The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c30.s1.45.3

v3.c30.s1.45.3

As they are, however, no effort has been made to soften their hard straight silhouettes or to bring them into harmony with the central propylon which towers starkly abrupt above them. This weakness of composition and lack of rhythm is one of the most glaring defects of the Jaunpur school. Another (and this is a defect common to most Indo-Islamic architecture) is its failure to visualise the subject in more than two dimensions at once or to design a building in the mass and with reference to every angle of view. The propylon screen of a Jaunpur mosque was meant to be seen from the quadrangle only and in this direction it certainly presented an effective appearance. Looked at, however, from the side or back, it was an incongruous adjunct unconnected, structurally or artistically, with the rest of the building. Few things, indeed, in Muslim architecture are so anomalous as the juxtaposition of these flat, abruptly squared, propylons and of the graceful domes immediately behind them. It is an anomaly of which no architect imbued with the true spirit of Islamic art could have been guilty. The architect of the *Lāl Darwāza Masjid* is said to have been a Hindu, named Kamau, the son of Visadru, and it is likely enough that the architect of the Atala *Masjid* was a Hindu also,—a Hindu to whom the dome and arch meant little more than structural expedients or unavoidable symbolic accessories, and who had little understanding of their inherent beauty.