Taj Mahal

The story of Taj Mahal

What you are standing in front of is the Taj Mahal, an ivory-white marble mausoleum on the right bank of the river Yamuna in Agra. Its single most striking feature is that it is not just a tomb, but the centrepiece of a 17-hectare complex laid out with a mosque, a guest house, formal gardens, and a crenellated wall on three sides.

Shah Jahan commissioned it in 1631, and the purpose was personal as well as dynastic: to house the tomb of his late wife, Mumtaz Mahal. The building also contains Shah Jahan’s own tomb. The name means “Crown of the Palace,” and an early court text, Padshahnama, refers to it as rauza-i munawwara, meaning the illumined or illustrious tomb.

The mausoleum itself was completed in 1648, while work elsewhere in the complex kept going for another five years. Its first recorded ceremony was on 6 February 1643, when Shah Jahan observed the 12th anniversary of Mumtaz Mahal’s death here. The whole complex is believed to have been finished in 1653. UNESCO describes it as “the jewel of Muslim art in India and one of the universally admired masterpieces of the world’s heritage.”

If you look closely at the material and the way the forms are arranged, you can see why it became so admired. The mausoleum is built of white marble with semi-precious stone inlay, while red sandstone was used for the other buildings in the complex. The design draws on Indo-Islamic and Mughal traditions, and the whole composition is built around symmetry. The central building sits on a 6-metre-high square plinth; its base is a large multi-chambered cube with chamfered corners that create an eight-sided shape. Each face has an iwan, or arch-shaped doorway, and each side is framed by a 33-metre-high pishtaq with smaller arched balconies stacked beside it. That same arch motif is repeated on the corners so the design stays balanced from every side.

Inside, the main chamber is octagonal, with jali screens that admit light from the outside. The complex sits on a platform measuring 300 metres in length and 8.7 metres in height on the banks of the Yamuna, and the platform itself is patterned with dark and light sandstone. The main axis runs north–south, and the corners were set so the sun could be seen rising and setting on the north and south corners on the summer and winter solstices respectively.

The work on this monument was immense. More than 20,000 workers and artisans were employed, under a board of architects led by Ustad Ahmad Lahori, Shah Jahan’s court architect. The complex was also designed and executed by a multinational group that included Ismail Afandi, Ustad Isa, Isa Muhammad Effendi, Puru, Amanat Khan Shirazi, Qazim Khan, Muhammad Hanif, Mir Abdul Karim, and Mukkarimat.

Its later history is visible too. In December 1652, Aurangzeb wrote to his father about leaks in the tomb, the mosque, and the assembly hall after the previous rainy season. In 1658, Shah Jahan was deposed and kept under house arrest at nearby Agra Fort, where he could see the Taj Mahal. After his death in 1666, Aurangzeb buried him here beside Mumtaz Mahal. In the 18th century, the Jat rulers of Bharatpur attacked the complex and carried away chandeliers and the gold and silver screen; parts of the buildings had fallen into disrepair by the late 19th century.

Today it is both a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a Monument of National Importance, administered by the Archaeological Survey of India. It draws more than five million visitors a year. Visitors come through three gates, entry is controlled, and the complex is open on all days except Fridays, from one hour before sunrise to 45 minutes before sunset. If you want one good detail to notice right now, stand back and read the symmetry first; then move closer and look for the marble inlay and the jali screens in the main chamber.