Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 2.djvu/267

 CHAP. IV. JAUNPUR. a*3 spaces were wanted, arches and domes and radiating vaults were employed, and there is little in those parts to distinguish this architecture from that of the capitals. But in the cloisters that surround the courts, and in the galleries in the interior, short square pillars are as generally employed, with bracket capitals, horizontal architraves, and roofs formed of flat slabs, as was invariably the case in Hindu and Jaina temples. Instead of being fused together, as they afterwards became, the arcuate style of the Moslims stands here, though in juxtaposition, in such marked contrast to the trabeate style of the Hindus, that some authors have been led to suppose that the pillared parts belonged to ancient Jaina or Buddhist monuments, which had been appropriated by the Muhammadans and converted to their purposes. 1 The truth of the matter appears to be, that the greater part of the Muhammadans in the province at the time the mosques were built were Hindus converted to that religion, and who still clung to their native forms when these did not clash with their new faith ; and the masons were almost certainly those whose traditions and whose taste inclined them much more to the old trabeate forms than to the newly- introduced arched style. As we shall presently see at Gaur, on the one hand, the arched style prevailed from the first, because the builders had no other material than brick, and large openings were then impossible without arches. At Ahmadabad, on the other hand, in an essentially Jaina country, and where stone was abundant, the pillared forms were not only as commonly employed as at Jaunpur, but were used for so long a time, that before the country was absorbed in the Mughal empire, the amalgamation between the trabeate and arcuate forms was complete. The oldest mosque at Jaunpur is that of Ibrahim Naib Barbak the general of Firuz Shah Tughlaq, in the fort, which we learn from an inscription on it, was completed in A.D. I37?. 2 It is not large externally 130 ft. north and south and consists of a central block of masonry, with a large archway, of the usual style of the Muhammadan architecture of the period, and five openings between pillars on either hand. The front row of these pillars is double, they are of various designs, the outer 1 The first to suggest this was the j at the time they were required for the Baron Hligel, and the idea was taken up by the late Mr Home and Rev. M, A. Skerring. There may have been some Jaina or Hindu buildings at Jaunpur of the I3th or I4th centuries that were utilised by the Muham- madans, but nine-tenths at least of the pillars in these mosques were made places they now occupy 2 Mr Blochmann read the date 778 A.H. ('Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal,' 1875, p. 14), Khairu-d-din in his ' History of Jaunpur,' translated by F. Pogson (p. 41) read this date as 798 A.H, or 1396 A.D.