Jami Masjid, Batala

Batala’s Jami Mosque sits in the busy main bazaar, a reminder of the town’s Mughal past. The town’s own historian, Sujan Rai Bhandari, credits it to a local judge, Qazi Abdul Haq, and places it in the reign of Aurangzeb (1658-1707). An official paper from those years already refers to it as the “greater” Jami mosque. That suggests it went up early in the reign and that Batala had an older mosque before it. Aurangzeb is also recorded as granting it a daily payment, which continued through the Mughal period. The mosque is a single long prayer hall facing a wide courtyard on its east side. Three even arches open the front, and behind them lie a central nave with an aisle on each side. Three niches mark the direction of prayer in the back wall, and the central one has an eight-sided plan. A stone pulpit is still in place beside it. Three domes crown the roof, one over each section. The middle one rises on a round drum, and each is finished with a lotus-shaped base and a pointed finial. Inside and out, the decoration is modest: shallow net patterns moulded in plaster on the arches and domes. What makes the mosque unusual is its writing. Verses were spelled out in iron letters fixed to the walls, but coats of whitewash have left most of them badly rusted. The few that scholar J.S. Grewal managed to read honour the Prophet and his first four successors and rank them above the family of Ali. Grewal saw in this the tension between Batala’s Sunni and Shia communities, and the town still keeps a separate Shia mosque. Only two of Batala’s mosques are architecturally notable, and this is the larger of them. When Subhash Parihar documented it in the early 1990s, it was serving as part of a government girls’ school. Source: Parihar, Subhash, Some Aspects of Indo-Islamic Architecture (Abhinav Publications, 1999), ch. 6.