The Mughal Mausoleum That Took 22 Years to Build for an Empress Who Died in Childbirth in 1631

Mumtaz Mahal (born Arjumand Banu Begum, c. 1593) was the favourite wife of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. They had married in 1612 when she was 19 and he was 20. She had borne him 14 children across the next 19 years. She died on 17 June 1631 at the imperial camp at Burhanpur in central India, giving birth to her fourteenth child. The infant — a daughter named Gauhara Begum — survived. The mother died of postpartum haemorrhage at approximately age 38.

Shah Jahan was at Burhanpur during the Deccan campaign. He was reportedly so devastated by the death that he absented himself from the public administration for approximately a week. Contemporary court chroniclers — particularly Abd al-Hamid Lahawri in the Padshahnama — recorded that he emerged from mourning with his hair entirely turned white at age 39.

He determined to build her the most magnificent funerary monument in the history of Islamic architecture.

The construction

The site selected was a plot on the south bank of the Yamuna river at Agra, then the imperial capital. The chief architect was Ustad Ahmad Lahauri (with a design team including the Persian architects Mirak Mirza Ghiyas and Ismail Afandi). The construction began in 1632.

The labour force was approximately 20,000 workers at peak, drawn from across the Mughal empire and beyond. Specialists included Persian master masons for the white marble dressing, Italian pietra dura craftsmen for the semi-precious inlay work (the floral inlays use agate, jasper, jade, lapis lazuli, turquoise, and approximately 28 other stones), Bukharan calligraphers for the Quranic inscription panels, Kashmiri gardeners for the chahar bagh paradise-garden plan, and Indian masons for the structural construction.

Approximately 1,000 elephants were employed to transport the white marble from the quarries at Makrana in Rajasthan — approximately 350 km away — to the Agra site. The total construction cost has been estimated at approximately 32 million rupees — approximately 1 billion dollars in modern equivalent terms, though historical-currency-conversion estimates are uncertain.

What it is

The Taj Mahal is a complex rather than a single building. The principal mausoleum is a 35-metre-cube structure topped by a 17-metre central dome, surrounded by four corner minarets. The mausoleum is set on a 95-metre-square marble platform raised approximately 7 metres above the garden level. The complex includes a mosque to the west, a guest hall (jawab) to the east, the four-quadrant chahar bagh garden, the gateway (darwaza-i rauza), and the outer walls.

The structural completion was approximately 1648; the detailed finishing work continued until approximately 1653. The total construction period was approximately 22 years.

The calligraphic inscriptions on the gateway and the mausoleum walls — designed by the Persian calligrapher Amanat Khan, who signed his work — include 22 Quranic passages dealing with paradise, resurrection, and divine mercy. The inscriptions are calibrated to appear uniform in size to a viewer at ground level — despite the actual letters at dome height being over a metre tall while the ground-level letters are only centimetres. The optical correction was engineering rather than chance.

What happened to Shah Jahan

The favourite son of Shah Jahan was Dara Shikoh — the intellectual eldest son, scholar of Sanskrit and translator of the Upanishads into Persian, advocate of Hindu-Muslim religious accommodation. The third son Aurangzeb was the more politically and militarily capable. The succession crisis began in 1657 when Shah Jahan fell ill.

The brothers fought across 1657-1658. Aurangzeb defeated and executed Dara Shikoh in August 1659. He deposed Shah Jahan in July 1658 and imprisoned him in the Mussaman Burj — the octagonal tower of the Agra Fort with a view across the Yamuna to the Taj Mahal.

Shah Jahan remained imprisoned in the Mussaman Burj for the remaining eight years of his life. He was cared for by his daughter Jahanara Begum, who voluntarily joined his imprisonment. He died at the age of 74 on 22 January 1666, while gazing across the river at the Taj Mahal.

His body was carried by river boat to the Taj Mahal and buried alongside Mumtaz Mahal in the subterranean burial chamber under the central mausoleum dome. The two cenotaphs (the above-ground decorative tombs visible to visitors) and the two actual graves in the subterranean crypt are the only asymmetric features of the entire Taj Mahal complex — Shah Jahan’s cenotaph is off-centre, since the original design had been intended only for Mumtaz Mahal as the central focus.

What survives

The Taj Mahal is essentially intact in its 1653 form. The 19th-century British Indian administration conducted some restoration work; the early 20th-century Lord Curzon administration commissioned the restoration of the Yamuna-side platform after a 19th-century flood; the subsequent post-independence Indian Archaeological Survey administration has maintained continuous conservation work.

The principal modern conservation concerns are atmospheric pollution from Agra industrial activity, which yellows the white marble; Yamuna river pollution; mass tourism wear on the marble floors; and groundwater changes from regional irrigation, which affect the foundations.