Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal emperor, reigned from 1628 to 1658. His wife Arjumand Bano Begum, who received the title Mumtaz Mahal, died in 1631 in Burhanpur while giving birth to her 14th child. Temporarily buried in the Zainabad garden, she was moved six months later to Agra, where she would rest in the crypt of the new mausoleum. The chosen site, on the banks of the Yamuna, belonged to the Kachhwaha family and was acquired in exchange for four havelis, traditional mansions.
Construction began in 1632. A network of wells was sunk along the river to support the foundations, and masons, stone carvers, inlayers, calligraphers, and dome builders were summoned from across the empire, as well as from Central Asia and Iran. The white marble came from Makrana, in Rajasthan; the semiprecious stones from distant parts of India, Ceylon, and Afghanistan; and the red sandstone from quarries such as those of Sikri and Dholpur. According to UNESCO, the principal architect was Ustad Ahmad Lahori.
The mausoleum was completed in 1648, and the mosque, guest house, main gateway, and outer courtyard in 1653. In 1658, Shah Jahan lost the throne to his son Aurangzeb, who kept him imprisoned in Agra Fort for eight years, until his death in 1666. The emperor was laid to rest beside Mumtaz: his larger cenotaph was installed to the west of hers more than thirty years later—which is why only Mumtaz’s cenotaph occupies the exact center of the hall.
Since the era of British rule, the complex has undergone successive rounds of conservation work, and in 1983 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. In 1996, the Supreme Court of India banned the use of coal and coke by industries in the Taj Trapezium Zone, an area of about 10,400 km² designated to protect the monument from pollution. By order of the same court, night viewing was authorized in 2004; in 2007, the Taj Mahal was announced in Lisbon as one of the New Seven Wonders of the World.
The design of the Taj Mahal translates the Islamic idea of paradise into stone. The chahar bagh, a garden divided into four parts by water channels, evokes the rivers of paradise described in Islamic mystical texts. Passages from the Quran in thuluth script, inlaid in black marble, frame the great gateway and the mausoleum; the choice of texts, on the Day of Judgment and the rewards of paradise, is attributed to the Persian calligrapher Amanat Khan of Shiraz, whose signature appears at the base of the inner dome.
The complex also remains a living place of faith. On Fridays, when it is closed to general visitors, the red sandstone mosque hosts the traditional midday prayers. During the Urs—the three days of annual celebrations marking the anniversary of Shah Jahan’s death—the couple’s actual graves, in the normally closed crypt, are opened to pilgrims and visitors, with rituals that include the offering of a chadar, a long ceremonial cloth.
The monument has also inspired literature. The poet Rabindranath Tagore, a Nobel laureate, described it as a teardrop glistening, spotlessly bright, “on the cheek of time,” and Shah Jahan himself dedicated verses to it. For UNESCO, it is the greatest architectural achievement in the whole range of Indo-Islamic architecture, endowed with unique aesthetic qualities of balance, symmetry, and harmony.
