Qutb Minar

The Qutb Minar is a tapering stone minaret and victory tower about 72.5 metres high in Mehrauli, in the south of Delhi, India. Begun around 1199 by Qutb ud-Din Aibak, commander of the Ghurid sultans in India, and completed by his successors over the following decades, it marked the arrival of Islamic rule in the region. With the mosque at its foot and later buildings around it, it forms the Qutb complex, one of the earliest groups of Islamic monuments in South Asia to survive.

The complex stands on the ruins of Lal Kot, the citadel of an earlier Hindu city called Dhillika. In the courtyard of the mosque is the Iron Pillar, much older than anything around it: its Sanskrit inscription in Brahmi script, dated to the fourth century CE, says it was raised as a standard of the god Vishnu on a hill called Vishnupada, in memory of a powerful king named Chandra. When and how it came to Delhi is not recorded on the pillar itself.

The Ghurids, a clan from the mountains of Ghur in present-day Afghanistan, pushed into the Indian plains in the late twelfth century. After Prithviraj Chauhan, Delhi's last Hindu ruler before the conquest, was defeated, Aibak took the city in 1193 and established Ghurid rule there. He built the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque, which his own inscription says was assembled from the carved columns and stones of twenty-seven demolished Jain and Hindu temples. The minaret was started beside it, and Aibak saw only its first storey completed. Its bands of inscriptions in naskh script include Quranic verses and the names and titles of the Ghurid sultans Ghiyath al-Din and Mu'izz al-Din.

Historians have long debated the purpose of the complex. Older scholarship saw it as a declaration of conquest meant to encourage conversion; more recent work stresses a negotiated blending of local and Islamic culture. Hindu masons worked under Muslim direction, and the historian Ved Parkash described the minaret as the first and finest example of Hindu and Muslim traditions fused together.

After the Ghurid sultan's death Aibak founded the Delhi Sultanate. His son-in-law and successor Iltutmish, who reigned from about 1210 to 1235, added three more storeys and enlarged the mosque, as did Alauddin Khalji later. Lightning damaged the top in 1368 or 1369, and Firuz Shah Tughlaq replaced it with two smaller storeys faced partly in white marble, adding a cupola. The finished tower has five storeys of red and grey sandstone and marble, separated by balconies resting on carved muqarnas brackets, and narrows from 14.3 metres across at the base to 2.7 metres at the top. Accounts of its internal staircase give 379 or 399 steps. Its nearest model is often said to be the brick Minaret of Jam in Afghanistan, built around 1190.

An earthquake in 1505 damaged the tower and Sikandar Lodi repaired it. During his rule Sher Shah Suri, who had driven the Mughal emperor Humayun into exile, added an entrance.

A severe earthquake on 1 September 1803 did serious damage. In 1828 Major Robert Smith, a British Indian Army officer, restored the minaret and crowned it with a new pillared cupola as a sixth storey. Widely seen as ill-advised, it was taken down in 1848 on the orders of the governor-general Viscount Hardinge and set up on the lawn to the east, where it is known as Smith's Folly. The tower leans just over 65 centimetres from vertical, a tilt considered safe.

UNESCO inscribed the Qutb Minar and its monuments as a World Heritage Site in 1993. The interior was closed to visitors after 4 December 1981, when the staircase lights failed and a stampede killed 45 people, most of them schoolchildren. The site's origins have also become politically charged. In November 2000 police stopped Hindu nationalist activists who planned a purification ritual inside the complex, citing the temple materials reused in the mosque. In 2022 a former Archaeological Survey of India regional director claimed, without evidence, that the tower was built in the fifth century to observe the sun, and the culture ministry ordered the survey to report on excavating near the minaret.