 The architecture of Islamic mosques and tombs is an invaluable treasure of world heritage. Many countries have taken inspiration from this tradition. Islam had conquered the Spanish parts, Spain, the part of Portugal and part of France also, in the year 750. After that, architecture gradually travelled from Spain to Portugal into France. It has influenced a lot of world architecture in almost all the countries. For example, one is surface decoration with tiles. The tile system was not there in European architecture. In Islam, it is known as Zulejo's and it is in European architecture also and especially in Portugal, they call it Azulejo's, that is the tiles. And if you see the colour, that would itself tell you that I mean it has been introduced directly from Islamic architecture. And that is even now being acknowledged also. After the Romans, the building of arches and domes had also been forgotten in Europe. These were reintroduced in this time. It's good to know that the art of dome construction, arch construction came actually went from Iran to Europe. Actually, the architecture of the egg is employed in the dome. What is important is, according to the beliefs of the old Persians, if you put an egg exactly perpendicular on the ground, even if you put a hoof of a camel on it, it won't break because of the cellular connection. Islamic architecture is characterised by a few visible symbols. One is the arch, which frames the space. Second is the dome, which looms over the sky and the skyscrapers. And the third is the minaret, which pierces the skies. These minarets were actually the symbols in the middle of the desert representing the fire, which was lit on the top, to guide the travellers when they travelled in the middle of the desert. A dome represents the infinite. It represents the sky. As the dome architecture represents the infinite, infinite, both. So, dome has a very important role to play. It is well known that the most famous Islamic monument of the world, the Taj Mahal, is in India. What is not equally well known is that the second oldest mosque in the world is also in India, in Kerala. In fact, India has a vast and rich architectural heritage of Islam. From Kerala in the south, till Kashmir in the north. From Tripura in the east, till Gujarat in the west. Islam came to India north from the north, as is very commonly believed. But it came through the Arab traders in what is today the region of Malabar in Kerala and developed as a trading community, as a merchant community. And you can see still traces of that community amongst the Maupalas who are basically who trace their ancestry to the Arabs. Since ancient times, India had considerable trade contact with the Arab world. In the first century AD, Pliny the Elder writes in Rome about the roots which existed going to India. He mentions the July monsoon winds that traders used to catch to bring them to the Indian coast. He mentions a ship which left the coast of Arabia and took 40 days to reach Moosirisi which was then the name of present day Kodangalur. With the advent of Islam, Arab traders became the carriers of the new faith. Behind me here, you see the first mosque which was made in India. It was made in Kodangalur by Raja Cheraman Perumal. It was made in 629 AD within the lifetime of the Prophet. The structure which you are seeing in the museum is the model of the old mosque which is known to be the first mosque of India. It was built in 629 AD by a messenger whose name was Malik Bindina and under his supervision, the mosque was built. Kayal Patnam is an ancient town on the mouth of the Tamira Pirani River. It is about one kilometer from its mouth. The Kodalkarai Mosque was built here by Arab traders as early as Hijri 12 or 633 AD. It is the first mosque to be built in Tamil Nadu. Kayal Patnam has many other early mosques. In fact, Kerala on the west coast of India and Tamil Nadu on the east coast have numerous mosques made through the ages. At Nagor on the east coast is one of the grandest Dargahs ever made. India became home to all traditions of Islam. Sunni, Shia and Sufi. Islam in the north of course came through two different invasions starting with the invasion of Mahmood of Ghazna who went as far as Gujarat. But thereafter there was a peaceful intrusion of different kinds of Sufi saints, of traders, of merchants and of other individuals who were basically moving into India, moving into the north of India because of the political instability or the diagnostic changes that were taking place in and around Central Asia and Afghanistan. So gradually this is how a community developed, a very small community which developed which of course increased its strength once the Turkish rule was established. Kuwaitul Islam was the first mosque built by Muslims soon after the conquest of Delhi. This mosque was built in 1193 and here every inch of the Maksura is beautifully carved. There are number of Quranic verses also very beautifully written on this one as if it has been written on wax. Some of the medieval writers have used this word that it is so beautifully done that it appears that it has been done on wax. On stones it was not possible. Close to the Qutb complex is the tomb of Balban, another 13th century ruler of Delhi. We are in Sultan Balban's tomb. Balban ruled from 1266 up to 1286. But the monument where we are standing marks a very important development in the field of architecture. After the coming of Muslims a number of arches were made. But those were false arches. But here for the first time they have used this one keystone so that the entire weight of the superstructure is divided into various parts and finally it goes into earth. That system was first of all introduced in this monument and afterwards it was widely used all over the country. Behind me is Alay Darwaza built by Alautin Kilji as part of the extension of Qutb complex in 1305. But this particular monument is very fascinating from the point of view of architecture. In 13th century because of the Mongol attacks in East Asia and Central Asia most of the craftsmen they were fleeing from the country. Most of them were given refuge in this part of India but all those artisans and other people craftsmen were also very fruitfully employed in this particular monument. In this monument we can see the introduction of the whole shoe arch for the first time in Indian monuments. Before this this was used either in Spain or in other parts of Central Asia. The most impressive monument in the Qutb complex is the Qutb Minar itself. It was made in the early 13th century by Qutbuddin Ebak Sultan of Delhi. It is one of the world's tallest minarets and is 72.5 meters high. The concept of Minaris, Vestation and Central Asia. All over Vestatia and Central Asia in 12th and 13th century there were more than 70 minarets like this one. But just before Qutb Minar there were two very important minarets in Vestatia. One was in Ghazni and the second was in Khaja Siaposh in Jam. So that also had this kind of circular and angular floating. Qutb Minar is directly influenced by that one. In Persia and Central Asia their building material was mostly bricks. It was not stone so they were not having beautiful craftsmen working on this kind of stones. In India we had very excellent craftsmen who were working on Indian temples. Those craftsmen were very effectively used here in this monument. And that is why we find the excellent carvings in this Qutb Minar. Ibn Battuta was a traveller who had travelled all over the Islamic Empire. He had started from Africa, he had seen the Samarkand, he had seen the muskars and when he came to India he records that nowhere in the world, nowhere in the Islamic Empire we have a minar like this one. In the meantime Islamic influences continued to grow further south in the Deccan. The end of the 15th century saw the establishment of five sultanates in the Deccan. These were Ahmed Nagar, Bijapur, Golconda, Bidar and Berar. The Sultan of Bijapur was a descendant of the Ottoman dynasty of Istanbul. The Sultan of Golconda was a Turkman prince who had taken refuge in India. The sultans were followers of the Shia sect of Islam and were close allies of the Safavid rulers of Iran. A distinct culture developed in the cosmopolitan community of the Deccan. The streets of the Deccan sultanates were filled with Turks, Persians, Arabs and Africans. In India the Deccan became the greatest centre of Arabic learning and literature. The Qutb Shahis founded the ruling dynasty of Golconda in 1512. They were deeply committed to retaining the roots of the Persian identity and culture. In this time architects and artists migrated to the Deccan from Persia. Sultan Ibrahim Adil Shah II ruled Bijapur from 1580 to 1627. He was a contemporary of Emperor Akbar, the Mughal Emperor who ruled in North India. A visit to his rosa or tomb is a very special pleasure. In fact it is like a pilgrimage for somebody deeply interested in Indian art. For some of the finest miniature paintings ever made in India were made in his rule. The Gol Gumbaz in Bijapur is a tomb of Sultan Mohammed Adil Shah, the successor of Sultan Ibrahim Adil Shah II. Mohammed ruled in Bijapur from 1627 to 1657 AD. This is the largest dome ever to be built in the Islamic world. It measures 37.92 meters on the inside. A particular attraction is a central gallery popularly called a whispering gallery where each sound that you make is echoed distinctly seven times. Every time I speak here it echoes so many times. Tourists love to come here. The massive Bedar Fort was built in the 14th and 15th centuries. It is one of the most formidable forts in the country. It has walls which run for 5.5 kilometers around. Inside it has beautiful palaces, two mosques, a madrasa, ornamental gardens and hams. The Tarkash Mahal here was perhaps made for a Turkish wife of the Sultan. When I managed to visit these sites and study them with a little bit more detail we were able to appreciate what great centers these were of architecture, culture and learning. Iran and Central Asia only had single courts. If you were a soldier, a religious figure, an intellectual, an artistic person and you could not find a sponsor, maybe in what is now Iran or Uzbekistan, chances are if you went to the Deccan you could find some sort of patronage. And there was this continuous migration of people, ideas, artistic devices and architectures from the Near East into the Deccan. We have in fact one very remarkable example of an architectural transplant from Central Asia. This is the great madrasa of Mahmud Gawan from the 1480s in Bidar. Now if you would take a photograph of this and put a label and say madrasa in Uzbekistan or part of Eastern Iran, it would be very hard to tell the difference because not only is the form of the madrasa with the corner minarets, the square courtyard in the middle and the four great arched portals or Iwans there, but the decoration of the exterior is in this tile mosaic which was perfected during Timurid times especially with white turquoise and brilliant blue. Timur when he came to Hindustan, he was struck by the beauty of our historical cities. This is Malfuzate Timuri, the autobiography of Timur. He has given a description about the cities of India and then he says, I ordered that all the artisans and clever mechanics who were masters of their respective crafts should be picked out from among the prisoners and set aside and accordingly some thousands of craftsmen were selected to await my command. I had determined to build a Masjid-e-Jami in Samarkand, the seat of my empire which should be without a rival in any country. So I ordered that all the builders and stone mazes of India should be set apart for my own special service. In some other records it is said that he had taken near about 3,000 artisans from India who were employed again in the construction of the Jami Masjid at Samarkand. 1526 was a year which changed the political map of India. It was the year of the advent of Babur who founded the great Mughal dynasty. Babur was a descendant of the Turku-Mongol conqueror Timur whose family ruled in Persia. The dynasty founded by Babur became one of the greatest the world had seen. They ruled a vast empire whose fame spread throughout the world. The culture and the art they created helped to shape future developments in all spheres of life in the Indian subcontinent. What is extremely important to recognize about the Mughals is that when they came to power and they took over northern India or Hindustan they had already been more than 250 years of Islamic building traditions, religious traditions, culture and literature in India. Humayun's tomb which might be considered the first great imperial masterpiece of the new dynasty sponsored by the 20-year-old Akbar in memory of his father is very much related to the previous architecture of Delhi. It's very much linked to Lodi and Tugluk architecture, let's say over the 14th and 15th centuries. We have to understand Mughal architecture as both Islamic and Indian. We may even use the rather old-fashioned term Indo-Islamic which I think is totally appropriate. Then we look at the design of the tomb itself and I've mentioned already these earlier systems which were already well entrenched in India like the little domed chattris, the different coloured stonework and we place all of those around a central dome which is in white marble, an Indian material, not a Middle Eastern material but the dome is bulbous. It has this sort of shape and it's a double dome which means the dome inside is not the same as the dome outside. It has a space, a dead space in between and this is almost the very first instance of this type of structural device and it's something which was brought into India from the Timurid tradition of Uzbekistan. And so we could go on and on to demonstrate that already at the very beginning of Mughal architecture it's presenting us with a fusion of local elements, local building techniques, styles and traditions with imported traditions and styles and the genius of Mughal architecture is that it sustained this incredibly rich mingling of different traditions throughout its whole history. The garden has been conceived as part and parcel of the monuments. In earlier monuments also we had this kind of gardens but you know that was never conceived as part and parcel of the monument. So what we can see is I mean here there is a very beautiful garden with lush green landscape and then the rivers and canals running all through this one and the fruit-bearing trees and the chirping of the birds that create a kind of heavenly aura. So in Quran there is a verse known as Jannat-in-Tajri-min-Tahhtial-anhar. So everything has been replicated from the Quran into a real land. Although Mughals had come in the year 1526 and they started making smaller monuments here but the first landmark monument of the Mughal period is this Umayun Storm. This was the monument that had given the inspiration to Taj Mahal but it took almost 70 years for the maturity of that this one into making a kind of Jannat of the Indian architecture in Taj Mahal. Agra was the imperial capital of Akbar in the mid 16th century. The fort here was one of the most powerful of North India since early times. In 1565 Emperor Akbar ordered the reconstruction of this fort. The fort has palaces of Emperor Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan. The most prominent amongst all the structures are the white marble buildings of Shah Jahan. The Khas Mahal is one of these elegant buildings made of pure marble. It is flanked by the palaces of his daughters Roshanara and Jahanara Beham. In 1571 Emperor Akbar decided to build a new capital city. A magnificent city was built at a site not very far from the previous capital at Agra. It was called Fatehpur Sikri. This was Akbar's most ambitious architectural project. By the end of the 16th century there were a quarter million people staying in the new city. In building Fatehpur Sikri, no cost was too much, no effort was too great for the Emperor Akbar. He wished to make the city true to his conception. As a matter of fact, miniature paintings of that period show the Emperor going amidst the workers, supervising the construction of the city himself. Fatehpur Sikri is one of the best ordered and symmetrically laid out cities of the entire medieval world. The grand Jami Masjid here was built on the model of the one in the holy city of Mecca. The Panch Mahal is a pyramidal five-storied pavilion. Each of the 176 pillars is uniquely carved with motifs drawn from different sources. The world's best known tomb stands testimony to a timeless love story. The Taj Mahal was built in 1648 by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his beloved wife Arjumand Banu Begum, known to the world as Muntaz Mahal. The construction of the Taj Mahal was a stupendous engineering feat. It is built of marble and finally inlaid with semi-precious stones. 20,000 workers and master craftsmen laboured for 17 years to erect this magnificent edifice. In general, there are two rivers and the same kind of two rivers you can see in Taj Mahal also. The whole entire monument has been conceived in a very elaborate way with the domes, with the minarets and the cavity and the rotundity of the monument. The most important thing which beautifies the monument more than anything else is the Pietra Dura work or inlay work. For depicting one particular flower, they have used 64 stones of various sides, various shades and of various colours also. And if you lit a torch into that one, you would feel that the whole thing is blooming. In the mid-17th century, the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan built a new imperial capital at Delhi. He made his palace inside the great Red Fort which he built on the banks of the Yamuna River. The Divane Arm or the Hall of Public Audience is where the emperor would hear petitions of the common people. The Divane Khas is the Hall of Private Audience. These structures are among the glories of the Red Fort. Several hundreds of mosques and Islamic tombs of great beauty are spread throughout India. Coming to the west of the country, in Gujarat is the world heritage site of Champaner of the 15th century. Coming to the east, there is the impressive Na Khuda Masjid and several others in Kolkata. There are famous Dargahs in Hajjo and other places in Assam. There are fine mosques, even in the farthest corners of India. Here we are in the northeast of India, in Agartala in the state of Tripura. This is the beautiful Gedu Biya's Masjid behind me. In the mountainous state of Kashmir, Islamic architecture was influenced by ancient Hindu and Buddhist traditions. These were combined with influences coming from Persia and from Turkistan. Wood was used extensively in the mosques and tombs of Kashmir. I think one should recognize the fact that Islam in India is not peripheral to anything that Islam in India has been a very dynamic force. It has been a very invigorating force. To the entire Islamic architecture, the contribution of Indian architecture is outstanding. You can take two monuments as symbolical monuments. One is Kutubinar and the second one is Taj Mahal. India has a vast living heritage of Islamic architecture. These monuments are a great treasure of India's culture and many of them are recognized as world heritage monuments. We see in these the confluence of local talent with inspirations from Iran, Arabia and Central Asia. These mosques, tombs, madrasas, palaces and fortresses are a beautiful and unique treasure of the heritage of Islamic architecture.