The Dawn and Dawn Society’s Magazine September 1910

We saw how the decline of the old religious fervour and spirituality among the children of the soil coupled with the iconoclastic zeal of the early Muhammadan invaders of Northern India brought about the decay or the old Hindu-Buddhist art of India especially of Northern India during the early years of Muhammadan rule. [...] It is far from improbable that the Alhambra itself was chiefly the work of Persians who stood to the Arabs in much the same relation that the Greeks did to the Romans." The same superiority of the Persians to the Arabs in artistic capacity and its persistence through all the changing vicissitudes of their political history down to the.present day is emphasised by the author only a few lines belo [...] In the 16th century when the Portuguese first came to Bengal they found Chittagong a very large port and gavP it the name of Porto Grando * and the European travellers who visited the country from this time forward speak in glowing terms of the grandeur of the foreign trade done in the port and of the large number of ships that it built and sent out over the sea. [...] V Before concluding this the first Part of our article on the subject of shibuilding by Bengalis in days gone by we are tempted to point out that in Western India in the Government Docks of Bombay itself for over a whole century from about the middle of the 18th to about the middle of the 19th the sonstruction of large ships for commercial (1) Vide The Trawls of Lodovico di Varthema in Egy [...] It will appear that the services rendered to the British Navy at the Bunbay Government Docks at the end of the 18th century in the great war with the French carried the fame of the Indian Masteblinder over to Great Britain so much so that when in 1802 the Board of Admiralty the supreme authority in naval matters in England determined to build at Bombay big men-of-war for the King's Navy th