style". Saracen was a term used in the Middle Ages in Europe for the Arabic-speaking Muslim people of the Middle East and North Africa, and the term "Indo-Saracenic" was first used by the British to describe the earlier Indo-Islamic architecture of the Mughals and their predecessors, and often continued to be used in that sense. "Saracenic architecture" (without the "Indo-") was first used for the architecture of Muslim Spain, the most familiar Islamic architecture to most early 19th-century writers in English. Characteristics 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. They partly reflected the British aspiration for an "Imperial style" of their own, rendered on an intentionally grand scale, reflecting and promoting a notion of an unassailable and invincible British Empire, The style has been described as "part of a 19th-century movement to project themselves as the natural successors of the Mughals". At the same time they were built for modern functions such as railway stations, government offices for an increasingly wide-reaching bureaucracy, and law courts. They often incorporated modern construction methods and facilities. While stone was typically used, at least as a facing, these included substructures composed of iron, steel and poured concrete, and later reinforced concrete and pre-cast concrete elements. The style has been said, by a native of Kolkata, 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. Madras (now Chennai) was a particular centre of the style, but still tended to use details from Mughal architecture, which had barely ever reached Tamil Nadu before. This was partly because English authorities such as James Fergusson especially deprecated Dravidian architecture, which also would also have been harder and more expensive to adapt to modern building functions. Typical elements found include: onion (bulbous) domes Chhajja, overhanging eaves, often supported by conspicuous brackets pointed arches, cusped arches, or scalloped arches horseshoe arches, in fact characteristic of Islamic Spain or North Africa, but often used contrasting colours of voussoirs round an arch, especially red and white; another feature more typical of