MARIKA SARDAR: This fountain comes from a garden in India, so it probably would've stood in the middle of a large pool and the spout you see at the bottom is actually where the water would've been fed into the fountain. Picture the water trickling down from the ring at the top rather than spouting up from it. …Metal work from the Deccan region of India is particularly distinctive because it combines ribbed forms and fantastic animal elements and just has a very strong architectural presence… We have a lot of palace architecture from the Deccan but one thing that we don't really have preserved are the gardens of the period that really were just as important a part of courtly life as the buildings themselves… We don't know so much in the Deccan what form they took, but there's a lot of poetry about gardens and the different types of plants and the scents and how this all played into the experience of the gardens.