four smaller domed chambers, follows the traditional plan of an Indian panchratna, or "five-jewelled" temple. Its prototype, as I have shown elsewhere,[1] is found in the Buddhist temple of Chandi Sewa in Java, built more than five centuries earlier, and in the sculptured stūpa-shrines of Ajantā. Neither Shah Jahān nor his court builders, much less an obscure Italian adventurer, can claim the whole merit of its achievement. The Tāj Mahall follows the rule of all the great architectural masterpieces of the world in not being "a thing of will, of design, or of scholarship, but a discovery of the nature of things in building a continuous development along the same line of direction imposed by needs, desires, and traditions."[2]
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 patron-
- ↑ Indian Architecture, by the Author (Murray, 1913), pp. 22-3.
- ↑ Architecture, by Professor Lethaby, p. 207.
