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[1]; 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
- ↑ P. 70
