The Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India: A Study of Indo-Aryan Civilisation c6.5

c6.5

Fergusson did not always rise above prejudices which are as strong now as in his own day, and the keynote of his writings on Indian art was that “it cannot, of course, be for one moment contended that India ever reached the intellectual supremacy of Greece or the moral greatness of Rome.” But, making allowances for this, the statement quoted above is as profoundly true in every respect now as when it was written over fifty years ago. If Fergusson’s followers had taken it for their starting-point, they might have added much to our knowledge of one of the most important chapters of the world’s history. But with a blindness characteristic of imitators they have quietly buried with his bones the one vital truth which illumines Fergusson’s pages, and have only taken for their texts the fallacies which Fergusson, if he had lived in the present day, would have been the first to reject—his classifications of "styles." The history of Indian architecture has therefore remained where Fergusson left it—not a history of Indian life, but a Museum of Antiquities wrongly labelled.