312. Plan of Adinah Mosque, Maldah. Scale 100 ft. to 1 in.
for a caravanserai; but in an edifice where expression and beauty were absolutely required it is far too monotonous. The same defect runs through the whole group; and though their size and elegance of details, joined with the picturesque state of richly foliaged ruin in which they are now found, make them charming subjects for the pencil, they possess all the defects of design we remarked in the great halls of a thousand columns in the south of this country.[524] It seems, indeed, almost as if here we had again got among the Tamil race, and that their peculiarities were reappearing on the surface, though dressed in the garb of a foreign race.
One of the most interesting of the antiquities of the place is a minar, standing in the fort ([Woodcut No. 313]). For two-thirds of the height it is a polygon of twelve sides; above that circular, till it attains the height of 84 ft. The door is at some distance from the ground, and altogether it looks more like an Irish round-tower than any other example known, though it is most improbable that there should be any connexion between the two forms. It is evidently a pillar of victory—a Jaya Stambha—such as the Kutub Minar at Delhi, and those at Coel, Dowlutabad, and elsewhere. There is, or was, an inscription on this monument which ascribed its erection to Feroze Shah. If this is so, it must be the king of that province who reigned in Gaur A.H. 702-715, or A.D. 1302-1315,[525] and the character of the architecture fully bears out this adscription.[526] The native tradition is, that a saint, Peer Asa, lived, like Simon Stylites, on its summit!
313. Minar at Gaur. (From a Photograph by J. H. Ravenshaw, B.C.S.)
Besides these, there are several of the gateways of Gaur which are of considerable magnificence. The finest is that called Dhakhal, which, though of brick, and adorned only with terra-cotta ornaments, is as grand an object of its class as is to be found anywhere. The gate of the citadel, and the southern gate of the city, are very noble examples of what can be done with bricks, and bricks only. It is not, however, in the dimensions of its buildings or the beauty of their details that the glory of Gaur resides; it is in the wonderful mass of ruins stretching along what was once the high bank of the Ganges, for nearly twenty miles, from Maldah to Maddapore—mosques still in use, mixed with mounds covering ruins—tombs, temples, tanks and towers, scattered without order over an immense distance, and half buried in a luxuriance of vegetation which only this part of India can exhibit. What looks poor, and may be in indifferent taste, drawn on paper and reduced to scale, may give an idea of splendour in decay when seen as it is, and in this respect there are none of the ancient capitals of India which produce a more striking, and at the same time a more profoundly melancholy, impression than these ruins of the old Pathan capital of Bengal.