--- A Radical Change and A Continuation of the Indian Past
The Mughal conquest of
Northern India from early 16th century to mid-19th century opened an entirely
new chapter in that region's architecture history. The new architectural developments sponsored by the Mughals were
a radical break from the Buddhist and Hindu traditions, but at the same time,
constituted a continuation of the Indian past.
The religion of Islam (or
literally "submission to God") which the Mughals brought to India
differed greatly from Buddhism and Hinduism, and so inevitably, the
architecture that served it had to be different as well. Horrified by the explicitly sensual
ornamentation on the Hindu temples, and at the same time, felt the urgent need
to assert their status as the minority ruler, the Mughal kings decided to
replace the Hindu temples with their own Islamic monuments.
The resulting architecture
of the early Mughal Empire was obviously alien to the Hindu or Buddhist
temples, for it derived much of its inspirations from the Mughal kings'
hereditary origins: the Timurid (or Persian) and Iranian Safawid
traditions. The typical Islamic temples
were the vaulted brick buildings of Mesopotamia and Iran, with their encrusted
ornament of stucco and carved or glazed brick.
The more advanced ones were erected in stone in Egypt, Syria, and
Turkey. Although the Indian temple
builders were no strangers to using stone as a building material, their method
and technique were never too far away from the imitation of post-and-beam wood-construction. In terms of building types, great monuments
of the Mughals were mostly funerary in purpose (Taj Mahal, for example),
whereas the Hindus would cremate the deceased and deposit their ashes into the
Ganges River. The nine-fold plan
(Timurid in origin) and the paradise garden, which were to exist again and
again in Mughal architecture, were also totally foreign to the Indian
tradition. And besides the above
differences in structure and form, the Muslims' usual mass prayer and its
worship of an abstract deity (not depicted as idols in Hinduism and Buddhism)
were ideas totally foreign to the indigenous people. The pre-prayer ablution was probably the only readily agreeable
element in the two. The difference was
so great that one can say the Mughals brought a radical change to the Buddhist
and Hindu traditions of India.
But Mughal architecture did
not totally alienate itself from its conquered land that was so rich in
religious and artistic traditions. As
the new religion began to take root, the minority Mughals were also being
slowly "Indianized." This
process was more evident in the architecture sponsored by the later Mughal
kings of Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jehan.
The first adaptation of local styles seemed to be the ornamental
sandstone tradition of the Delhi Sultanate, which was explicitly employed on
the "Old Fort" building by the Mughals at Delhi. Later borrowing of Indian elements was
unmistakably the chhatri (a small
domed kiosk), a typical feature of Indian (Sultanate) architecture that was to
appear on almost every great monument of the Mughals; including Taj Mahal, a
climax in Mughal architectural development.
Ideas of Hinduism was even at one time (1579 AD) included in Emperor
Akbar's Din Illahi, a short-lived new
religion that mixed ideas of Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, and Christianity.
The decline of Hinduism at the dawn of Mughal invasion provided a psychological readiness for the Indian people to accept an entirely new religion. At the same time, the Hindu temples seemed to exhaust as an architectural style; its inspiration for further development seemed to be limited to more elaboration on the exterior. At this time of directional uncertainty, the Mughals provided new forms and structural means; at the same time, they were open to synthesize many Indian traditions. In this sense, Mughal architecture was a continuation of the past; it indeed was a foreign style being "Indianized", and eventually evolved to a style known to the world as part of the "all-Indian" style.