"The Indian Museum, Calcutta, as well as the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad Museum, Calcutta, acquired a large number of architectural objects from the ancient sites of Bengal, particularly, Gaud, Hazrat Pandua, Bagerhat, Hughli, Rajshahi, Dinajpur and elsewhere. Besides freshly quarried basalts, a large quantity of locally available building materials was employed by the architects of Gaud, Hazrat Pandua and elsewhere. Ravenshawâs unwarranted observation that âThough it (Hazrat Pandua) cannot boast of such antiquity as Gaud, its remains afford stronger evidence than those of the latter city of its having been constructed mainly from the materials of Hindoo buildingsâ, has been brushed aside by Westmacott, who thinks that Hazrat Pandua is older than Gaud. One of the strongest advocates of the Indianized form of Muslim structures is Havell, who is too intolerant to allow any credit to the Muslim builders for the use of radiating arches, domes, minarets, delicate relief works. He maintains that the central mihrab of the Adina Masjid (Pl. III) at Hazrat Pandua is so obviously Hindu in design as hardly to require comments. While Havell writes that âThe image of Vishnu or Surya has trefoil arched canopy, symbolizing the auraâ of the god, of exactly the same type as the outer arch of the mihrab, Beglar says that the Muslims delighted in âplacing the sanctum of his orthodox cult (in this case the main prayer niche) on the spot, where hated infidel had his sanctumâ. Saraswati is even more emphatic on this point when he contends, âAn examination of the stones used in the construction of the Adina Masjid (one of them bearing a Sanscrit inscription, recording merely a name of Indranath, in the character of the 9th century AD) and those lying about in heaps all round, reveals the fact, which no careful observer can deny, that most of them came from temples that once stood in the vicinity.â Ilahi Bakhsh, Creighton, Ravenshaw, Buchanan-Hamilton, Westmacott, Beglar, Cunnigham, King, and a host of other historians and archaeologists bear glowing testimony to the utilization of non-muslim materials (Fig. 3b & Pl. V), but none of them ventured to say that existing temples were dismantled and materials provided for the construction of magnificent monuments in Gaud and Hazrat Pandua."
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Syed Mahmudul Hasan, Mosque Architecture of Pre-Mughal Bengal, Dacca (Bangladesh), 1979.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pandua%2C_Malda
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Pandua, Malda
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