Anarkali Baradari

On the north-east edge of Batala, in the middle of the great tank dug by Shamsher Khan, stands a two-storey pavilion with a smaller room on top. It is called the Jal Mahal, or water palace, and the Baradari, a name for a pavilion with twelve doorways. The tank is about 238 by 218 m and dates from 1589-90, under Akbar. The pavilion is much later. It was added by Sher Singh, the son of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, who held Batala as his estate and grew up in the town. There is some doubt about how it began. Charles Rodgers wrote in 1891 that Shamsher Khan had built a mosque in the middle of the tank and that Sher Singh turned it into a baradari. The 1914 Gurdaspur gazetteer says the same. The historian Subhash Parihar disagrees. He knows of no other mosque built in the middle of a tank with no bridge to reach it, and he reads the building’s style as Sikh-period. In his view the pavilion was never part of the original plan, and Sher Singh built it new. In its time the tank was full. Water ran in through arches in its east side, most probably from a canal taken off the Ravi, which then flowed not far from Batala. The only way to the pavilion was by boat. Local accounts say Sher Singh held meetings with his courtiers here, and that an underground tunnel once joined it to his palace beside the tank, which is now part of Baring Union Christian College. Traces of the tunnel are said to survive near the college. Today the water is gone. The tank is a dry basin overgrown with weeds and scrub, and the pavilion stands alone in the middle of it, with a new paved path at the edge. The Archaeological Survey of India looks after the Jal Mahal together with Shamsher Khan’s tomb, and has carried out repairs to the outer walls. The date the tank dried up is not recorded in the sources found. Sources: Parihar, Some Aspects of Indo-Islamic Architecture (Abhinav Publications, 1999), ch. 6; Rodgers, Revised List of Objects of Archaeological Interest in the Punjab (1891); Gurdaspur District Gazetteer (1914)