The Humble Resting Place Of Delhi’s One & Only Queen

The Humble Resting Place Of Delhi’s One & Only Queen

It’s 1 pm and people trickle into the humble stone complex at the far end of Pahari Bhojla for the midday namaaz. A beeline extends from the two small water tanks on the left for the namazis to wash up before the prayer. The devotees then face the mihrab on the western wall, as Maulana Tohid Alam, 30, leads the prayer. Their backs are turned towards two mounds of stone in the centre of the complex. Under one of these mounds lies Razia Sultan, the queen of Delhi.

Believed to have been killed in 1240 AD in present-day Haryana, there are several questions surrounding the death of the only woman emperor to rule from Delhi. In their book ‘Old Delhi: 10 Easy Walks’, Gaynor Barton and Laurraine Malone write that Razia may have been murdered by robbers when she was resting under a tree. Others say it was a group of villagers, not robbers, who were trying to gain favour with her half-brother and rival for the Delhi sultanate throne, Muiz ud-Din Bahram. While even the site of her burial is contested (Delhi or Haryana), one thing is for sure – she found no place next to her father Iltutmish, who is buried in the Qutb Complex in Mehrauli, the site of his throne. It is curious that her supposed grave is so far from home. It’s possible she was brought here instead of Mehrauli because her political rivals didn’t want her death to incite public sympathy. Another oft-cited reason is that she was buried near the gravesite of Sufi saint Turkman Bayabani, of whom she was a devotee.

Photographed by Kirti Narain


In all likelihood, the site of her burial in old Delhi was a jungle until the Mughals built Shahjahanabad or the Walled City in the 17th century, 400 years after her death. Today, one can hardly imagine the area could once have been an open forest. There are several theories about how the locality, Bulbul-i-khana, got its name. Some residents say the forest was abundant with bulbuls or songbirds. Others say the area hosted a medieval bazaar where the region’s choice bulbuls were traded and housed. Still, others say that ‘bulbul’ didn’t refer to birds at all but to the begums in a medieval king’s harem. Neither the bulbuls nor any evidence of a harem survives today, though.

Here Lies the Queen

An uphill walk through winding lanes which hardly get any sunlight, the tomb is not easy to find. The houses are a closely-stitched tapestry with no gaps in the middle. The lanes perennially smell damp and mongooses scurry about with abandon. Idle scooters and occasional horse carts parked in the way need to be carefully manoeuvred around until you reach the dead-end at the end of the hill. Marked by a plaque and an iron gate, this is where Razia is believed to be buried.

Maulana Tohid Alam has been at the mosque here since 1999. The young imam is responsible for the upkeep of the mihrab and conducts all the five prayers. Through the day, he can be seen tinkering about the complex before he retires for the night in the small shed at the corner of the compound. The mihrab has been around for as long as the oldest members of the neighbourhood can remember but the complex is said to have become an active mosque only about 25 years ago. The shrine has occasional tourists, usually led by an agent or a guide. “Sometimes a group of 30-40 foreign tourists will come but on some days the complex is completely empty,” the maulana says. “Officers from ASI (Archaeological Survey of India) come every now and then,” he adds.

An ASI plaque outside the complex calls it “unpretentious”, an understatement to say the least. The tomb is open-air with two simple graves in the centre, one of them unidentified. It has none of the fanfare that a monument built in honour of a ruler typically has. There are no ornate marble carvings or red sandstone walls like in Raziya’s father’s tomb in Mehrauli. The complex and the cenotaph are both built with rudimentary rubble, with no visible ornamentation. If earlier the graves opened out to the sky, today it’s only illegal construction from neighbouring houses threatening to close in. The windows which are unadorned by air-conditioners look directly into the compound as pigeons build their nests in niches along the wall. The only embellishments, if at all, is on the mihrab side which is decorated with pictures of Mecca, a chart dictating the various timings for prayer and rosary beads hung from a nail, among other things.

Photographed by Kirti Narain


The Mysterious Grave

Like everything surrounding Razia’s death and her place of burial, the unidentified grave next to hers also raises several questions. Some say it belongs to her sister Sazia, of whom very little is known. Razia and Sazia were said to be close and it is possible that she wished to be buried next to her valiant sister. Other conjectures are that it is her husband Malik Altunia, the governor of Bathinda who was supposedly killed along with her. It is not clear where the two were killed or who brought their bodies back. The tale that Danish Alam, 25, and Mohd Ishaq, 27, young residents of Bulbul-i-khana grew up hearing was that the two were killed in battle somewhere in Haryana and their bodies were brought back by Yaqut, Razia’s loyal Abyssinian slave.

The maulana, on the other hand, says with conviction that it is, in fact, Yaqut himself lying in the grave next to Razia’s. A 1983 film starring Hema Malini and Dharmendra alludes to a romance between the queen and her slave. Several accounts say that a rumour that Razia had a love affair with her ‘habshi’ (African) stable boy was manufactured by the Turkish elite that was trying to oust her from power.

Incidentally, Razia’s legacy is as unknown to her current neighbours as the identity of the person in the second grave. Mohd Kasim, 35, a tea stall owner laughs in disbelief when he learns how many years it has been since she wielded power. “How can you expect me to know what happened 900 years ago? I can’t even tell you what happened 50 years ago!” he scoffs. Interestingly, Kasim’s shop is right next to a gate that has ‘Razia Sultan’s Tomb’ painted in bold letters. He has been to the mausoleum a few times to read namaz but has never questioned what makes the woman lying in the complex so iconic.

Taj Begum, 60, also has a similar understanding of Razia’s story. She has been working as a cook in the locality for 22 years but her work leaves her with no time to visit the mausoleum of an erstwhile queen. “I’m a poor woman, I only want to put food on the table,” she says matter-of-factly.

A Battle for Succession

The erstwhile queen’s legacy, however, is not simply that she was the first and only empress of Delhi. Though her reign was short-lived (she was killed around the fourth year of her rule), there were several things of note in her administration. She rejected the veil and had people call her ‘Sultan’ instead of ‘Sultana’ – meaning she was the ruler herself, not the daughter or the wife of a ruler. She’s known to have established schools and research institutions, abolished the jizya (the tax on Hindus), ridden through the land and into battlefields atop horses and elephants, and done everything that her brother Ruknuddin could not do in the six months that he was in power before her.

There were only trials in Razia’s path since the question of succession arose and Iltutmish named his favourite and most competent offspring as his heir apparent. Upon her father’s death in 1236 AD, the Turkish nobility rejected his nomination and appointed her brother to the throne. But Ruknuddin was inept and was assassinated within six months of coming to the throne. For the next four years, until her death, Razia was the formidable sultan of the Mamluk Dynasty. But her efforts, patronage of poetry and general abandon as a woman rubbed the Ulema and the Turkish nobility the wrong way.

After an elaborate plot to overthrow her, Razia and Altunia were killed while fleeing the hostile Bahram and the rest of the Turkish nobility. Just like that, the life of the first female ruler of the sultanate was snubbed out and a woman never sat on the throne again. Nobody even knows for certain where she was laid to rest and if the unremarkable tomb in Bulbul-i-khana is indeed hers. But Maulana Tohid Alam is more optimistic about the forgotten queen. “We read namaz at her site of burial, what can be better than that? She must have been a very lucky (khush qismat) woman,” he says reverently.

That’s certainly one way of looking at it.

If you liked this article we suggest you read:

Related Stories

No stories found.
logo
Homegrown
homegrown.co.in