The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c30.s1.13.1

v3.c30.s1.13.1

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.