The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c30.s1.13

Language: English

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It will help us better to appreciate the merits and faults of this Bengal architecture, if we betake ourselves directly from the eastern to the western side of India, and consider the instructive analogies and contrasts presented by the provincial architecture of Gujarāt, where traditions of a pre-existing school were equally strong but strikingly dissimilar from those prevailing in Bengal. When the armies of ‘Alā-ud-dīn Khaljī overran Gujarāt and annexed it to the Delhi Sultanate, they found still flourishing there a singularly beautiful style of architecture. The history of this style—conveniently designated ‘the style of Western India’—has already been told in the second volume of this history. Its zenith had been reached some two centuries before the coming of the Muhammadans, but at the close of the thirteenth century the school of Western India was still full of vitality and the Indian architects and craftsmen whom the conquerors pressed into their service were hardly less gifted than their forefathers who designed the far-famed temples at Somnāth and Siddhāpur, at Modhera and Mount Ābū. The particular style which they favoured was distinguished by a breadth and spaciousness unusual in pre-Muhammadan India, and with these qualities it combined a chaste and graceful elegance that could not fail to appeal strongly to Muslim taste.

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Fortunately for the future of this school the annexation of Gujarāt took place at the very moment when the Imperial architecture of Delhi had reached its highest expression under ‘Alā-ud-dīn Khaljī, and the builders who came from Delhi to the new province must have been deeply imbued with the spirit of that architecture; indeed it is more than likely that some of them had personally participated in the building of the splendid structures erected by ‘Alā-ud-dīn at the *Dargāh* of Nizām-ud-dīn and the Qutb. This point which has hitherto escaped notice, had an intimate bearing on the subsequent development of the Gujarāt school. It meant that the sense for symmetry and proportion and the almost faultless taste which had characterised Khaljī architecture became, from the outset, the key-notes of the Gujarāt style also. The effect of this influence from Delhi is well evidenced in the noble façade of the *Jāmi‘ Masjid* at Cambay, which was erected as early as 1325, i.e. within fifteen or twenty years of the Jamā‘at Khāna at Nizām-ud-dīn; and it is also evident a little later (1333) in the mosque of Hilāl (or Buhlūl) Khān Qāzī at Dholka, which in spite of its insignificant minarets and other shortcomings, is imbued nevertheless with the same breadth of conception and purity of taste.

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Although, however, the foundations of this Gujarātī style were thus well and truly laid in the fourteenth century, the times were altogether too unsettled, and conditions under the provincial Government of Delhi in other respects too unpropitious for architecture to make much headway; and it was not until the establishment of independence under the Ahmad Shāhī dynasty that the greatness of this school really began. Like most Indian potentates the Ahmad Shāhī rulers sought to display their wealth and power in the magnificence of their buildings, each in turn endeavouring to outdo the efforts of his predecessors. Ahmad Shāh, from whom the dynasty takes its name, commemorated his accession by founding the city of Ahmadābād, and later on in his reign he built the forts of Songarh, Dohad and Ahmadnagar. Among the monuments with which he beautified his new capital were the Ahmad Shāh and *Jāmi‘ Masjids*, and to his reign also belong the fine gateway known as the *Tīn Darwāza* and the mosques of Haibat Khān and Sayyid ‘Ālam. Each and every one of these buildings, as well as a multitude of others erected by succeeding kings, is distinguished by some particular traits of its own. Space, however, would fail to tell of them all, and we must be content, therefore, to pick out a few of the most typical examples. Of Ahmad Shāh's buildings, the two most instructive are the *Tīn Darwāza* (Triple Gateway) and the *Jāmi‘ Masjid*. The former (Pl.

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XXIV) was the principal entrance to the outer court-yard of the palace, where feudatories and foreign ambassadors assembled before making their way to the Royal presence. It is 37 feet in thickness and pierced by three openings (the central one 17½ feet wide), connected one with the other by three cross passages. The charm of this gateway springs from its perfectly proportioned and delicately framed archways set off against highly ornate buttresses on the faces of the intervening piers, though the latter, be it said, are not entirely homogeneous in feeling with the rest of the design. The *Jāmi‘ Masjid* is a far more magnificent creation. By the collapse of its two minars in the earthquake of 1819 it has been shorn of a prominent feature, but it is questionable whether the minars ever added materially to its beauty. As it now stands, it is one of the most superb, as it is also one of the most imposing structures of its class, in the world. The defect of most mosques planned on a large scale is, as we have seen in connexion with the Ādīna *Masjid* at Pāndua, the dull monotony of their composition. In the *Jāmi‘ Masjid* at Ahmadābād there is no such weakness. The prayer chamber is 210 feet in width by 95 feet in depth, but its façade is so admirably composed, so broken up and diversified, and so well proportioned in its parts, that its vastness only serves to enhance the beauty and impressiveness of the whole.

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The low flanking wings on either side with their pseudo-arched fronts are unusual adjuncts, but the other features of the façade—its shapely expansive arches, its engaged minars blended more harmoniously than in the foregoing example with the rest of the design, its carved mouldings and string courses and battlements—all these are familiar characteristics of the Gujarātī style. The same is true also of the interior with its 260 graceful columns, now emerging into an established architectural order, its narrow aisles, its clerestory galleries, its symmetrically arranged domes built on the Hindu corbel system, its traceried windows and its rich arabesques. Most of these features are derived from the old pre-Muslim school, and all are repeated time and again in subsequent buildings, though seldom with better effect than here. The mode of lighting and ventilating the interior, which was an invention of the Gujarāt architects, is a specially happy solution of a well-known problem but one, strangely enough, that has never found favour in other parts of India. It consists in carrying the upper roof well beyond the one below it, the overlapping portion being supported on dwarf columns and the outside of the gallery thus formed being closed with perforated screens, the advantage of this arrangement being that all the light and air required can be admitted, while the direct rays of the sun and the rain are effectually excluded.