Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c14.28

c14.28

invaders had founded independent states in which they made their homes; but they contrived at the same time to conduct themselves more as colonists than as permanent residents in the country of their adoption. To the distant territories of their ancestors they instinctively turned, and to those sources they continued to look for inspiration in all branches of learning and intellectual pursuits. Among such were the pioneers of the Mughal dynasty, Babur and Humayun, whose real interests were not centred in the people of India and their institutions, but in their own native land beyond the Oxus. Towards the blue domes and glittering minars of Bukhara and Samarqand, with all the refinements that these symbolized, their thoughts were ever directed; and their hopes lay in a return sooner or later to the green valleys and flowered gardens of Turan. Thus we find the homesick Babur saying that although ‘the empire of Hindustan is extensive, populous and rich’, it ‘is a country that has few pleasures to recommend it’. He is particularly severe in his remarks regarding the barrenness of the Agra district, which nevertheless his grandson Akbar subsequently made, with architecture and art, into something approaching the magnificence of their Timurid home. Babur describes it, however, as ‘so ugly and detestable’ that he was ‘quite disgusted with its want of beauty and disagreeable aspect’. As to the people of Hindustan he specially complains of the indigenous artisans who have ‘no genius . . . , no ingenuity or mechanical invention in planning or executing their handicraft works, no skill or knowledge in design or architecture’. He also condemns their work as of ‘the Hindu fashion, without neatness and without order’, so that when he required any important constructive work he sent as far distant as Constantinople, for the pupils of the celebrated Albanian architect Sinan, to carry out his ideas.