Tomb of Jamil Beg (Ruins)

In the quiet fields of Kalanaur stands the Takht-i-Akbari, where Emperor Akbar was crowned in 1556. Its importance is largely overlooked, yet a building close beside it has been forgotten even more completely, so much that even the locals barely know of it. Once large and glorious, it has now collapsed and vanished. It was the Tomb of Jamil Beg. Jamil Beg was the son of Taj Khan, a noble at Akbar’s court. In 1603, during Raja Basu’s rebellion, he attacked Basu’s army near Pathankot and was killed along with about fifty of his father’s men. Taj Khan is believed to have built the tomb soon after. It was the town’s last important building, but by 1891 its walls and dome were badly cracked, and the surveyor Charles Rodgers warned that restoring it would be extremely costly. Nothing was done, and rain brought most of it down soon after 1994. The tomb stood on a high platform about 27.5 metres square. Each side had an arched entrance, and inside, corner arches turned the square chamber into an octagon that carried a double dome. The whole building was plastered and polished to look like marble. Its greatest glory was its decoration: sunken panels inside and out, painted in red, brown and blue with geometric and floral designs, plus painted medallions, stucco stalactites in the corners, and Persian verses in raised letters that Rodgers read as a father’s grief for his son. Subhash Parihar photographed the paintings before the collapse, and his photographs are now the main record. The tomb’s loss shows how much of Punjab’s Mughal heritage vanished for lack of protection. The location is an approximation: the real building lies between Kalanaur and Takht-i-Akbari. Sources: Parihar, Some Aspects of Indo-Islamic Architecture (1999); Rodgers, Revised List of Objects of Archaeological Interest in the Punjab (1891).