Tomb of Shaykh Muhammad Ghawth, Gwalior

The tomb of Shaykh Muhammad Ghawth at Gwalior is a regular square without chamfered angles, with two-storeyed hexagonal towers at its corners, a square projection in the middle of each side crowned by a square chhatri, and a broad sloping chhajja on massive carved brackets all round. ^{1 4} Its broad single dome rises on an octagonal drum above a high square platform ringed by four hexagonal chhatris — in Nath's words, like a peacock resting among his hens. ¹

The square hall, 13.11 metres a side, carries its dome on corner squinches; at its centre is an oblong white marble chhatri closed by finely chiselled jalis, a replica of a canopied bed, holding the shaykh's tombstone. ^{1 2} Round the hall runs a lofty verandah 5.87 metres wide on pillars 8.53 metres high, its almost semicircular arches filled with jalis on the north and east: about a hundred panels in some twenty designs, mostly geometric. ² Nath calls it the first Mughal building to use jalis on such a scale, a decade before Fatehpur Sikri and four before Akbar's tomb at Sikandra. ² A Persian inscription on the south-west abutment records Akbar's Deccan expedition of AH 1008/1599; there is no other inscription, not even an epitaph. ²

The sources do not say who built the tomb: Bada'uni mentions a khanqah the shaykh built at Gwalior, and Abu al-Fadl is silent. ⁵ Nath thinks it unlikely that the austere shaykh, his sons or Akbar paid for it, and argues that its builder was Tansen, the greatest musician of the age, a native of Gwalior and the shaykh's disciple, who came to Akbar's court in AH 970/1562, the year of his master's death, and was buried at his feet in Gwalior around 1590. ^{6 7 3} He concedes that there is no direct epigraphic or documentary evidence. ³

For Nath, jalis, bracketed chhajjas and chhatris are local elements used here decisively, and Akbar followed them at Fatehpur Sikri and in his tomb at Sikandra; the dome is close to the "Pathan" domes of Delhi, while the jalis and brackets came from Gujarat by way of Rajasthan and the Man Mandir at Gwalior. ^{4 8} He compares it with the tomb of Shaykh Ahmad Khattu at Sarkhej near Ahmadabad (1416-51), which he thinks the shaykh saw during his years in Gujarat. ⁹