A Handbook of Indian Art/Section 1/Chapter 10

by Ernest Binfield Havell

CHAPTER X

MUHAMMADAN ARCHITECTURE AT MANDU, JAUNPUR, AHMADĀBĀD, AND GAUR

Many other remarkable monuments of the Afghan rule in India are found at Mandu, the former capital of the Sultanate of Mālwā founded by Dīlāwar Shah in the beginning of the fifteenth century, when Timūr's bloody raid into India gave him an opportunity of renouncing his allegiance to the Sultans of Delhi.

Mandu, built upon a grand plateau overlooking the valley of the Narbadā river, was in its time one of the most formidable of the hill fortresses of India. It played a conspicuous part in the history of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and its imposing palaces, mosques, and tombs, reservoirs and dharmasālas, or rest-houses for travellers, designed with the stern simplicity of the Sunni sect to which most of the Afghan Sultans belonged, still testify to the architectural magnificence of an Indian royal city in those days.^[1]

The fine mosques of Jaunpur represent another local development of the same school, most likely based upon the pre-Muhammadan craft traditions of Benares, which had been a great building centre from the dawn of Indian history right down to modern times. Jaunpur was founded by the Delhi Sultan

Plate XLIVa

JĀMI' MASJID, AHMADĀBĀD, INTERIOR

Plate XLIVb

JĀMI' MASJID, CHAMPANĪR

Fīrūz Shah in the fourteenth century, and under the Sharkī dynasty in the fifteenth, when it formed an independent Musalman State, it became famous as a seat of Islamic learning especially remarkable for its tolerant attitude towards Hindusim.

The Muhammadans began at Jaunpur, as they did at Delhi and elsewhere, by using the materials provided by the Hindu temples they destroyed. The buildings erected afterwards under the enlightened Sharkī Sultans are eloquent of the spirit of the Musalman colleges of Jaunpur, for they show an interesting and original synthesis of Hindu and Muhammadan structural ideas which had its parallel in the attempt made by Husain Shah, the Sultan of Gaur, to found a religious cult called Sātya-Pir, with the object of uniting Musalman and Hindu in divine worship.^[2] The imposing propylons of the mosques, in which arch and bracket are combined most skilfully, are adaptations of the Hindu temple gopurams. From a technical point of view, it is interesting in these early Indo-Muhammadan buildings to observe the various experiments made by the masons in arch-construction. There is no sign that they were working under expert foreign guidance; evidently every mason had his own ideas on the subject, and was allowed to work in his own way provided that he conformed to the building ritual of Islam dictated by the mullahs or by the officers of the court under whose orders the builders were placed.

Contemporary with the Jaunpur school was the Muhammadan school of Gujerat, established under a dynasty which threw off allegiance to the Delhi Sultanate at the end of the fourteenth century. The founder of it, Muzaffar Shah, was the son of a Rajput chieftain who, when taken prisoner by the Musalmans, renounced Hinduism to save his life. His son and successor, Ahmad Shah I, built Ahmadābād in the first half of the fifteenth century. Outside the chief towns the province remained Hindu, and the Muhammadan architecture of Gujerat is in every detail, even more distinctly than in other places, derived from the local building traditions. Ahmadābād was planned after the ancient Indo-Aryan tradition of a royal capital. Ahmad Shah was a contemporary of the famous Kumbhā, the Rānā of Chitor, whose royal chapel has been described above^[3]; and Ahmad's royal mosque, both as regards structure and ornamentation, was laid out on nearly the same lines as a great Jain temple which was being built at Rānpur in Kumbhā's territory about the same time. This purely Indian school of building, which originated some of the most beautiful mosques and tombs of Islam, attained to full development about the end of the fifteenth century, when Mahmūd Begarah captured the hill fortress of Champanīr, and built there a splendid mosque, finished in 1508 (Pl. XLIV, b). From the middle of the same century Gujerat became one of the most powerful Musalman States in Northern India: there was great building activity in its chief towns, Ahmadābād, Champanīr, Cambay, Baroch, Dholkā, and Mahmūdābād, until near the end of the sixteenth century, when Gujerat became a province of Akbar's empire.

These Gujerati buildings are distinguished by the varied design of their minarets, which were adaptations of the contemporary Hindu towers of victory, and by the exquisite perforated stone tracery of their windows (Pl. XLV), hardly less beautiful than the stained glass

Plate XLVa

AHMADĀBĀD, PERFORATED STONE WINDOW

Plate XLVb

CHAMPANĪR, PERFORATED STONE WINDOW

of the Western Gothic school, with which Indo-Muhammadan architecture has many affinities, and fulfilling a similar aesthetic idea with the modifications necessitated by the requirements of a tropical climate. The origin of these stone trellises can be traced back through the pierced stone windows of Hindu temples to the wooden screens which filled the windows of Buddhist stūpa-houses.

Gujerat was also famous for its magnificent step-wells and irrigation works, serving public orchards and ordinary agricultural purposes, which both, under Hindu and Muhammadan rule, were constructed as a part of the religious duty of the State. The finest of these step-wells now in use is at Asārwā, near Ahmadābād (Pl. XLVI, a). It was built, according to the Sanskrit inscription in one of its pillared galleries, in the first year of the sixteenth century by a Hindu lady, Bāī Srī Harīra, whose husband was apparently connected with Mahmūd Shah's court.^[4] The underground chambers surrounding step-wells were designed to provide a cool retreat in the torrid heat of the Indian summer.

On the north-eastern side of India, Gaur was for several centuries one of the most important building centres of Hindustan. In the sixteenth century it was reckoned by the Portuguese as one of the greatest of Indian cities, its population being estimated at over a million. Its early history as the capital of the Hindu kingdom of Gaur, when it was known under the name of Lakhnauti, goes back to many centuries before Christ. Situated as it was on the banks of the Ganges with easy access to the sea, it had a maritime trade which no doubt extended to the whole of the Indian coast-line, and it was perhaps from Gaur as a centre that the characteristic forms of Bengali architecture spread to other parts of India.

We have seen already in early Buddhist architecture that the craftsmanship of the village served the purposes of the monastery and temple, the forms consecrated by use in the religious ritual of Vedic times being perpetuated in brick and stone when Aryan religion was organised as a brotherhood, based upon the village community, and the garden cities of India—with their public orchards, bathing places, and assembly-halls—made the village the foundation of civic life and the unit of their planning.

We might therefore expect it to be the case in Bengal, the home country of Buddhism, that the characteristics of cottage-building would be repeated in the temple, and that the mosque, as in other parts of India, would be an adaptation of the temple. This is in fact what we find there. The excellent thatched cottages of Bengal have curved roofs with pointed eaves, built upon an elastic bambu framework which gives them rigidity and acts most effectively in throwing off the rain. The "horse-shoe" arch, the "bulbous" dome, and the curvilinear sikhara must have been originally built on the same principle, which is as effective in its practical purpose whether the roof be built of thatch or brick and plaster or of slabs of stone.

The Pathāns, when they made Lakhnauti a Muhammadan capital, found therefore a local school of building using curvilinear roofs; and as brick rather than stone is the natural building material of the country, they had less difficulty in adapting the temple to Muhammadan symbolism, for the Bengali builders were accustomed to use the arch both for structural and

Plate XLVIa

STEP WELL, NEAR AHMADĀBĀD

Plate XLVIb

CHOTA SONĀ MASJID, GAUR

decorative purposes. The Pathān mosques and tombs of Gaur, Panduah, and Māldā on this account are an even closer imitation of Hindu and Buddhist buildings than they were in the neighbourhood of Delhi, where stone of large dimensions was procurable, and consequently the arch was not used by Hindu masons to serve a structural purpose. The terra-cotta and fine moulded brick decoration used both in the mosque and temple in Bengal was certainly not imported by the Muhammadans: the cognate art of enamelled tiles and bricks so much used in Muhammadan buildings in India was probably a local one in Gaur. It is sometimes found in early Buddhist buildings in India—e.g. Kanishka's stūpa at Peshawar—and may have been one of the arts which the early Aryans introduced into the Ganges valley from Mesopotamia, together with the priceless economic products of Babylonia with which they enriched the agriculture of India. Persian culture was certainly a powerful influence on the court life of Muhammadan India, but was not, as is generally assumed, the great creative impulse in Indian art. During the whole period of Muhammadan rule in India that came from within: the dilettanti monarchs of Turkish, Pathān, and Mongol extraction dictated the fashions of their courts, and the Indian craftsmen did their best to please their foreign rulers, whether they were uncompromisingly Sunni or tolerantly Shiah in their religious professions. But it was the innate versatility of the Indian builders, past masters in their craft and heirs to a tradition going back to the building of Nineveh and Babylon, which made Muhammadan buildings in India the most beautiful of their kind in the world.

The most important Muhammadan buildings now remaining at Gaur, among the ruins covering an area about ten miles in length and between two and three miles in breadth, date from the last half of the fourteenth century to the first half of the sixteenth. Some of them have pillars of polished basalt, instead of the usual brick piers, and the brickwork is faced with fine masonry, instead of tiles, exquisitely decorated in low relief. When the Indian mason was thus employed in the service of Islam he began experimenting with arch-construction in the same way as at Jaunpur, but the forms of the arches he used were those he had been accustomed to use in Buddhist and Hindu temples.

Gaur was absorbed into the empire of the Great Moguls in 1576, and soon became subject to the fate of the former Hindu city and many others like it. Its splendid deserted buildings were used as brickfields and quarries, from which ready-made materials could be transported for the building of other cities. It thus happens, says Fergusson, that Murshidābād, Māldā, Rangpur, and Rājmahal have been built almost entirely with its materials, whilst Hughly and even Calcutta are rich in the spoils of the old capital of Bengal.

Plate XLVIIa

ITIMĀD-UD-DAULA'S TOMB, AGRA

Plate XLVIIb

SAMMAN BURJ, AGRA

1. A summary of the romantic history of Mandu is given in the History of Aryan Rule in India, by the Author (Harrap), pp. 347-55.
2. Satya-Nārāyana was the name under which Vishnu was worshipped in Bengal. Pir was the Arabic synonym for the Supreme Spirit.
3. P. 70
4. For description of the well and illustrations see Indian Architecture, by the Author (Murray, 19 13), pp. 143-4.