A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal (32 page)

The designers used a simple basic plan. Paradise gardens are almost invariably walled, providing privacy and a protection for the peaceful order within from the dusty chaos and swirling discord without. Watercourses intersect in the centre of the garden and represent the four rivers of life and perhaps also symbolize the irrigation essential to living in the desert. Some take the cross where the water channels meet as representing the meeting of the human and the divine, but beyond any symbolic meaning the Persians used the water for the very practical purpose of irrigating the four sections of the garden, which they stocked with flowers and trees. The gardens thus became known as
char baghs
, ‘four-fold enclosed gardens’. (
Bagh
is another Persian word for garden.)

When Timur invaded Persia, he took back to central Asia much from the cultural reservoir that the country and its people provided. As well as craftsmen, he borrowed ideas from the ‘paradise garden’ and incorporated them into the gardens with which he surrounded his capital city of Samarkand. Because their kingdoms were hillier, and often better provided with water, Timur and his nobles made more use of running water in fountains and waterfalls cascading down through terraced gardens. From the limited pictorial and descriptive material available, they seem to have planted their gardens with fruit trees such as pomegranate, peach, quince and cherry, together with other trees, such as the plane and poplar. They filled the beds with flowers like the iris, rose, violet and narcissus. Interestingly, because of local conditions they apparently used clover, not grass, for ground cover. Timur gave his vast gardens encircling Samarkand romantic names such as ‘World’s Picture’ and ‘Meadow of the Deep Pool’. As he moved his nomadic encampment from garden to garden, Timur, who was tall and broad with a long white beard, had his throne placed on a platform above the spot where the watercourses representing the four rivers of life crossed, thus emphasizing his domination of the four quarters of the world.

When Babur conquered India he brought with him the garden tradition. One of his first acts was to build cooling gardens in his hot new capital of Agra. These were essentially pleasure grounds – the biggest innovation of his successors was to make their gardens the setting for their tombs. The emperor and his nobles would create
char baghs
which they would enjoy and live in while alive and in which they would be buried when they died. The Moghuls introduced other developments including broader water channels and a greater use of large sheets of still water to reflect the tombs or pavilions built at the channels’ intersections. Shah Jahan usually built pavilions of white marble, sometimes with a counterpointing pavilion in black, as, for example, in the black pavilion that in 1630 he ordered to be constructed in the Shalimar Gardens in Kashmir.

The Moghuls made even more use of running water in their gardens than their Timurid forebears. They incorporated fountains producing spouts of water and a romantic, cooling mist which brightened into a prismatic rainbow when struck by the rays of the sun. They added water shoots and embellished water channels by causing water to run down sheets of marble carefully carved in fish-scale patterns to produce ripples and reflections. As dusk fell and bats swooped down to drink, servants lit oil lamps kept dry in niches behind the falling water to enhance the velvet beauty of the night.

Such was the importance of the garden to the Moghuls that they frequently used it as a metaphor for the state. Abul Fazl described Akbar’s motive in punishing wrongdoers as being to improve the world for all:
‘As gardeners adorn gardens with trees and move them from one place to another, and reject many, and irrigate others, and labour to rear them to a proper size, and extirpate bad trees and lop off rotten branches, and remove trees that are too large … and gather their various fruits and flowers and enjoy their shade when necessary, and do other things which are established in the science of horticulture, so do just and far-seeing kings light the lamp of wisdom by regulation, and instructing their servants, and thus appear the standard of guidance.’

Whatever the symbolism they employed in their garden design, and however cleverly they manipulated the garden as a metaphor, Babur and his successors enjoyed their gardens profoundly for their natural beauty just as gardeners do today. They designed them to appeal to all five senses – sight, scent, sound (that of water and of birds and insects attracted to the fruit and pollen), touch (the texture of leaves, the smoothness of marble and the coolness of water) and taste (through the consumption of the fruit).

Like Timur, the Moghuls often conducted their business in the open air. In one miniature painting Babur sits in his garden, enthroned beneath a canopy and surrounded by blossoming trees and flowers, to receive ambassadors. Other paintings show emperors and nobles besporting themselves with their scantily clad concubines in secluded bowers within their gardens, bright flowers in full bloom, fertile trees laden with ripe fruit ready to drop and phallic fountains shooting plumes of water skywards.

In one of the best-known portraits of Shah Jahan, he is surrounded by flowers, among them irises, tulips, daffodils, hollyhocks and campanula. To him, the design of the gardens of the Taj Mahal would have been as important as that of the buildings and would have combined with them to create a coherent, exquisite whole. A court poet wrote of the emperor’s desire to create in the Taj Mahal complex a perfection that would endure

So long as the words flower and garden remain,
So long as there are residues of cloud and rain
.

Shah Jahan and his planners designed the Taj Mahal garden as a classic walled garden to be laid out on the
char bagh
, or quadripartite, plan. Two marble water channels – one of which is the north–south channel which forms the central axis of the whole complex – cross at right angles in the middle of the garden, halfway between the tomb and the gateway, and divide it into four squares. The water channels are raised, as in most Moghul gardens, to allow them to be used for irrigating the surrounding planting. To reaffirm the bilateral symmetry, the architects designed identical red sandstone pavilions to be built into the boundary walls at the two ends of the east–west cross channel. They topped each pavilion, where musicians are said to have played, with an octagonal
chattri
. At the intersection of the channels they placed a large square white marble pool perfectly positioned to reflect the Taj in its waters. Such pools, which were a feature of Moghul gardens, apparently have their origins in the ablution tanks of mosques where the Islamic faithful undertake a ritual cleansing prior to prayer.
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The designers set the pool in a marble platform sixty-four feet square, decorated with lotus patterns. At certain times of day, five fountains within the pool shot jets of water into the air. Around the edge of the pool were a further twenty-four fountains, with another twenty-four playing on each side of the pool in the broad central channel running between the gateway and the mausoleum. The gardeners stocked the pool with lotus flowers, the symbol of fertility, and with goldfish. (Today, guides none too convincingly claim that some of the fish in the pool are direct descendants of the originals.)

The designers further subdivided the garden, quartered by the channels, into four equal squares, producing sixteen squares in all. What the Moghuls planted in the Taj gardens is not clear in detail. Today’s arrangements are much influenced by British planting just over a century ago. For example, although the Moghuls introduced to India the cypress – which originally came from Persia and Asia Minor – as a symbol of eternity, including the eternity to which the dead were destined, the avenue of cypresses now leading to the tomb from the gateway is unlikely to have been original. Cypresses did, however, probably feature among
‘the trees and rare aromatic herbs’
that the court historian Salih mentions being planted. Perhaps, as often in their gardens, the Moghuls originally alternated cypresses with fruit trees. The latter provided shade as well as symbolizing earthly life renewed each spring, in contrast to the more sober associations of the cypress. Some garden historians think that the gardens of the Taj Mahal were originally much lower than they are today, to the extent that those walking along the raised water channels would have been so high above the gardens that they would have been able to pluck the luscious fruit from the trees with ease.

When the French doctor François Bernier visited the Taj Mahal he found the gardens
‘full of flowers’
. Unfortunately he did not name them, but they probably included roses (so essential to the attar of roses invented by Mumtaz’s grandmother), as well as irises, crown imperials and other spring bulbs featured in the tomb’s inlay work. As regards other flowers, Jahangir mentions, among his favourite bushes, jasmine – another source of perfume – and the flowers of the pagoda tree. Among the fruit trees would have been the mango and the orange. The Moghuls also loved apples and pears. Although easier to cultivate in the more temperate climate of Kashmir, they grew in Agra, if carefully watered, for the dry three quarters of the year.
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As everyone who has ever visited a construction site knows, the actual planting of the Taj Mahal’s garden would have had to await the completion of the remainder of the complex and the removal of all the rubble, scaffolding and other building paraphernalia. However, the architects would have drawn up the detailed plans for the gardens at the same time as those for the rest of the complex, not only because the garden was an integral part of the overall concept but also to allow the builders to construct the garden features, such as platforms and paths, and, in particular, the system for supplying water to the Taj’s pools and fountains from the Jumna River.

The scale and sophistication of these waterworks, which were built to the west of the site and are currently being excavated and restored, again show that the Taj was an immense engineering achievement as well as an artistic one. West of the Taj, where the land slopes down to the Jumna, the builders diverted the river’s waters into a settlement tank where silt and other debris would sink to the bottom and then into a channel parallel to the western wall of the Taj and some 250 feet from it. Alongside this channel’s western edge the workers constructed a tall arched brick aqueduct. They made the top of the aqueduct wide enough to contain not only another water channel but also a system of thirteen
purs
to raise the water up to it.

Each
pur
consisted of a roller placed at the edge of the aqueduct, overlooking the water channel below. A leather bucket was attached to a rope wound around the roller and water was raised by an attendant leading a pair of oxen away from the roller down a gentle slope. (The buckets were made from the skins of oxen tied together at the four extremities – an ominous indication to the oxen of their eventual fate.) The Moghuls had continued to use the system of
purs
native to India, despite Babur’s condemnation of it as
‘laborious and filthy … it takes one person to lead the ox and another to empty the water from the bucket. Every time the ox is led out to pull up the bucket and then led back, the rope is dragged through the ox’s path which is sullied with ox urine and dung.’
Presumably attendants washed the roof down regularly.

Once the
purs
had raised the water to the aqueduct, it flowed along the channel into a storage tank and then onwards into another. Alongside the southern end of this latter tank the builders constructed a final aqueduct, some thirty feet high, at right angles to the other one and to the Taj’s western wall. When a second series of
purs
had raised the water to this level, a channel conducted it to a series of three connecting tanks built into the end of the aqueduct close to the wall of the Taj complex by the western pavilion at the terminus of the Taj’s main east–west water channel. The first tank – the one farthest from the Taj wall – was four and a half feet deep, the next six feet deep and the one nearest the wall was nine feet. These progressively deeper tanks produced the necessary head of water pressure to feed the Taj’s garden. Pipes took the water down underground into the complex, where the builders buried the main pipe in masonry beneath a paved walkway.

To make sure that the fountains went off uniformly, and not randomly, however far they were from the header tank and however inconsistent the water flow, the engineers designed an ingenious system of copper pots placed beneath the fountains. They connected the water supply to the pots, rather than direct to the fountains, so that the water first filled the pots and only when all were filled did it rise simultaneously from the fountainheads.