Indo-Saracenic architecture

[citation needed] The style enjoyed a degree of popularity outside British India, where architects often mixed Islamic and European elements from various areas and periods with boldness, in the prevailing climate of eclecticism in architecture.

The wider European version, also popular in the Americas, is Moorish Revival architecture, which tends to use specific South Asian features less, and instead those characteristic of the Arabic-speaking countries; Neo-Mudéjar is the equivalent style in Spain.

In India there had been an earlier inversion of the style in Lucknow before the British takeover in 1856, where Indian architects rather "randomly grafted European stylistic elements, as details and motifs, on to a skeleton derived from the Indo-Islamic school."

With a number of exceptions from earlier, most Indo-Saracenic public buildings were constructed by parts of the British Raj government of India, in place between 1858 and 1947, with the peak period beginning around 1880.

to be most common in "Southern and Western India", and of the three main cities of the 19th-century Raj, it was and is much more evident in Mumbai and Chennai rather than Kolkata, where both public government buildings, and the mansions of wealthy Indians tended to use versions of European Neoclassical architecture.

Likewise, civic as well as municipal and governmental colleges along with town halls counted this style among its top-ranked and most-prized structures to this day; ironically, in Britain itself, for example, King George IV's Royal Pavilion at Brighton, (which twice in its lifetime has been threatened with being torn-down, denigrated by some as a "carnival sideshow", and dismissed by threatened nationalists as "an architectural folly of inferior design", no less) and elsewhere, these rare and often diminutive (though sometimes, as mentioned, of grand-scale), residential structures that exhibit this colonial style are highly valuable and prized by the communities in which they exist as being somehow "magical" in appearance.

However the occasional residential structure of this sort, (its being built in part or whole with Indo-Saracenic design elements/motifs) did appear quite often, and such buildings have grown ever more valuable and highly prized by local and foreign populations for their exuberant beauty and elegance today.

[citation needed] Either evidenced in a property's primary unit or any of its outbuildings, such estate-caliber residential properties lucky enough to boost the presence of an Indo-Saracenic structure, are still to be seen, generally, where in instances urban sprawl has not yet overcome them; often they are to be found in exclusive neighborhoods' (or surrounded, as cherished survivors, by enormous sky-scarpers, in more recently claimed urbanized areas throughout this "techno" driven, socio-economic revolutionary era marking India's recent decade's history), and are often locally referred to as "mini-palaces".

Additionally, more often seen are the diminutive renditions of the Indo-Saracenic style, built originally for lesser budgets, finding their nonetheless romantic expression in the occasional and serenely beautiful garden pavilion outbuildings, throughout the world, especially, in India and England.

Motifs such as chhajja (a sunshade or eave laid on cantilever brackets fixed into and projecting from the walls), corbel brackets with richly carved "stalactite"[citation needed] pendentive decorations, balconies, kiosks or chhatris, and minars (tall towers) were characteristic of the imitation-Mughal architecture style, which was to become a lasting legacy of the nearly four hundred years of the Mughal presence in these areas.

In 1861, the new British colonial administration established the Archaeological Survey of India, gradually restoring several important Indian monuments (such as the Taj Mahal) over the following decades.

The British attempted to encapsulate South Asia's past within their new Indic buildings and so represent Britain's Raj as legitimate to the Indian public.

The building of New Delhi as the new imperial capital, which mostly took place between 1918 and 1931, led by Sir Edwin Lutyens, brought the last flowering of the style, using a deeper understanding of Indian architecture.

[citation needed] According to Thomas R. Metcalf, a leading scholar of the style, "the Indo-Saracenic, with its imagined past turned to the purposes of British colonialism, took shape outside India [ie the subcontinent] most fully only in Malaya".

Kuala Lumpur was only a small settlement when in 1895 the British decided to make it the capital of their new Federated Malay States; it needed a number of large public buildings.

In Singapore European styles had been the norm since the first British public building there in 1827, both copying Calcutta and reflecting a smaller proportion of Muslim Malays in the population, and the role of the city as a military and trade base.