The Taj Mahal - Agra

The Pearl in the Mugal Crown

The Taj Mahal has some indefinable quality, something you cannot put your finger on. Whole forests have been pulped and gallons of ink spilt to produce the hundreds of books, articles, and letters singing its praises, yet the place remains an enigma, beautiful and instruct able. This Mughal Tomb is one of the great visual clichés of our time; it is the supreme symbol of India. We have all seen countless photographs of it: Postcards, book jackets, travel posters, holiday snaps. Yet despite this familiarity, the Taj always surprises those who visit it for first time. For some it is more breathtakingly beautiful than they ever imagined. Others are initially disappointed. But, as with most sites in India, the place grows on you, slowly but surely. Even for those who are initially skeptical, a second, third, or even fourth visit confirms its charm – and they are captivated forever. What is this elusive quality that makes the Taj the most magical building in the world?

To begin with the facts: the Taj Mahal was built by the fifth Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (1627-1658) as the tomb for his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, “the jewel of the palace.”

She died while giving birth to their fourteenth child, and the emperor never really recovered from his loss. It is said that he observed mourning for two years, eating only the plainest of food and living a life of complete simplicity. Whereas previously he had been a man of action who loved the challenges of running the empire, he now became progressively reclusive and devoted his attention to what, apart from Mumtaz, had always been his passion: architectural. He resolved to build his wife the most magnificent memorial on earth. Saddened also by the treacherous revolts and rivalries of his sons, one of whom was the eminently unlikable Aurangzeb, Shah Jahan enshrined his memories of happier times in a marble-faced tomb he had built across the River Yamuna from his own residence in Agra Fort. This Palace was known as “the crown of locality” (taj-I-mahal). In later life, the emperor would sit at his windows in the fort gazing out at the mausoleum of his beloved wife. He intended to build his own tomb in black marble on the opposite bank of the Taj and link the two by bridge that would symbolize a love that transcended the flow of time itself. This dream never materialized; but even on its own the tomb of Mumtaz Mahal stands as the masterpiece of Mughal art.

The Taj was begun in January 1632 and finished In February 1643, its completion coinciding with the twelfth anniversary of Mumtaz’s death. Its cost in those days was well over five million rupees and, by today’s standards, incalculable. No one knows who drew up the plans. Architectures, designers, and craftsmen were summoned from all over the known world. Among the team assembled were Shah Jahan chief architect, Ustad Ahmad Lahwari, a Persian architect, designers, Muhammed Afandi. There were also European master craftsmen involved: A French goldsmith, Austin of Bordeaux, and a jeweler from Venice called veroneo. Wooden models were submitted to the emperor, who no doubt contributed himself to the project; at the least, he deserves credit for selecting the final plan.

An English Traveler, peter Mundy, witnessed the start of the mighty project in 1632 and tell us: “ The building is begun and goes on with excessive labour and cost, prosecuted with extraordinary diligence; old and Silver are esteemed common metal, and Marble but as ordinary stone.” Indeed, the mausoleum was constructed by a veritable army of labour. Twenty thousand artisans worked on it, including five hundreds carpenters and three hundred blacksmiths. Elephants, bullocks, camels and mules were used to ferry materials and work the constructions pulleys. The marble came from Makarana in rajasthan. For this journey alone, over a thousand elephants were used, each one able to carry a block of up two and a half (two and a quarter metric tons).

The precious stones for the inlay also came from far and wide: carnelian from Baghdad, turquoise from Tibet and Persia, malachite from Russia, diamonds and onyx from central India. It is as if all the skill, expertise, and resources accumulated by the eclectic, adventurous Mughal dynasty came together at one point in time and space to create what has become the most enduring romantic symbol of human love.

The Entrance Gate

You approach the Taj through a wooded park that was originally an extension of the groups of the tomb. Already the while top of the dome peeps tantalizingly over its red sand-stone surroundings. A small entrance gate, flamked by the Tomb of the Royal Serving Ladies (on the left) and the stonecutters’ Mosque (on the right), leads to a long arcade. This was the main bazaar of Mumtazabad, the city that sprang up around the constructions of the shrine. The arcade still houses shops, selling everything from marble replicas of the Taj to hair oil and, of course, those ubiquitous Kashmiri handricrafts. This avenue opens out into a large, shaded court now used as a meeting point and car park. You are in the front courtyard of the Taj compound – the sacred space walled off from the hustle and bustle of the marketplace and originally free from the hawkers who now throng it. It is here that you get your first glimpse of the massive entrance gate, an integral feature of the tomb too often ignored. It is worth spending a couple of minutes appreciating this gate.

In sacred architecture the entrance is that delicate yet absolute demarcation line between the sacred and the profane. Here, it is intentionally massive and awesome, as it had a practical as well as symbolic function: It protected the enormous wealth of gold and jewels originally with in the actual building inside.

This monolithic sentinel stands one hundred feet (thirty meters) high and is in effect an enormous triumphal archway, attesting to the glory of its royal builder as well as the glory of God. The domed pavilions (chhatris), Hindu in style, that sit on top of the gate enhance the military effect; they resemble the tents and banners of some vast encamped army, at rest but vigilant.

To the Muslim such a gateway has a specific spiritual purpose. It symbolizes the transaction from the realm of the senses to the realm of the spirit and is thus the entrance to paradise, the door to the womb of spiritual rebirth. This purpose is made explicit by the verses from eighty-ninth chapter of the Quran, which frame the central portals. In as assured and graceful Arabic script they remind you that the tomb garden is a replica of paradise. They end: “O soul that art at rest, return to the Lord, at peace with Him and He at peace with you. So enter as one of His servants; and enter into His garden.” Notice how the lettering appears to be the same size from top to bottom. In fact, this is a skillful trick of Shah Jahan’s engravers. The letters are gradually lengthened as their distance from the eye increases so as to preserve the illusion of consistency.

The massive brass door is recent, a substitute for the original, which was solid silver and decorated with eleven hundred silver nails, whose heads were contemporary silver coins. They, along with other treasures, were removed from the mausoleum by the Jhats, a local Hindu tribe who plundered much of the Mughal Empire after its collapse.

The transaction from the profane to the sacred is carefully and deliberately orchestrated and can only be appreciated by walking very slowly. As you mount the steps into the entrance hall, you get your first glimpse of the tomb (A.2), which is revealed gradually through the darkened frame of the doorway of the entrance hall. The arch of this frame is echoed on the tomb ahead: first by the shape of the large arched alcove of the main face (iwan), then by the smaller, latticed arch that actually surrounds the dark doorway itself. Step by step your view expands to include the other faces of the building, and by the time you are standing on the threshold of the hall, the whole dome is in sight, its elegant finial just falling within your line of vision. As you walk through the entrance chamber, the vista expands to include not only the tomb but the backdrop of limitless sky behind. It is as if you had gone very deep into the heart of some tiny jewel and there discovered infinity. Many people’s first reaction is: “Oh but how small it looks!” for we have all been brought up on photographs of a building taken out of its context. In fact, this apparent lack of size is another optical illusion. The dome is actually over 230 feet (70 meters) from the ground and is made to look small by the skillful use of proportion, as you can see if you compare the size of the people on the marble platform halfway down the garden against the building itself. They are dwarfed by it.

A couple of points about the entrance gate before you descend into the gardens: Do try and get up to the balcony on the first (U.S. second) floor because only from here can you see and photographs the Taj in true relation of its auxiliary buildings. These are an integral part of the overall design. Sometimes the balcony is open to the public, sometimes the officials need a little gentle persuasion to let you up, but the view from there is magnificent. The gate also provides the best vantage point for viewing the Taj by moonlight. In addition there is an interesting collection of old photos of the Taj in the last century, displayed in the office in the southwest corner of the entrance hall. Few people seem to know about this; a polite and friendly approach to the supervising officer will get you in.

If you move to the left of the gateway, you will be in the best spot of analyze the composition of the Taj and begin to discover its secret. Beauty resides in proportion; if you examine the two interlocking parts of the complex – building and garden – you see that the whole achieves its effect by being a finely balanced synthesis of a number of deliberate contarcts.

Viewing the Outside of the Building

The Principal contrast is between the bulbous, full-blown dome, and the flat planes of the building on which it rests. If you look at the plan of Taj, you see its basically a square with its corner cut off to form an irregular octagon. The octagon breaks down into four smaller octagons, all the same size and linked around a central, fifth one. This mandala is unified by the Dome- a circle whose center is the center of the middle octagon and whose circumferences link the centers of the other four. The truncated outside corners of the building have the effect of leading the eyes around its edges and inviting us to explore what lies beyond, thus giving a dynamic tension to what would otherwise have been too flat, too like a house of playing cards.

The central dome rises high over the main iwan; in fact it appears to be a continuation of it, so gracefully do the lines move upward. Actually, the dome is set on a high drum some way behind the iwan, thus avoiding any sense of crowding as there had been in the earlier domes of Tran and India. This main dome is echoed by four balancing cupolas, which, being slightly flatter in outline, serve to contain its swell by exerting a stabilizing pull downward. This restraining tension is extended out to the corner towers, each of which is topped by a similarly flattish cupola.

The convex swell of the dome is also balanced by the concave recessed niches that cover the facade. Whereas the dome draws light to it, and radiates it our like some giant lustrous pearl, the iwan niches provide deep and cool caverns of shadow. Nor is this shadow at all heavy; the faceted surfaces of the inside of the niches break it up into its own variety. This device is most effective when it is most necessary: in the glaring light of the middle of the day. It saves the tomb from becoming too massive; preventing its monumental strength from degenerating into mere heaviness, and it saves the façade from being too one-dimensional. The resemblance of this dome to a huge pearl in not accidental. There is a well-loved saying of the prophet that describes paradise as containing the throne of God, surmounted by a gigantic dome made of white pearl, supported by four corner pillar. On each pillar is written a letter (R, H, M, N). Together these spell the word ar-Rahman (“the All-Merciful”), one of the ninety-nine names of Allah. From each of the four letters there flows a river of grace.

Moreover, in Islamic symbolism the pearl represents the eternal nature from which manifest creation arises at the will if Allah. Thus, the pearl is the prototype of all that is female and peculiarly suited to represent the emperor’s beloved Mumtaz. The cosmological purpose of the domed building (hujra) is to unite heaven and earth. The squared, grounded shape of the building represents the material universe, whereas the circular dome is the vault of heaven. The transaction between the two is effected by the octagon. This symbolism is repeated in the shape of the finial, which has three spheres, representing the worlds of animals, men, and angles, and which, crowned by the crescent moon of Islam, points to Infinity.

The Side Mosque and the Answer

On the left of the mausoleum is the tomb mosque in red sandstone. It is common in Islam to build a mosque next to a tomb: It sanctifies the place and provides somewhere for the family and mourners to offer up prayers (smaller tombs have a mihrab set into the qibla wall). The tomb replica opposite, on the east of the platform, is known as “the Answer.” It cannot be used for prayer, since it faces away from Mecca; it was added purely to preserve the symmetry of the complex.

The Minarets

The Taj is surrounded by its four corner towers, standing like silent sentinels guarding the tomb within and lending it balance, space, and elevation. Look at them closely: Yes, they are slanting! Each was constructed off plump – intentionally, unlike Pisa – the one on the southwest corner by eight inches (twenty centimeters), the others by two inches (five centimeters). This was so that if there was ever an earthquake, they would fall away from the tomb itself, not onto it.

The Garden

In all Islamic art, the garden symbolizes paradise, or the primordial unity of being we enjoyed before the fall. The message inscribed over the entrance portal to the Taj is an echo of an earlier saying at the gate to Akbar’s tomb in Sikandra: “These are the gardens of Eden: Enter them to dwell therein eternally.” In fact, the words for “garden” and “Paradise” are the same in the Persian language as they are in Hebrew.

It is easy to see how important an image the garden was for a desert people. Its shaded, watered greenness provided a restful and sustaining oasis in the midst of an inhospitable environment. The Mughals, originally from the plains of central Asia, shared their nomadic ancestors’ love of gardens. In fact, their main complaint against India was its lack of verdant and well-watered places. The founder of the dynasty, Babur (“The Tiger”) designed his own gardens in Kabul and actually helped in laying them out. He passed on to his descendants his love for Kashmir, with its forests, lakes, and waterfalls, and also for the fertile valleys of Afghanistan, laden with fruit-bearing trees.

The guiding principle of the Islamic garden is one of a contrived and tranquil symmetry. It is a man-made replica of the perfection of Allah. The rectangular plan of the Taj complex measures 1,900 by 1,000 feet (580 by 300 meters) in a north-south axis. Of this, the garden occupies a central square, whose sides are one thousand feet (three hundred meter) long. The remaining rectangles comprise the tomb, with its balancing buildings in the north, and the entrance area, including what is now the carpark, in the south. This central garden is essentially Persian and follows the traditional chahar bagh design: based on the number four, which signifies completeness and is sacred in Islam. The garden is divided is first into four square by the intersection of two marble watercourse. These meet at a square tank in the middle of the lawns, on each side of which are identical benches and stairways.

Water is cooling, purifying, and symbolic of initiation, and the Taj, like a Hindu Temple, is situated on the banks of a river. Because it lies between these two stretches of water, the cenotaph is reflected on the both sides. This reflection has a dogmatic, as well as an esthetic, purpose. The Muslim Paradise is the opposite, or mirror image, of this world. Thus muslim art makes great use of the principle of reversibility. The Quran is thought to be the mirror image of a tablet in heaven; the Tree of life grows upside down in the paradisiacal garden. This is the esoteric meaning behind both the use of reflection in water here and the inverted Hindu lotus motif that crowns the dome.

The four lawns are in turn subdivided into four, to produce a total of sixteen flowerbeds. Each bed was originally planted with four hundred flowers. The canals were lined with trees: cypress-symbolizing death, fruit trees symbolizing life. In its heyday, the garden must have been breathtaking. The waters were filled with fish and the gardens with nightingales, peacocks, and rare birds of beautiful plumage. The lawns were patrolled by guards in white robes, whose duty was to scare off birds of prey. Their weapons were peashooters! Quite the antithesis of the dreary funerary gardens of Christianity, these Islamic grounds were visited by the nobility for picnics and celebration, and Shah Jahan held darbars here. This is why there are stables and outhouse around the southern walls.

With the decline of the Mughal dynasty, the garden also waned, becoming overgrown and weed-ridden. By the nineteenth century the Taj and its surroundings were a favorite spot for courting couples, and open-air balls were held under the brilliant white dome. It was also a haunt of British soldiers, who held drinking parties here. Indeed, the Taj was the setting for what must have been the most damning story of the Raj in India. The villain of the piece was Lord William Bentinck, who was governor-general of all India from 1828 to 1835. Bentinck in chiefly remembered for his abolition of sati, his campaign against the robber gangs called the Thugs (who worshiped Kali and ritually strangled their victims with a yellow scarf weighted with a silver coin), and his educational policy of replacing Persian with English as the official language of India. Bentinck decided that the Taj could be a good source of a little rapid money. Shah Jahan’s mausoleum was to be demolished, shipped back piece by piece to England, and auctioned off to the wealthy, who, in the Victorian manner, could sprinkle their gardens with these quaint imperial souvenirs. Believe it or not, the scheme actually reached the stage when there were cranes erected in the Taj Gardens, poised to being demolition. The only reason that this never happened was that a pilot auction held in England, with marble shipped back from the Agra fort a few miles downriver, failed to arouse the anticipated interest and cash. The reason we can stand and marvel at the Taj today is solely that Bentinck’s scheme was not, in our ugly modern phrase, “financially viable.”

Fortunately for the British record, the balance of Bentinck was redressed by the work of Lord Curzon, a man who loved the country and did much to awaken India to its own cultural heritage. He renovated much of the damage done by the Jhats, reset the marble platform around the Taj, and cleaned up the gardens, restoring them to something of their former glory.

The Tomb

Now proceed to the tomb itself. As you will notice, most tourist troops dutifully down the central aisle, look at the monument and return. While this is one way to approach the building, do not forget that there are side paths and that the compound is meant to be explored from every angle. Not only are these sides aisles quiet, even when the place is crawling with visitors, they also offer the best and most shady vantage points for unusual shots of the tombs, framing it with deep green foliage or setting it against a host of brilliant scarlet and yellow canna lilies. The sides’ gardens are themselves worth a look, providing a dappled contrast to the play of light on the bright marble. Approached obliquely, the Taj reveals its facets one by one, decorously.

As you approach you can also observe how the overall unity of the building comes partly from the simple uniformity of its basic decorative comes partly from the simple uniformity of its basic decorative motif. This is the keel arch set within a rectangle – the archetypal shape of Islam. This shape is repeated on different scales throughout the complex; in both the entrance gateway and the main iwan, the smaller recessed niches and the trellised doors and windows they contain, the podium on which the building stand, the ornamentation on the drum of the dome, the eight-cusped arches of the roof cupolas, and the turrets that surmount the four towers. Everywhere one looks, this refrain is repeated in different keys, each reinforcing and echoing the others. The upward thrust of these arches adds a sense of elevation to the central dome, which seems to have burst out of its rectangular frame and to be soaring heavenward.

Whichever angle you approach from, the initial illusion of the smallness of the building gives way to another one. With each step we take, the dome appears to grow larger, swelling ripely as if being gradually inflated. Once you arrive under the looming dome and look up, the backdrop is just the blue expanse of sky, unending and unrestricted. Against this the marble bud seems to be floating in space, like the birds that wheel around it. It is monumental, yet somehow insubstantial, massive yet simultaneously filled with an airy lightness.

The Doorways

This synthesis is partly achieved by the balance of plain surfaces and intricate ornamentation. The entire text of Chapter 36 of Quran is inscribed over the four main doorways of the mausoleum, beginning with the front door and moving around clockwise to finish at the eastern one. This text, which reads from right to left, is recited to the Muslim on his deathbed and ends with the words: “Therefore, glory be to Him in whose hands is the glory of all things, and to Him you shall be brought back.” The same trick of lengthening the Arabic letters is employed here as on the front gate.

The inner niches around the doors are also inscribed with quranic texts. It is sometimes forgotten that calligraphy is the most important of the arts in Islam. The Quran was dictated to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel, and therefore the spoken and written word is the nearest we can come to expressing the inexpressible Allah. There are seven major types of Islamic calligraphy, from the original geometric and simple Kufi script to the script of the intrigue-ridden court of the Ottoman Turks, which was so ornate that it became a cipher for sending coded messages. The script used on the Taj is naskh. The outside is also decorated with lovely floral arabesque motifs. The calligraphic inscriptions here give us a further indication that the Taj was constructed as a replica of paradise. It is unique among Islamic funerary monuments in the number and length of the Quranic passages it bears – twenty-five altogether, totaling no less than 241 verses. This is especially remarkable when contrasted with the other buildings of Shah Jahan, which, although mosques contain but a few quranic passages amid the Persian inscription, most of which are concerned primarily with praising the building or its builders.

The Taj has often been called a sentimental building, but surely this is only true of the legends that surround it. Architecturally, the cenotaph has purity, which is almost classical. This sense is intellectual restraint extends to the decoration. For all its famed embellishment, there is something unshakably austere about Mumtaz shrine.

The Central Chamber

Inside the darkened central chamber lie the cenotaphs (Zarihs) of the emperor and his beloved queen. The actual bodies are buried in a crypt (maqbara) below; it was the custom to have both a public tomb and a private one (qabr) reserved for the members of the family. They were originally surrounded by a screen of silver, encrusted with precious stones, but this was removed by Aurangzeb in 1672, as he feared it might be stolen. The latticed marble substitute, again octagonal, is a beautiful piece of work, however: finely carved and with some exquisite inlay work. Mumtaz rests directly beneath the center of the dome, her gravestone marked by the female slate; Shah Jahan’s is to her left, marked by the male pen-box. It was squashed in as something of an afterthought, by Aurangzeb, who was too mean to make the dream of the Black Taj a reality.

Perhaps the imbalance here at the heart of the Taj reflects a fatal flaw in the dynasty itself – like some worm in the Mughal bud. It is a fitting, and ironical comment on a family that was such an extraordinary mixture of barbaric cruelty and esthetic refinement. The beauty of the inlay work on these tombs is legendary: thirty-five types of precious stones are used, and one flower, only an inch (a couple of centimeters) square, can contain up to sixty pieces of stone. Take your flashlight and examine the work; it is breathtaking. By holding the flashlight flat against the marble you can see the translucence of the stones.

Above the tombs hangs a lamp that never goes out. The original was stolen by the Jhats; this replacement was added by Lord Curzon, who had it made in Egypt.

Around the octagonal chambers are the four other octagonal rooms, originally meant to house the graves of other members of Shah Jahan’s family. But again, Aurangzeb failed to honor his father’s wishes.

The acoustics, especially in the central chamber, are marvelous. The domed ceiling was designed to act as an echo chamber for the chanting of the Quran and the melodies of the court musicians. The slightest noise is picked up and reverberated around the vault, trailing off after many seconds into silence. If you want an idea of how the dome was designed to be used, listen to the records of the Canadian flautist Paul Horn, recorded inside the chamber.

And here is the final illusion presented by the Taj. The domed ceiling you are looking at is not the actual dome. The building was constructed with a double dome, which is how it rises to such a height and yet remains stable. This device of a double dome was central Asian in origin. With the Taj, Shah Jahan’s architects brought to fruition an experiment first tried in Humayun’s tomb in Delhi, some ninety years earlier.

The Facade

After the cenotaph, walk around the building a couple of times, to get an idea of the surface inlay. Because the faces of the building are flat, the angularity forces you to readjust your prospective continually, and to look at the building afresh at each moment. A circular structure, like a stupa for example, has a greater monotony, which suits its spiritual purpose of creating a certain state of mind. But the effect of the Taj is created by the contrast of planes, the play between the different facets of its surface, and the three distinct levels of the garden, the parapet, and the building itself.

The Minarets

From here outside the tomb we can get close-up view of the four minarets. Aldous Huxley, who was not over impressed by the Taj, called these towers “the ugliest structures ever erected by human hands.” There is indeed something ungainly about them – out of keeping with the whole. In comparison with the almost contemporary stone needles that grace the mosques of Ottoman Turkey and pierce the skyline of Istanbul, these towers are hardly minarets at all. Nevertheless, despite their rather lavatorial tiling with its heavy black pointing, they reinforce the purpose of the mausoleum to remind us of the power of death and the littleness of human destiny in comparison.

Everyone has a favorite time of day to see the Taj. Just make sure you avoid the middle of the day, for a paraphrase Noel Coward: “Mad dog and tourists go out in the midday sun.” Between ten and three, not only is the heat oppressive for much of the year, but the full light of day does not show off the Taj at its best. It sits like some enormous beached whale, patiently enduring the tourists who scurry like ants all over it. But in the early morning or evening-which are the traditional times of worship in India – its dignity returns. In the softer light the marble can glow pink, bluish, or a delicate lilac. Just after sunrise the place is especially lovely. The early sun picks out scintillating clusters of tiny lights in the marble, and the sandstone has a honeyed mellowness it does not regain till the golden light of the early evening strikes it. The place is quite still, only the birds are on the move: Flocks of brilliant parakeets flash against the white marble, and the first of the somber black kites start their wheeling homage. If you go to the black of the terrace and look down over the river, you will see a small white Hindu temple to your right. Here are people doing their ritual washing and praying as they have done for countless years. The river is still and flat, dung cakes spread out to dry on the bank. This is the time to sit quietly, watching the play of light and shade all around you, and wait for the day to begin. There is nothing quite like it. Except perhaps the Taj by moonlight…

By:
Alistair Shearer Author
NORTHERN INDIA GUIDE BOOK