A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c7.27

c7.27

The term 'Indian' is ambiguous. In a geographical sense all art produced on Indian soil is Indian. That use of the term, however, is unfruitful and fallacious. Much of the art work produced on Indian soil is of alien origin, and should be considered historically as a local development of the styles of certain foreign schools. Most people in England, if they think of Indian art at all, probably think first of the luxurious buildings and decorations executed for the lavish Mughal court during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But, except in the geographical sense, most of the Mughal art is no more Indian than is Government House, Calcutta. The Tāj and Government House are alike in so far as both were built by the hands of Indian masons for foreign masters to foreign designs. The architect of the Tāj, as we shall see in Chapter XII, was either a Venetian or a Turk. Nobody pretends that he was an Indian, and the whole composition, although, like Government House, erected by Indian workmen, is essentially foreign, that is to say, Persian. All the characteristically Muslim art in India is equally alien, modelled on styles prevalent in Mecca, Isfahan, or Constantinople, and not evolved from Indian types. The Indo-Muhammadan art of the Mughal period is substantially Persian, and on rigorous logical principles should be discussed in an appendix to a treatise on Persian art, rather than as a branch of the art of India.