Shahi Sunehri Masjid

About

The Sunehri Masjid, whose full honorific, Shahi Sunehri Masjid, carries the weight of royal association, stands within Chandni Chowk, the ancient bazaar district at the core of Old Delhi. Its name, which translates from Hindi-Urdu as the "golden mosque," speaks to a visual character that has distinguished it from its neighbours across the centuries.

Set amid the ceaseless movement of one of South Asia's most celebrated commercial and cultural thoroughfares, the mosque offers a place of stillness and prayer to Delhi's Muslim community. Chandni Chowk itself has long been a meeting ground of traditions, faiths, and peoples, and the Sunehri Masjid has stood within that confluence as a house of worship whose presence shapes the spiritual character of the area.

The mosque's situation in the old walled city means it shares its skyline with monuments and markets that together tell the layered story of Delhi, Mughal, colonial, and contemporary, making it both a place of active devotion and a quiet landmark of enduring faith.

History

Roshan-ud-Daula, a noble rising in the court of the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah, built the mosque in 1721-22 and dedicated it to his spiritual guide, Shah Bhik. Raised on a plinth above the shops of Chandni Chowk and reached by a flight of stairs, its three domes were once sheathed in gilded copper, giving the mosque its name, sunehri, golden. It was from the balcony of this mosque that the Persian conqueror Nadir Shah is recorded to have watched, and ordered, a massacre of Delhi's citizens on the morning of 22 March 1739, in reprisal for a riot that had killed some of his soldiers. In 1897 the scholar Amin al-Din founded the Madrasa Aminia within the mosque's precincts, moving it to Kashmiri Gate two decades later.

Significance

The mosque's own signboard still reads Shahi Sunehri Masjid, Est. 1721, and its arched, gilded profile remains one of the most recognisable silhouettes on Chandni Chowk, rising above the street's jewellers and spice merchants a short walk from Sikh, Jain and Hindu houses of worship. It continues today as an active mosque, its stucco arabesques and jali screens carrying the faithful through daily prayer much as they have since the reign of Muhammad Shah.

Architecture

Late Mughal mosque architecture: three bulbous domes originally sheathed in gilded copper, two slender minarets, an elevated plinth with a three-bay arched facade in stucco arabesque and floral relief