A Handbook of Indian Art/Section 1/Chapter 9

by Ernest Binfield Havell

CHAPTER IX

MOSQUE AND TOMB

If the palaces of Muhammadan India, except for the extreme beauty of the decoration, can but rarely take the same rank in architecture as those of the Hindu princes of Rajputana, on the other hand its mosques and tombs are unsurpassed, and generally appeal more to the European critic than the earlier works of the Indian master-builder, to whom the entire credit of their creation is due; for though, like all great artists, he borrowed from his neighbours, especially from Persia, the Indian mosque and tomb are Indian and nothing else—as perfect in masonic craftsmanship as those of Persia are in the art of brick and glazed terra-cotta.

The striking contrast between the most remarkable of Indian mosques and tombs, especially those of the strict Sunni school, and the best known Hindu buildings has made many critics besides Fergusson ignore the derivative character of all Islamic architecture, and to attribute to Pathān and Mogul some subtle artistic sense which was lacking in the mind of the Indian master-builder before he became a slave of the Musalman conqueror or a convert to the creed of Islam.

In the beginning of the thirteenth century, when the first Indo-Muhammadan dynasty was founded at Delhi, Musalman architecture had its established canons, but no great original masterpieces to hold up as examples for the Hindu builder. The Arabs had borrowed their builders from Rome, Byzantium, and Persia. The combination of the three schools, working together under conditions laid down by Islamic law, produced what is called Saracenic architecture, which, however, had not developed into an independent style before Islam began to draw upon the artistic resources of India in the same way as it had borrowed Indian science—mathematical, medicinal, and astronomical—to build up the schools for which Arab culture became famous in Europe.

Before the advent of the Prophet, Mahāyāna Buddhism, besides converting the Far East, had spread all over Western Asia; and the description given by Arab writers of the Kaaba, the most venerated shrine in Arabia, which was the first model of a Muhammadan mosque, strongly suggests a Buddhist temple or monastery filled with Mahāyānist images. It had been for all Arabs a place of pilgrimage from a very remote period—Muhammadan tradition says from the time of Abraham. It contained hundreds of images, among them those of Jesus Christ and the Holy Virgin. As M. Foucher has pointed out, Hariti, the Buddhist Madonna, is one which occurs in Mahāyānist iconography all over Asia; and it is not at all improbable that in the seventh century an ancient Buddhist shrine in Arabia contained images of Hariti and her partner, which were confused, as is so often the case, with Christian images.^[1]

That which happened in later times in every province of India where Muhammadan rule was established

Plate XXXVIIIa

MIHRABS IN ĀDĪNAH MASJID, GAUR

Plate XXXVIIIb

MIHRAB IN JĀMI' JUNĀGADH

must have occurred earlier in Arabia and in Persia, when the war-lords of Islam had few building craftsmen except those they took prisoner or imported from other countries. The Buddhist images were torn from their niches and broken up or melted; the former temple or monastery, if not utterly destroyed, was used as a place of Muhammadan worship, and the empty niches (mihrābs) with their arches—lancetted, trefoiled, or sometimes of the earlier Hīnayāna trefoiled form—remained in the walls. The principal one in the western wall of the converted mosque pointed the direction to which the faithful must turn when saying their prayers, and was called the "Kiblah"^[2]; so the arched niche was retained in every newly-built mosque and became a symbol of the faith. In private houses the numerous small niches which formerly had served as shrines for the saints, or household gods, of Mahāyāna Buddhism, were also retained: they were useful as cupboards or receptacles for the hookah, rose-water vessel, lamp, or other article of domestic use. The niche with its changed contents became as common a motif in the Muhammadan art of Arabia, Persia, and India, as it had been when it was the shrine of a Buddhist saint.

It followed almost inevitably that the pointed or horse-shoe arch was also used structurally for window and door openings instead of the semicircular Roman arch or the beam of the temple portico. The Persian builders quickly perceived the wonderful colour effects produced by their enamelled terra-cotta—an art which they had inherited from Babylon and Nineveh—when placed upon the curved surfaces of the niche, and the convenience of placing a doorway or window under the shelter of its semi-dome instead of building a projecting porch or balcony for it. The law of the Kurān, which, like the Mosaic law, forbade the making of a graven image or the likeness of anything which is in heaven or earth, dictated the character of Muhammadan decorative art so long as the Sunna—the canonical law of Islam—was strictly observed. Texts from the Kurān, in the beautiful scripts of Arabia and Persia, were used with great effect as architectural decoration both carved and painted. But this rule was not held to be valid by the Shiāhs, the dissenting sect, who both in Persia and in India allowed themselves a free use of animals and human figures, so that in all Muhammadan countries there was the same difference between Sunni and Shiāh architecture as there was between Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna architecture in India.

The stūpa-dome was another Buddhist contribution to Muhammadan architecture, in which a dome was likewise a symbol of a tomb or relic shrine. The domes of the earlier Khalifs were constructed after Roman or Byzantine models; but when the Muhammadan builders began to be recruited from the Gandharan districts on the north-west frontier of India, and Indian influence on the building craft of Islam gradually became stronger, both the form and system of domical construction in the West were discarded, and the types familiar to Buddhist builders were substituted for them. Thus the "bulbous" dome of Muhammadan Persia is undoubtedly derived from the stūpa shrine of the type sculptured in the stūpa-houses XIX and XXVI at Ajantā. The principle of its construction, by which the outward thrust is counteracted by a system of internal ties in the form of a wheel with eight spokes—the eight-petalled lotus—instead of by external abutments as in the Roman and Byzantine

Plate XXXIXa

BULAND DARWĀZA, FATEHPUR-SIKRI

Plate XXXIXb

RǍNPUR TEMPLE, INTERIOR

dome, is certainly Indian and Buddhist.^[3] The Indian builders, when they attacked the same problem on a larger scale, using fine masonry instead of light impermanent materials, solved it in the traditional way by a system of pendentives beautifully fashioned in the form of a lotus flower which acted as an internal counterpoise. The dome of the Sultan Muhammad's tomb at Bijāpūr (Pl. XLIX, a), which until recent times was the second largest in the world, is the most famous example of this system. As Fergusson observed, it is better both as engineering and as pure æsthetic than the more cumbrous Roman system followed by European builders.

But it may be said that, even if Islam borrowed most of the constructive elements of its architecture from the building craft of India, artistic merit depends upon the way in which these elements were used, and in this essential Muhammadan art shows an originality and sense of fitness all its own. This is quite true, but Fergusson describes the early Muhammadan architecture of India as "invented by the Pathāns,"^[4] who, he says, "had strong architectural instincts ... and could hardly go wrong in any architectural project they might attempt."^[5] The Pathān style, he writes, was "the stepping-stone by which the architecture of the West was introduced into India."^[6]

He also gives the Moguls the credit of inventing the style called after the dynasty of that name. Other writers, while discarding the term "Pathān architecture," follow the lead of Fergusson in treating Indo-Muhammadan architecture as a foreign importation, instead of being, as it really was, a new and brilliant development of the ancient Indo-Aryan building traditions under the pressure of foreign domination. The æsthetic ideas which found expression in Musalman architecture in India came from the mind of the Indian builder, and not from his Arab, Pathān, Turkish, or Mongol master.

For nearly a thousand years before the mission of the Prophet of Arabia began, India had exercised a profound influence upon the building craft of Asia, for wherever Indian Buddhist teachers found a footing, the Indian craftsman and artist followed to show the correct practice of the True Law in the ritual of the Buddhist Church. The great universities of India were schools of religious craftsmanship as well as of philosophy and science. In some of the oldest temples of Japan there exist at the present day fresco paintings of the school of Ajantā. We know from the memoirs of the Chinese pilgrims, Fa Hiān and Hiuen Tsang, how the work of the Indian image-maker was prized by the foreign pilgrims who flocked to Indian shrines, as much as the precious manuscripts in which the teaching of the Law was written. One cannot doubt that the Silpa-Sāstras, the canonical books of the Indian craftsman, were among the Buddhist texts which were carried to many distant countries by these earnest seekers after truth, and that their first care on reaching home after their long and perilous journeys would be to build a fitting shrine for the sacred relic or image, as nearly as possible after the Indian model.

The master-builder in all countries was a constant traveller, accustomed to long journeys in search of work, and the rapid spread of Buddhist propaganda, both from its original home in Magadha and from the

Plate XLa

TOMB OF SIKANDAR LODI

Plate XLb

SHĒR SHAH'S MOSQUE, DELHI

Gandhara country, in which it subsequently took root, must have created a great demand for the Indian builder in all the great cities of Asia.

Following upon this widespread and age-long diffusion of Indian building traditions throughout the Buddhist world came a demand of a similar character from another quarter which regarded Buddhist religious doctrine as anathema, but had no less need for the services of the Indian craftsman. In a.d. 712, or ninety years after the Hegira, Islam established direct control with India through the Arab conquest of Sind, which remained a province of the khalifate until it became an independent Musalman State. It is known that Indian pandits and physicians were employed at the Baghdad court; and it must be inferred that the demand for Indian builders was not less great, for long afterwards the war-lords of Islam, who butchered Brahman and Buddhist monks wholesale, made a point of sparing the lives of the skilled Indian craftsman. Mahmūd of Ghaznī, amazed at the magnificence of the Indian temples he looted, carried off thousands of their craftsmen to build for him at Ghaznī, and set up there a slave market of Indian women and craftsmen to supply the harems and workshops of Muhammadan Asia. This method of recruiting for their public works service was continued by many other Musalman monarchs.

It is necessary to take all these historical facts into consideration in order to follow the evolution of the schools of architecture classed by Fergusson as "Indo-Saracenic." The latter were in all cases directly derived from the local schools of Hindu or Buddhist building which preceded them. The earliest archæologically styled Pathān, which was established by the court builders of the first Sultan of Delhi, and influenced the Muhammadan buildings of Northern India from the end of the twelfth to the middle of the sixteenth centuries, is only entitled to the name from the fact that some of the Sultans were Turks and others Pathāns. Mahmūd of Ghaznī may be said to have laid the foundations of the school by bringing Indian and Persian builders to Ghaznī, some by compulsion and others by persuasion, for several of the Rajput fighting clans joined the armies which he led to the loot of the cities of Hindustan. The characteristics of these so-called Pathān buildings are, as might be expected, a blend of Indian and Persian traditions adapted to the strict Sunni ritual, as dictated by the Ulamās of the Delhi court. The severity of their style must be attributed to the puritanical sentiment of the Sunni interpreters of Islamic law, and not to the racial temperament of the Pathān or Turkish fighting men or of their leaders. The external curve of the "Pathān" dome is the exact outline which the masonry dome of the Hindu temple mandapam of the period would assume if all its external sculpture were chipped off. As the masons were practical builders, they naturally adapted the structure of the dome to the new conditions. The dome is invariably crowned by the Buddhist and Hindu symbol, the Amalaka, or blue-lotus fruit, which probably passed the censorship of the Ulamā because its connection with the worship of Vishnu was not understood. The use of recessed arches was a suggestion from Persian Musalman buildings adapted, as before stated, from the niched shrines of Buddhist saints. The forms of the arches themselves, in all "Indo-Saracenic" styles, were invariably taken from the ritual of the Indian image-maker.

There is a finer feeling for proportion and

Plate XLIa

LOTUS DOME, AJANTĀ SCULPTURE

Plate XLIb

DIAGRAM SHOWING CONSTRUCTION OF LOTUS DOME

architectonic beauty in Indian mosques and tombs, generally built of brick or rubble-stone cased in fine masonry, than is often found in Persian Musalman buildings, which owe their peculiar charm more to their exquisite colouring and ornament. The grand portals of Indian mosques and tombs, such as the Buland Darwāza of Akbar's imperial mosque at Fatehpur Sikri, are more perfect in form and structure than the façades of Persian mosques, which the Indian builder was set to imitate. The Persian made his fronts for the display of the potter's lovely tile-mosaic, and often disregarded structural fitness in the effort to attain a splendid colour effect.

In this sculpturesque quality—the feeling for rhythm in profiles and masses—which is a special characteristic of Indian mosques and tombs, one can also detect the hand of the Hindu and Buddhist temple craftsman, who under Musalman rule found his occupation as an image-maker gone, but ample demand for his services as a master-builder.^[7] It is a quality as conspicuous in the virile strength of the "Pathān" school as it is in the feminine, sometimes effeminate grace of Jahāngīr's and Shah Jahān's buildings.

The most perfect and latest examples of the former school are the mosque and tomb of Shēr Shah, the able and crafty Afghan chieftain who drove Bābur's son, Humāyūn, from his throne and ruled as master of Hindustan from 1540 to 1545. The mosque stands within the walls of the Purāna Kīlā, or Old Fort, at Delhi—which was Shēr Shah's capital—and the latter at Sahserām, in Bengal, where he had his family estate.

One façade of the mosque is shown in Pl. XL, b. It can be seen at once that the Indian builder has acquired a perfect mastery of the elements of design introduced by the ritual of Islam and put his own stamp upon them; for there is hardly any direct imitation of foreign models, but a skilful and harmonious adaptation of Hindu tradition to Muhammadan structural requirements. The dome, like all "Pathān domes, is crowned by the Indian lotus-and-vase symbol. The crenellated parapet is the lotus-leaf pattern which is seen in the gateway of the Kailāsa temple at Ellora. Lotus flowers fill the spandrils of the arches, and the lotus-bud ornamentation of the soffits is also derived from the traditional symbolism of Hindu and Buddhist shrines. The bracketed cornice is another characteristic Indian feature. The arched openings are beautifully spaced and proportioned, not placed in Persian fashion at the back of a semi-cylindrical niche, but, probably with the idea of saving space within the līwān, slightly set back within the larger ornamental arches.

Shēr Shah's tomb, finely placed in the centre of an artificial lake (Pl. XLII, a) is one of the noblest of Indian monuments. The terrace in which it is built, reached by a bridge which is now broken, is 300 feet square, and the dome of the sanctuary is the second largest in India, being 71 feet in diameter, or 13 feet more than the dome of the Tāj Mahall. Like all Muhammadan tombs in India, it is very characteristic of the man for whom it was built. The Musalman monarch usually took the keenest interest in the designing of his own mausoleum, and his court builders were no less keen to follow his wishes in giving it a personal note. Shēr Shah was a strict Sunni, a stern disciplinarian, and an able but iron-handed ruler, who in his short reign of five years

Plate XLIIa

TOMB OF SHĒR SHAH

Plate XLIIb

TOMB OF HUMĀYŪN

restored peace and order in the provinces which had been reduced to a state of anarchy by the devastations of Timūr, and by the bitter struggle for mastery between Mogul, Afghan, and Rajput chieftains which followed the death of Bābur. He protected the Hindu ryots from the exactions of Musalman Zamindars, so that his State treasury might be replenished; and as his own countrymen, to whom he gave largess with a bountiful hand, were not builders, he set Hindu craftsmen to work in carrying out his building projects in conformity with Sunni prescriptions. Just as the Indian mosque is always Indian, so is the tomb of the great Pathān: it is the fifteenth-century development of the Indo-Aryan hero's tomb, the Buddhist stūpa. We have already seen how in the seventh century a.d., at Ajantā, the original idea of the stūpa as it was at Sānchī and Bharhut is altered. The dome, instead of being a solid mass enclosing a small relic chamber, has become a structural dome^[8] of lotus-leaf form serving as the roof of an image shrine. The Lord Buddha has arisen from the dead and his tomb has become his throne-chamber.

We must infer that in the seventh century a.d. the living Indian king, enthroned in state as the Buddha's representative on earth, would have been seated under such a domed canopy. So when the Musalman Sultans and nobles of Delhi five centuries later employed Indian craftsmen to build their tombs in their pleasure-gardens, the latter had a traditional type of structure easily adapted to it—the pavilion on the central terrace of a royal garden where the king sat. The foreign Musalman monarchs in India nearly always had Indian wives and adopted Indian customs, so the domed pavilions which cover the earliest Muhammadan tombs in India were probably usual in the Hindu royal gardens of the period, and were obviously derived from the Buddhist canopied shrine as sculptured at Ajantā.^[9] The consecration of the pavilion as a tomb, on the death of the owner of the garden, made it a shrine which often attracted large crowds of pilgrims. The garden tomb became for the Indian Musalman, and often for the Hindu pilgrims, what the Buddhist reliquary or cenotaph had been. This made it necessary to extend the original nucleus of the pavilion, or arcaded chamber—which was either square or octagonal in plan—by building arcaded or pillared corridors round it, analogous to the covered procession paths of Buddhist and Hindu shrines.

Shēr Shah planned on a magnificent scale the tomb in which he and his comrades in arms should rest, evidently anticipating that it would be a resort of many pious Musalmans; not without reason, for he was prodigal in the benefactions he bestowed on his fellow-countrymen and co-religionists as their share of the rich kingdom he had won by his sword. In his reign, his biographer records, "no Afghan, whether in Hind or in Roh, was in want, but all became men of substance."

The structural scheme of the tomb, with its central octagonal chamber surrounded by arcaded corridors,

Plate XLIIIa

ATĀLA MASJID, JAUNPUR

Plate XLIIIb

RĀNĪ RUPAWANTI'S MASJID, AHMADĀBĀD

is very similar to that of the many-spired Bengali temples. Pl. XLII, a, shows it in its present condition after the recent restoration by Sir John Marshall, who rightly replaced the feeble and meaningless kiosk placed on the summit by previous restorers by the original Hindu symbol which crowns other Afghan tombs in the neighbourhood.

Neither in this nor in any other of the great Indo-Muhammadan monuments is the hand or mind of the foreign builder apparent. It is neither "Pathān" nor "Indo-Persian." Though Shēr Shah was an Afghan by race, his family had been settled in Bengal for generations, a fact which gave him a great advantage over his rival, Humāyūn, for the Moguls at that time were looked upon as interlopers, disliked both by Hindus and by Musalmans born in India. This stately pile commemorating the deeds of the doughty Afghan chief is an early example of the great school of Indian masonic craftsmanship to which the fortress palace of Datiyā belongs. The only part which the Pathāns took in the new creation was that they forced the Indian builder to break loose from the rigid ritual of the Brahman and Buddhist temple and gave him a wider scope for his inventive faculties.

1. See The Beginnings of Buddhist Art, by A. Foucher, translated by L. A. Thomas and F. W. Thomas, pp. 271-91.
2. From Arabic Qabala, to be opposite.
3. See Appendix.
4. History of Indian Architecture. 2nd edit., vol. ii, p. 288.
5. Ibid., p. 197.
6. Ibid., p. 188.
7. Every Hindu master-builder was versed in the ritual and practice of image-making, though he usually specialised in one or other of the two arts.
8. Though no structural dome of this kind now exists either at Ajantā or elsewhere in India, the sculptured representations of them are decisive proof that they existed; and in the great Mahāyāna monasteries described by Hiuen Tsang they were doubtless very much larger than the largest sculptured representations of them. The dome of the canopy shown in Pl. XLIV, a, could not have been built in a solid mass; and it could hardly have been constructed otherwise than by the method employed by modern Persian builders shown in Pl. XLI, b, which, with its wooden internal ties in the form of a wheel, is undoubtedly derived from the Indian Buddhist tradition. See Appendix.
9. Ultimately from the more primitive domed canopy shown at Sānchī (Pl. XXII, b).