India Discovered

by John Keay

  The Mohammedans had worked themselves entirely free from Hindu influence&. All the arches are true arches; all the details invented for the place where they are found & and from this time forward Mohammedan architecture in India was a new and complete style in itself, and developed according to the natural and inevitable sequences of true styles in all parts of the world.

  These sequences are often expressed in biological terms, as a budding, a flowering and a decay. The Late Pathan was the Saracenic style in the bud, the early Moghul period until the death of Shah Jehan its classical flowering, and the late Moghul period from Aurangzeb onwards its rococo decadence. In this ‘natural sequence’ the only exception according to Fergusson was the reign of Akbar (1556–1605). He alone of all the Moghuls showed a spirit of tolerance towards the non-Islamic peoples and a willingness to adopt their artistic ideas. Hence the many Hindu features in his palaces at Fatehpur Sikri and Agra, the reappearance of the trabeate arch, fantastically carved brackets, ornate pillars and the peculiar snake-like struts so beloved of the Jains. These buildings were truly Indian, but Akbar was the exception. ‘The spirit of tolerance died with him,’ wrote Fergusson. ‘There is no trace of Hinduism in the works of Jehangir or Shah Jehan.’

  Unlike Fergusson, Cunningham was not greatly interested in Islamic architecture. He had reservations about Fergusson’s various styles, but he never propounded any grand theory about the relationship between Hindu and Mohammedan styles. Not so, though, Ernest Havell. Whereas Fergusson saw the story of Islamic architecture as one of emancipation from Hindu influences, Havell insisted that, on the contrary, it was one of rapid capitulation to the superior indigenous art of India. Akbar was not the exception but the classic example. His wholesale adoption of Hindu styles and his patronage of Indian craftsmen marked the end of a brief experiment with non-Indian forms (Tughluk’s tomb for example), and the beginning of one of the greatest periods for purely Indian building.

  Taking the bull firmly by the horns, Havell turned to the classic age of Moghul architecture, the reign of Shah Jehan (1628–58), and in particular to none other than the Taj Mahal. The great dome of subtle contour, the soaring minarets, the formal Persian garden, the chaste inlay work and tracery, the clustered cupolas – nothing, surely, could be more typically Mohammedan. But Havell was a determined polemicist and a uniquely qualified scholar. His first point was that whatever its inspiration, ‘there is one thing which has struck every writer about the Taj Mahal and that is its dissimilarity to any other monument in any other part of the world’. Outside India there was nothing that approached it and, within India, its supposed precursor, Humayun’s tomb in Delhi, or the other two white marble tombs, those of Itimad-ud-Daula in Agra and Salim Chishti at Fatehpur Sikri, were so inferior as to be unworthy of comparison.

  Fergusson would have agreed with this, though not with Havell’s conclusion – that what made the Taj unique was its sculptural quality. Because for this there was no precedent in the strictly non-representational art of Islam. If the inspiration for the building was to be sought in sculpture rather than architecture, then it must be sought in Indian sculpture. The purity of line and subtlety of contour which characterized it were precisely the qualities that distinguished the Mathura Buddhas or the Khajuraho apsaras. Fergusson deplored the hint of effeminacy in Shah Jehan’s buildings; but to many this represents the great appeal of the Taj. As the tomb of Shah Jehan’s beloved Mumtaz Mahal, it is the apotheosis of Indian womanhood, a radiant architectural embodiment of all that is feminine, India’s Venus de Milo perhaps. And only an Indian artist with his purely conceptual approach could have created a building that was so blatantly seductive.

  It was a measure of the Taj’s uniqueness that some even suggested that its designer might have been one of the Europeans employed by Shah Jehan. This idea was, of course, anathema to Havell. It was just another example of foreigners trying to find a non-Indian inspiration for anything in Indian culture that took their fancy. Examining the literary evidence in some detail, he concluded that even the inlay work – cornelian and agate stones embedded in the white marble in the most delicate of floral designs – was not, as was generally thought, of Italian origin. It was true that the pietro duro work of Florence was much in fashion at the time, but mosaic inlays had been used in India for centuries: James Tod had mentioned a Jain temple of the fifteenth century with something similar. Besides, the records showed that the inlay artists employed on the Taj were all Hindus.

  The gardens, too, which add so much to the staging of the Taj, were the work of a Hindu, from Kashmir. But on this point Havell was prepared to give ground. There was no Indian tradition of formal gardens, divided and subdivided with geometrical precision by neat paths and water courses. From the pools of dense shade to the gay parterres and the gurgling fountains, this was an oasis legacy, the expression of a hard, warrior people’s longing for luxury and physical indulgence, a place in which to forget the austerities of the Central Asian deserts and dally with Omar Khayyam and a long glass of sherbet.

  Undoubtedly the siting of the Taj Mahal has a lot to do with its unique appeal. The shady gardens and reflecting water-courses, the flanking buildings in sober red sandstone, the dark frame of the great gateway and the backdrop of the Jumna river – all combine to make the sudden sailing into sight of the white marble mirage a dramatic experience. But it was the building itself that Havell was most interested in. He had studied the silpa-sastras — the traditional manuals of the Hindu builder – and believed that even the bulbous dome conformed more closely to Indian ideals than those of Samarkand. There was even a sculptural representation of such a dome in one of the Ajanta cave temples. Moreover, the internal roofing arrangement of four domes grouped round the fifth, central, dome conformed exactly to the panch-ratna, the ‘five jewel’ system so common to Indian buildings of all sorts.

  All this was not enough in itself to shake traditional views, but Havell was not finished. In the nineteenth century, as now, people were inclined to concentrate too much on the buildings of Delhi and nearby Agra. For most, the Pathan and Moghul styles were the sum total of Islamic architecture, because they were the ones represented in Delhi and Agra. Fergusson, of course, knew better, and devoted considerable attention to the Islamic buildings of Gujerat, Bijapur, Gaur and elsewhere. But he made no attempt to fit these into his ‘natural sequence’ of Saracenic architecture; they were simply provincial styles, of considerable merit but no lasting significance. Havell, though, examined them much more closely and became convinced that, away from the political turmoil of north-west India, the architectural continuity before and after the Mohammedan conquest was unbroken; and that it was from these provincial centres that the ideals and craftsmen used by Shah Jehan had been drawn. In Gujerat some of the mosques of the first Mohammedan dynasty are indistinguishable from temples; also in Gujerat, white marble had been used extensively by both Hindu and Jain. On the other side of India, at Gaur in Bengal, the Mohammedans inherited the brick building tradition of the Hindu capital that had occupied the same site. Here there were exceptionally versatile masons, familiar with the voussoir arch. The extent to which they were subsequently employed throughout the Moghul empire can be judged by the ubiquity of curved Bengali roofs – even in the Red Fort at Agra. At Bijapur the Mohammedans also inherited a local building tradition, for nearby lay the great Hindu capital of Vijayanagar. European accounts of Vijayanagar before its destruction only hint at its architectural wonders, but certainly the dome and the pointed arch were in general use. It was no coincidence that the great building period in Mohammedan Bijapur began immediately after the fall of Vijayanagar. Encouraged to concentrate on the dome, the erstwhile Hindu architects produced first the Bijapur Jama Masjid and then the giant Gol Gumbaz with one of the largest domes in the world. According to Havell, it was on the skills of these master dome builders that Shah Jehan drew for the Taj Mahal.

  In all this there was much speculation. It was fifty years since Fergusson had first
put pen to paper, yet new material was still being ‘religiously docketed and labelled according to his scheme’. In showing that he could have been wrong about the inspiration behind Moghul architecture, Havell sought to question the whole basis of his work. ‘The history of architecture is not, as Fergusson thought, the classification of buildings into archaeological water-tight compartments according to arbitrary ideas of style, but a history of national life and thought.’ Its object should be the identification ‘of the distinctive qualities which constitute its Indianness, or its value in the synthesis of Indian life’.

  This was certainly asking too much of a nineteenth-century art historian. But it was true enough that any scheme of classification must have its faults; and the greatest casualty of Fergusson’s was the secular architecture of India. His classifications related primarily to religious buildings, to temples, tombs and mosques. Palaces, forts and public works were tacked onto his various classifications with little regard for their style. Hence the Rajput palaces, arguably the most impressive and certainly the most romantic group of buildings in India, were sandwiched incongruously between the latest and least distinguished Indo-Aryan temples and a preamble on the earliest Saracenic buildings. Subsequent works, following Fergusson’s scheme, often relegate them to an appendix. For, as Havell rightly observed, there could be no argument that in secular architecture the styles of Hindu and Mohammedan, of Rajput and Moghul, were one and the same. Moreover, the origins of this style were wholly Indian. Witness the great fifteenth-century Man Singh palace in the Gwalior fort. ‘One of the finest specimens of Hindu architecture that I have seen & the noblest specimen of Hindu domestic architecture in northern India,’ noted Cunningham. Babur, the first of the Moghuls, evidently agreed. His official diary shows that he admired and coveted this building above all others in India. In due course it became the inspiration for all the palaces of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for the Moghul forts of Delhi and Agra as well as for the Rajput forts of Orchha, Amber and Jodhpur.

  “If our poets had sung them, our painters pictured them, our heroes lived in them, they would be on every man’s lips in Europe.’ Thus, with good reason, wrote E. B. Havell of the much neglected forts and palaces of the Rajputs. In his drawing of Amber Bishop Heber strove to convey the impression of ‘an enchanted castle’. Gwalior, ‘the Gibraltar of India’, furnished the inspiration for the Moghul forts of Agra and Delhi. (Watercolour by Francis Swain Ward, c. 1790.)

  To the Islamic architecture of Delhi, the British responded with good intentions marred by questionable taste and occasional spite. The Qutb mosque was ably landscaped but its famous was crowned with a ‘silly’ pavilion that ‘looked like a parachute’. In Old Delhi Shah Jehan’s Jama Masjid was carefully repaired in the 1820s but very nearly blown up by way of reprisal after the 1857 Mutiny.

  The tomb of Humayun in Delhi anticipates the Taj Mahal in Agra. In the late eighteenth century, travellers found the Taj well-endowed and much revered; but Humayun’s tomb stood neglected and anonymous amidst a wilderness of ruins. The preferential status of the Taj, ‘the gateway through which all dreams must pass’, was proudly maintained by the British, although not without reservations about whether such a masterpiece could really be Indian.

  Acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1910, the Sanchi torso owed its celebrity to its supposedly classical modelling. As an example of ‘lndo-Grecian art of the 1st century AD’ it was one of the few Indian sculptures to win aesthetic approval. Yet, it has now been shown to date from the tenth century AD, a period once dismissed as artistically decadent.

  No event contributed more to the European acceptance of Indian art than the discovery of the caves of Ajanta. Containing the finest gallery of wall paintings to survive from any ancient civilization, they were quickly acknowledged as ‘the greatest artistic wonder of Asia’. Sadly, attempts to preserve them have done more harm than good, (drawing by Jas. Burgess of a scene depicting ‘The Temptation’ in Ajanta Cave XXVI.)

  General Sir Alexander Cunningham spent much of his career and all of his long retirement tramping across India in search of its Buddhist past.

  Colonel James Tod, historian and champion of the Rajputs, who also brought to notice the Jain temples of Mount Abu and amassed a collection of coins from which the history of western India was largely reconstructed. ‘In a Rajput I always recognize a friend.’ (Rajput miniature from Udaipur.)

  Colonel Colin Mackenzie employed Indian scholars to search out historical materials. The Mackenzie collection of manuscripts, inscriptions and coins is still the best archive for reconstructing the history of peninsular India. (Portrait by Thomas Hickey.)

  B. H. Hodgson, for fifty years the doyen of British Indian scholars, and ‘the highest living authority on the native races of India’, spent most of his life in the Himalayas living like an Indian sage.

  Sir George Everest, most cantankerous of Surveyors-General, who completed the south-north triangulation of the subcontinent, also extended his measurements along the Himalayas enabling the first accurate triangulation of their peaks. The highest was named after him.

  E. B. Havell, the principal of the Calcutta School of Art, rejected received ideas about the Indian artist and championed the notion that his art was based on conceptual rather than representational ideals. (Portrait by one of his pupils.)

  Sir William Jones was ‘the father of Oriental studies’. His discoveries in philology, history and literature provided the first evidence that India boasted a classical civilization to rival those of Greece and Rome.

  Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India 1898–1905, was the first to acknowledge that India’s architectural heritage constituted ‘the greatest galaxy of monuments in the world’, and that its maintenance and restoration should be an imperial responsibility.

  To the discovery of India’s past was added a proto-historical dimension with the twentieth century excavation of an urban civilization dating from 2500 – 1500 BC. The ‘Harappan’ or ‘Indus Valley’ culture, although widespread and highly sophisticated (witness the statuette of a ‘dancing girl’), is likely to remain somewhat enigmatic until the pictographic script (as found on steatite seals, can be read.

  If our poets had sung them [wrote Havell of the Rajput palaces], our painters pictured them, our heroes and famous men had lived in them, their romantic beauty would be on every man’s lips in Europe. Libraries of architectural treatises would have been written on them.

  Bishop Heber had been equally impressed when he toured the palace of Amber a century earlier.

  I have seen many royal palaces containing larger and more stately rooms – many the architecture of which was in purer taste, and some which have covered a greater extent of ground – but for varied and picturesque effect, for richness of carving, for wild beauty of situation, for the number and romantic singularity of the apartments, and the strangeness of finding such a building in such a place, I am unable to compare anything with Amber&. The idea of an enchanted castle occurred, I believe, to all of us, and I could not help thinking what magnificent use Ariosto or Sir Walter Scott would have made of such a building.

  Even Fergusson was not blind to the romantic appeal of the Rajput palaces. He praised their settings and lack of affectation. But there was no room for them in his scheme of things.

  There are some twenty or thirty royal residences in central India, all of which have points of interest and beauty; some for their extent, others for their locality, but every one of which would require a volume to describe in detail.

  He contented himself with a description of only the more obvious examples – Gwalior, Amber, Udaipur and Dig – and could only mention the two great palaces of Orchha and Datia. Havell went into more detail, noting the way these buildings seemed to grow organically out of the rocks on which they stood ‘without self-conscious striving after effect’. Thus, above all, their romantic appeal; but there is also a grandeur and an elegance of detail beside which the Moghul palaces pale into mere pretti
ness. Here was Hindu architecture both more virile and more noble than its Islamic equivalent.

  Sir Edwin Lutyens, the architect of New Delhi, thought the palace of Datia one of the most architecturally interesting buildings in India. It is also one of the most impressive. Conceived as a single unit, unlike the Moghul palaces, it towers above the little town of Datia like the work of an extinct race of giants. Each side is about 100 yards long and rises from the bare rock so subtly that it is hard to tell where nature’s work ends and man’s begins. The impression is of immense strength, and only the skyline of flattened domes and cupolas gives any hint of the treasures within. There, the first two storeys are dark and cool, hot weather retreats; then suddenly one emerges into the light and a fairyland of pillared walkways, verandahs and pavilions. Paintings and mosaics adorn the walls, and the verandahs are screened with several hundred feet of the most intricately fretted stone windows.

  Datia was built by Rajah Bir Singh Deo in the seventeenth century. The palaces of Orchha were also his work, and here there are more painted halls and dappled pavilions as well as some of the finest carved brackets. But in this case the setting is one of ruination – miles of crumbling stables, overgrown gardens and forgotten temples. Somehow it seems more in keeping with these now forlorn masterpieces. Several thousand people a day visit the Moghul palaces of Delhi and Agra; scarcely a single soul disturbs the rats and the bats at Datia and Orchha. Havell’s rhapsodies and Lutyens’ admiration have changed nothing. It says much for the formative and lasting character of James Fergusson’s work that they have yet to find their true place in the scheme of India’s monuments.