Page:Bulandshahr- Or, Sketches of an Indian District- Social, Historical and Architectural.djvu/89

 cized. But, unfortunately, the people of the country will not regard them from this purely utilitarian point of view. The Government is omnipotent, and if it chooses to lodge its servants at equal cost in sheds and godowns instead of in courts and palaces, it must be not from want of thought or skill, but because it deliberately prefers the shed and godown style of construction. The latter is, therefore, the style which loyal subjects are bound to adopt, if they would be in harmony with their rulers.

The most important Government building in the Bulandshahr district is the set of Law Courts and Revenue Offices at head-quarters. The façade, which is 170 feet in length, may be adequately described as a long low wall pierced with a uniform row of round-headed cavities. There is no porch, nor any other feature by which to distinguish the front from the back, nor on either side is any one doorway marked off from its fellows as a main entrance. The design would answer equally well, or indeed much better for a dry goods store, a barrack, or a factory. No stranger, unfamiliar with the economic eccentricities of Anglo-Indian administration, could for a moment suppose that a building of such a mean and poverty-stricken appearance represented the dignity of the Empire to about a million of people, and was the fiscal centre of a district contributing over fourteen lacs of rupees to the annual revenue of the State. It might, perhaps, be imagined that external dignity had been judiciously disregarded in order to secure a maximum of internal convenience; but if such was the intention, it has signally failed of attainment; the paltry appearance of the exterior only prepares the eye for the still greater shabbiness of everything inside.

The buildings, to which the remainder of this article will be devoted, have been designed and carried out in the hope of stemming the tide of utilitarian barbarism, which had swamped Bulandshahr as completely as every other part of the Province. In April 1878, when I took over charge of the district, the only two buildings in it, ancient or modern, of the slightest architectural pretension, were a ruinous tomb of Shahjahan's reign at Kásna, and an unfinished stone pavilion of somewhat later date at Shikárpur. The four Municipalities had each been provided, about twenty years previously, by the energy of the then Collector, with a complete set of public institutions—school, dispensary, and post-office—all substantially constructed of good brick and mortar, but on regulation patterns of the severest type, without any concession to local sentiment. The principal