The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c30.8

Language: English

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Of the many and various groups into which the Islamic monuments of India are divided, that of Delhi occupies the central and pre-eminent place; for it was at Delhi that the Muhammadans erected their first splendid memorials, and it was at Delhi that there afterwards arose a succession of buildings extending over the whole six centuries of their rule. But before approaching Delhi we must cast back for a moment to the older Muslim kingdoms of Sind and Afghānistān and see what contribution, if any, they made to the development of Islamic art in India. With the Arabs, who in the beginning of the eighth century possessed themselves of Sind, our concern is small. Like other Semitic peoples they showed but little natural instinct for architecture or the formative arts. Though the Caliphs retained Sind for more than a century and a half and though Muslim rule endured there until the close of the tenth century, the sole surviving relics of it are the foundations of some small mosques unearthed a few years ago in the buried city of Mansūra¹, which, so far as can be judged from their remains, possessed no artistic merit. But if the Arabs were a negligible factor, it was far otherwise with the Ghaznavids of Afghānistān, who overran Northern India in the first quarter of the eleventh century. At that time Persia occupied an all-important place in the world of Islamic art.

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Her genius was of the mimetic rather than the creative order, but she possessed a magic gift for absorbing the artistic creations of other countries and refining them to her own standard of perfection. Situated as she was in the heart of the Middle East, she became the crucible in which the arts of Turkistān and China on the one side, of Mesopotamia, Syria and the Byzantine Empire on the other, were fused together and transmuted into new forms and from which they issued afresh with the indelible stamp of Persian beauty set upon them². And the channel by which this stream of art flowed southward into India was Ghaznī. Ghaznī, however, was more than a mere medium for the dissemination of Islamic art. All the culture and magnificence which in the ninth and tenth centuries had belonged to the Sāmānid dynasty of North-Eastern Persia, had passed, as if by the natural right of inheritance, to the Ghaznavids, and under Mahmūd the Great and his immediate successors, Ghaznī became famous among all the cities of the Caliphate for the splendour of its architecture³. Most of its buildings, unfortunately, perished during the ruthless burning of the city by ‘Alā-ud-dīn Husain Jahānsūz, the Ghūrid, and others fell victims to the ravages of time or of later vandals. To-day, the only monuments of note that are known to survive are the tomb of Mahmūd the Great and two minars or Towers of Victory, the one erected by Mahmūd himself and the other by one of his successors, Mas‘ūd.

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For us the minars are especially interesting as being the prototypes of the famous Qutb minar at Delhi and analogous to the towers of Dāmghān in Persia and at Mujdah and Tāūq in Mesopotamia⁴. Up to half a century ago they were standing to a height of about 140 feet, and at that time consisted of two storeys, the lower star-shaped in plan, the upper round, both built of brick and embellished with elaborate designs in terra-cotta¹. The tomb of Maḥmūd Yamīn-ud-Daula (999–1030 a.d.) which was also of brick has been completely modernised by restoration, the only feature preserved intact being its richly carved doors which were brought from Ghaznī by the British in 1842 and are now in the Fort at Āgra. These doors are of deodar wood, divided into panels and adorned with six pointed stars and simple geometric figures; the stars and figures, as well as the vertical styles between the leaves, being carved into a variety of interlacing designs or flowing arabesques, and the whole further enriched with decorative hinges and bands of ironwork.

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Along the lower edge of the lintel is an inscription in Kufic² lettering invoking the forgiveness of God and his blessings on ‘Abū-l-Qāsim Maḥmūd,’ son of Sabuk-tigīn, while round the framing of the doors is repeated in the same script the formula, ‘the sovereignty belongs to God.’ Assuming that these doors are of the same age as the tomb (and it is *prima facie* improbable that a later generation would have lavished so much care upon their carvings), they acquire a special interest from the exceptionally developed character of their arabesques, and interlaced designs, which resemble Cairens work of the later twelfth rather than of the eleventh century³. As more materials become available for the study of this period of Islamic art, it may well prove that in work of this kind, Afghānistān, which was under the immediate influence of Persia, was a century ahead of Egypt.