age 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.
Even in the present day the Indian building craft retains much of its former vitality, as an investigation by the Archæological Survey of India which I was able to set on foot through the India Society, has amply proved.[1] Unfortunately, many European writers and the Public Works Administration of India have lent support to fiction that all that is great in Indian architecture was created by foreigners, offering an almost insuperable impediment to that perfect fulfilment of the needs and desires of the age which Indian master-builders have always been able to accomplish in former generations. There is, however, some hope that the light thrown upon Indian art history in recent years, and the experience gained in the building of the New Delhi, will help to infuse the life and thought of India into modern state undertakings. A matter of so much educational and economic importance as the preservation of craft traditions, which have shown such amazing vitality and strength in the struggle against the disintegrating forces of modern commer-
- ↑ See Report on Modern Building, by the Archæological Survey of India, 1913.
