tectonic beauty in Indian mosques and tombs, generally built of brick or rubble-stone cased in fine masonry, than is often found in Persian Musalman buildings, which owe their peculiar charm more to their exquisite colouring and ornament. The grand portals of Indian mosques and tombs, such as the Buland Darwāza of Akbar's imperial mosque at Fatehpur Sikri, are more perfect in form and structure than the façades of Persian mosques, which the Indian builder was set to imitate. The Persian made his fronts for the display of the potter's lovely tile-mosaic, and often disregarded structural fitness in the effort to attain a splendid colour effect.
In this sculpturesque quality—the feeling for rhythm in profiles and masses—which is a special characteristic of Indian mosques and tombs, one can also detect the hand of the Hindu and Buddhist temple craftsman, who under Musalman rule found his occupation as an image-maker gone, but ample demand for his services as a master-builder.[1] It is a quality as conspicuous in the virile strength of the "Pathān" school as it is in the feminine, sometimes effeminate grace of Jahāngīr's and Shah Jahān's buildings.
The most perfect and latest examples of the former school are the mosque and tomb of Shēr Shah, the able and crafty Afghan chieftain who drove Bābur's son, Humāyūn, from his throne and ruled as master of Hindustan from 1540 to 1545. The mosque stands within the walls of the Purāna Kīlā, or Old Fort, at Delhi—which was Shēr Shah's capital—and the latter at Sahserām, in Bengal, where he had his family estate.
One façade of the mosque is shown in Pl. XL, b.
- ↑ Every Hindu master-builder was versed in the ritual and practice of image-making, though he usually specialised in one or other of the two arts.
