cialism, cannot fail to engage the attention of an India progressing towards the goal of self-government under her new Aryan rulers.
APPENDIX
THE LOTUS DOME
The symbolism of the lotus flower and leaf is universal in Indian poetry, sculpture, and painting. It is especially applied to the rising or setting sun, which is likened to a lotus flower floating on the cosmic waters—hence the poetic expression of the Buddha's or Vishnu's or Siva's "lotus-foot." The similarity in form of the dormer windows and gable-ends of Indian cottages, when roofed with bent bambu rafters, to the sun's disc as it touches the horizon was doubtless the reason why they were so extensively used as a decorative motive in early Indian art, and why subsequently in Mahāyānist and Hindu art the same form was adapted as the aureole or glory for a Bodhisattva or Deva image.
The hideous archæological terms borrowed from Fergusson, such as "horse-shoe" arch and "bulbous" or "swelling" dome, are meaningless and misleading in their application to Indian artistic symbolism. Mr. K. A. C. Cresswell, in the Indian Antiquary for July 1915, attempts to disprove the theory of the Indian origin of the lotus dome by showing that Timūr, in his buildings at Samarkand, made his craftsmen follow the design of the great wooden dome of the Ummayad Mosque at Damascus; ergo, he argues, Timūr could not possibly have had in his mind the smaller and inconspicuous solid domes of Ajantā, or any domes he saw in India. Dr. Vincent Smith, pronouncing judgment on the evidence brought forward, condemns the Indian theory as "purely fanciful and opposed to clear evidence," and relegates my "erroneous theory" to a footnote.[1] The question is not, however, disposed of so easily. Timūr's excursions as an amateur architect are interesting as an
- ↑ Akbar the Great Mogul, p. 435.
