Indian craftsmen to build their tombs in their pleasure-gardens, the latter had a traditional type of structure easily adapted to it—the pavilion on the central terrace of a royal garden where the king sat. The foreign Musalman monarchs in India nearly always had Indian wives and adopted Indian customs, so the domed pavilions which cover the earliest Muhammadan tombs in India were probably usual in the Hindu royal gardens of the period, and were obviously derived from the Buddhist canopied shrine as sculptured at Ajantā.[1] The consecration of the pavilion as a tomb, on the death of the owner of the garden, made it a shrine which often attracted large crowds of pilgrims. The garden tomb became for the Indian Musalman, and often for the Hindu pilgrims, what the Buddhist reliquary or cenotaph had been. This made it necessary to extend the original nucleus of the pavilion, or arcaded chamber—which was either square or octagonal in plan—by building arcaded or pillared corridors round it, analogous to the covered procession paths of Buddhist and Hindu shrines.
Shēr Shah planned on a magnificent scale the tomb in which he and his comrades in arms should rest, evidently anticipating that it would be a resort of many pious Musalmans; not without reason, for he was prodigal in the benefactions he bestowed on his fellow-countrymen and co-religionists as their share of the rich kingdom he had won by his sword. In his reign, his biographer records, "no Afghan, whether in Hind or in Roh, was in want, but all became men of substance."
The structural scheme of the tomb, with its central octagonal chamber surrounded by arcaded corridors,
- ↑ Ultimately from the more primitive domed canopy shown at Sānchī (Pl. XXII, b).
