"…the very grandeur of the Mogul buildings is oppressive. Europe has its monuments of sun-kings, its Louvres and its Versailles. But they are part of the development of a country’s spirit; they express the refining of a nation’s sensibility; they add to the common, growing stock. In India these endless mosques and rhetorical mausolea, these great palaces speak only of a personal plunder and for a country with an infinite capacity for being plundered. The Mogul owned everything in his dominions; and this is the message of the Mogul architecture. I know only one building in England with this quality of dead-end personal extravagance…the Blenheim. Imagine England as a country of Blenheims, continually built, destroyed and rebuilt over five hundred years, each a gift of the nation and seldom for services rendered…leaving at the end no vigorous nation…no principle beyond that of personal despotism. The Taj Mahal is exquisite…But in India it is a building wastefully without function; it is only a despot’s monument to a woman, not of India, who bore a child every year for fifteen years. It took twenty-two years to build; and the guide will tell you how many millions it cost."
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V. S. Naipaul: The Indian Trilogy. Quoted in The Daily Egyptian (21 August 1965), p. 4; Curtain Raisers: Essays, Reviews, Letters by K. Natwar Singh, p.150 Also Quoted in
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Indo-Islamic_architecture
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Indo-Islamic architecture
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