A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal (27 page)

Once he had decided that he wished to commemorate Mumtaz Mahal and the awesome nature of his love for her, as well as the power and prestige of his imperial reign, Shah Jahan’s first task was to choose a suitable site for the complex he envisaged. Among the factors he seems likely to have considered were a wish for the site to be peaceful and away from the bustling city of Agra. It should also be visible from a distance and near enough to the Jumna River to allow easy supply of water for irrigation of the gardens and for its water features, as well as to provide a cooler environment in summer. If the site was to be on the Jumna, it should not be at a point easily subject to flooding or erosion but should allow his architects to make use of the river, whose level was considerably higher than it is today, as a constantly changing reflective backdrop to their design. The emperor may also have wanted to allow for a future tomb for himself nearby. Finally, Shah Jahan would have wished to be able to see the mausoleum from his quarters in Agra’s Red Fort. The pleasure gardens where Mumtaz Mahal had been temporarily buried were in direct line of sight from his window in the fortress palace of Burhanpur.

The site Shah Jahan chose, about one and a half miles from the Agra fort, and situated at the end of a series of nobles’ gardens and directly opposite one of Babur’s gardens, satisfied these criteria. It was, for example, downstream from a sharp approximately right-angled bend in the river at the Agra fort that formed a watershed, thus reducing the thrust of the Jumna at the Taj site. The land in question was owned by the Raja of Amber (Jaipur), who willingly offered it to the emperor. However, significantly, Islamic tradition considers that women who, like Mumtaz Mahal, die in childbirth are martyrs and thus that their burial sites should become places of pilgrimage. Tradition also requires that there should be no perceived element of coercion, whether real or not, in the acquisition of such holy sites. Therefore Shah Jahan gave the raja not one property but four separate ones in generous compensation. He had acted quickly and had already acquired the land by January 1632, when Mumtaz’s body was returned to Agra. Thus it was here, at the site of the future Taj Mahal, that she had temporarily been laid to rest.

Shah Jahan had next to develop a concept and then a detailed plan for the tomb complex. In so doing he would naturally have called on the advice of the experienced team of architects assembled to work on his father’s and his own previous projects. The account of the building of the Taj Mahal by the court historian Lahori names Mir Abul Karim and Mukamat Khan as the superintendents of construction who, as their title implies, were the project managers responsible for the organization and carrying out of the work. Mir Abul Karim was already about sixty years old at the time Shah Jahan appointed him and had previously worked on several projects for Jahangir at Lahore. Mukamat Khan had come to India from Shiraz, in southern Persia, during Jahangir’s reign. Shah Jahan had named Mukamat Khan as his minister of works shortly after his accession and he seems to have been primarily an administrator rather than an engineer or architect. Shah Jahan continued to promote him frequently. In 1641 he would appoint him governor of Delhi, where he superintended the construction of the Red Fort in the new city of Shahjahanabad.

Lahori does not name the Taj’s architect. Neither do any of the other contemporary accounts. For the chroniclers to name the superintendent of construction for a building but not the architect was not particularly unusual, partly because architects often worked in teams and partly because they seem to have been considered of a lower status than the superintendents of construction. Just as in the West, there was nowhere that aspiring architects could study. They learned ‘on the job’, rising from the ranks of master craftsmen.
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However, because Lahori named no architect for the Taj Mahal, his identity has been the subject of much dispute. The Portuguese father Sebastien Manrique who visited Agra in 1640 later claimed that the architect was
‘a Venetian by name Geronimo Veroneo who had come to this part in a Portuguese ship and died in the city of Lahore just before I reached it’
. Europeans chauvinistically attached a great deal of credibility to this claim during succeeding centuries. Their chauvinism derived partly from a wish to claim a share in an acknowledged wonder of the world and partly from a racist sentiment that a non-European could not have designed such a beautiful building.

Manrique’s claim has little substance. European influence on Moghul architecture was very limited. If a European had been the architect, he would almost certainly have incorporated in the building at least some European architectural features. There are none.

Also, Manrique is the only person to name Veroneo as the architect although there are many other contemporary European accounts. In particular, the English clerk Peter Mundy was in Agra when construction of the Taj began. Unlike Manrique, Mundy knew Veroneo personally but he does not mention him as the architect in his description of how building commenced.

Veroneo’s body was seemingly brought to Agra from Lahore, since he is buried in the Christian cemetery at Agra. The well-preserved Latin inscription on his tombstone reads simply, ‘Here lies Geronimo Veroneo. Died at Lahore on 2 August 1640.’ Had he designed the Taj Mahal, it is likely his tombstone would have recorded it. Furthermore, as his place of burial confirms, Veroneo was a Christian and Shah Jahan would have been unlikely to employ a non-Muslim to design a holy complex to much of which only Muslims were admitted.

Most significantly, Veroneo was a jeweller by trade and not an architect. Peter Mundy mentions him as a goldsmith in the pay of Shah Jahan, and other European travellers also record him as a highly skilled jeweller. If Manrique’s story, which can only have reached him at second-hand, has any kernel of truth, it may be that Shah Jahan consulted Veroneo about the enamelled and jewelled golden screen or rail containing 40,000
tolas
of gold (about 1,000 pounds), which he originally had made to surround Mumtaz’s tomb and replaced later with a white marble screen. No paintings or detailed description of the gold rail exists, so the extent, if any, of European influence cannot be determined.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Colonel William Sleeman, who had attained celebrity by suppressing the murderous cult of thuggee in India, claimed in his popular book on the country that a Frenchman, Augustin or Austin of Bordeaux, was the architect of the Taj.
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However, the only other reference to Augustin in India occurs 150 years earlier in a book by his fellow Frenchman the jeweller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, which states unequivocally that Shah Jahan wished to employ Augustin to cover part of his private apartments in silver but that Augustin had died before he could do so. This story may possibly have given rise to Sleeman’s account. Most conclusively, in a letter now in the French National Library in Paris, Augustin of Bordeaux describes himself as ‘not a draughtsman’ and uninterested in architectural matters.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a series of manuscripts surfaced in Agra and elsewhere purporting to be copies of original seventeenth-century documents written in the court language of Persian and relating to the construction of the Taj Mahal. Many historians consider these manuscripts entirely spurious and that they were produced to satisfy the hunger of the British in general, and a British school headmaster in Agra in particular, for hard facts. These documents named a man called Ustad Isa as the architect of the Taj Mahal and gave his birthplace as variously Agra, Persia and Turkey. The doubts about the manuscripts are such that Ustad’s very existence might be questionable had a local Indian historian not found evidence that a family claiming descent from him, who were themselves draughtsmen, lived in Agra until 1947. In that year, being Muslims, they migrated to Pakistan following the partition of India. The family were also said to possess a seventeenth-century plan of the Taj Mahal, though this can no longer be located. The same historian, however, points out that the word used in the manuscripts to describe Ustad Isa’s position means draughtsman, not architect, and that therefore while Ustad may have existed he was probably, at most, responsible for putting on paper the builders’ plans based on the thoughts of others.

The most credible name for the architect of the Taj Mahal is that of Ustad Ahmad Lahori, who died in 1649. During the 1930s, a researcher discovered an early-eighteenth-century manuscript of a poem written by one of Ustad Ahmad Lahori’s sons in which he claimed that his father was the architect of both the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort at Delhi. There is other contemporary evidence, including from a court chronicle, that he was, indeed, the architect of the Red Fort but none that he was the architect of the Taj Mahal. It seems incongruous that if Ustad was the architect of both buildings, and not just the Red Fort, Shah Jahan did not have his chronicler say so. Perhaps Ustad’s son was, understandably, simply adding to his family’s prestige by claiming for his father, who probably had a part in the project, a greater share of the glory of what was immediately recognized as a masterpiece by his son as well as by the Europeans who fabricated a European architect.

The romantic may wish to believe the story contained in one of the disputed nineteenth-century manuscripts that when Shah Jahan despaired of the poor designs submitted to him, a vision of the completed tomb appeared to a Sufi mystic in a dream. The Sufi gave the design to Shah Jahan so that he could fulfil the dying Mumtaz’s wish for
‘a mausoleum which would be unique, extremely beautiful the like of which is not on earth’
.

However, others may seek the solution in what his court historian Lahori says about Shah Jahan’s personal involvement in how the buildings were designed:
‘The royal mind, which is illustrious like the sun, pays full attention to the planning and construction of these lofty and substantial buildings, which … for ages to come will serve as memorials of his abiding love of constructiveness, ornament and beauty. The majority of the buildings he designs himself and on the plans prepared by skilful architects after long consideration he makes appropriate alterations and amendments.’
As far as the generality of buildings is concerned, these statements may reflect a patron’s or sponsor’s exaggerated view of his own role in a project. However, Shah Jahan did have a fine appreciation of architecture. Even in his youth Jahangir commended his skills. In his grief, Shah Jahan is bound to have wanted a much greater input into the design of his wife’s tomb than of other buildings. He may, indeed, have made such a significant contribution to the initial concept or made so many changes to plans submitted by others, or even redrawn them, that he did not wish to single out for credit any one of the team of architects whom he consulted.

In the summer of 1632, Shah Jahan returned to Agra, where he could oversee his great project in person. As one of his official historians wrote, Burhanpur had become
‘distasteful to the royal mind of His Majesty’ as the scene of ‘the lamentable demise of Her late Majesty the Queen’
. Indeed, in later years he would avoid the city if he could. Furthermore, his Deccani campaign had not prospered. After over two years of ineffectual warring, during which he had lost many men to famine and disease as well as to the fighting, he had gained little more than a few forts and his armies were exhausted. He therefore decided to leave his campaign in the hands of others. However, a particular factor in the timing of Shah Jahan’s departure must have been the wish to be present at the
urs
– the traditional annual ceremony for the dead – which would mark the first anniversary of Mumtaz’s death.

Peter Mundy witnessed the return of the imperial court, now minus its empress:
‘All the face of the earth, so far as we could see, was covered with people, troops of horse, elephants with innumerable flags, small and great, which made a most gallant show.’
Shah Jahan was riding a dark grey horse, his son Dara Shukoh close by him. On 11 June, six days before the anniversary of his wife’s death, Shah Jahan was borne into the fort at Agra in a closed palanquin. It was midnight – the hour deemed most auspicious by his astrologers.

The
urs
was sombre but lavish.
‘The comptrollers of the royal household erected gorgeous pavilions in the gardens around her sacred grave, spread magnificent carpets and laid out a lavish array of foods, beverages, condiments, confectionery and fragrant essences – more than can be imagined. All the learned and pious Shaikhs and divines then congregated together and formed a glorious assemblage.’ Shah Jahan, in his white robes of mourning, listened to the reciting of prayers, then withdrew. The official history states that ‘His Majesty retired to his private apartments to avoid the dense crowds’
. No doubt he wished to be alone with the grief that was beginning to find a permanent expression in his great building, for which the foundations were already being dug on the banks of the Jumna.

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Most of Edward I’s crosses have disappeared, but the one at Charing Cross was reconstructed and is the point used for calculating distances from London.