Page:The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 1.djvu/221

The Buddhists were the great stone-builders of India. Their monasteries and shrines exhibit the history of the art during twenty-two centuries, from the earliest cave structures of the rock temples to the latest Jain erections dazzling in stucco, over-crowded with ornament. It seems not improbable that the churches of Europe owe their steeples to the Buddhist topes. . . Hindu art has left memorials which extort the admiration and astonishment of our age.

The Hindu palace architecture of Gwalior, the Indian Mahommedan mosques, the mausoleums of Agra and Delhi, with several of the older Hindu temples of Southern India, stand unrivalled for grace of outline and elaborate wealth of ornament.

English decorative art in our day has borrowed largely from Indian forms and patterns. . . . Indian art works, when faithful to native designs, still obtain the highest honours at the international exhibitions of Europe.

Here is what Andrew Carnegie in his Round the World says about the Taj of Agra:

There are some subjects too sacred for analysis, or even for words. And I now know that there is a human structure so exquisitely fine or unearthly, as to lift it into this holy domain. . . . The Taj is built of a light creamy marble, so that it does not chill one as pure cold white marble does. It is warm and sympathetic as a woman. . . . One great critic has freely called the Taj a feminine structure. There is nothing masculine about it, says he; its charms are all feminine. This creamy marble is inlaid with fine black marble lines, the entire Koran, in Arabic letters, it is said, being thus interwoven. . . Till the day I die, amid mountain streams or moonlight strolls in the forest, wherever and whenever the moon comes, when all that is most sacred, most elevated and most pure recur to shed their radiance upon the tranquil mind, there will be found among my treasures the memory of that lovely charm—the Taj.

Nor has India been without its laws, codified or otherwise. The Institutes of Manu have always been noted for their justice and precision. So much does Sir H. S. Maine seem to have been struck with their equity that he calls them “an ideal picture of that which, in the view of the Brahmins, ought to be the law”. Mr. Pincott, writing in 1891 in The National Review, alludes to them as “the philosophical precepts of Manu”.

Nor have the Indians been deficient in the dramatic art. Goethe thus speaks of Shakuntala, the most famous Indian drama:

Wouldst thou the young year's blossoms, and the fruits of its decline,
  And all by which the soul is charmed, enraptured, feasted, fed.