Page:Bulandshahr- Or, Sketches of an Indian District- Social, Historical and Architectural.djvu/63

 Rahtor dynasty, about 1050 A. D., Anang Pál II retired to Delhi and there established himself. But at the beginning of the eleventh century, Har-datt, the Rája of Baran, though nominally a feudatory of Kanauj. appears to have been the virtual sovereign of all the country now included in the districts of Aligarh, Bulandshahr, Merath and Delhi, with parts of Murádabád, Mathurá and Eta.

His name is still perpetuated by Hápur, a corruption of Hara-pur, now the head-quarters of the Stud Depôt, of which town he is the traditional founder, and all the fragments of stone sculpture that have been discovered at Bulandshahr may be assigned to his time. As might have been expected from its nearness to Delhi, the Muhammadans have made a clean sweep of the district and razed to the ground every building, secular or religious, that had been erected by its former Hindu rulers. I have been over every part of it, but the sum total of all the antiquities I have been able to collect may be very briefly enumerated. An unusually lofty column is one of a pair that were dug up in some low ground at the entrance to the town from the Chola Railway Station. Though long since brought under cultivation, the field is still called 'the Sarovar,' and is the traditional site of a large masonry 'tank' which Har-datt is said to have constructed. The companion column is at Merath, where it was sent by the Sardár Bahádur, into whose hands it had come, and has been worked up into a house he has built there. The one now in my possession I rescued from his stables, where it had been thrown on the ground and was used by his grass-cutters to sharpen their tools on. Six short pillars of the same period were found buried under the steps of a small mosque on the highest part of the old town. In digging the foundations of a house on the opposite side of the same street I recovered a curious stone, sculptured with a representation of three miniature temples. These are of such different design that, if they had been found separately, I might have been inclined to refer them to different architectural epochs. But the excessively archaic type of one must be attributed to the influence of religious conservatism: similar forms may be seen in conjunction on the front of the temples of Khajuráho, which are known to be of the tenth century A. D. A circular pillar, with a coil of human-headed snakes at the base, is, as already mentioned, from Ahár, as also a medieval door-jamb and a block carved with rows of temple facades in the style of the Násik caves. This last is