Page:A Handbook of Indian Art.djvu/253

Rh from Delhi; calligraphists from Shirāz, Baghdad, and Syria; inlay workers who were all Hindus from Kanouj, and a Hindu garden-designer from Kashmir. Ustād Isā's native place is given variously as Agra, Shirāz, and Rūm (European Turkey). The Turkish title of Effendi which is given him in some MSS. proves nothing as to nationality; and regarding the other foreign craftsmen, one would have to know something of their family history to determine whether they were Indians or not. The so-called Turks may have been Indian craftsmen in the service of the Ottoman Sultans, or of the Sultans of Bijāpūr who had Turkish ancestry.

It is said that Shah Jahān, in consultation with his experts, saw drawings of all the chief buildings of the world—a statement not to be taken too literally—and that when the design was settled a model of it was made in wood. Veroneo appears to have been present at these consultations, and he declared afterwards that he had furnished the design which met with the Pādshah's approval. The silence of the detailed native accounts on this point, and of all contemporary writers besides Father Manrique, would have little significance were it not for the silence of the Tāj itself. It must be inconceivable to any art critic acquainted with the history of the Indian building craft that Shah Jahān, if he had so much faith in a European as an architect, would only have used him to instruct his Asiatic master-builders in designing a monument essentially Eastern in its whole conception, or that Veroneo himself would have submitted a design of this character and left no mark of his European mentality and craft experience upon the building itself. Shah Jahān was professedly a strict Sunni, and probably at the instigation of Mumtāz Mahall, who, like