Page:A Handbook of Indian Art.djvu/201

Rh dome, is certainly Indian and Buddhist. The Indian builders, when they attacked the same problem on a larger scale, using fine masonry instead of light impermanent materials, solved it in the traditional way by a system of pendentives beautifully fashioned in the form of a lotus flower which acted as an internal counterpoise. The dome of the Sultan Muhammad's tomb at Bijāpūr (Pl. XLIX, ), which until recent times was the second largest in the world, is the most famous example of this system. As Fergusson observed, it is better both as engineering and as pure æsthetic than the more cumbrous Roman system followed by European builders.

But it may be said that, even if Islam borrowed most of the constructive elements of its architecture from the building craft of India, artistic merit depends upon the way in which these elements were used, and in this essential Muhammadan art shows an originality and sense of fitness all its own. This is quite true, but Fergusson describes the early Muhammadan architecture of India as "invented by the Pathāns," who, he says, "had strong architectural instincts ... and could hardly go wrong in any architectural project they might attempt." The Pathān style, he writes, was "the stepping-stone by which the architecture of the West was introduced into India."

He also gives the Moguls the credit of inventing the style called after the dynasty of that name. Other writers, while discarding the term "Pathān architecture," follow the lead of Fergusson in treating Indo-Muhammadan architecture as a foreign