The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c30.5

Language: English

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By the close of the twelfth century, then, when the Muslims established their power permanently in India, it was no longer a case of their having to be tutored by their new subjects in the art of building; they themselves were already possessed of a highly-developed architecture of their own, as varied and magnificent as the contemporary architecture of Christian Europe; and the Muslims, moreover, who conquered India—men of Afghān, Persian and Turkī blood—were endowed with remarkably good taste and a natural talent for building. The picture that some writers have drawn of them as wild and semi-barbarous hill-men descending on an ancient and vastly superior civilisation, is far from the truth. That they were brutal fighters, without any of the chivalry, for example, of the Rājputs, and that they were capable of acts of savagery and gross intemperance, may be conceded. But these were vices common in those ages to most Asiatic nations and did not preclude them any more than they had precluded the Ghaznavids from participating in the prevalent culture and arts of Islam. Qutb-ud-dīn Aibak was ruthless enough to enslave *en masse* the population of Kālinjar, but he also had the genius and imagination to create a mosque as superb as any in Islam; and though ‘Alā-ud-dīn Khaljī slaughtered thousands of Mongols in cold blood at Delhi, he was the author of buildings of unexampled grace and nobility.

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Doubtless, it was due in a great measure to this inborn artistry, coupled with a natural catholicity of taste, that the newcomers were so quick to appreciate the talent and adaptability of the Indian craftsmen and to turn these qualities to account on their own buildings. Few things in the history of architecture are more remarkable than the skill with which, from the very outset, the Muhammadans transformed Hindu and Jaina temples into mosques for the Faithful, or the imagination which they displayed in employing Indian sculptors to adorn their edifices with designs incomparably more exquisite than their own. To create a successful building out of such alien materials, to reconcile two styles so characteristically opposed, without transgressing the standard formulas of Islamic art, might well have been deemed an impossible task. For the contrast between the Hindu temple and the Muslim mosque could hardly have been more striking. The shrine of the former was relatively small and constricted; the prayer chamber of the latter was broad and spacious. The one was gloomy and mysterious; the other light and open to the winds of heaven. The Hindu system of construction was trabeate, based on column and architrave; the Muslim was arcuate, based on arch and vault. The temple was crowned with slender spires or pyramidal towers; the mosque with expansive domes.

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Hinduism found concrete expression in the worship of images, and its monuments were enriched with countless idols of its deities; Islam rigidly forbade idolatry or the portrayal of any living thing. Decorative ornament in Hindu architecture delighted in plastic modelling; it was naturalistic as the Gothic and far more exuberant; Islamic ornament, on the other hand, inclined to colour and line or flat surface carving, and took the form of conventional arabesques or ingenious geometric patterning. Yet, with all these conspicuous contrasts (and there are many more that might be added), there are certain factors common to both forms of architecture which materially assisted towards their amalgamation. Thus, a characteristic feature of many Hindu temples, as well as of almost every Muslim mosque—a feature derived from the traditional dwelling-house of the East and as familiar in India as in other parts of Asia—was the open court encompassed by chambers or colonnades, and such temples as were built on this plan naturally lent themselves to conversion into mosques and would be the first to be adapted for that purpose by the conquerors. Again, a fundamental characteristic that supplied a common link between the two styles, was the fact that both Islamic and Hindu art were inherently decorative. Ornament was as vital to the one as to the other; both were dependent on it for their very being. In the Indian architect this sense for the decorative was innate;

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it came to him as a legacy from the pre-Aryan races and ran through the whole fabric of the art. The Muslim, on the other hand, had inherited a vast wealth of rich and varied designs particularly from the Sasanian and Byzantine empires, and though his taste in the handling of ornament might not be so exquisite as the Indian, the value he attached to it was in no way less. Thus it came about that when the conquest of India opened up new realms of art before his eyes, he at once gauged their vast possibilities and set about taking the fullest advantage of them.