Foster-brother to the emperor Aurangzeb, Master of Ordnance, and from 1671 governor of Lahore, Fidai Khan Koka is the name the record attaches to the Badshahi Mosque. His title is an imperial office rather than a professional one, and what he did is better described as directing the design and construction than drawing it; Mughal practice made no clean division between the two. The commission was extraordinary by any measure — the largest mosque the dynasty ever built, raised in roughly two years to face the Lahore Fort across a shared forecourt, its scale calculated as an answer to his half-brother’s Jama Masjid at Delhi. He is included here because the attribution is documented and because omitting patron-builders would erase most named authorship in Mughal architecture.
