Khan Mohammad Mridha Mosque

• 1. Introduction

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  A flight of twenty-five steps leads up from the east to the Khan Mohammad Mridha Mosque in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The mosque stands 150 meters west along the road that runs beside Lalbagh Fort. Worshippers still pray here, even though the government owns the site as an archaeological monument. Who ordered it built, and who designed it, depends on which record you trust. Why does a prayer hall sit so far above its surroundings? And what becomes of a building this old in a city where heritage has so often been ignored?

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• 2. Two Dates, Two Builders

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  In 1706 CE, by one account, Khan Mohammad Mridha built the mosque in a neighborhood called Atish Khan Mahalla. He acted on the instruction of Qadi Ibadullah. An inscription found at the site tells the story a little differently. It credits a man named Khan Muhammad Mirza and places the work under Farrukhsiyar, the Deputy Governor of Dhaka. The same inscription says a Qazi Ibadullah ordered construction during 1704-05. Mirza may also have been the architect, though the source says only that he could have been. The names are spelled differently and the dates differ by a year or two. The one figure who appears in both versions is Ibadullah, the patron behind the project. His order produced a building with an unusual foundation, because its lowest level hides under the prayer area.

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• 3. Rooms Beneath the Prayer Floor

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  Sixteen feet and six inches above the ground, the platform of the mosque lifts the whole building over its neighbors. Beneath that platform lie the tahkhana, underground rooms that actually sit above grade. Their roof forms the platform itself. The tahkhana consists of vaulted rooms that were meant for living purposes. In front of the main mosque there is a spacious prayer area open in all directions. Air moves freely across it and keeps worshippers cool. Despite all this height and space, the mosque proper occupies only a small portion of the platform.

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• 4. Domes and Mihrabs

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  The prayer hall is a rectangle measuring 48 feet by 24 feet, and three domes cap it. The central dome is the largest. The side domes are smaller because intermediary pendentives bring them down in size. At the corners stand short, slender minarets that rise just above the parapet and end in ribbed cupolas. The facade carries paneling and ornamental merlons along the parapet. Multi-cusped arches and engaged columns frame the entrances to the hall. Inside, two lateral arches divide the space into three bays, and each bay holds a mihrab set in a rectangular panel under a multi-cusped arch. Only the Imam and a few worshippers fit in this main mosque. The three-domed design reflects architecture practiced during the sixteenth century. Two Persian inscriptions survive, one over the central archway and the other over the central mihrab.

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• 5. A School for Travelers

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  Mawlana Asadullah, who died in 1709, was the founding teacher of the madrasa built north-west of the mosque. He taught fiqh, philosophy and logic, using both Arabic and Persian. The Nawabs of Bengal paid for the school. Today an annex on the north side serves as a madrasa. It includes a hujra, an arcaded hall used for travelers and visitors. The compound also reaches outward from these buildings into a garden on the eastern side.

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• 6. Garden and Palm

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  Seasonal flowers fill the garden in the eastern part of the compound. A gardener appointed by the Department of Archaeology looks after it. In the northern portion of the garden sits a well that once supplied water for wudu, the washing that refreshes a person before prayer. Nobody uses it now. On the southern side stands a tall, old palm tree, which gives the place a mark of great age. The Department of Archaeology that pays the gardener has had a much larger and more troubled role in the life of the building.

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• 7. Repairs and Encroachment

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  In 1913, the Archaeological Survey of India listed the building as a historic monument under the name Mirza's Masjid. By then it had suffered alterations and appropriations, and these had to be demolished to bring it back to its original form. The earliest known photograph shows a ruined structure at the turn of the nineteenth century, just before that first restoration attempt. Afterward the Department of Archaeology and the mosque committee carried out periodic repairs. Some of those repairs ignored the architectural and historic importance of the building. Damaged drains led the authorities to add new outlets that carry rainwater off the upper terrace, called the sahn. They also improved water and sanitation services. Meanwhile, encroachments squeezed the boundaries of the compound. That squeeze drew serious attention from architects and conservation enthusiasts in 1989, when the mosque became a case study at an architectural conservation workshop in Dhaka. The AKTC and UNDP sponsored that workshop.

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• 8. Heritage Left Idle

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  Dhaka is a 400-year-old city, and the conservation of its heritage sites has always been ignored. Destruction of historical monuments began on a moderate scale during the Pakistan period. It gained momentum after independence, and heritage properties suffered to an appalling extent during military rule. Conservationist architects complain that friezes and other ornamental features of old buildings get replaced with dissimilar, odd-looking ones. The details, sizes and proportions of the original ornament are lost in the process. The Antiquities Act of 1968, the Bangladesh National Building Code and the Metropolitan Building Rules of 2006, revised in 2008, all call for government protection of heritage sites. They also call for a standing committee. Yet the government has stayed idle on the issue. The mosque's own mutawalli, a custodian, notes that the government owns it as an archaeological site and supervises it through the Department of Archeology under the Ministry of Cultural affairs. In his words, there is a "lack of sincerity and transparency in the government intervention."

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