What Is the Taj Mahal? A Tomb, a Grief and the Mughal Empire at Its Height
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In June 1631 the favourite wife of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan died giving birth to their fourteenth child in a military camp in central India, and the emperor, by the account of his court, wept until his beard turned white, wore mourning for two years, and ordered a tomb for her on the bank of the river at Agra that took twenty thousand workers twenty-two years to finish. The building is the most famous in India and among the most visited on Earth, it is a tomb and a garden and a statement about paradise and power, and its whiteness, which every photograph shows, is not quite what the architects intended.
The empire
The Mughals were a Muslim dynasty descended from Timur and Genghis Khan who conquered northern India from 1526 and ruled most of the subcontinent for two centuries, at their height the richest state in the world, with a quarter of global manufacturing and a court whose wealth astonished European visitors. Shah Jahan, the fifth emperor, reigned from 1628 to 1658 and was the dynasty's builder: the Red Fort and the great mosque of Delhi, the Peacock Throne, and the tomb. His wife, Arjumand Banu Begum, given the title Mumtaz Mahal, chosen one of the palace, had been his companion for nineteen years and his adviser in government, and the tomb was named for her.
The building
The Taj is a complex, not a single building, laid out along an axis from a gateway through a garden to the mausoleum on a platform at the river's edge:
- •The mausoleum: a white marble cube with chamfered corners, 57 metres on each side, under a double dome 73 metres high, the outer shell giving the silhouette and the inner ceiling a proportioned room; four minarets at the corners, built to lean very slightly outward so that in an earthquake they would fall away from the tomb
- •The garden: a charbagh, a Persian paradise garden divided by water channels into four, with the tomb at one end rather than the centre, which lets the river form the far boundary and the building be seen reflected
- •The mosque and the guest house: identical red sandstone buildings flanking the tomb, the second existing only for symmetry
- •The decoration: calligraphy of Quranic verses on the arches, growing larger as they rise so that they read the same size from the ground, and pietra dura, flowers inlaid in the marble from thousands of pieces of jasper, jade, carnelian and lapis
- •The cenotaphs: the empty tombs in the central chamber, with the real graves in a crypt beneath, and Shah Jahan's added off-centre beside his wife's, the one asymmetry in the complex
Who built it
No architect's name is certain. The court histories credit a board of designers under the emperor himself, and the name most often given is Ustad Ahmad Lahauri, a Persian from Lahore who also laid out the Red Fort; the calligrapher, Amanat Khan, signed his work on the gateway, the only signature on the building. The marble came from Makrana in Rajasthan, 300 kilometres away, on carts drawn by a thousand elephants and oxen along a ramp built for the purpose, and the stones for the inlay from across Asia, jade from China, turquoise from Tibet, sapphire from Sri Lanka. The workforce was drawn from across the empire and beyond, masons, inlayers, calligraphers and dome-builders from Persia, Central Asia and the Ottoman lands, and the story that Shah Jahan had their hands cut off afterwards so that they could never build its equal is a later legend with no source. The cost, in the money of the time, was about 32 million rupees, several hundred million pounds today, and the complex was complete in 1653.
What it means
The design is a picture of paradise. The Quran describes the gardens of the blessed as watered by four rivers, and the charbagh is that garden; the inscriptions on the tomb are the chapters of the Quran that speak of the Day of Judgement and the reward of the faithful, and the whole complex, with the tomb at the river end where the water is, reads as the throne of God in paradise with the empress laid at its foot. It was also a statement of dynasty, built by an emperor who had taken the throne by killing his brothers and who wanted a monument to Mughal order and wealth that no rival could match. The love story is real and it is also what the building was designed to tell, which is why it has been believed.
After
Shah Jahan was deposed in 1658 by his son Aurangzeb and spent his last eight years imprisoned in the Agra Fort, from whose windows the tomb is visible across the bend in the river; he was buried beside his wife in 1666. The empire declined in the eighteenth century, the Taj was looted of its silver doors and carpets, and the British, who took Agra in 1803, considered selling the marble and instead, under Lord Curzon around 1900, restored the gardens in an English style, with lawns where the Mughals had fruit trees. The building's present threats are the air and the river: acid rain and soot from Agra's traffic and industry have yellowed the marble, which is periodically cleaned with a clay pack, and the Yamuna, from which the foundations draw the moisture that keeps their timber sound, has shrunk and fouled. Some eight million people a year come to see it, and India's government restricts the numbers and the hours as it has never done before.
The takeaway
The Taj Mahal is the tomb Shah Jahan built at Agra for his wife Mumtaz Mahal after her death in childbirth in 1631, a white marble mausoleum under a double dome at the river end of a four-part paradise garden, inlaid with semi-precious stone and inscribed with the Quran's verses on judgement and reward, completed in 1653 by twenty thousand workers. It is a monument to grief, to paradise and to Mughal power at its peak, and it is threatened today by polluted air and a dying river.