Place · Mughal tomb · India
Bibi ka Maqbara
The 1660 mausoleum at Aurangabad built by Prince Azam Shah for his mother Dilras Banu Begum (first wife of Aurangzeb, died 1657 shortly after childbirth), in deliberate imitation of the Taj Mahal built by Dilras's father-in-law Shah Jahan for Mumtaz Mahal three decades earlier. The 72-metre-tall monument reduces the Taj's scale and refinement — the dome is lower, the minarets squatter, the inlay less fine (plaster instead of pietra dura) — reflecting the Mughal treasury's exhaustion by 1660 under Aurangzeb's parsimonious court. The 'Bibi ka Maqbara' ('tomb of the lady') carries no founder inscription and is often misattributed as Aurangzeb's own. Chief architect Ata-ullah was the son of Ustad Ahmad Lahauri (chief architect of the Taj). The tomb is ASI-protected.
- Function
- Burial and funerary
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 19.901, 75.320
Worth knowing
Called the poor man's Taj, which is unfair but instructive: the marble ran out partway up, so the upper structure is plastered brick. The building is a lesson in what an empire could still afford forty years after Shah Jahan.
Connections (4)
- Architectural modelTaj Mahal
Bibi ka Maqbara was built by Aurangzeb's son Azam Shah for his mother Dilras Banu Begum about forty years after the Taj and on roughly a fifteenth of the budget — marble on the lower storey and the dome, plaster above, and proportions that are noticeably less resolved. It is the most direct evidence we have of what the Taj cost, because it is what the same dynasty produced when it could not afford one.
- Site adjacencyDaulatabad
Bibi ka Maqbara at Aurangabad was built by Aurangzeb's son Azam Shah for his mother Dilras Banu Begum in deliberate imitation of the Taj, at a fraction of the cost and with marble only on the lower parts — the rest is plastered. It stands on the same plain as Daulatabad, the fort Muhammad bin Tughlaq made his capital three and a half centuries earlier, so two Delhi-based dynasties left their Deccan mark within sight of each other.
- Ancestor ofAurangzeb
Aurangzeb's son Azam Shah built the Bibi ka Maqbara at Aurangabad between 1660 and 1670 as a tomb for his mother Dilras Banu Begum, Aurangzeb's chief wife — a half-scale echo of the Taj Mahal that his great-great-grandfather Shah Jahan had built for his own wife at Agra. The reduced marble and plaster of the Bibi ka Maqbara show the Mughal state's reduced architectural budgets under Aurangzeb's austere reign. The tomb is in the same Mughal garden tradition that began at Humayun's Tomb a century earlier.
- Site withinAurangabad / Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar
Bibi ka Maqbara — built by Aurangzeb's son Azam Shah between 1660 and 1670 as a tomb for his mother Dilras Banu Begum — sits in Aurangabad proper, within the modern city limits about three kilometres north of the walled core. The 'half-Taj' is Aurangabad's single most-visited Mughal monument and has defined the city's visual identity since the seventeenth century.
Sources
Standard reference accounts; site and museum records
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