Bahrampur Mosque

The Bahrampur Mosque stands just outside the village of Bahrampur, about 8 km west of Dina Nagar in Gurdaspur district. It was completed in 1685 during the reign of Aurangzeb. It is one of the few buildings in the region whose date and patron can be read directly from an inscription. The inscription is carved on a stone slab above the central doorway. It names the builder as Haji Bahram, faujdar of the chakla of Jammu and Kangra, who raised the mosque in accordance with the will of his brother, Haji Rajab Ali, so that people might benefit from it until the Day of Judgement. The slab was buried under thick whitewash until the historian Subhash Parihar cleaned it and read all eight lines. Two ruined graves beside the northern wall are believed to include Rajab Ali’s. The mosque measures about 17.6 by 12.8 metres. Its front has three arches: a pointed one in the centre and a cusped one on each side. Behind them is a covered verandah, which also appears at two other Aurangzeb-era mosques in Haryana, at Sadhaura and in the Taraori sarai. Inside, the prayer hall has a central nave, two side aisles and three mihrabs. Each section has its own dome, and the domes sit toward the back, so they are barely visible from the front. Small lamp niches in the walls have narrow flues that carried smoke out through the roof and kept the interior free of soot. Despite the name, the village was not named after Haji Bahram. The Shah Jahan Nama already mentions Bahrampur in 1641-42, when Mughal commanders were ordered to halt at Raipur and Bahrampur during the campaign against Raja Jagat Singh of Kangra. Local tradition credits Akbar’s regent Bairam Khan with founding it around 1555-56, but Parihar finds this unlikely on linguistic grounds. The origin of the name remains unknown. When Rodgers visited in 1891, the three domes were intact but the walls needed repair, the northern part was being used as a cowshed, and no conservation had been attempted. By the early 1990s the mosque was in excellent condition and was serving as a primary school. It's presently working as a functional mosque.