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
