ravenshaw's volume carries an inscription of Nusrat Shah dated A.H. 937, and a second, reported by Major Francklin, of Husain Shah dated the 22nd of Muharram A.H. 909. The Husain Shah text is a foundation record for a gateway, naming the sultan at ceremonial length as 'the support of Islam and of Moslems, Alauddunya wa uddin Abul Muzaffar Shah Husain Sultan'. Francklin found that slab lying on the ground near a gateway of the mosque.

   The editorial note attached to it is the honest part: the annotator judges that the loose slab is 'far more likely to belong' to that gateway than the other inscription Ravenshaw found in place, and then admits he cannot check whether Francklin's inscription is the same one Blochmann listed from a report he did not have to hand. Two inscriptions, one building, and a nineteenth-century scholar telling you plainly which parts he is unsure of.

   A reliquary building, likely in use. Ask before entering.

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.

• Francklin's description is quoted by Ravenshaw from an earlier account and is therefore second-hand here; the colours and counts are his, from a visit some decades before 1878.
• How much of the tilework survives now is unverified. This research opened an 1878 book, not the building.
• Ravenshaw read and photographed the Gaur inscriptions himself in the 1870s; the readings are his and have been revised since, so any date taken from them is reported as his rather than as settled.
• Whether either inscription is still in place, and whether the loose slab was ever reattached, is unverified.
• The A.H. 909 reading is Francklin's, reported by Ravenshaw's annotator, who could not confirm it against Blochmann's list. It is a second-hand reading of a damaged stone.