A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c18.76

c18.76

The extant contributions of the Emperor Jahāngīr (1605–27)³ to Indo-Persian architecture, although important, are not very numerous. The design of the magnificent mausoleum of Akbar at Sikandarah near Agra, in which Jahāngīr personally had an undefined share, is exceptional. The building, completed in 1612 (A.H. 1021), is said by one Muslim writer to have been under construction for twenty years, having been begun, according to custom, by the sovereign whose remains were to find their resting-place within it. But the inscriptions and the *Memoirs* of Jahāngīr seem to prove that it was wholly erected under his orders between 1605 and 1612.⁴ It is composed of five square terraces, diminishing as they ascend, and the only edifice of the period at all resembling it is Akbar's five-storied pavilion, or Panch-Mahall, at Fathpur-Sīkrī. It has been suggested that both compositions must have been copied from Indian Buddhist *vihāras*, but the objection to that suggestion is that there is no reason to suppose that any *vihāra* of the kind existed in India in Akbar's time, except the square rock-cut *rathas* at Māmallapuram, near Madras (*ante*, p. 36), which have some rather distant resemblance to the mausoleum. We know that the Ceylonese in the twelfth century imitated Cambodian buildings arranged on the same principle of diminishing square terraces (*ante*, p. 55), and it seems to me not improbable that the hint for the design of both the exceptional Mughal structures may have come from Cambodia rather than from Madras. Artists and skilled craftsmen from many distant