CHAPTER Yl.

The Influence of Modern Europe on Indian Art.

*' It is on the architecture of to-day that the preservation of Indian*
Art in any semblance of healthy life now hinges."

J. L. KIPLING, Journal of Indian Art, VOL. I.

fate of Indian decorative art in modern times-
needs no elaborate demonstration. A comparison
of the manufactures of a hundred, or even fiftyr
years ago, as seen in the museums of Europe and Indiar
with the productions of to-day, reveals a degradation in
quality of material and design which it would be practically
impossible to exaggerate. There is no more depressing-
aspect of present-day conditions than the universal decline
of taste in India, from the Raja, whose palace, built by
the London upholsterer* or imitated from some European
building, f is furnished with vulgar superfluity and uncom-
fortable grandeur, to the peasant clothed in Manchester-
cottons of appalling hue and meaningless design. The-
Delhi Exhibition was a sufficient revelation of the extent
to which the degradation has advanced. References to it
appear on every page of booKs like "Sir George Bird wood's
e Industrial Arts of India/ Sir George Watt's 'Indian Art
at Delhi,' and amongst incidental references of almost every
traveller and writer on Indian matters. In 1879 an
address to Sir George Bird wood, signed by William Morris,.

* Like one now in progress, being made by a firm of upholster-
ers in London for the ruler of a small State in the Punjab, at a cost
of 35 lacs

t Like a well-known palace in Calcutta, a copy of Windsor
Palace.