CHAPTER X HOW THE LOTUS OF THE GOOD LAW WENT A-VOYAGING
A Prince without Justice is a River without Water
Or a Lake in the Rains without Lotus flowers.
HINDU SAYING
ONE period of Indian garden building may be said to close with Fadai Khans gardens at Pinjor. But the spacious formal garden, 'the greatest contribution of the Mughals to Indian art,' as Mr. Havell justly remarks in his recent book on Indian Architecture, outlived the fall of the Mughal Empire, and started on a new lease of life in the Hindu gardens of Rajputana and Central India. To understand the later development of the style there, it is necessary first to look back far beyond the times of the early Mohammedan conquests.
'Theories which bring into connexion with each other modes of thought and feeling, periods of taste, forms of art and poetry, which the narrowness of mens minds constantly tends to oppose to each other, have a great stimulus for the intellect, and are almost always worth understanding.' It would be difficult to find a better expression and a sounder reason for the study of any branch of Indian art than that contained in these vital words of Walter Pater. How much of truth and value their application holds in the case of the gardens, a glance at the various influences which acted and reacted on each other there will show. Two connecting links are plainly visible: the Indian Buddhist origin of the distinctive Chinese and Japanese gardens, and the Hindu influence on the Indian Moslem pleasure-grounds.
Babar, as we have seen, was the first to introduce the Central Asian irrigated garden into India. But although the comparatively late date of 1526 marks that epoch in Indian art and garden history, the early Buddhist source of the Turki love of flowers and garden design has been most curiously brought to light by the discoveries of Sir Aurel Stein.
