Taj Mahal

Stand at the main gateway and look up at the band of Arabic calligraphy framing the arch. The letters seem perfectly even from top to bottom. They are not. The script gets larger the higher it climbs, scaled so that a person standing on the ground perceives it as uniform. The man who worked out that correction was a calligrapher called Amanat Khan, and he was the only person permitted to sign the building. His name is still there, inlaid in black stone, on a monument otherwise built to honour one woman and erase everybody else.

A Death In Burhanpur

Mumtaz Mahal died in 1631, in the city of Burhanpur, giving birth to her fourteenth child. She had been married to the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan for nineteen years and had travelled with him on campaign, which is why she died far from the capital. Court chroniclers wrote that the emperor withdrew from public life for months and that his beard turned white. Her body was buried temporarily at Burhanpur, then moved to Agra, where construction began in 1632 on a plot beside the Yamuna river.

The mausoleum itself was largely finished around 1643; the full complex, with its gardens, mosque, guesthouse and walls, took until the early 1650s. Something like twenty thousand workers were involved. The white marble came from the Makrana quarries in Rajasthan. The jade, lapis, carnelian and other stones inlaid into the floral patterns came from across the empire and beyond it. Ustad Ahmad Lahauri is usually named as chief architect, though Mughal building was a collective business and no single hand signed the plans.

The Parts You Are Not Shown

The two ornate cenotaphs in the central chamber are empty. The real graves of Mumtaz and Shah Jahan lie in a plain crypt directly beneath, closed to visitors. The upstairs is the performance; the downstairs is the fact.

Shah Jahan's cenotaph is also the single asymmetric thing in the whole complex. Everything else is mirrored across a central axis, and Mumtaz lies exactly on that axis. His marker was squeezed in beside hers after his death. The long-standing story that he planned a matching black marble tomb for himself across the river comes from a seventeenth-century French traveller's account; excavations on the far bank have not turned up a second foundation.

Then there is the matter of the minarets. All four tilt very slightly outward. The usual explanation is structural insurance: if one came down in an earthquake, it would fall away from the dome rather than onto it.

The View From A Cell

In 1658 Shah Jahan's son Aurangzeb deposed him and confined him in Agra Fort, a few kilometres upriver. From his rooms the old emperor could see the white dome across the bend of the Yamuna. He spent the last eight years of his life looking at it, and when he died in 1666 he was carried across the water and laid beside his wife.

What The Next Centuries Did

As Mughal power dissolved in the eighteenth century, the tomb was left to fend for itself. In the 1760s the Jats of Bharatpur raided Agra; silver fittings and other valuables were reported stripped from the doors. Under British rule the gardens hosted picnics and dances, and soldiers were said to chip out pieces of inlay as souvenirs. The often-repeated claim that Governor-General Bentinck intended to dismantle the marble and sell it is not supported by any documented order.

In the early 1900s Viceroy Lord Curzon ordered a broad restoration and hung a bronze lamp, made in Cairo, in the main chamber; it still hangs there. But his gardeners also replaced the dense fruit trees of the original Mughal garden with open English-style lawns, which is the layout you walk through today.

During the Second World War, and again in the 1971 war with Pakistan, the dome was wrapped in scaffolding and cloth to hide it from aircraft. A tomb had to be camouflaged.

Now

The Taj Mahal is managed by the Archaeological Survey of India and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1983. It receives millions of visitors a year, enough that entry to the main chamber is now time-limited.

The real enemy is the air. Traffic, industry and the polluted Yamuna have been turning the marble yellow. India's Supreme Court has restricted factories in the surrounding region since the 1990s, designating a protected "Taj Trapezium Zone," and conservators periodically coat the surfaces with a clay pack of fuller's earth, the same mud traditionally used as a face mask, to draw out the grime. Falling water levels in the river raise a quieter worry: the wooden foundations beneath the platform depend on moisture from the Yamuna to stay sound.

An emperor built it for one person and then watched it from prison. It has belonged, since, to raiders, colonial administrators and a republic. Whoever holds it, the letters over the gate still look even from where you stand.