Journey
The Mughal line
Eight buildings across a century and a half, in which a Central Asian dynasty worked out an Indian architecture: Persian garden-tomb plans, Indian red sandstone and marble, Rajput chhatris and jālis, and a scale nothing in the subcontinent had attempted. Each one is a direct answer to the building before it — which is clearest at the end, where Shāh Jahān builds the most domed tomb of all at Agra and a tomb with no dome at Lahore in the same decade, and Aurangzeb closes the sequence with the largest mosque any of them attempted.
Stops (8)
- Humayun's Tomb · Humayun's Tomb — the prototype, 1570
Built by Humayun's widow Hamida Banu Begum fourteen years after his death, and the first monumental garden-tomb in India: a domed mausoleum at the centre of a charbagh divided by water channels. Every later Mughal tomb including the Taj descends from this plan. Bahadur Shah Zafar was captured here in 1857.
- Fatehpur Sīkrī · Fatehpur Sīkrī — the city as an experiment, 1571
Akbar's capital around a Chishti hermitage, built entirely in red sandstone with post-and-beam construction borrowed from Gujarati and Rajput practice rather than from Persia. The Diwan-i-Khas has a single central pillar carrying a throne platform reached by four bridges, which is architecture as a political diagram.
- Agra Fort · Agra Fort — the working seat
Akbar's citadel in red sandstone, rebuilt in white marble by Shah Jahan, from which the empire was actually run for most of three reigns. The two building styles stand side by side inside one wall, which makes the fort the clearest place to see what changed between grandfather and grandson.
- Taj Mahal · The Taj Mahal — the plan perfected, 1653
Mumtaz Mahal's tomb, twenty-two years in building, with the mausoleum moved to the end of the garden rather than its centre so the river becomes the far side of the composition. The proportions are self-similar at several scales and the minarets lean outward so they would fall away from the dome.
- Shahdara · 1637
Shāh Jahān's other answer, built at Shahdara across the Ravi at Lahore in the same decade as the Taj and by the same patron, and the opposite building. It has no dome at all — a flat terrace with four tapering minarets, the only imperial Mughal tomb built that way — and puts everything into ground-level surface instead: pietra dura flowers, marble inlay, the ninety-nine names of God. One emperor's son therefore produced both the least vertical and the most vertical of all Mughal mausolea within about ten years.
- Red Fort, Delhi · The Red Fort — the capital moves back, 1648
Shah Jahan's new city at Delhi, with the Diwan-i-Khas carrying the inscription about paradise being here and the Peacock Throne under it. Nadir Shah took the throne in 1739. The fort became the last Mughal's residence, the site of his trial in 1858, and then a British barracks.
- Lahore Fort & Shalimar · Lahore Fort and Shalimar — the western capital
The other imperial seat, with Jahangir's picture wall of glazed tiles — elephants, angels, polo — running four hundred metres along the exterior, and Shah Jahan's Shalimar garden in three descending terraces fed by a canal cut from the Ravi over a hundred kilometres away.
- Badshahi Mosque, Lahore · 1671–73
The last of them, and the largest. Aurangzeb built it directly opposite the Lahore Fort's Alamgiri Gate, which he also built, so that the imperial residence and the imperial congregation face each other across one garden — the standard Mughal pairing of fort and Friday mosque, made here for the final time and on the greatest scale. Red sandstone carried from Rajasthan, three marble domes, a courtyard for something near a hundred thousand. After it the dynasty built nothing on this scale again.