[Stone Screen, Sidi Said Mosque, Ahmedabad, India]

The sixteenth-century mosque of Sidi Said (or Sayyid) in Ahmedabad, India is famous for the intricately carved sandstone jalis, or perforated stone screens, that fill its semicircular windows. The screen chosen by the photographer Thomas Biggs for inclusion in the 1866 publication, Architecture at Ahmedabad, features a series of palms and flowering saplings flanking a large, centrally placed tree. Biggs, originally stationed in Bombay as part of the British regiment, was undoubtedly attracted to the arboreal motif’s connotations of life, knowledge, and creation. In disrepair and used as an office in the 1860’s (note the weeds growing along the bottom edge of the window), the mosque was later restored. The jalis captured the imagination of the American designer Lockwood de Forest, who established wood carving workshops in Ahmedabad, where similar patterns were reproduced in furniture for the American market (see for example, the chair, ca. 1881 – 86, in the American Wing, 1992.340).