Dakhni Serai

South of Malhian Kalan, on the old Agra-Lahore highway, stands one of the best-preserved Mughal sarais in Punjab. The enclosure measures about 180 by 172 metres, inside a wall with an octagonal bastion at each corner. A three-storey gateway stands in the middle of the east and west sides. Both were once covered in glazed tiles in arabesque designs of yellow, orange, green, turquoise, indigo and white. Much of the tilework has come off, but in 1926-27 the archaeologist John Marshall judged it as fine as the tilework in the Lahore Fort. The western gateway was later bricked up, so visitors now enter through the eastern one. Inside, the courtyard is lined with about thirty rooms for travellers on each side, with larger rooms for travellers of rank in the middle of the north and south sides and in the corners. A three-domed mosque stands in the south, with the foundations of a bath house to its east. No inscription records who built it. Historians have credited Ali Mardan Khan, around 1640, or Wazir Khan, around 1632-33. Subhash Parihar argues that “Dakhini” means Deccani, and that a 1712 court newsletter names it Sarai Rustam Khan Dakhini. He credits Rustam Khan, a Deccani noble of Shah Jahan, and dates it between 1634 and 1658. Around 1900 it served as a leper asylum. It was declared a protected monument in 1919. Sources: Parihar, Some Aspects of Indo-Islamic Architecture (1999), ch. 14; Parihar, Mughal Monuments in the Punjab and Haryana (1985), ch. 3.