Page:A Handbook of Indian Art.djvu/243

Rh with the Renaissance of Indian architecture in the Mogul period. The first five of the Great Moguls were, like the monarchs and noblemen who imposed their ideas upon Renaissance building in Europe, men of wide culture keenly interested in architectural design. But while each of them gave a personal note to his palace, mosque, or tomb, there was no fixed formula, no "Mogul style"—or paper patterns to which the Indian master-builders were tied. Humāyūn's tastes were Persian; his builders designed him a Persianised version of the orthodox Indian Musalman's tomb. Akbar, in the beginning of his reign, ordered his imperial mosque at Fatehpur-Sikri to be built as a "duplicate of the Holy Place" (at Mecca or Baghdad) ; but except in the general plan which conforms to the ritual of Islam the mosque is a perfectly original design in which the creative mind of the Indian builder is dominant. Even the orientation of the mosque is not orthodox Musalman, for it is like that of a Vishnu temple.

Jahāngīr's favourite wife, Nūr Mahall, who practically ruled the empire, was a Persian by birth, and she loved to imitate the painted tile decoration of her native land in a sumptuous fashion with precious marble inlay, perhaps giving suggestions for the patterns herself. But the Itmād-ud-daulah's tomb at Agra which she built for her father is neither a Persian nor Mogul building. It is Indian, yet something new. Similarly, when the Sultan of Bijāpūr bade his builders make his tomb as fine as that of the Emperors of Rome, they gratified his wishes by making an Indian dome, unique in engineering and unsurpassed in beauty, but not Roman or Turkish. The eclecticism of the Mogul