A palace ordered as paid work for an unemployed town, planned for seven storeys and standing today at three and a half.
The chronicler Mohammad Kasim, in the Farishta, records that Sultan Mehmood Shah Khilji attacked and defeated Sharki Sultan Mehmood of Jaunpur at Kalpi in 1445 AD. Returning to his capital at Mandu, the Sultan called for a seven day celebration and ordered a seven storey building along with a village to be named Zafrabad, near Chanderi, for his own future visits.
The other account of the order is economic. Chanderi at that time had a shortage of work and many unemployed people, and the Sultan is said to have used the victory as a pretext to commission the Koshak Mahal as a civil project that would give the town work and wages. Hundreds of workers spent years on it. Whether the seven planned storeys were ever finished is disputed: some hold that the project was abandoned, others that all seven were built and only three and a half remain. Workers from Chanderi who helped clear the palace during a restoration in the 1930s and 1940s reported vast quantities of large stones inside and around it, surely from upper floors. It is also said that after the events of 1857 the British Army instigated the demolition of many palaces in the region in retaliation against the aristocracy, and that the Koshak Mahal was among the buildings fired on by cannon.
The monument is raised on four pillars and measures 116 square feet in plan, with walls ten feet thick. Each storey is fifteen feet high and the verandahs are 43 feet by 43 feet. The two main entrances stand 45 feet high and 26 feet wide, and every storey has six doors and one window.
The architect combined Malwa Islamic, Iranian, Afghani and Indian Vedic forms in one building. One side of the monument is decorated with lotus flowers and the other with betel leaves, which is an unusually direct pairing of motifs to look for.
Staircases rise from both sides as you enter, leading up through each storey. At the doorways of each staircase a few lines are inscribed in Farsi and Nask script, easy to walk past if you are not looking for them.
Koshak Mahal is four kilometres from Chanderi, just off the Isagarh Road, so it needs transport rather than a walk. The interior involves stairs between floors.
October to March is the comfortable season for a site that is largely open stone with little shade. Morning or late afternoon light picks out the carved lotus and betel leaf work far better than the flat glare of midday.
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