Place · Mughal riverfront charbagh · India
Mehtab Bagh, Agra
Also known as Mahtab Bagh, Moonlight Garden, Mehtab Bagh (Moonlight Garden)
Mehtab Bagh, the 'Moonlight Garden', is a square Mughal charbagh on the Yamuna floodplain directly opposite the Taj Mahal, aligned with it and matching its width, so that it reads as part of the same riverfront plan. It was the last of eleven Mughal gardens along this bank. Floods and villagers taking building material reduced it to a sand mound by the 1990s, until an Archaeological Survey of India survey led its restoration; its large octagonal pond still reflects the mausoleum.
- Function
- Landscape & environmental change
- Patron dynasty
- Mughal
- River basin
- Yamuna
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered — The garden is documented; its builder is given variously as Babur and Shah Jahan.
- Location
- 27.180, 78.042
Worth knowing
The 'Black Taj' legend, traced to the travels of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, was fed in 1871 when the archaeologist A. C. L. Carlleyle mistook the moss-blackened remains of an old pond here for its foundations.
Wikipedia attributes the garden both to Babur (d. 1530) and to Shah Jahan, who chose the floodplain as a place for viewing the Taj; the Black Taj is a legend.
Connections (3)
- Site withinAgra
Mehtab Bagh lies in Agra on the north bank of the Yamuna, in the floodplain opposite both the Taj Mahal and Agra Fort. Inscriptions at the site record that it adjoined other gardens to the west, the Chahar Bagh Padshahi and a second Chahar Bagh Padshahi, and it was the last of eleven Mughal gardens built along that bank. By the 1990s floods and villagers taking building material had reduced it to a mound of sand, until an Archaeological Survey of India survey led its restoration.
- Site adjacencyTaj Mahal
Mehtab Bagh is perfectly aligned with the Taj Mahal on the opposite bank of the Yamuna, and its width is identical to that of the Taj complex. Shah Jahan is said to have chosen the crescent-shaped floodplain across the river as the ideal place for viewing the mausoleum and made it a moonlit pleasure garden of white plaster walkways, pavilions, pools and fountains. A large octagonal pond on its southern edge still reflects the Taj, whose mausoleum was completed in 1648.
- Traditional linkJean-Baptiste Tavernier
Legends attributed to the travelogue of the seventeenth-century French traveller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier tell that Shah Jahan wished to build a Black Taj Mahal for himself across the river as a twin to the Taj, a plan cut short when his son Aurangzeb imprisoned him. In 1871 the British archaeologist A. C. L. Carlleyle, finding the remains of an old pond at Mehtab Bagh blackened by moss and lichen, mistook them for the foundation of the fabled tomb, and the myth attached itself to the garden.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Mehtab Bagh" and "Taj Mahal".
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