Taj Mahal

Background and Commission

The Taj Mahal was commissioned by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (r. 1628-1658) as a mausoleum for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, born Arjumand Banu Begum, who died in 1631 in Burhanpur, in the Deccan, while giving birth to the couple's fourteenth child. Mumtaz Mahal's body was initially interred temporarily before being moved to Agra, where construction of a permanent tomb began around 1632. Shah Jahan conceived the building explicitly as an architectural rendering of Jannat, the Quranic paradise: its layout, inscriptions, and garden design draw directly on Islamic paradise imagery, with the entire complex meant to evoke a garden of eternal reward.

The commission came at the height of Shah Jahan's reign and of Mughal architectural patronage generally. The same emperor was responsible for the Red Fort and Jama Masjid in Delhi, the Shalimar Bagh gardens in Lahore, and extensive additions to Agra Fort, and the Taj Mahal is generally regarded as the culmination of a distinctly Shahjahani style of Mughal architecture that favored white marble over the red sandstone preferred by his predecessors Akbar and Jahangir, along with a heavier use of pietra dura inlay and refined floral ornament.

Architecture and Layout

The complex covers roughly 42 acres on the south bank of the Yamuna and follows a Charbagh, or four-part Persian garden plan, in which raised walkways and water channels divide the grounds into quadrants symbolizing the four rivers of paradise described in Islamic cosmology, a garden form the Mughals had already used at earlier tombs, including that of Akbar at Sikandra and Humayun's tomb in Delhi, the Taj Mahal's most direct architectural predecessor. Visitors enter through a monumental red sandstone gateway, the Darwaza-i Rauza, inscribed with Quranic calligraphy, before the gardens open onto a long reflecting pool aligned with the mausoleum itself.

The mausoleum stands on a raised marble plinth at the northern end of the garden, built entirely of white Makrana marble quarried in Rajasthan, prized for a translucence that shifts in tone through the day, pale pink at dawn, white at midday, silvery-blue by moonlight. Its central dome, a double-shelled 'onion' dome roughly 73 meters (240 feet) high, is flanked by four smaller domed pavilions and four minarets, each about 40 meters tall, built with a slight outward tilt, generally understood as a precaution so that in the event of structural failure or earthquake the minarets would fall away from, rather than onto, the central tomb. The building's exterior is covered with pietra dura inlay, semi-precious stones such as jasper, jade, and lapis lazuli set into the marble in floral and arabesque patterns, and with Quranic calligraphy in black marble, executed by the calligrapher Amanat Khan, whose lettering was deliberately scaled larger toward the top of each panel so that, viewed from ground level, the script reads as visually uniform.

Inside, an octagonal chamber holds cenotaphs for Mumtaz Mahal and, off-center, Shah Jahan, added after his death and the only asymmetrical element in an otherwise rigorously symmetrical design, surrounded by a carved marble lattice screen (jali). The actual graves lie in a plain crypt directly beneath, in keeping with Islamic funerary practice, which favors unadorned burial. Flanking the mausoleum are two identical red sandstone buildings: a mosque on the western side, oriented toward Mecca, and a near-identical structure on the east, the Mehmaan Khana or guest house, built chiefly to preserve the complex's symmetry rather than for any independent liturgical function.

Materials and Craftsmanship

Beyond the white Makrana marble that forms its structural body, the Taj Mahal's decoration drew on a supply network stretching across Asia: contemporary accounts and later scholarship describe jasper brought from Punjab, jade and crystal from China, turquoise from Tibet, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, carnelian from Arabia, and sapphire from Sri Lanka, worked by inlay artisans into the pietra dura floral panels that cover the building's lower walls and cenotaphs. The scale of this stone-inlay workforce, together with marble carvers, calligraphers, and dome-builders, reflects the Mughal court's ability to draw skilled labor and rare materials from across its own territory and well beyond its borders, a hallmark of imperial workshop production under Shah Jahan more broadly.

Construction

Construction is traditionally dated from around 1632 to 1653, with the mausoleum itself largely complete by around 1643 and the surrounding structures finished over the following decade. Contemporary and near-contemporary Mughal chronicles describe a large workforce, traditional figures cite around 20,000 laborers and craftsmen, drawn from across the empire and beyond, including masons, marble carvers, calligraphers, and pietra dura specialists whose techniques show clear Persian and Central Asian influence. The building's chief architect is traditionally identified as Ustad Ahmad Lahauri, though the strength of this attribution is disputed among historians, since it rests substantially on a claim made by one of his descendants centuries later rather than on strong contemporary documentation; court officials Mir Abd-ul Karim and Makramat Khan are also recorded in Mughal sources as having supervised aspects of the project. The total cost is recorded in later tradition at approximately 32 million rupees, though, as with most Mughal-era financial figures, this estimate should be treated as approximate rather than precise.

Later History

In 1658 Shah Jahan was deposed by his son Aurangzeb after a war of succession among his four sons and spent the last years of his life confined at Agra Fort, roughly two kilometers upstream from the Taj Mahal, reportedly able to view the monument from his quarters. He died in 1666 and was buried beside Mumtaz Mahal in the mausoleum he had built for her. The complex saw periods of neglect under later, financially weaker Mughal rule and suffered some depredation during Jat raids on Agra in the 18th century and under British colonial administration in the early 19th century, when parts of the gardens and decoration were altered or removed. A major restoration was undertaken from 1900 under the British viceroy Lord Curzon, who also redesigned the gardens along more formal, British-influenced lines. The Taj Mahal was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983 and was named one of the New7Wonders of the World in a global public poll in 2007. In recent decades the monument has faced environmental pressure from industrial pollution and Yamuna river degradation, prompting the creation of the Taj Trapezium Zone, a designated pollution-control area around the site, and periodic mud-pack cleaning treatments to restore the marble's original color.