# A Handbook of Indian Art/Section 1/Chapter 11

CHAPTER XI
THE BIJĀPŪR AND MOGUL SCHOOLS—MODERN INDIAN BUILDING
All the Muhammadan building schools described above belonged to Hindustan, the ancient Aryāvarta. South of the Vindhya mountains, in the Dekhan and farther south, there were several other Muhammadan schools, marked by a strong individuality, which, like those of the north, were derived from the pre-existing Buddhist and Hindu traditions. Kulbarga, Bidar, Golkonda, Ahmadnagar, and Aurangabad—the capitals of different Muhammadan kingdoms of the Dekhan from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries—were laid out by the Indian craftsmen in the service of Muhammadan Sultans as magnificently as the ancient cities of India which the armies of Islam destroyed or used as Gaur was used. But the most distinguished of the southern schools under Musalman rule was that of Bijāpūr, the capital of the State of the same name which became independent in 1490, when Yusuf 'Adil Shah, its Turkish governor, threw off allegiance to the Bāhmani Sultans and founded a dynasty which lasted until the latter part of the seventeenth century. But the great building projects of the Bijāpūr Sultans only began with the reign of 'Ali 'Adil Shah I in the middle of the sixteenth century, after the victory of the united Musalman forces of the Dekhan over Rām Rāj, the Rājā of Vijayanagar, and head of the Hindu ​coalition which for two centuries had barred the passage of the arms of Islam to the farther south.
During this period Vijayanagar had been in Southern India what Gaur was in the north, a great trading centre and one of the most populous cities of the East, crowded with artisans of every kind, and laid out sumptuously with artificial lakes, parks, gardens, palm-groves, and orchards. Paez, a Portuguese traveller in the early sixteenth century, described it as "the best provided city in the world: stocked with provisions of every kind, with broad and beautiful streets full of fine houses. The palace of the Rājā enclosed a space greater than all the castle of Lisbon." The relations between Vijayanagar and its Musalman neighbour had by no means been always hostile. The Rājās had sometimes assisted the Bijāpūr Sultans in their quarrels with other Musalman States, and had enlisted a Muhammadan bodyguard in their service, allowing its officers to swear fealty on the Kurān, and building for them a mosque in the quarter of the city set apart for them. After the fatal battle of Talikota, in which Rām Rāj was killed, Vijayanagar was sacked by the Musalmans, and Bijāpūr, with the help of the captive Hindu craftsmen, became the chief building centre of the Dekhan.
The architecture of Bijāpūr was characterised by the fact that the Sultans who were the builders of the city were nearly all of the Shiah sect, and as tolerant towards Hinduism as the Vijayanagar Rājās had been towards Islam, admitting Brahmans into their service and using Mahratti instead of Persian as the official language for revenue administration. Ibrāhīm II (1580—1606), in whose reign most of the finest buildings of Bijāpūr were begun, was even suspected of taking part in Hindu religious ceremonies.
Plate XLVIIIa
PANCH MAHALL, FATEHPUR-SIKRI
Plate XLVIIIb
RĀJA BIRBAL'S PALACE, FATEHPUR-SIKRI
The earliest of the great buildings at Bijāpūr is the royal mosque of 'Ali 'Adil Shah, built in the last half of the sixteenth century to celebrate the fall of Vijayanagar. It closely resembles the ruined building now known as the "Elephant Stables" in the old Hindu city, which was probably built as a mosque for the Muhammadan bodyguard of the Vijayanagar Rājās. 'Ali 'Adil Shah's successor, Ibrāhīm II, built the magnificent mausoleum (Pl. L, b) and mosque called after his name as memorials for his favourite daughter and for his wife, Tāj Sultana, which was ​doubtless among the "famous buildings of the world" discussed by Shah Jahān and his master-builders when the design of the Tāj Mahall at Agra was under consideration. The Bijāpūr monument was built under similar circumstances a few years before Shah Jahān commenced the wonderful memorial to his beloved wife.
THE MOGUL SCHOOL
It may be convenient for historical purposes to classify all Muhammadan buildings erected by the Indian master-builders under the Mogul dynasty, from its foundation by Bābur in 1526 down to the eighteenth century, as "Mogul," though they are by no means Mogul, or Mongolian, in design and are very varied in character. In order to understand the history of the Mogul or of any Indo-Muhammadan school of building, one must first consider the effect of Islam's war-like propaganda upon the building traditions of India. Before the Muhammadan conquest the Indian hereditary builders, whose traditions of technique and design went back in an unbroken line to some of the most ancient cities of the world, had for many centuries borrowed no structural ideas from outside India, but kept strictly to the craft ritual laid down in their own sacred writings. Though it is written in the Silpa-Sāstrās that the master-builder should be "conversant with all the sciences," it is probable that, as in the present day, every branch of the Indian building craft had become highly specialised, common traditions co-ordinating the different branches and preserving unity of structure and design.
Many centuries of practice within these lines had developed extraordinary technical skill without exhausting the immense fertility of invention possessed by the ​Indian craftsman, when the Muhammadan conquest made a revolutionary change in his hereditary craft practice. Thousands of craftsmen, each expert in his own special branch, were forced into the service of Islam in different parts of Asia and Europe, and set to work indiscriminately at the bidding of their masters. The expert builder of Hindu vimānas might not build a temple spire, but he could design or build the dome of a mosque or tomb equally well. The image-maker might not make images, but he could construct the mihrāb of a mosque or carve texts from the Kurān. The painter might not paint pictures, but he could ornament enamelled tiles, decorate walls without using figures or animals, and draw designs for the mullahs when they were planning a mosque or tomb.
Thousands of Indian craftsmen thus settled down to a new life and new work in their forced exile, took Muhammadan names, and became Persians, Arabs, Turks, Spaniards, or Egyptians. A few centuries afterwards the establishment of a Muhammadan empire in India increased the demand for Musalman craftsmen, and offered many inducements for the descendants of these Indian captives to seek employment in the opulent cities some of which their ancestors had helped to build. The new ideas brought into India by these "foreigners" were only the old ones in a new shape, the craft ritual of India adapted to different technical conditions and to a new environment. Religious animosities by this time had softened down. The Hindu and Musalman craftsmen worked amicably together without compulsion, and used their inventive faculties to add to the splendour of Indian cities and gratify the taste of their Mogul rulers, who planned their capitals after the traditions of Indo-Aryan royalty, and were themselves generally more than half Indian by birth.
​The Mogul building tradition was therefore wholly Indian, only a new departure analogous to that of the Renaissance in Europe. The Hindu builder threw his old structural formulas into the melting-pot, and reshaped them himself, with astonishing constructive skill, in new forms of such fantasy and variety that the European critic, accustomed to the archæological rules of the Renaissance and generally profoundly ignorant of Indian history, finds it difficult to follow them: for while the Renaissance tied down the European master-builder to narrower constructive limits than the Gothic, the changes in craft traditions made by the Muhammadan conquest of India gave the Indian master-builder a new and much wider field for his invention and skill. Especially in the Mogul period the dilettante began to exercise considerable influence upon the design of buildings, but not to the same extent as in Renaissance architecture in Europe. At the beginning of Renaissance architecture the amateur archæologist was admitted into the fraternity of masons, and after a time had so much influence upon building traditions that craftsmanship and design were divorced from each other, with disastrous results, both economic and artistic. The fragments of Greek and Roman building were drawn, measured minutely, written about in countless volumes, and made the models of a correct taste which every builder was bound to accept. The literary amateur who knew his books became the master-builder, and the master-builder, whose creative mind had led the van of civilisation, became a more or less illiterate artisan, whose vocation it was to shape a set of paper patterns to a practical form and supply the technical knowledge which the architect lacked.
Plate XLIXa
SULTAN MUHAMMAD'S TOMB, BIJĀPŪR
Plate XLIXb
SULTAN IBRĀHĪM'S TOMB, BIJĀPŪR
Jahāngīr's favourite wife, Nūr Mahall, who practically ruled the empire, was a Persian by birth, and she loved to imitate the painted tile decoration of her native land in a sumptuous fashion with precious marble inlay, perhaps giving suggestions for the patterns herself. But the Itmād-ud-daulah's tomb at Agra which she built for her father is neither a Persian nor Mogul building. It is Indian, yet something new. Similarly, when the Sultan of Bijāpūr bade his builders make his tomb as fine as that of the Emperors of Rome, they gratified his wishes by making an Indian dome, unique in engineering and unsurpassed in beauty, but not Roman or Turkish. The eclecticism of the Mogul ​period was a great opportunity for the Indian builder, and he made full use of it.
Mogul architecture, so-called, can hardly be said to have commenced until the founding of the present city of Agra by Akbar in 1558, opposite to the old city on the left bank of the river which Bābur had made his capital. The latter, who was the first of the Indian Mogul line, expresses in his memoirs a profound contempt for all things Indian, and it is said that he employed architects from Constantinople to carry out his numerous building projects. This may possibly be true, for out of the many buildings erected by Bābur at Agra, Delhi, and Kabul, apparently only two have lasted to the present day—a result which might be expected from the importation of foreign builders unused to Indian technical conditions. In the sixteenth century, moreover, the Indian master-builder had nothing to learn from European methods. Dr. Vincent Smith suggests vaguely that there is some reason for thinking that the grandeur of the proportions of buildings in the north of India and Bijāpur may be partly due to the teaching of this foreign school; but grandeur of proportion was not a monopoly of the Western schools, and excepting the radiating arch, with which Indian builders of the sixteenth century were perfectly familiar, there is ​no peculiarity of design or construction characteristic of Western methods in any Indian buildings of the sixteenth or seventeenth century. If Western craftsmen had taken a leading part in the design of any Mogul buildings, they would certainly have left more tangible evidence of their handiwork than "grandeur of proportions."
The most conspicuous mark of foreign influence in Mogul building first appears in the tomb of Humāyūn (Pl. XLII, b), built early in Akbar's reign when the government was in the hands of Humāyūn's devoted friend and general, Bairām Khan. Humāyūn had won back his throne, from which he had been driven by Shēr Shah, with the help of a Persian army. Akbar's mother was Persian, and there is no doubt that Persian craftsmen had a voice in the design of Humāyūn's mausoleum, though white marble and red sandstone are used as facing materials instead of enamelled tiles. But Humāyūn's court fashions only had a detrimental effect upon the Indian masonic tradition which had found such noble expression in his Afghan rival's tomb at Sahserām a few years before (Pl. XLII, a). The two monuments reveal the character of the men whose remains they cover. Humāyūn's pompous but uninspired monument shows the "grand seigneur," if somewhat shallow and capricious, a brave fighter and charming companion, but incapable as a ruler of men; Shēr Shah's, the stateliest of funeral monuments, a monarch strong both in war and in peace, a strategist and organiser, iron-fisted and unscrupulous, but a ruler of great constructive ability.
When Akbar had grown to manhood and thrown off the tulelage of his Afghan guardian, Bairām Khan, he also took a keen interest in building, and left the ​impress of his versatile genius upon his palaces at Agra, the new capital which he built at Fatehpur-Sikri, and his tomb at Sikandra. His great fame and the wealth of his treasury must have attracted craftsmen from all the cities of Asia. Akbar himself was eager to enlarge the range of his knowledge, and in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of his court, where Christians, Jews, Brahmans, Zoroastrians, and Musalmans disputed with each other, and every foreigner who had new ideas to offer was welcome, he had ample opportunity of making himself acquainted with the style of buildings in other countries, but he had no desire to pose as a foreigner or to introduce Mongolian fashions. His new capital was laid out on strictly Indian lines—like one of the royal cities of Rajputana—the Jami Masjid, with its towering gate of victory (Pl. XXXIX, a), taking the place of a Vishnu temple, but oriented in the same way. It is only in some of the decorative details that Persian and perhaps Chinese influence is visible. The symbolic design of his throne chamber in the private hall of audience (Dīwān-i-Khās), where he sat upon a massive Vishnu pillar as a Chakravartin, or ruler of the four quarters, is entirely Indo-Aryan, for Akbar's ambition was to obliterate all sense of foreign domination in the minds of his subjects, and to dissolve religious controversies in a common feeling of loyalty to "a most just, a most wise, and a most God-fearing king." And in having his own tomb at Sikandra planned after the model of an Indian five-storied assembly-hall, ​apparently as a meeting-place for the royal Order, the Dīn-Ilāhī, which he founded, Akbar probably had in his mind his great predecessor, Asoka, who united all Aryāvarta in devotion to the saintly Head of the Sangha, the Buddhist religious brotherhood. The Panch Mahall (Pl. XLVIII, a), adjoining Akbar's palace at Fatehpur-Sikri, where most probably the Order met during Akbar's lifetime, is of similar design, the four lower pavilions corresponding to the four grades of the Order, Akbar being enthroned under the domed canopy at the top as Grand Master.
Jahāngīr (1605-27), Akbar's rebellious and unscrupulous son, under whose directions the tomb was completed, altered the original design of the top story where Akbar's cenotaph is placed, omitting the canopy of "curious white and speckled marble, ceiled all within with pure sheet gold richly inwrought," with which, according to William Finch, who visited the mausoleum when it was being built, it was to have been covered.
Akbar kept up a great state ceremonial, but regulated the economy of his public works with great care and exactitude. Jahāngīr, for political reasons, allied himself with the Sunni party, which was bitterly hostile to Akbar's religious views, so that in the buildings of his reign anything which might give offence to orthodox Musalman feeling is studiously avoided. In this he was followed by his son, Shah Jahān; but at the same time both monarchs indulged their ​luxurious tastes in the lavish use of the most costly building materials, especially white marble with precious inlay. The commanding influence which women now assumed at the Mogul court—the imperious Nūr Jahān, Jahāngir's empress, and of her niece, Shah Jahān's beloved Mumtāz Mahall—is shown in the feminine elegance, contrasting strongly with the manly vigour of Akbar's buildings, which characterises the Itmād-ud-daulah's tomb, the Moti Masjid and the Tāj Mahall at Agra, and the Dīwān-i-Khās at Delhi. But all these buildings, as well as the later additions to Akbar's palace at Agra, are natural developments of the Indian craft tradition of pre-Muhammadan times, influenced by the idiosyncrasies of the ruling monarch, and adapted by Indian court craftsmen to the ideas and social conditions of Muhammadan India. It is quite futile to seek for the creative impulse behind them in Samarkand, Timur's capital, or any other of the cities where the Moguls' Turkish ancestors ruled, for every phase of Mogul architecture is essentially Indian.
The Indian type of bulbous or lotus dome which characterises Mogul buildings after Akbar's time most probably was brought to Delhi from Bijāpūr, but it originated in Buddhist India—together with the "horse-shoe" or lotus-leaf arch from which its constructive principle is derived—from a dome of light construction built in an elastic framework, like the thatched roofs of Bengal, tied together internally by the mahā-padma, or great lotus—i.e., eight or more radiating bambu or wooden ties which suggested to the builder the mystic lotus. He therefore emphasised the symbolism externally by a band of lotus petals round the neck of the dome, and repeated ​the lotus flower on the top of it, where the ends of the ribs were joined to the finial. This lotus symbolism is almost universal in the bulbous domes of India, and marks distinctly their native origin, for it would never have entered into the mind of a foreign Musalman craftsman, except one who inherited the traditions of Buddhist India.
The Empress Nūr Jahān, besides the tomb of her father, the Itmād-ud-daulah at Agra, built Jahāngīr's tomb at Shahdara, near Lahore. Her charming apartments in the Agra Palace, known as the Samman Burj, or Jasmine Tower (Pl. XLVII, b), were also probably built after her directions. Mumtāz Mahall afterwards lived in them, and Shah Jahān, imprisoned in his own palace by his son, Aurangzīb, passed his last hours there gazing at the peerless monument he had raised to her memory.
The most famous of Shah Jahān's buildings owe much of their beauty to their faultless contours, the white marble with which they are faced lending itself admirably to the efforts of the masons to achieve this purity of line. The reticence in sculptured ornamentation which orthodox Musalman feeling demanded also helped in the same direction, while its jewel-like enrichment adds to the Tāj Mahall a peculiar feminine charm.
Nearly all critics agree in recognising that this monument, built by Shah Jahān for his most beloved wife, Arjumand Bānū Begam—otherwise Mumtāz Mahall, "the Elect of the Palace"—is unique in its evasive loveliness, so difficult to define in architectural terms, but most expressive of the builder's intentions that the fairest and most lovable of Indian women should have a monument as fair and lovely as herself. In this personal note, however, the Tāj Mahall does ​not stand alone, for, as we have already noticed, the Muhammadan rulers of India took so keen an interest in the making of their own tombs that in many cases the personality of the man or woman can be seen almost as distinctly in the architectonic monument as it would have been in the portrait statue which the law of Islam forbade them to make. From a purely æsthetic point of view some may even prefer the epic grandeur of Shēr Shah's tomb to the lyrical charm of the Tāj Mahall.
Plate La
TĀJ MAHALL, AGRA
Plate Lb
SCREEN SURROUNDING CENOTAPH, TĀJ MAHALL, AGRA
It is said that Shah Jahān, in consultation with his experts, saw drawings of all the chief buildings of the world—a statement not to be taken too literally—and that when the design was settled a model of it was made in wood. Veroneo appears to have been present at these consultations, and he declared afterwards that he had furnished the design which met with the Pādshah's approval. The silence of the detailed native accounts on this point, and of all contemporary writers besides Father Manrique, would have little significance were it not for the silence of the Tāj itself. It must be inconceivable to any art critic acquainted with the history of the Indian building craft that Shah Jahān, if he had so much faith in a European as an architect, would only have used him to instruct his Asiatic master-builders in designing a monument essentially Eastern in its whole conception, or that Veroneo himself would have submitted a design of this character and left no mark of his European mentality and craft experience upon the building itself. Shah Jahān was professedly a strict Sunni, and probably at the instigation of Mumtāz Mahall, who, like ​Nūr Jahān, wielded unbounded influence over the Emperor, he had renewed the destruction of Hindu temples which had ceased entirely during the reigns of father and grandfather. He had broken down the steeple of the Christian church at Agra, and would hardly have outraged Muhammadan orthodoxy and the memory of his beloved wife by employing a Christian as the chief designer of a tomb which was to be peerless in the world of Islam. There is not the least evidence that Veroneo's position at the court was that of a builder or architect. Nearly all Europeans in the Mogul imperial service were artillerists, and it was probably in that capacity that he enjoyed Shah Jahān's favour. Father Manrique's story is not corroborated by any other contemporary writer. Tavernier and Bernier both allude to the building of the Tāj, and they would certainly have given a European the credit due to him if they had heard and believed the tale.
Moreover, the idea that Indian builders of the seventeenth century worked, in the modern European fashion, after measured drawings prepared beforehand by the chief architect, and that the faultless curves of the central dome betray the mind and hand of a foreigner, is altogether wide of the mark. They worked then, as they do now, after a general idea, based upon traditional practice. When the general idea had been settled by Shah Jahān, the execution of it would have been left in the hands of his expert advisers, and the dome built by the dome-builder would be the latter's own creation, not a precise copy of a paper pattern or model set before him. So if Veroneo was so deeply versed in Indian craft tradition that he could design a lotus dome after the rules laid down in the Silpa-Sāstrās, the dome ​itself, built by Asiatic craftsmen, would not have been his.
The building of the Taj commenced soon after Mumtāz Mahall's death in childbirth in 1631, and lasted nearly twenty-two years. Ibrāhim II, the Shiah Sultan of Bijāpūr, had died five years before its commencement, and the splendid mausoleum which he had raised to the memory of his favourite daughter, Zohra Sultāna, and his wife, Tāj Sultāna, was probably still under construction when Shah Jahān was afflicted by the loss of his beloved Mumtāz Mahall. Ibrahim's Tāj Mahall must have been then the latest wonder of the Musalman world, and certainly it was keenly discussed by Shah Jahān and his builders. The dome of the Tāj at Agra is the best proof of that, for it might have been built by the same mason who built the dome of Ibrāhim's tomb. Both are constructed on the same principles: they are of nearly the same dimensions, and—a fact unnoticed by Fergusson and his followers—the contours of both correspond exactly, except that the lotus crown of the Tāj at Agra tapers more finely and the lotus petals at the springing of the dome are inlaid, instead of ​sculptured, in accordance with the whole scheme of decoration.
Plate LIa
SHAH JAHĀN'S MOSQUE, DELHI
Plate LIb
MOSQUE NOW UNDER CONSTRUCTION, BHOPAL
Shah Jahān's great mosque, the Jāmi Masjid at Delhi (Pl. LI, a), though strikingly picturesque when its tall minarets and imposing gateways and domes are silhouetted against a sunset sky, does not come up to the level of his other buildings. The design of the līwān is very much bettered in a fine mosque of the same style, and even larger in scale (Pl. LI, b), which is now being built at Bhopal under the personal direction of H.H. the Begam.
Though the great traditions of the Mogul court builders have thus survived in full vigour to the present day, the monuments of the dynasty after the end of Shah Jahān's reign in 1658 are hardly worth notice. Aurangzīb, his successor, broke away completely from the artistic traditions of his dynasty, and, reverting to the strictest rule of the Sunni sect, enforced the law of the Kurān forbidding portrait painting and sculpture, expelled the musicians who had enlivened the Mogul court, withdrew state ​patronage from the Hindu craftsmen who had contributed so much to the creation of the greatest monuments of Islam, and set on foot a wholesale destruction of Hindu temples. Aurangzīb's Musalman craftsmen were wholly unable to keep up the high architectural standard of his more tolerant predecessors; but the spendid traditions of the Indian master-builder survived the chaos which accompanied the decline and fall of the Mogul Empire, and in the latter part of the nineteenth century several of the palaces of Hindu princes at Benares (Pl. LII) are architectural achievements of the highest rank, judged by any standard, Eastern or Western.
Plate LIIa
NINETEENTH-CENTURY PALACE, BENARES (Ghoslā Ghat)
Plate LIIb
NINETEENTH-CENTURY PALACE, BENARES (Munshi Ghat)
* ↑ The area of floor space covered by the dome exceeds that of the Pantheon by about 2,500 square feet, but the dome itself is slightly smaller.
* ↑ An inscription to this effect is placed on the mosque.
* ↑ Vincent Smith, History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, p. 406.
* ↑ Ibid., p. 406.
* ↑ Fergusson's theory that the Muhammadans taught Indian builders to use the radiating arch is by no means proved. It was used in Babylon before Rome was built, and it is impossible to believe that Indian builders should not have observed its use during the many centuries of India's close commercial intercourse with Mesopotamia, both in early times and in the days of the Roman Empire. It was probably used in brick-building countries, like Bengal, long before the Muhammadan conquest. In other places Indian builders avoided the arch for very good technical reasons.
* ↑ For an account of Akbar's reign and his political and religious ideals, see History of Aryan Rule in India, by the Author (Harrap & Co.), pp. 450-557. The buildings at Fatehpur-Sikri are described in the Author's Handbook to Agra and the Tāj (Longmans), and in Indian Architecture (Murray).
* ↑ Neither Jahāngīr's inscriptions nor statements in his memoirs can be taken as proof that the tomb was wholly built according to Jahāngīr's instructions after Akbar's death. It is highly improbable that Akbar neglected to make arrangements for perpetuating his work as founder of the Dīn-Ilāhī; or that Jahāngīr, if he had an entirely free hand in the building of his father's tomb, would have permitted a scheme which departed so far from orthodox Sunni tradition.
* ↑ The petals are clearly shown in the sculptured relief from Ajantā, Pl. XLII, a.
* ↑ A more detailed discussion of the subject is given in Indian Architecture, by the Author, chapter ii.
* ↑ Bijāpūr became tributary to Shah Jahān in 1636. Skilled craftsmanship was a form of tribute always so highly prized by Musalman sovereigns that Shah Jahān is not likely to have neglected this opportunity of obtaining the builders he wanted. The dome of the Tāj is nearer to that of Ibrāhim's tomb than it is to Humāyūn's or the Khan Khānān's tomb at Delhi, which Mr. K. A. C. Creswell, from its close resemblance in plan and general arrangement, takes to be the model of the Tāj (Indian Antiquary, July 1915). Both the Tāj and the Bijāpūr domes have the Indian Mahāpadma, or lotus crown, which is never found in Persian or Arabian domes. The plan of the Tāj is also of Indian origin.
* ↑ The Bijāpūr dome is 57 feet in diameter, the Agra dome 58 feet.
* ↑ The designs of the jewelled inlay were evidently inspired by the borders of the pictures painted by the court painters of the time.
* ↑ Indian Architecture, by the Author (Murray, 1913), pp. 22-3.
* ↑ Architecture, by Professor Lethaby, p. 207.
* ↑ See Report on Modern Building, by the Archæological Survey of India, 1913.