Page:A Handbook of Indian Art.djvu/229

Rh decorative purposes. The Pathān mosques and tombs of Gaur, Panduah, and Māldā on this account are an even closer imitation of Hindu and Buddhist buildings than they were in the neighbourhood of Delhi, where stone of large dimensions was procurable, and consequently the arch was not used by Hindu masons to serve a structural purpose. The terra-cotta and fine moulded brick decoration used both in the mosque and temple in Bengal was certainly not imported by the Muhammadans: the cognate art of enamelled tiles and bricks so much used in Muhammadan buildings in India was probably a local one in Gaur. It is sometimes found in early Buddhist buildings in India—e.g. Kanishka's stūpa at Peshawar—and may have been one of the arts which the early Aryans introduced into the Ganges valley from Mesopotamia, together with the priceless economic products of Babylonia with which they enriched the agriculture of India. Persian culture was certainly a powerful influence on the court life of Muhammadan India, but was not, as is generally assumed, the great creative impulse in Indian art. During the whole period of Muhammadan rule in India that came from within: the dilettanti monarchs of Turkish, Pathān, and Mongol extraction dictated the fashions of their courts, and the Indian craftsmen did their best to please their foreign rulers, whether they were uncompromisingly Sunni or tolerantly Shiah in their religious professions. But it was the innate versatility of the Indian builders, past masters in their craft and heirs to a tradition going back to the building of Nineveh and Babylon, which made Muhammadan buildings in India the most beautiful of their kind in the world.

The most important Muhammadan buildings now remaining at Gaur, among the ruins covering an