Lattan (Painted) Mosque, Gaur

The Lattan mosque stands four miles north of Gaur police station across the Bhagirathi, on the right of the Nawabganj road between the Tantipara mosque and the Five-Arched Bridge. ¹ Europeans called it the "China" or "Painted" mosque because its bricks were coloured. ^{1 2}

A local story, repeated by Francklin and Cunningham, holds that a dancing girl of the sultan's harem built it to atone for her former life, "Lattan" being a corruption of natin, dancing girl. ^{1 2} The author prefers Bloch's view: that the name came from the mosque's gaudy tiled appearance, which reminded peasants of a dancing girl in bright clothes and jewels — "the mosque that resembles a dancing girl", not "the dancing girl's mosque". ^{2 3}

It follows the square plan begun by the Eklakhi tomb: 72½ by 51 feet overall, its central chamber 34 feet square under a hemispherical dome on squinches whose interior rises in three stages with eight ribs, bell-and-chain motifs between them and a lotus pendant at the crown. ^{3 4} It is about 50 feet high inside and 70 outside; the qibla wall has three tiled mihrabs, and an eastern vestibule 34 by 11 feet has a four-sided Bengali chau-chala roof over its central bay; there are four fluted corner towers and two more at the corners of the vestibule. ⁴ Against Cunningham's dismissal, the author judges its tilework, some of it now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, a gem of Muslim ornamental art in Bengal. ⁵