 The town also has a mosque, built by Gays-ud-din Balban, that bears an inscription in Arabic dating to 682 Hijri (1283 A.D.).Garhmukteshwar was the scene of major anti-Muslim violence in November 1946, at a time when various areas of British India were experiencing significant communal unrest as the partition of the country into India and Pakistan loomed.Gyanendra Pandey describes the place as "a metaphor for the atrocities of Partition; and Partition itself a metaphor for the kind of extraordinary genocidal violence that was not witnessed again in India, perhaps until 1984".