ABSTRACT
The suggestion that the present Jami4 may not have been a mosque but an audience hall seems also a misunderstanding caused by the unusual plan of the building. The idea ignores an elementary Muslim design principle, as if this building were an audience hall the sultan’s throne would need to be in the middle near the western wall — the only wall in the building — and would have its back towards the qibla. In palace buildings in India and elsewhere a basic, but fundamental, consideration for the archi tect is to avoid placing the throne in such an orien tation. In Tughluqabad, the earliest extant Muslim throne room in India is set at the south of the audi ence hall, so the sultan would have faced north.7 A
similar orientation can be found in the private as well as the public audience halls of the Bahmani palaces at Bidar.8 A north-south orientation was generally observed in the design of most sultanate and early Mughal palaces, and in Jahangir’s public audience hall at Lahore fort, for example, it is located at the north side of the court.9 In the late Mughal designs, such as the Red Forts at Delhi and Agra, the throne is at the east,10 so that the emperor faced the qibla — an auspicious position indeed, with his courtiers ranged to the left and right according to protocol, as shown in numerous miniatures.11 How ever, in an afternoon audience the emperor would have faced the sun, and although by elevating the throne on a platform within a colonnaded hall the emperor would be in the shade, he would have still seen the public silhouetted against the sun. This undesirable lighting effect may have been a reason that sultanate architects avoided placing the thrones on the eastern side. When the orientation of the Jami* of Gulbarga is considered along with the other factors, little doubt remains that the building was indeed de signed as a mosque and not a secular "meeting place of outstanding political significance for the early Bahmani sultans".
