restored peace and order in the provinces which had been reduced to a state of anarchy by the devastations of Timūr, and by the bitter struggle for mastery between Mogul, Afghan, and Rajput chieftains which followed the death of Bābur. He protected the Hindu ryots from the exactions of Musalman Zamindars, so that his State treasury might be replenished; and as his own countrymen, to whom he gave largess with a bountiful hand, were not builders, he set Hindu craftsmen to work in carrying out his building projects in conformity with Sunni prescriptions. Just as the Indian mosque is always Indian, so is the tomb of the great Pathān: it is the fifteenth-century development of the Indo-Aryan hero's tomb, the Buddhist stūpa. We have already seen how in the seventh century a.d., at Ajantā, the original idea of the stūpa as it was at Sānchī and Bharhut is altered. The dome, instead of being a solid mass enclosing a small relic chamber, has become a structural dome[1] of lotus-leaf form serving as the roof of an image shrine. The Lord Buddha has arisen from the dead and his tomb has become his throne-chamber.
We must infer that in the seventh century a.d. the living Indian king, enthroned in state as the Buddha's representative on earth, would have been seated under such a domed canopy. So when the Musalman Sultans and nobles of Delhi five centuries later employed
- ↑ Though no structural dome of this kind now exists either at Ajantā or elsewhere in India, the sculptured representations of them are decisive proof that they existed; and in the great Mahāyāna monasteries described by Hiuen Tsang they were doubtless very much larger than the largest sculptured representations of them. The dome of the canopy shown in Pl. XLIV, a, could not have been built in a solid mass; and it could hardly have been constructed otherwise than by the method employed by modern Persian builders shown in Pl. XLI, b, which, with its wooden internal ties in the form of a wheel, is undoubtedly derived from the Indian Buddhist tradition. See Appendix.
