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Authors: Michael Preston Diana Preston

Tags: #History, #India, #Architecture

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r.—reigned

=—married

*  The seven of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz’s children who survived into adulthood

NOTES: All the emperors had several wives

Humayun’s mother was Ma’suma
Akbar’s mother was Hamida
Jahangir’s mother was a princess of Amber unnamed by chronicler Abul Fazl
Shah Jahan’s mother was Jodh Bai

 

 

 

 

Prologue

 

I
n a dusty fortress on the hot, airless plateau of the Deccan in central India an army commander sat playing chess with his beautiful, bejewelled and heavily pregnant wife. The year was 1631 – under the Muslim calendar, 1040 – and both were Muslims. Suddenly, as the popular version of the story goes, a severe pain gripped the woman’s abdomen. Doctors were hastily summoned but despite their efforts this, the thirty-eight-year-old mother’s fourteenth pregnancy, was going severely wrong. Weak through loss of blood, she whispered to her distraught husband of their everlasting love and begged him not to marry again. Her final request was that he should build her a mausoleum resembling paradise on earth, just as she had seen in her dreams.

The authoritative court chroniclers record her death just a few minutes later after giving birth to a daughter:

When she brought out the last single pearl
She emptied her body like an oyster
.

 

They continue that for two years her husband, that same commander, the Moghul Emperor Shah Jahan, hid himself away, spurning worldly pleasures and exchanging sparkling gems and rich clothes for simple mourning garments of pure white. In the words of one of his court poets,
‘his eyes wept pearl drops of sadness’
. His hair turned white overnight. He devoted his energies to fulfilling the dream of his wife Mumtaz Mahal, ‘Chosen One of the Palace’, creating a tomb that was not only a representation of heaven on earth but a symbol of sensuality and luxury even in death. Built on a bend in the River Jumna at Agra, Shah Jahan’s capital, in northwestern India, we know it as the Taj Mahal, the world’s most famous memorial to love.

The Taj Mahal’s architect is not known for certain but this much-debated figure produced a design of flawless symmetry and exquisite elegance, a synthesis of Muslim and Hindu styles executed in rose sandstone and milk-white marble. Despite its massive size – the main dome rises over 240 feet and throws a load of over 12,000 tons on its supports – the Taj Mahal seems to float almost weightless above its surrounding courtyards, mirror-like water courses and vivid green gardens. Its mythic fragile beauty rarely fails to captivate even the most cynical.

Contemporaries immediately recognized the Taj as a marvel of the age. A seventeenth-century French traveller decided that this building
‘deserves much more to be numbered among the wonders of the world than the pyramids of Egypt’
. A Moghul scholar wrote that:
‘The eye of the sun overflows with tears from looking at it; its shadow is like moonlight to the earth.’

Later generations struggled to express the emotions the Taj’s ethereal, melancholic beauty inspired in them. To the Nobel Prize-winning poet Sir Rabindranath Tagore the Taj was
‘a teardrop on the cheek of time’
. To Rudyard Kipling it was
‘the ivory gate through which all good dreams come; the realization of the gleaming halls of dawn that Tennyson sings of … the embodiment of all things pure, all things holy, and all things unhappy’
. Edward Lear decided that
‘Descriptions of this wonderfully lovely place are simply silly as no words can describe it at all. Henceforth let the inhabitants of the world be divided into two classes – them as has seen the Taj Mahal and them as hasn’t.’
Fittingly, it was a woman, the wife of an early nineteenth-century British army officer, who best captured the sublime intensity of the love that inspired the building. She wrote simply to her husband,
‘I cannot tell you what I think for I know not how to criticize such a building, but I can tell you what I feel. I would die tomorrow to have such another over me.’

By the end of the eighteenth century the British artist Thomas Daniell, who produced some fine early paintings and plans of the Taj Mahal, could write after his visit:
‘The Taj Mahal has always been considered … a spectacle of the highest celebrity … visited by persons of all rank and from all parts.’
The Taj’s celebrity has only grown over succeeding centuries. It is now an international icon and, like the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Great Wall of China and the Sydney Opera House, one of the world’s most readily identifiable structures. Despite being built by an occupying dynasty, it is a symbol of India adopted by numerous tourist organizations, restaurant owners and manufacturers in India and worldwide. It has also become a symbol of enduring love. By the time of Princess Diana’s visit to India with her then husband Prince Charles in February 1992, the power of the Taj Mahal’s image was such that when she visited the Taj alone and allowed herself to be photographed – a single, disconsolate and melancholy figure seated on a white marble bench before a monument to an abiding royal romance – no words were needed.

The Taj Mahal is not only an expression of supreme love but also of confident power and opulent majesty. It was the creation of an emperor whose dominions stretched westwards across the Indus into present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, eastwards to Bengal and southwards to the central Indian plateau of the Deccan. Shah Jahan’s ancestors, the four preceding emperors, had acquired these huge – and hugely wealthy – lands by persistent opportunism. They had been pushed out of their traditional territories beyond the mountains of the Hindu Kush by fierce rivalries among the rulers of the local clans. Under the leadership of Babur, the first Moghul emperor, they had begun probing down through the Khyber Pass into Hindustan – northern India. Their hold on their territorial gains had at first been precarious. Not until the reign of Babur’s grandson – Shah Jahan’s grandfather Akbar from 1556 to 1605 – was the Moghuls’ grip on India secure.

With stability and prosperity came the opportunity for the Moghuls to indulge their traditional aesthetic interests. Nostalgic for the cooler climes they had left behind them, they had a particular love for exquisite gardens, watered by fountains and streams and with airy pavilions in which to relax. They were the prototype for the gardens of the Taj Mahal and several survive to this day. The emperors also became enthusiastic builders, constructing in their new lands fortresses and palaces and within their pleasure gardens their own beautiful mausolea. They brought with them a tradition of tomb building which they developed over the years into a unique fusion of the Islamic and indigenous traditions. The fabulous wealth of India, piled high in the imperial Moghul treasuries, enabled them to build mausolea of extraordinary magnificence and sophistication. Shah Jahan could literally stud the Taj Mahal with jewels, inlaid into the building’s white marble to form the glowing flowers of an earthly representation of the heavenly paradise where Mumtaz awaited her grieving husband.

The Taj Mahal was the Moghul Empire’s ultimate artistic expression – emulated but never equalled. However, it extracted a high price from its builder, Shah Jahan, in every sense. Creating this ‘heaven on earth’ was an almost impossible undertaking, physically and financially. A contemporary English traveller wrote,
‘the building goes on with excessive labour and cost … Gold and silver esteemed common metal and marble but an ordinary stone.’
The Taj’s construction and the emotional impact of Mumtaz Mahal’s death depleted Shah Jahan’s treasuries and distracted him from the business of government. It also fuelled the tensions within a now motherless imperial family, inserted the seed of Shah Jahan’s own downfall and helped precipitate what was then the world’s most powerful empire into religious fundamentalism and decline.

While Shah Jahan still lived, he witnessed four of his and Mumtaz Mahal’s sons fight among themselves for his throne, and the victor, the strictly orthodox Aurangzeb, murder two brothers and several of Shah Jahan’s grandchildren. As for Shah Jahan himself, he passed his final years a prisoner in the Agra fort. Here he reputedly drew out his days gazing across the Jumna towards the Taj Mahal, piling recriminations on his son for the divisions he was creating in the empire and regretting what might have been had Mumtaz Mahal, the Lady of the Taj, survived.

The seventy-three years of Shah Jahan’s life, from 1592 to 1666, were a pivotal period in the fortunes of the Moghuls, but also a time of rapid change in the wider world which itself had a growing influence on the Moghul Empire. In the Middle East, the Ottoman Turks were rebuilding their power after their great naval defeat by Spanish and Venetian fleets at Lepanto. Under Mehmet III, who had in 1595 murdered twenty-seven of his brothers and half-brothers to win power – a number that puts into perspective the fratricidal tally at the end of Shah Jahan’s reign – and his successors, the Ottomans reconquered much of the Balkans. In 1639, they recaptured from Persia what is now Iraq and established a permanent border with the Persians. Persia would henceforth need to turn east in search of any further conquests.

Persia had long been alternately ally and adversary of the Moghuls. The Persian emperors had provided support to the earlier Moghul emperors in time of crisis, but more recently, under the new Safawid dynasty, they had sheltered and encouraged rebels and disputed the Moghuls’ shifting northwest borders. Despite their nomadic origins in central Asia, the Moghuls looked towards Persia for their cultural inspiration. The Emperor Akbar had adopted Persian as the language of the court and members of the imperial family, as well as courtiers, were skilled in the composition of both Persian poetry and prose.

The Moghuls also looked to Persia as a reservoir of talented manpower. Many Moghul courtiers, generals and artists were Persian-born or of Persian descent. Among the former was Amanat Khan, the calligrapher from Shiraz who was the only man Shah Jahan allowed to sign his work on the Taj Mahal. Among the latter was Mumtaz Mahal herself. Her grandfather had arrived at the Moghul court from Persia a penniless immigrant only a few decades previously and had risen to be the chief minister of Shah Jahan’s father Jahangir.

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