Mehrauli: a room lived in, then buried in

The route

• One stop of the seventeen rows the site universe holds for Mehrauli and South Delhi. Delhi is the best-covered ground in this archive and the least in need of another guide, which is why this pilot is one building and not twelve.
• Carr Stephen wrote in 1876, before the ASI's Delhi inventory; his attributions have been revised since and the dates here are his.
• 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

   Jamali Kamali Mosque and Tomb جمالی کمالی

   mosque · 50 min · 28.5203, 77.1836

   Stand here. In the tomb chamber, not the mosque. This is the room he lived in.

   A poet buried in the room he had lived in

   What the board says: That the Jamali Kamali mosque and tomb date from the Lodi–Mughal transition.

   Shaikh Fazl-ullah, called Jalal Khan, wrote under the name Jamali. Carr Stephen's 1876 account describes him as a great traveller and a poet whom kings delighted to honour — the favourite of four successive rulers of Delhi, at the height of his fame under Sikandar Lodi, and still high in royal favour when he died under Humayun.

   In 935 A.H. (1528) he built a mosque here in the old village of Qutb Sahib, and beside it a room. The room is the point. He lived in it. He then went with Humayun to Gujarat and died there in 942 A.H. (1535); his body was brought back to Delhi and interred in the room he had occupied as a dwelling during his lifetime. The mosque and the tomb sit in two adjoining walled courts, and in the wall between them is a doorway, now closed.

   Carr Stephen also noticed that the way in had been changed. The court is entered from the east, but he judged that entrance 'quite a modern alteration' — the original gateway was in the southern wall, cut off by a later wall joining the eastern to the western. He compares the mosque closely to the Moth-ki Masjid, differing chiefly in having one dome where that has three, and gives the dimensions: the body 120 feet long and 27 wide, 32 feet from floor to roof, and ten feet more to the top of the dome.

   The doorway in the wall between the two courts is shown as closed in the 1876 account. Whether it still is, is unverified.

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.

• Carr Stephen wrote in 1876, before the ASI's Delhi inventory, and his attributions have been revised since. The dates here are those he gives.
• Whether the doorway between the two courts is still closed, and whether the eastern entrance he thought modern is the one used now, is unverified.
• The second grave in the tomb, conventionally called Kamali, is not identified in this source and is not identified here.