Indo-Saracenic Architecture: Victoria Terminus, Mysore Palace and More

Travel through almost any large Indian city and you will pass buildings that seem to belong to two worlds at once: a railway station with Gothic spires and Indian domes, a law court with minarets, a palace with Mughal arches and English clock towers, a museum whose facade could be Rajput or Victorian depending on where you stand. These buildings are so familiar — on postcards, currency notes and film sets — that they are rarely looked at closely. Yet they record one of the most interesting and contested episodes in Indian architecture, and they still influence how Indian homes, hotels and public buildings are designed today.

The usual label for them is Indo-Saracenic, and it is often used loosely. Many articles and guidebooks call every colonial-era building with a dome or a pointed arch "Indo-Saracenic", including Mumbai's Victoria Terminus. That is not quite right, and the difference matters for anyone who wants to understand these buildings or borrow from them. This article explains where the style came from, what its elements are, how it differs from the Victorian Gothic Revival that shaped Victoria Terminus, and what designers can sensibly learn from it today — with dimensioned drawings of the key forms.

What Indo-Saracenic means

Indo-Saracenic — sometimes called Indo-Islamic revival or, more loosely, Indo-Gothic — is the name given to an architectural style developed in British India from roughly the 1870s to the 1920s, with earlier precursors. Saracenic was a European term of the period for Islamic architecture, and the style borrowed heavily from Mughal and other Indo-Islamic buildings; it also drew on Rajput, Hindu, Jain and regional Indian traditions. What made it distinct was the combination: Indian forms and ornament were applied to buildings whose planning, structure and services were European — railway offices, universities, law courts, museums, banks and princely palaces built with iron, steel, brick, cement and modern drainage.

Historians have read the style in different ways. To its British promoters, it was a way of making imperial buildings look as though they belonged to India, and of presenting British rule as heir to the Mughals. To many princely rulers who commissioned it, it was a way to be both modern and rooted. Later critics saw it as a costume — Indian dress on a European body — and argued that it treated Indian architecture as a catalogue of motifs rather than a living tradition. All these readings have some truth, and they are worth keeping in mind when borrowing from the style today.

Roots: the sources the style borrowed from

The style did not appear from nowhere. Through the nineteenth century, British engineers, surveyors and artists measured and drew Indian monuments in growing detail, and the Archaeological Survey of India, founded in 1861, began systematically documenting them. Pattern books followed. The best known, the Jeypore Portfolio of Architectural Details prepared under Colonel Samuel Swinton Jacob of the Jaipur Public Works Department and published from 1890, collected measured drawings of brackets, columns, arches, jaalis and chhatris from Rajasthan and elsewhere, so that designers could reuse them. That is both the strength and the weakness of the style: it had access to an enormous vocabulary, but it often used that vocabulary as a kit of parts.

Among the sources, Mughal architecture was the most important — its domes, arches, jaalis, minarets and gardens are explained in the related article on Mughal architecture on this blog. Rajput palaces supplied jharokhas, chhatris and bracketed balconies. Gujarat's Sultanate mosques and the stone-carving traditions of Gujarat and Rajasthan supplied fine ornament; the Gateway of India's details, for instance, are commonly described as drawing on Gujarati work. Deccani and South Indian buildings supplied regional variants, particularly in Madras and Mysore. Underneath all of it sat a European building: symmetrical plans, corridors, staircases, iron roof trusses, large glazed windows, and the services a Victorian institution required.

The earliest building usually described as a forerunner of the style is Chepauk Palace in Madras (now Chennai), built for the Nawab of Arcot and completed in 1768, which combined Indo-Islamic forms with a European approach to construction a century before the style became fashionable. The style's mature phase began in the 1870s and continued into the 1920s, when the new imperial capital at New Delhi, designed by Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker, turned towards a more classical synthesis and the age of large Indo-Saracenic commissions came to an end.

The vocabulary: elements of an Indo-Saracenic building

Indo-Saracenic buildings share a recognisable set of elements. Almost none of them was invented for the style; each was borrowed from an older Indian tradition and placed on a new kind of building. Knowing their names and origins makes the buildings much easier to read — and makes it easier to borrow one element thoughtfully rather than all of them at once.

Two of these elements — the chhajja and the arcade — were doing serious climatic work, and they are the ones that transfer best. A chhajja projecting 600–900 mm over a window shades the glass from high sun and throws monsoon rain clear of the wall. An arcade or verandah 2400–3600 mm deep keeps sun off the rooms behind it and gives a usable, breezy outdoor room. Many Indo-Saracenic buildings are pleasant to be in despite their size precisely because of these deep, shaded edges, which they inherited from older Indian buildings.

Victoria Terminus: why it is usually classed as Gothic Revival

Victoria Terminus in Mumbai — renamed Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in 1996 and Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus in 2017 — is one of the most photographed buildings in India and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2004. It was designed by the architect Frederick William Stevens as the headquarters of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, built over about a decade and completed in 1888, and named in honour of Queen Victoria. It appears in countless lists of Indo-Saracenic buildings. UNESCO's own description, however, presents it as an outstanding example of Victorian Gothic Revival architecture in India, blended with themes deriving from Indian traditional architecture. That is the more accurate classification, and it is worth understanding why.

The building's bones are Gothic. It is organised like a great Victorian public building, with a symmetrical front, projecting wings around a forecourt, pointed arches, ribbed vaulting, turrets, tracery, stained glass, polychrome stone banding and a richly carved skyline of pinnacles and gargoyle-like sculpture. The high central dome, topped by a statue usually described as representing Progress, is closer to Italian Gothic and Renaissance precedent than to the bulbous Mughal dome. The Indian contribution is mainly in the ornament and craftsmanship: carved panels of local plants and animals, Indian motifs in the stonework and ironwork, and adaptations to the climate. In other words, Victoria Terminus is a Gothic building with Indian elements, whereas an Indo-Saracenic building is a European-planned building dressed predominantly in Indian forms.

This is not a hair-splitting point. Mumbai's nineteenth-century core is dominated by Victorian Gothic buildings — the university, the High Court and others around the Oval Maidan — and in 2018 UNESCO recognised them, together with the city's Art Deco buildings, as the Victorian Gothic and Art Deco Ensembles of Mumbai. Victoria Terminus belongs with that Gothic family. Stevens' later Municipal Corporation building opposite the station, completed in the 1890s, moves further towards Indian forms, with domes and arches that show how the two approaches were converging. Many buildings of the period sit somewhere along that spectrum, which is why the looser term Indo-Gothic is sometimes used for the hybrids.

Mysore Palace: Indo-Saracenic at its most complete

If Victoria Terminus shows Gothic dressed with Indian detail, Mysore Palace shows the Indo-Saracenic style at full strength. The palace of the Wadiyar rulers of Mysore stands on the site of an older palace that was largely destroyed by fire in 1897. The new palace was designed by the British architect Henry Irwin, who also worked on the Madras High Court and other buildings in South India, and it was completed in 1912. It is today one of the most visited monuments in India and is famous for being illuminated with tens of thousands of bulbs on festival evenings, especially during Dasara.

The palace combines a symmetrical, European-style plan and modern construction with an exuberant Indian vocabulary: a tall central tower crowned by a gilded dome, smaller domes and chhatris along the roofline, arcaded verandahs with cusped arches, and richly decorated interiors. Its grand halls — the public durbar hall with its rows of carved columns and painted ceilings, and the octagonal marriage pavilion (Kalyana Mantapa) with its stained-glass ceiling — show the style's appetite for craft drawn from many sources: Indian carving and painting, imported cast iron, stained glass and tiles. The mix is precisely what defines Indo-Saracenic architecture: Hindu, Islamic, Rajput and European elements assembled into one ceremonial building.

Laxmi Vilas Palace in Vadodara, covered in detail in a separate article on this blog, belongs to the same family. Built for Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III and completed in 1890, it was designed by Major Charles Mant and completed after his death by Robert Fellowes Chisholm, two of the leading figures of the style. It combines Hindu, Jain, Mughal and Gothic elements in a vast princely residence. Taken together, Mysore and Vadodara show the style in its most personal form: not as an imperial office but as a home and a court.

The landmark buildings compared

The table below lists major buildings of the period, with the architects generally credited and commonly cited completion dates. It is consistent with the comparison given in the Laxmi Vilas article on this blog and adds the buildings discussed here. Where a building is better classed as Gothic Revival, the table says so.

How to read the arches

The quickest way to place a building of this period is to look at its arches. A Gothic Revival building uses the pointed arch drawn from two centres, often filled with tracery. A Mughal-derived opening often uses the four-centred arch, flatter at the crown, or a pointed arch framed in a rectangle. The cusped or multifoil arch — with scalloped lobes on the inside of the curve — is the single most characteristic Indo-Saracenic motif, widely used in arcades, windows and doorways. Horseshoe and ogee forms appear occasionally. The drawing below shows four common forms at the same span.

Materials and making: then and now

Indo-Saracenic buildings were made with a mix of traditional Indian craft and industrial materials. Facades were usually of local stone — sandstone, basalt or granite — or of brick with stone or plaster dressings. Carving was done by Indian stone masons, many trained in local workshops and art schools. Behind the facades, iron and later steel beams, cast-iron columns, Mangalore-pattern roof tiles, imported tiles and stained glass carried the building into the modern era. This dual character is worth remembering: the style was never purely handmade, and it was one of the first in India to use mass-produced components alongside crafted ornament.

The prices are indicative October 2026 ranges consistent with others used on this blog; the jaali figures match the full jaali article. They are given so that a homeowner can compare options, not as a quotation. For any work on an actual heritage building, specialist conservation advice is essential: replacing lime with cement, or carved stone with moulded substitutes, can damage historic fabric.

What modern homes can learn — and what to avoid

The Indo-Saracenic style is easy to imitate badly. A modern bungalow topped with fibreglass domes, thin plaster arches stuck to flat walls and a chhatri on every corner looks like a stage set, not a home. Copying the ornament without the reasons behind it produces kitsch. Copying the reasons — shade, depth, craft, proportion — produces buildings that feel calm and rooted. In Aaditya Interior's work, the style informs projects most often through three moves: a deep verandah or sit-out with a simple arcade, a single well-proportioned arch at a pooja unit or foyer, and jaali screens that filter sun and give privacy.

The niche in the drawing shows the approach. One arch, properly proportioned — its rise roughly half its span — framed in a real depth of 300 mm, not a profile glued to a flat wall. One material for the jaali, with an openness of about 25–40 per cent so that a concealed LED strip behind glows evenly through it. One stone ledge at a comfortable 850–900 mm for keys, a lamp or a small idol. Nothing else. The effect is unmistakably Indian and recognisably of the style, but it would sit just as comfortably in a contemporary flat.

At the scale of the house, the lessons are larger. Deep chhajjas over south and west windows, an arcaded or pillared verandah, a jharokha-like bay window with a seat, lime-finished walls that breathe, and a courtyard or double-height space in the middle are all ideas the style took from older Indian buildings — and they remain among the most effective ways to make a home comfortable in a hot climate.

The style's afterlife and future

By the 1920s, the large Indo-Saracenic commissions were over. New Delhi's monumental buildings followed a more classical path, and after independence, Indian architects largely turned to modernism, influenced by Le Corbusier at Chandigarh and by Indian modernists who sought a new architecture rooted in climate and material rather than historical ornament. For decades, Indo-Saracenic buildings were seen as relics — admired by tourists, neglected by architects, and in many cases poorly maintained.

That view has softened. Conservation projects have restored many of the great buildings, UNESCO listings have raised their profile, and a younger generation sees them as a genuinely Indian chapter of architecture made by Indian hands, whatever the politics of their commissioning. Today, the style's vocabulary reappears in heritage hotels, in palace restorations converted to hospitality, in wedding venues and in residential interiors that want a sense of place. The challenge for designers is to use it with the restraint and climatic intelligence that the best original buildings showed, rather than as a set of decorative stickers.

Rules for borrowing from Indo-Saracenic design

• Borrow the climatic elements first — chhajjas, verandahs, jaalis and courtyards — before any ornament.
• Use one strong arch rather than many weak ones; give it real depth and a rise of roughly half its span.
• Keep cusped profiles for special places — the pooja unit, the foyer, a mirror frame — not for every door.
• Avoid fibreglass domes and applied chhatris on ordinary houses; they read as theatre, not architecture.
• Specify jaalis by openness and bridge width, and choose materials for the room's moisture and sun.
• Use lime finishes and natural stone where possible; they age gracefully and suit the style.
• For heritage buildings, appoint a conservation architect and avoid cement repairs on lime masonry.
• Describe buildings accurately: call Victoria Terminus Gothic Revival with Indian elements, not Indo-Saracenic.

Frequently asked questions

Is Victoria Terminus Indo-Saracenic?

It is often called that, but it is more accurately described as Victorian Gothic Revival with Indian elements — the way UNESCO describes it. Its plan, pointed arches, vaulting, turrets and stained glass are Gothic; its Indian character lies mainly in carved ornament and craftsmanship.

Who designed Mysore Palace?

The present Mysore Palace was designed by the British architect Henry Irwin after the earlier palace was damaged by fire in 1897, and it was completed in 1912. It is one of the best-known Indo-Saracenic buildings.

What are the main features of Indo-Saracenic architecture?

Bulbous domes, chhatris, jharokhas, chhajjas on brackets, cusped and four-centred arches, minarets, jaalis and arcades, applied to buildings with European planning, structure and services.

What is the difference between Indo-Saracenic and Mughal architecture?

Mughal architecture is the original Indo-Islamic tradition of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, with Indian plans such as tombs in charbagh gardens. Indo-Saracenic architecture borrowed Mughal and other Indian elements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for new building types — railways, courts, colleges and palaces — planned and engineered in the European way.

Can Indo-Saracenic design work in a modern flat?

Yes, in small doses: a single arched niche, a jaali partition, a carved or inlaid accent, lime-finished walls or encaustic tiles in a foyer. Avoid applying domes and multiple arches to a small interior; one well-made element says more than many.