The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c30.s1.46

v3.c30.s1.46

When we turn from the north of India to the Deccan, Muslim architecture confronts us with an unexpected phenomenon. So long as the Deccan was part and parcel of the Delhi Empire, the Muslims settled there would naturally look to the northern capital for their ideas of art and culture, and whatever buildings they erected would be either put together out of dismantled Hindu shrines and the like, or modelled on the Khaljī or Tughluq architecture in fashion at the time¹. When once, however, the political connexion with Delhi had been severed, it might have been thought that the Muslims in that remote and little accessible country would rapidly have succumbed to the Hindu influences that surrounded them and that their architecture would have taken its complexion from the Hemādpanti, Chālukyan and Dravidian buildings which were daily before their eyes. As a fact, the very reverse happened. Nowhere else in India did the assimilation of indigenous art proceed so slowly as in the south. From 1347, when their independence was established, down to the close of the fourteenth century, the Bahmanīs based their architecure almost exclusively on that of the Imperial capital, and during the following century also they drew much of their inspiration from the same fountain head. From the beginning of the fifteenth century, however, other and more remote influences began to make themselves felt. At all times the Bahmanī dynasts were generous patrons of art and science and learning and their court was as attractive to poets, scholars and artists as their army was to soldiers of fortune. Thus it came about that much of their military architecture was introduced directly from Europe, and that Persia played a more important part in the development of their civil architecture than in that of any other contemporary Indian style. Some of the monuments erected by the Bahmanīs, such as the *Jāmi‘ Masjid* at Gulbarga, are definitely known to have been erected by Persian architects; others, such as the Chānd Minar at Daulatābād (1435) and the College of Mahmūd Gāwān at Bīdar (1472), are so predominantly Persian in character as to leave no room for doubt that they were largely the work of architects and craftsmen from that country²; others, again, exhibit obvious Persian inspiration, but in a more partial and indirect form.