park committee as well as its tank or water committee, and Bābur's complaint that Indians knew nothing about pleasure-gardens, and had neither baths nor colleges, must be ascribed to his extreme ignorance of the country, though doubtless many of the finest gardens of Northern India were devastated in the long series of marauding invasions which occurred before his time.
Bābur's gardens at Agra and elsewhere were after the Persian model, divided crosswise with paved terraces and water-channels, a platform—"the mount of Felicity"—in the centre providing a place for recreation and entertainment. The plan was therefore the same as that of the Indo-Aryan village plan, repeated in the planning of the temple court. The pleasure-gardens of the Muhammadan dynasties had the religious character which runs through all Indian art, for one of them was always chosen as the owner's last resting-place. He usually took great pains in ordering the building which should eventually cover his tomb, and the garden itself was a symbol of the Elysian fields in which he hoped to wander after death.
While many of the Hindu princes who became tributaries of the Mogul conquerors imitated the luxurious habits of the imperial court in the more spacious and sumptuous designing of their palaces and garden-mansions, they departed very little from the earlier traditions of the Indian master-builder. Nor were their pleasure-gardens ever used as private cemeteries. The most beautiful of the garden-palaces of India now existing is that which was built by the Rāja Surāj-Mall of Bharatpur at Dīg, about the middle of the eighteenth century, and ornamented with some of the loot from the palace at Agra which
