The Historian

For this summer issue, we admire the quintessential "cooling" jali-one of India's great contributions to global architecture and look at a lesser known but magnificent piece from the extraordinary madrasa of Ghaziuddin Khan from the Mughal era.

- SAM DALRYMPLE

In the year 1710, as the Mughal Empire began to fracture and collapse, a blind spymaster with a long white beard passed away in the Gujarat capital of Ahmedabad.Ghaziuddin Khan had lived an extraordinary life. An immigrant from Bukhara (now in Uzbekistan), he had found employment in the Mughal court at the age of 20, and over the next three decades emerged as one of Emperor Aurangzeb’s leading generals. It was under his guidance that the Mughal army captured the two great capitals of the Deccan—Bijapur and Hyderabad—and his son was later appointed the first Nizam of the Deccan. His family would retain the title until 1971, two and a half decades after independence.

In 1686, bubonic plague rendered Ghaziuddin Khan blind, yet with the help of his network of spies he would govern the province of Gujarat for almost a decade more. Perhaps even more extraordinary, however, was that this blind spymaster should subsequently commis sion one of the Indian capital’s most beautiful and least known masterpieces.