India, Old and New

by Sir Valentine Chirol

It had been well for these Slave kings had no other record survived of them than those which they have left in stone and marble. Great builders and mighty warriors they were in the cause of Allah and his Prophet, but their depravity was only exceeded by their cruelty. The story of the whole dynasty is a long-drawn tale of horrors until the wretched Kaikobad, having turned Delhi for a short three years into a house of ill-fame, was dragged out of his bed and flung into the Jumna, his infant child murdered, and the house of Khilji set up where the Slave kings had reigned. It was the second of these Khilji princes, Ala-ud-Din, who built, alongside of Kutub-ed-Din's mosque, the Alai Darwazah, the monumental gateway which is not only an exceptionally beautiful specimen of external polychromatic decoration, but, to quote Fergusson, "displays the Pathan style at its period of greatest perfection, when the Hindu masons had learned to fit their exquisite style of ornamentation to the forms of their foreign masters." Yet the atrocities of his twenty years' reign, which was one of almost unbroken conquest and plunder, wellnigh surpass those of the Slave kings. He had seized the throne by murdering his old uncle in the act of clasping his hand, and his own death was, it is said, hastened by poison administered to him by his favourite eunuch and trusted lieutenant, Kāfur, who had ministered to his most ignoble passions. To the Khiljis succeeded the Tughluks, and the white marble dome of Tughluk Shah's tomb still stands out conspicuous beyond the broken line of grim grey walls which were once Tughlukabad. The Khiljis had been overthrown, but the curse of a Mahomedan saint, Sidi Dervish, whose fame has endured to the present day, still rested upon the Delhi in which they had dwelt. So Mahomed Tughluk built unto himself a new and stronger city, but he did nothing else to avert the curse. Indeed, he invented a form of man-hunt which for sheer devilish cruelty has been only once matched in the West by the cani del duca when the crazy Gian Maria ruled in Milan. Well may his milder successor, Firuz Shah, have removed to yet another new capital. Well may he have sought to disarm the wrath to come by pious deeds and lavish charities. The record he kept of them is not without a certain naïve pathos:

Under the guidance of the Almighty, I arranged that the heirs of those persons who had been slain in the reign of my late Lord and Patron, Sultan Mahomed Shah, and those who had been deprived of a limb, nose, eye, hand, or foot, should be reconciled to the late Sultan and appeased by gifts, so that they executed deeds declaring their satisfaction, duly attested by witnesses. These deeds were put into a chest, which was placed at the head of the late Sultan's grave in the hope that God in his great mercy would show his clemency to my late friend and patron and make those persons feel reconciled to him.

The curse fell upon Delhi in the reign of the next Tughluk, Sultan Mahmud. Timur, with his Mongolian horsemen, swooped down through the northern passes upon Delhi, slaying Mahomedans and Hindus alike and plundering and burning on all sides as he came. Opposite to the famous ridge, where four and a half centuries later England was to nail her flag to the mast, he forded the Jumna, having previously slain all captives with his army to the number of 100,000. Mahmud's army, with its 125 elephants, could not withstand the shock. Timur entered Delhi, which for five whole days was given over to slaughter and pillage. Then, having celebrated his victory by a great carouse, he proceeded to the marble mosque which Firuz Tughluk's piety had erected in atonement of his grim predecessor's sins, and solemnly offered up a "sincere and humble tribute of praise" to God. Within a year he disappeared in the same whirl-wind of destruction through the northern passes into his native wilds of Central Asia, leaving desolation and chaos behind him.

From so terrific a blow Delhi was slow to recover. A group of picturesque domes marks the resting-place of some of the Seyyid and Lodi kings who in turn ruled or misruled the shrunken dominions which still owned allegiance to Delhi. The achievement of a centralised Mahomedan empire was delayed for nearly two centuries. But the aggressive vitality of Islam had not been arrested, and out of the anarchy which followed Timur's meteoric raid Mahomedan soldiers of fortune built up for themselves independent kingdoms and principalities and founded dynasties which each had their own brief moment of power and magnificence. In all these states, which spread right across Middle India from the Arabian Sea to the Gulf of Bengal, Islam remained the dominant power; but, even whilst trampling upon Hinduism, it did not escape altogether the inevitable results of increasing contact with an older and more refined civilisation. Amidst rapine and bloodshed and the constant clash of arms, it was a period of intense artistic activity which, as usual in the countries conquered by Islam, expressed itself chiefly in terms of stone and marble, and though Hinduism never triumphed as classical paganism, for instance, triumphed for a time in Papal Rome, the steady and all-pervading revival of its influence can be traced from capital to capital, wherever these Mahomedan podestas established their seat of government during that Indian Cinque Cento, which corresponds in time with, and recalls in many ways, though at best distantly, the Italian Cinque Cento, with its strange blend of refined luxury and cruelty, of high artistic achievement and moral depravity.

To the present day almost all those cities—some of them now mere cities of the dead, such as Golconda and Gaur and Mandu, some, such as Bijapur and Bidar and Ahmednagar and Ahmedabad, still living and even flourishing—bear witness to the genius of their makers. From motives of political expediency, the Mahomedan rulers of those days, whether Bahmanis or Ahmed Shahis or Adil Shahis or whatever else they were called, were fain to reckon with their Hindu subjects. Wholesale conversions to the creed of the conquerors, whether spontaneous or compulsory, introduced new elements into the ruling race itself; for converted Hindus, even when they rose to high positions of trust, retained many of their own customs and traditions. Differences of religion ceased to be a complete bar to matrimonial and other alliances between Mahomedans and Hindus. Even in war Mahomedan mercenaries took service with Hindu chiefs, and Hindus under Mahomedan captains. There was thus, if not a fusion, a gradual mingling of the Mahomedan and Hindu populations which, in spite of many fierce conflicts, tended to promote a new modus vivendi between them. It was a period of transition from the era of mere ruthless conquest, which Timur's tempestuous irruption brought practically to a close, to the era of constructive statesmanship, which it was reserved to Akbar, the greatest of the Moghul Emperors, to inaugurate.

Each of these early Mahomedan states has a story and a character of its own, and each goes to illustrate the subtle ascendancy which the Hindu mind achieved over the conquering Mahomedan. I can only select a few typical examples. None is in its way more striking than Mandu, over whose desolation the jungle now spreads its kindly mantle. Within two years of Timur's raid into India the Afghan governors of Malwa proclaimed themselves independent, and Hushang Ghuri, from whom the new dynasty took its name, proceeded to build himself a new capital. The grey grim walls of Mandu still crown a lofty outpost of the Vindhya hills, some seventy miles south-east of Indore, the natural scarp falling away as steeply on the one side to the fertile plateau of Malwa as on the other to the broad valley of the sacred Nerbudda. The place had no Hindu associations, and in the stately palaces and mosques erected by Hushang and his immediate successors early in the fifteenth century scarcely a trace of Hindu influence can be detected, though some of them still stand almost intact amidst the luxuriant vegetation which has now swallowed up the less substantial remains of what was once a populous and wealthy city. The Ghuris came from Afghanistan, and the great mosque of Hushang Ghuri—in spite of inscriptions which say in one place that it has been modelled on the mosque of the Kaaba at Mecca, and in another place on the great mosque at Damascus—is perhaps the finest example of pure Pathan architecture in India, and one of the half-dozen noblest shrines devoted to Mahomedan worship in the whole world; a mighty structure of red sandstone and white marble, stern and simple, and as perfect in the proportions of its long avenues of pointed arches as in the breadth of its spacious design. Behind it, under a great dome of white marble, Hushang himself sleeps. Unique in its way, too, is the lofty hall of the Hindola Mahal, with its steeply sloping buttresses—a hall which has not been inaptly compared to the great dining-hall of some Oxford or Cambridge College—and alongside of it, the more delicate beauty, perhaps already suggestive of Hindu collaboration, of the Jahaz Mahal, another palace with hanging balconies and latticed windows of carved stone overlooking on either side an artificial lake covered with pink lotus blossoms. Mandu was at first an essentially Mahomedan city, and under Mahmud Khilji, who wrested the throne from Hushang's effete successor, its fame as a centre of Islamic learning attracted embassies even from Egypt and Bokhara. But its greatness was short-lived. Mahmud's son, Ghijas-ud-Din, had been for many years his father's right hand, both in council and in the field. But no sooner did he come to the throne in 1469 than he discharged all the affairs of the state on to his own son and retired into the seraglio, where 15,000 women formed his court and provided him even with a bodyguard. Five hundred beautiful young Turki women, armed with bows and arrows, stood, we are told, on his right hand, and, on his left, five hundred Abyssinian girls. Profligate succeeded profligate, and the degeneracy of his Mahomedan rulers was the Hindu's opportunity. The power passed into the hands of Hindu officers, who were even suffered to take unto themselves mistresses from among the Mahomedan women of the court. The end came, after many vicissitudes, with Baz Bahadur, chiefly known for his passionate devotion to the fair Hindu, Rup Mati, for whom he built on the very crest of the hill, so that from her windows she might worship the waters of the sacred Nerbudda, the only palace now surviving in Mandu which bears a definite impress of Hinduism. Baz Bahadur surrendered to the Emperor Akbar in 1562.

At Ahmedabad, on the other hand, the Ahmed Shahi Sultans of Gujerat found themselves in presence of an advanced form of Hindu civilisation as soon as they entered into possession of the kingdom which they snatched from the general conflagration. Whether Ahmedabad, which is still the modern capital of Gujerat and ranks only second to its neighbour, Bombay, as a centre of the Indian cotton industry, occupies or not the exact site of the ancient Karnāvati, Gujerat was a stronghold of Indian culture long before the Mahomedan invasions. Architecture especially had reached a very high standard of development in the hands of what is usually known as the Jaina school. This is a misnomer, for the school was in reality the product of a period rather than a sect, though Jainism probably never enjoyed anywhere, or at any time, such political ascendancy as in Gujerat under its Rashtrakuta and Solanki rulers from the ninth to the thirteenth century, and seldom has there been such an outburst of architectural activity as amongst the Jains of that period. To the present day the salats or builders, mostly Jains, have in their keeping, jealously locked away in iron-bound chests in their temples, many ancient treatises on civil and religious architecture, of which only a few abstracts have hitherto been published in Gujerati, but, as may be seen at Ahmedabad, in the great Jaina temple of Hathi Singh, built in the middle of the last century at a cost of one million sterling, they have preserved something of the ancient traditions of their craft.

Firishta described Ahmedabad as, in his day, "the handsomest city in Hindustan and perhaps in the world," and very few Indian cities contain so many beautiful buildings as those with which Ahmedabad was endowed in the course of a few decades by its Ahmed Shahi rulers. No one can fail to admire the wealth of ornamentation and the exquisite workmanship lavished upon them, though they are not by any means the noblest monuments of Mahomedan architecture in India. In fact—and herein lies their peculiar interest—they are Hindu rather than Mahomedan in spirit. For they were built by architects of the Jaina school, who were just as ready to work for their Moslem rulers as they had been to work in earlier times for their Hindu rajas. By the mere force of a civilisation in many ways superior to that of their conquerors, these builders imposed upon them, even in the very mosques which they built for them, many of the most characteristic features of Hindu architecture. To obtain, for instance, in a mosque the greater elevation required by the Mahomedans, to whom the dim twilight of a Hindu shrine is repugnant, they began by merely superimposing the shafts of two pillars, joining them together with blocks to connect the base of the upper with the capital of the lower shaft; and this feature in a less crude shape was permanently retained in the Indo-Mahomedan architecture of Gujerat. Nowhere better than at Ahmedabad can the various stages be followed through which this adaptation of a purely Hindu style to Mahomedan purposes has passed. It was at first somewhat violent and clumsy. The earliest mosque in Ahmedabad, that of Ahmed Shah, is practically a Hindu temple with a Mahomedan façade, and the figures of animals and of idols can still be traced on the interior pillars. The octagonal tomb of Ganj Bakhsh, the spiritual guide of Ahmed Shah, just outside the city at Sarkhij, marks an immense stride, and the adjoining mosque, of which all the pillars have the Hindu bracket capitals and all the domes are built on traditional Hindu lines, retains nevertheless its Mahomedan character. Still more wonderful is the blend achieved in the mosque and tomb of Ranee Sepree, the consort of Mahmud Bigarah, who was perhaps the most magnificent of the Mahomedan kings of Gujerat. It was completed in 1514, just a hundred years after the foundation of the Ahmed Shahi dynasty, and it shows the distance travelled in the course of one century towards something like a fusion of Hindu and Mahomedan ideals in the domain at least of architecture.

In Bijapur alone, of all the great Mahomedan cities of that period which I have seen, did the proud austerity of Mahomedan architecture shake itself free from the complex and flamboyant suggestions of Hindu art—perhaps because the great days of Bijapur came after it had taken its full share of the spoils of Vijianagar, the last kingdom in Southern India to perish by the sword of Islam. Having laid low the Hindu "City of Victory," the conquerors determined to make the Mahomedan "City of Victory" eclipse the magnificence of all that they had destroyed. The Gol Kumbaz, the great round dome over the lofty quadrangular hall in which Sultan Mahomed Adil Shah lies under a plain slab of marble, is an almost perfect hemisphere, which encloses the largest domed space in the world, and it dominates the Deccan tableland just as the dome of St. Peter's dominates the Roman Campagna. To such heights Hindu architecture can never soar, for it eschews the arched dome; and beautiful as the Hindu cupola may be with its concentric mouldings and the superimposed circular courses horizontally raised on an octagonal architrave which rests on symmetrical groups of pillars, it cannot attain anything like the same bold span or the same lofty elevation. Have we not there a symbol of the fundamental antagonism between Hindu and Mahomedan conceptions in many other domains than that of architecture? Even if the Arabs did not originate the pointed arch, it has always been one of the most beautiful and characteristic features of Mahomedan architecture. The Hindu, on the other hand, has never built any such arch except under compulsion.

To unite India under Mahomedan rule and attempt to bridge the gulf that divided the alien race of Mahomedan conquerors from the conquered Hindus required more stedfast hands and a loftier genius than those Mahomedan condottieri possessed. A new power more equal to the task was already storming at the northern gates of India. On a mound thirty-five miles north of Delhi, near the old bed of the Jumna, there still stands a small town which has thrice given its name to one of those momentous battles that decide the fate of nations. It is Panipat. There, on April 21, 1526, Baber the Lion, fourth in descent from Timur, overthrew the last of the Lodis. Like his terrible ancestor, he had fought his way down from Central Asia at the head of a great army of Tartar horsemen; but, unlike Timur, he fought not for mere plunder and slaughter, but for empire. He has left us in his own memoirs an incomparable picture of his remarkable and essentially human personality, and it was his statesmanship as much as his prowess that laid the rough foundations upon which the genius of his grandson Akbar was to rear the great fabric of the Moghul Empire as it was to stand for two centuries. Though it was at Delhi that, three days after the battle of Panipat, Baber proclaimed himself Emperor, no visible monument of his reign is to be seen there to-day. But the white marble dome and lofty walls and terraces of his son Humayun's mausoleum, raised on a lofty platform out of a sea of dark green foliage, are, next to the Kutub Minar, the most conspicuous feature in the plain of Delhi. Endowed with many brilliant and amiable qualities, Humayun was not made of the same stuff as either his father or his son. Driven out of India by the Afghans, whom Baber had defeated but not subdued, he had, it is true, in a great measure reconquered it, when a fall from the top of the terraced roof of his palace at Delhi caused his death at the early age of forty-eight. But would he have been able to retain it? He had by no means crushed the forces of rebellion which the usurper Sher Shah had united against Moghul rule, and which were still holding the field under the leadership of the brilliant Hindu adventurer Hemu. Delhi itself was lost within a few months of Humayun's death, and it was again at Panipat, just thirty years after his grandfather's brilliant victory, that the boy Akbar had in his turn to fight for the empire of Hindustan. He too fought and won, and when he entered Delhi on the very next day, the empire was his to mould and to fashion at the promptings of his genius.