Dedicatory inscription of Prince Daniyal's congregational mosque, Gaur (AH 905 / 1500)

This schist slab, 41 x 115.3 cm, was the foundation inscription of a mosque at Gaur in Bengal and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1981.320). ¹ Welch sees in it how India's genius for stone, renowned under Hindu and Buddhist patronage, was applied in very different ways under Muslim rulers; the inscription was worked with chisels, files and abrasives. ¹

The inscription opens with a prophetic hadith whose sense is that whoever builds a mosque for God, God will build for him a palace like it in Paradise, and goes on to record that in the reign of Sultan Ala al-Dunya wa al-Din Abu al-Muzaffar Husain Shah, Prince Daniyal built this congregational mosque on 10 Dhu al-Hijja AH 905, that is 7 July 1500. ^{1 2} The text is in Arabic, written in a special Bengali variant of tughra script known as "bow and arrow". ²

The catalogue quotes Annemarie Schimmel's view that the slab is a particularly successful example of the "rhythmic parallelism" that Richard Ettinghausen and Irma Fraad found characteristic of Indian calligraphy: the vertical shafts are worked into a regular pattern broken by the long backward strokes of ya and superimposed kaf, and the round nun in the upper register forms a bow. ² This stone has exactly sixty verticals of equal length, through which five "bows" of twelve shafts each are set, each of the four outer bows with a straight horizontal letter as its string, which is why Schimmel judges it the finest of all published inscriptions from Bengal. ²

Ala al-Din Husain Shah (r. 1493-1518), a sayyid of Arab descent, was among the most admired kings of Bengal; he came to power after the deposition and killing of Shams al-Din Muzaffar Shah, whom he had served as vizier, and under him Bengal prospered while he and his family built mosques, tombs and palaces at Gaur and elsewhere, some of which survive. ² Simon Digby, who first translated the inscription, identified Prince Daniyal as one of Husain Shah's eighteen sons; the prince's name also appears on a tomb at Monghyr dated 1497. ² In the nineteenth century Gaur became a quarry for contractors from Calcutta, and the stone was probably carried off then and in due course sent to England. ²