Taj Mahal

The Taj Mahal was commissioned in 1631 by the fifth Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan (r. 1628–1658), in memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died on 17 June that year while giving birth to their 14th child, Gauhara Begum. The contemporary historians Muhammad Amin Qazvini, Abdul Hamid Lahori and Muhammad Saleh Kamboh wrote that the emperor showed no one else the affection he had shown her; after her death he avoided royal affairs for a week and gave up music and lavish dress for two years. For the tomb he chose land south of Agra on which a mansion of Raja Jai Singh I stood, and Jai Singh gave it to him in exchange for a large palace in the centre of the city. Lahori's Padshahnama of 1636 calls it rauza-i munawwara, "the illumined tomb"; the name Taj Mahal, "Crown of the Palace", is of Urdu origin, though one derivation takes "taj" from the second syllable of "Mumtaz".

The building draws on the design traditions of Indo-Islamic and Mughal architecture. It took its inspiration from Timurid and Mughal buildings such as the Gur-e Amir in Samarkand, the tomb of Timur, progenitor of the Mughal dynasty, and Humayun's Tomb in Delhi, which inspired its charbagh garden and its hasht-behesht plan. The charbagh, a design inspired by Persian gardens, had been introduced to India by Babur, the first Mughal emperor.

The complex covers 17 hectares on a platform 300 metres long beside the Yamuna. At its centre is the mausoleum, of white marble on a square plinth 6 metres high and 95.5 metres a side: a multi-chambered cube with chamfered corners, each face opened by an iwan framed by a pishtaq 33 metres high. An onion-shaped marble dome 23 metres high rises on a drum and is topped by a gilded finial; four smaller domed chattris stand at its corners, and four minarets over 40 metres tall, at the corners of the plinth, lean slightly outward so that in a collapse they would fall away from the tomb. In line with the Islamic prohibition of anthropomorphic forms, the decoration is calligraphy, abstract forms and plant motifs: carved marble dados, pietra dura inlays of vines, flowers and fruit, and passages of the Qur'an in thuluth script, set larger higher up so that they read evenly from below.

The octagonal main chamber holds the false cenotaphs of Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan within a pierced marble screen, with the real tombs in the chamber below; hers lies at the exact centre and his beside it to the west, breaking the symmetry, marked by a pen box as a man's tomb. The garden is divided by walkways into four quarters and 16 flowerbeds, with a raised marble water tank between tomb and gateway; unusually, the tomb stands at its end rather than its centre. At the far end of the complex stand two red sandstone buildings, a mosque and a matching jawab built for symmetry.

Construction began in 1632. An area of roughly 1.2 hectares was excavated, filled with earth to reduce seepage and levelled, and piles filled with lime and stone were sunk for the tomb's footings. The complex was built mainly of brick and lime mortar, the main tomb faced with white marble from Makrana in Rajasthan and the other buildings lined with red sandstone from Fatehpur Sikri. Twenty-eight kinds of precious and semi-precious stone were inlaid into the marble, among them jade and crystal from China, turquoise from Tibet, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, sapphire from Sri Lanka and carnelian from Arabia. Workmen built a colossal brick scaffold that mirrored the tomb, a 15 km earthen ramp brought marble and materials to the site in wagons drawn by oxen and elephants, and a post-and-beam pulley system raised the blocks into place.

More than 20,000 artisans, labourers, painters and others are believed to have taken part, among them sculptors from Bukhara, calligraphers from Syria and Persia, designers from southern India, stone cutters from Baluchistan and Italian artisans. They worked under a board of architects led by Ustad Ahmad Lahori, with the chief calligrapher Amanat Khan Shirazi, who signed the inscription at the base of the inner dome. Shah Jahan held the first ceremony at the unfinished mausoleum on 6 February 1643. The mausoleum was completed in 1648, and the whole complex is believed to have been finished in 1653, at a cost then estimated at around ₹32 million.

The tomb was soon tested. In December 1652 Shah Jahan's son Aurangzeb wrote to his father that the tomb, the mosque and the assembly hall had developed extensive leaks in the previous rainy season. In 1658 Aurangzeb deposed Shah Jahan and put him under house arrest in the nearby Agra Fort, from where he could see the Taj Mahal; on his death in 1666 Aurangzeb buried him beside his wife. The fanciful writings of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, a European traveller and gem merchant who visited Agra in 1665, gave rise to the long-lived myth of a Black Taj Mahal that Shah Jahan meant to build across the river; excavations in the 1990s showed that the blackened stones offered as its ruins were discoloured white ones.

Personal and emotional responses to the building have consistently eclipsed scholarly appraisals. It became a renowned symbol of love and also of Shah Jahan's wealth and power. The art historian Ebba Koch reads the whole compound as a symbol of earthly life and the afterlife: the white mausoleum and its garden on one side, the red sandstone side meant for worldly markets on the other, each a mirror of the other, with the great gate as the passage between them. Other stories have no support: tales of Shah Jahan mutilating his builders, of Lord William Bentinck planning to auction its marble, and the theories, promoted by Henry George Keene in 1879 and by William Henry Sleeman, that an Italian or a Frenchman designed it.

In the 18th century the Jat rulers of Bharatpur, invading Agra, attacked the Taj Mahal and took away two chandeliers, one of agate and one of silver, that had hung over the main cenotaph; according to the Mughal historian Kanbo, the gold shield covering the finial of the main dome was also removed. The gold finial was replaced by a copy in gilded bronze in the early 19th century, and as the Mughal Empire declined the gardens went unmaintained. By the late 19th century parts of the buildings had fallen into disrepair, and the viceroy Lord Curzon ordered a restoration, completed in 1908, which also replaced the gardens with the European-style lawns still there today.

In 1942 scaffolding was put up to disguise the building against expected Japanese air attacks, and again in the India-Pakistan wars of 1965 and 1971. Since independence in 1947 the Archaeological Survey of India has maintained it, and in 1983 it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Since the late 20th century pollution and acid rain have turned it yellow-brown; after directives of the Supreme Court in M. C. Mehta v. Union of India in 1997, the government set up the Taj Trapezium Zone, 10,400 square kilometres with strict emission standards. A falling water table in the Yamuna basin has raised concern for the structure, with cracks in 2010 and the minarets showing signs of tilting, and in the 2020s mud packs have been used to restore the white colour.

The Taj Mahal is regarded as one of the best examples of Mughal architecture and a symbol of Indian history, and through the global attention it has received it has become a symbol of India itself. UNESCO inscribed it as "the jewel of Muslim art in India and one of the universally admired masterpieces of the world's heritage", and in 2007 it was declared a winner of the New 7 Wonders of the World initiative. Its garden resembles the Shalimar Gardens closely enough to suggest the same architect, Ali Mardan, and the discovery of the Mahtab Bagh, the "Moonlight Garden" across the Yamuna, led the Archaeological Survey of India to suggest that the river itself was meant as one of the rivers of Paradise.

It draws about five million visitors a year and is the highest-earning monument of the Archaeological Survey of India; polluting vehicles are kept away, and visitors walk or ride electric buses from the parking areas. The town of Taj Ganji, or Mumtazabad, to the south grew from caravanserais and markets built for visitors and workers. Its origins have been disputed in modern politics too: P. N. Oak's 1989 book claimed that it had been a Hindu temple, but India's Supreme Court dismissed his petition in 2000, the Allahabad High Court dismissed a similar one in 2005, and in 2017 the Archaeological Survey of India declared that there was no evidence it had ever housed a temple.