Of Taj Mahal and Stupid Hindus

Taj Mahal part of ancient temple, claims UP BJP chief

PTI | Dec 7, 2014, 08.02 PM IST

READ MORE UP BJP chief|Taj Mahal|Laxmikant Bajpai

UP BJP chief Laxmikant Bajpai on Sunday sought to drag the famed mausoleum into another row by claiming that it was a part of an ancient temple.

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BAHRAICH: After Azam Khan's demand of handing over the Taj Mahal to UP waqf board, the state's BJP chief Laxmikant Bajpai on Sunday sought to drag the famed mausoleum into another row by claiming that it was a part of an ancient temple.

Bajpai told reporters that Mughal emperor Shah Jahan "purchased a part of Tejo Mahalaya temple's land from Raja Jai Singh" and claimed that documents to prove it still exist.

He also alleged that "Azam Khan has usurped property of waqf and was now eyeing the world heritage Taj Mahal."

READ ALSO: Taj Mahal should be handed over to waqf board: Azam Khan

"Azam's dream to offer namaz five times at Taj will never be fulfilled," he said.



On November 13, Khan had said that the Taj Mahal, one of the wonders of the world, should be declared a property of the state's waqf board.

Khan, during a convention of 'mutawallis' (caretakers) asked chairman of State Sunni Central Waqf Board to make Taj Mahal a property of the board and appoint him as 'mutwalli'.

Though, later, when reporters asked Azam about his controversial statement, he said,"why you take things said in a lighter vein so seriously."

READ ALSO: Azam Khan out of his mind, say tourism industry leaders

However, spokesman of All India Shia Personal Law Board, Maulana Yasoob Abbas, has told PTI, "As far as Mumtaz Mahal is concerned, she was a Shia, but Taj Mahal is heritage of the country and it should not be handed over to Sunni or Shia boards."

"Shia and Sunni boards are unable to maintain their mosques and madrasas then how will they handle Taj Mahal. If the issue of handing Taj Mahal to the waqf board is raised then Shia and Sunni will come face to face, therefore it should be kept away from the tussle," he added. 

 

 

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Sid Harth • 1 min ago

There cannot be a discussion on a sketchy news item. P N Oak, a Poona Konkanasth Brahmin was a certified lunatic. Later he accepted Sikhism, (Kartar Singh) so they say. As to the reason for his changing his religion, he was asked a question. His reply was: To protect a Hindu temple--Tejo-Mahalaya. Maybe, totality of what they call, Hindutva? Bunch of idiots! ...and I am Sid Harth

Sid Harth • 7 mins ago

Unfortunately, very few of these conventional uses of Koranic passages have ever been compiled; for Indian monu- ments, the only systematic study is Muhammad Ashraf Husain, Record of All the Quranic and Non-Historical Epigraphs on the Protected Monuments in the Delhi Province (Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India, xLvII), Calcutta, 1936, which tabulates more than 450 occur- rences of some 250 Koranic passages (most consisting of several sequential verses) inscribed on about 100 mosques and tombs. 33 Cf. Oleg Grabar's similar conclusion, stated in his recent article, "The Inscriptions of the Madrasah-Mausoleum of Qaytbay," in Studies in Honor of George C. Miles (as cited in n. 31), 465-468: "For, as our knowledge of Islamic art progresses, it becomes more and more evident that Qur'anic citations were used in the manner of biblical subjects in Christian iconography." See also Grabar's "The Umayyad Dome of the Rock," Ars Orientalis, III, 1959, 33-62; and the important article by Dodd, 35-79. 34 The Sura begins with a series of solemn oaths, next cites previous instances of God's wrath, then summons up a frightening vision of the approaching Day of Judgment (verses 21-26): Nay! When the earth is ground to power- And thy Lord cometh, and His angels, rank upon rank- And Hell, that Day, is brought near--on that Day will Man remember, but how shall the remembrance profit him? He shall say: "Ah would that I had made provision for this my life!" For upon that Day, His chastisement shall be such as none other can inflict! And His bonds shall be such as none other can bind! (adapted, with modifications, from the translations by cAbdullah Yusuf cAli, The Holy Qur'an, Text, Translation and Commentary, Lahore, 1937-38; and Arthur J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted, New York, 1955). 3s The expression "And enter thou My Paradise!" (wa udkhuli jannati) is unique among all the Koranic references to Paradise in being the only instance in which God utters such a direct invitation. Moreover, among the more than 120 occurrences of the word janna (literally, "Garden") in the Koran, this is the only passage in which the Arabic possessive suffix i ("My") is attached; see Ahmad Shah, Miftah-ul-Quran, Concordance and Complete Glossary of the Holy Quran, 2 vols., Lahore, n.d. (reprint of 1906 ed.).

Sid Harth • 7 mins ago

(Fig. 9): "O thou soul at peace, Return thou unto thy Lord, well-pleased and well- pleasing unto Him! Enter thou among My servants- And enter thou My Paradise!"35 The closing words on the gateways of both monu- ments are equally clear in their implication: namely, that they were conceived as symbolic replicas of the gateway and gardens of the celestial Paradise. Accord- ing to Islamic tradition, Muhammad entered Paradise through its gateway during his miraculous heavenly ascension known as the Micraj, an event depicted in the 31 The widespread popular notion that the role of the calligraphy is purely decorative is, of course, patently absurd. Far more important than their visual qualities, the Koranic passages inscribed on the Taj are imbued with profound religious meaning, which stems not only from the intrinsic content of the passages themselves, but also from the rich aura of cognitive connotations and associations that certain Koranic passages had gradually acquired in Islamic theology and popular beliefs. Even when Koranic inscriptions cannot easily be read, their function is always more symbolic than decorative; see Richard Ettinghausen, "Arabic Epigraphy: Communication or Symbolic Affirmation," in Near Eastern Numismatics, Iconography, Epi- graphy and History: Studies in Honor of George C. Miles, Beirut, 1974, 297-317. 32 Judging from the epigraphical evidence, it seems to have been a practice of long standing in India-as well as in other Islamic lands-to select Arabic and Persian architectural inscriptions that would be appropriate to the meaning and function of the monu- ment as a whole.

Sid Harth • 8 mins ago

THE MYTH AND MEANING OF THE TAJ MAHAL 13 That the choice of these Koranic passages was de- liberate, and not haphazard, seems self-evident, as self-evident as the attempt by the Taj's designers to coordinate every single feature of the building, from its overall plan to the smallest decorative detail, into a to- tally unified architectural conception of flawless visual symmetry. In view of this obvious concern with visual and decorative effect, the content of the inscribed Koranic passages must have been a matter of equal, if not greater, concern to the scholar in charge of the selec- tion.31 Furthermore, the content of the passages must have been considered on several levels, for, in addition to purely textual connotations, the overall meaning of each inscribed passage would have been affected by its placement on a specific part of the architectural com- plex, as well as its contextual relationship to the total ensemble of inscriptions.32 Accordingly, it would seem that all of the Koranic passages were meant to be read and construed together; and that they constitute in ef- fect a thematically unified inscriptional program, analogous in its cognitive significance to the icono- graphic programs of religious monuments decorated with images.33 As in the case of Akbar's tomb, the final words of the Taj's gateway inscription also epitomize the symbolic meaning of the inscriptional program as a whole. The south faqade of the gateway (Fig. 8) is inscribed with the entire Sura 89, al-Fajr, "The Daybreak," one of the great apocalyptic Suras of the Koran, and one that clearly establishes the eschatological themes dealt with throughout the Taj's inscriptional program. In contrast to the flowery Persian panegyric on the gateway of Ak- bar's tomb, here the theme is essentially that of the impending doom of the Day of Judgment, when God will punish the wicked with terrible finality.34 Only at the very end of this Sura is the apocalyptic imagery mitigated by the allusion to the Paradise that God has promised as a reward for the faithful

Sid Harth • 9 mins ago

12 THE ART BULLETIN 2 Abu 'l-Hasan, Portrait of Shah Jahan at Age 25, 1617. London, Victoria and Albert Museum 3 Abu 'l-Hasan, Shah Jahan on the Peacock Throne, ca. 1635. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art (after Carroll) 4 Tomb of Humayun (1507-1555), Delhi, completed ca. 1570 beyond: "These are the gardens of Eden, enter them to live for ever!"27 Surprisingly, the Taj Mahal, which perhaps comes closer to evoking heavenly visions than any other work of Islamic architecture, makes no such poetic claims, at least not directly. Unlike Akbar's tomb--the gateway of which is inscribed with a lengthy Persian eulogy com- posed especially by the calligrapher-the Taj's numer- ous inscriptions are drawn almost exclusively from the Koran.28 Incidentally, the calligrapher of Akbar's tomb and the Taj Mahal was the same man, CAbd al-Haqq of Shiraz, given the title Amanat Khan by Shah Jahan.29 As Amanat Khan seems to have been the author as well as the scribe of the Persian eulogy of Akbar's tomb, so also it appears that he was charged with the responsi- bility for selecting the Koranic passages to be inscribed on the Taj.30 27 See Smith, 35. Altogether, there are three couplets, inscribed in six separate panels, running across the lower calligraphic border of the entrance gateway, the full translation of which is given infra. It should be noted that the last line of the third couplet, reproduced in Fig. 7, is in Arabic, whereas all the rest are in Persian. 28 As listed in the Appendix at the end of this article, the Koranic inscriptions on the Taj number twenty-five, but three of these occur twice, making twenty-two different passages in all, of which four- teen are complete Suras. Aside from the two sets of epitaphs on the cenotaphs of Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan, the only other non- Koranic inscriptions are the three dated historical epigraphs on the mausoleum and the gateway, and a few other short pious phrases in Arabic prefixed to some of the inscriptions. In addition to its un- precedented size, the Taj is unique among published Islamic funer- ary monuments with respect to the number and length of its in- scribed Koranic passages. 29 Since CAbd al-Haqq, who was a scholar and courtier, as well as a calligrapher, was awarded the title Amanat Khan (meaning "Trustworthy Noble") only in 1632, shortly after work on the Taj was begun, he of course did not use it in the colophons on Akbar's tomb, which was finished in 1613. In the colophon dated 1638 inside the Taj, however, the calligrapher used only his honorary title. Ap- parently the first scholar to realize the true identity of Amanat Khan was S.A. Akbarabadi, in his Urdu monograph, Muraqqac-i-Akbarabad yac ni Tarikh-i-Agra, Agra, 1931 (cited in Chaghtai, 129). 30 This is the view argued in my forthcoming article. In effect, Amanat Khan's earlier work on Akbar's tomb had elevated him to the status of imperial calligrapher, therefore making him the most appropriate choice to supervise the inscriptional pro

Sid Harth • 10 mins ago

Essentially the same facts are reported in the various histories of Aurangzeb's reign, although nothing is said about whether Au- rangzeb might previously have authorized the place of burial, if not the manner of it. Only one contemporaneous source implies that Shah Jahan had constructed the Taj as a tomb for himself, as well as his wife; see Zafar Hasan, ed. and trans., The Waqiat-i-Alamgiri of Aqil Khan Razi, Delhi, 1946, 56, where it is stated: "As none of the high princes or exalted amirs were present there at that time, a few of the eunuchs and others, contrary to the custom of illustrious kings and practice of his ancestors, placed his coffin early in the morning on a boat and carried it by way of the river to the mausoleum (the Taj Mahal), which he had erected for this purpose." See also Jadu-Nath Sarkar, trans., Maasir-i-cAlamgiri...of Saqi Must cad Khan, Calcutta, 1947, 35; and Anees Jahan Syed, Aurangzeb in Muntakhab-al Lubab, Bombay and New Delhi, 1977, 223. 24 See James Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, Lon- don, 1910, ii, 290ff.; cf. Brown, 96ff. See also the important articles by Jairazbhoy and Hoag. 25 Jairazbhoy, 79ff.; Hoag, 240ff. See also the collection of papers on Islamic gardens presented in a colloquium at Dumbarton Oaks, Elizabeth B. MacDougall and Richard Ettinghausen, eds., The Islamic Garden, Washington, D.C., 1976, espec. Annemarie Schimmel, "The Celestial Garden in Islam," 11-39; and William L. Hanaway, Jr., "Paradise on Earth: The Terrestrial Garden in Persian Literature," 41-67. The Paradise symbolism of the Taj complex is briefly alluded to in the recent book by Burckhardt, 174-180; cf. also Henri Stierlin, Ispahan, image du paradis, Lausanne, 1976. 26 Hoag, 243ff. The full texts of the inscriptions on Akbar's tomb are given in Smith, 29-35 (cf. also my forthcoming article, "Amanat Khan and the Calligraphy on the Taj Mahal").

Sid Harth • 10 mins ago

25 Occasionally, the metaphor was carried to poetic excess, as in the Persian passages inscribed on the palatial tomb of Shah Jahan's grandfather Akbar (Fig. 5), which extravagantly claim that its gardens surpass in beauty and magnificence even those of the celestial Paradise.26 The thrust of the entire inscriptional program is summed up in the con- cluding lines of a couplet inscribed on the entrance gateway (Figs. 6, 7), the last words that one is supposed to read before passing through to the walled garden 22 This is the usual interpretation, based upon the fact that the cenotaph of Mumtaz Mahal occupies the exact center of the octa- gonal screen in the great domed hall (see Fig. 31), leaving barely enough room for Shah Jahan's cenotaph on the west side. Recently, however, R. Nath (p. 76ff.) has persuasively argued that the present arrangement was the one originally intended by the Emperor, since it is similar to the asymmetrical placement of the cenotaphs of Ic- timad al-DAwla (Jahangir's Grand Vizir) and his wife, in their tomb at Agra, which was completed in 1628, less than four years before the Taj was begun. 23 The most detailed account of Shah Jahan's death is that given in the contemporary history by Muhammad Salih Kanbo; see Ghulam Yazdani, ed., cAmal-i-Salih, or Shah Jahan Namah of Muhammad Salih Kambo, 3 vols., Bibliotheca Indica, Calcutta, 1912-1939, III, 346ff. Muhammad Salih states that the Princess Jahanara wanted to ar- range a magnificent funeral for her father, but did not have the authority to do so. As a result, the body was taken from the Fort by a back stairway from the octagonal tower where he had died, and quietly buried in the Taj without a public ceremony. At the time of his father's death, Aurangzeb was in Delhi. As soon as he heard of Shah Jahan's illness, however, Aurangzeb ordered Prince Muham- mad Mu cazzam to go to Agra, but the Prince arrived only after the body was already interred, which apparently took place the morn- ing after the Emperor's death late in the night of January 14, 1666 O.S.

Sid Harth • 11 mins ago

THE MYTH AND MEANING OF THE TAJ MAHAL 11 does not seem to have been his original intention.22 Except for Tavernier's unsupported claim, there is abso- lutely no evidence that Shah Jahan ever contemplated building a separate tomb for himself either. In any event, Shah Jahan still had no tomb of his own when, in 1658, at the age of sixty-six, he was imprisoned by Au- rangzeb in the Agra Fort. The Persian histories are not clear as to whose decision it was to bury Shah Jahan in the Taj when he died eight years later.23 In the face of such widespread uncertainties, we must fall back upon the evidence that the tomb itself provides, in order to explain why the Taj looks the way it does, and to determine what other meanings it may have possessed for Shah Jahan which led him to create such an extravagant and extraordinary monument. Var- ious other scholars have already considered the form of the mausoleum proper, showing its derivation from the tomb of Shah Jahan's great-grandfather, Humayun (Fig. 4), and its ultimate debt to architectural styles imported from Persia.24 Although the Taj certainly fits into this architectural evolution, the formalist approach by itself cannot shed much light upon the underlying meaning of the monument. There are two important categories of evidence that have been largely neglected by writers on the Taj: the plan of the entire complex, and the in- scriptional program of Koranic passages inscribed on the mausoleum and the gateway. When taken together, these two categories of evidence strongly suggest that the Taj had an allegorical significance going far beyond its literal funerary function, a significance which, as we shall see, is nonetheless appropriate to that primary function. From the plan of the Taj complex, it is obvious that the garden constitutes an extremely important feature in the overall architectural conception. Unlike all previ- ous Mughal garden tombs, the Taj is placed at one end of its garden, rather than in the center. The quadripar- tite layout itself, however, is not unusual, being an example of the typical Persian chahar-bagh, or four-fold garden. As is well known, Persian gardens in general, and Mughal garden tombs in particular, are often de- scribed metaphorically in Persian poetry and inscrip- tions as being like Paradise.

Sid Harth • 12 mins ago

13 Manucci, I, 186ff. 14 Bernier, 11. Sir Thomas Herbert, Peter Mundy, and Tavernier also report the same rumor, the validity of which is, however, denied by Manucci, ibid.; for a full discussion, see Vincent A. Smith, "Joannes deLaet on India and Shah Jahan," Indian Antiquary, XLIII, 1914, 239- 244. Smith cites the second impression of de Laet's De Imperio Magni Mogolis, Leiden, 1631, as evidence that the rumor had reached Europe within about six months after the death of Mumtaz Mahal. For discussion of a painting that apparently depicts Jahanara seated beside her father in an allegorical court scene, executed by the little-known Dutch painter Willem Schellinks around 1650, see Jeannine Auboyer, "Un Maitre hollandais du XVIIe siecle s'inspir- ant des miniatures mogholes," Arts asiatiques, ii, 251-273. 15 Bernier, 11. 16 Manucci, I, 231; II, 116. 17 Tavernier, I, 91: "Shah Jahan began to build his own tomb on the other side of the river, but the war with his sons interrupted his plan, and Aurangzeb, who reigns at present, is not disposed to complete it." 18 Cited in Carroll, 157ff. Huxley's frivolous views are discussed by R.A. Jairazbhoy, "The Taj and Its Critics," East and West, vi, 1956, 349-352. 19 Hermann Keyserling, The Travel Diary of a Philosopher (cited in Carroll, 153). 20 Ibid. 21 Chatterji's novel apparently has not been translated into English; the quotation is from the Hindi version, Sesh Praina, Delhi, 1964, 32

Sid Harth • 14 mins ago

10 THE ART BULLETIN cared for was the search for women to serve his plea- sure."13 Bernier and other European travelers make an even more serious indictment against Shah Jahan when they report contemporary rumors that he had incestu- ous relations with his eldest daughter Jahanara for a period of several years following his wife's death.14 Bernier even states that the Muslim doctors of the law at court sanctioned the relationship on the grounds that "it would have been unjust to deny the King the privi- lege of gathering fruit from the tree he himself had planted."15 According to Manucci, Shah Jahan's illness in 1658, when Aurangzeb seized power, and his death in 1666 were both the result of the urinary disorder known as strangury, brought on by overdoses of aph- rodisiacs, which the aging ruler utilized out of vanity, to bolster his waning sexual powers.16 It is curious that critical accounts such as these have been ignored, as the popular notion of Shah Jahan's devotion to his dead wife has assumed mythic pro- portions. Incidentally, the theory of a second Taj- supposed to be an exact replica, except in black marble--can be shown to be a part of this myth, based only upon a single dubious reference by Tavernier, and totally unsupported by the Persian histories.17 Moreover, Tavernier only mentions that Shah Jahan had started some sort of tomb across the river; its supposed size and color are elaborations upon this unsupported notion, apparently first introduced in the nineteenth century. Even in this century, when we have become increas- ing skeptical of romantic explanations of anything, no one has effectively challenged the myth, although a few writers have intuitively sensed its flaws. Aldous Hux- ley, in his book of 1926, Jesting Pilate, obliquely struck at the myth by attacking the popular view that the Taj is a supremely beautiful monument. He thought it wasn't. 18 A far more serious critic than Huxley was the German philosopher Hermann Keyserling, who con- cluded in 1914 that the Taj in the final analysis was an "absolutely purposeless" work of art.19 While praising its beauty, Keyserling felt that the Taj lacked expressive and spiritual power, stating that "it is not even neces- sarily a funeral monument; it might just as well, or just as badly, be a pleasure resort."20 At about the same time, the Bengali novelist Sarat Chandra Chatterji was expressing similar doubts about the popular explanation of the Taj. In his novel The Un- answered Question, Chatterji's heroine, after pointing out some of the flaws in the myth of Shah Jahan's mari- tal devotion, concludes that the Emperor would proba- bly have built a monument like the Taj even if Mumtaz Mahal had not died, that he would have found some other excuse to build it, perhaps "in the name of reli- gion," or perhaps as a "memorial to conquest, after killing hundreds and thousands of people."21 I would not go this far in castigating Shah Jahan's character, but obviously some sort of explan

Sid Harth • 14 mins ago

7According to a popular legend recorded in an early 19th-century Persian work by Qasim cAli Afridi (1771-1827), Mumtaz Mahal on her deathbed extracted two promises from her husband: first, that he not have any more children by his other wives, and second, "that he should build such a mausoleum over her, the like of which was not to be found anywhere else" (cited in Jogindra Nath Chowdhuri "Mumtaz Mahal," Islamic Culture, xi, 1937, 379). This account is to- tally unsupported by the Persian histories of Shah Jahan's reign, and seems to be nothing more than a romantic fabrication. 8 W. H. Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official, Karachi, repr. 1973, 317. 9 See the translation by V. Ball, Travels in India by Jean-Baptiste Taver- nier, Baron of Aubonne, 2 vols., London, 1925, I, 91: "I witnessed the commencement and accomplishment of this great work, on which twenty-two years have been spent, during which twenty thousand men worked incessantly." Since Tavernier (the French edition of whose memoirs was published in 1676) apparently first reached India only in 1640, he could not have seen the commencement of the Taj, which, according to the Persian histories, occurred around January, 1632. The evidence of the histories and the three dated epigraphs on the Taj suggest that the exterior of the tomb was com- plete by around 1636, and the rest of the complex took approxi- mately another six to ten years; it was probably finished by 1647 at the latest (see my article, "Amanat Khan and the Calligraphy on the Taj Mahal," forthcoming in Kunst des Orients). 10 For a brief account of Shah Jahan's new capital, see Percy Brown, Indian Architecture (The Islamic Period), Bombay, n.d., 111ff. Since proponents of what I have called the "myth" of the Taj maintain that the tomb symbolizes the Emperor's eternal devotion to his dead wife, it is curious that Shah Jahan decided to shift his capital from Agra to Delhi before the entire complex was complete; in fact, until his imprisonment in the Agra Fort in 1658, he was away from the city most of the time. 11 William Foster, ed., The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1615-1619, 2 vols., London, 1899, I, 424. Roe's negative reaction to Shah Jahan was at least partly due to his inability to secure the trade concessions he had been sent to negotiate. 12 Saksena, 34ff., where the views of Muhammad Salih Kanbo (the author of another Persian history of Shah Jahan's reign) justifying Khusrau's murder are quoted: "It is entirely lawful for the great sovereigns to rid this mortal world of the existence of their brothers and other relations, whose very annihilation is conducive to the common good."

Sid Harth • 15 mins ago

The Taj was Shah Jahan's first great architectural proj- ect in a long series of monuments constructed during the thirty years of his reign. Some of his other projects, such as the magnificent Red Fort in his new capital Shahjahanabad at Delhi (1639-1648), were more exten- sive and costly, but none ever surpassed the Taj in spendor.10 In the popular view, the years of effort and the incredible expense of building the Taj-like its in- spired beauty--also furnish proof of Shah Jahan's noble devotion and his great and abiding love. II The image of Shah Jahan's supposed nobility of character, however, like his supposed religious or- thodoxy, is contradicted by other contemporary ac- counts of Mughal India, which portray him as arrogant, petty, and ruthless, a man obsessed with power and the emblems of power. Sir Thomas Roe, the first English ambassador to the Mughal court, met Shah Jahan in 1617, and characterized the vain young prince (Fig. 2), then in his twenties, as "ravenous and tyrannical," and possessed of such a pride "as may teach Lucifer.""' Five years after this encounter, in 1621, Shah Jahan appar- ently had his elder brother Khusrau murdered, and he eventually ordered the deaths of five other close male relatives in his relentless pursuit of the imperial throne.12 Other contemporary European accounts also cast serious doubt upon Shah Jahan's reputation as a de- voted husband, especially after the death of Mumtaz Mahal. According to the gossipy chronicles of the Ital- ian Manucci, Shah Jahan indulged his sexual appetites with the wives of his officials and others, to such an extent that it seemed "as if the only thing Shah Jahan

Sid Harth • 15 mins ago

I would die tomorrow to have such another over me!"8 Sleeman does not record his reaction to this emotional outburst, but he must have been deeply moved as well. In the final analysis, of course, it is the silent and majestic beauty of the mausoleum itself that seems to furnish irrefutable proof of the nobility and intensity of Shah Jahan's affection for his wife. Never before or since has such an extravagant memorial been built by a man for a woman. Within the Islamic tradition, a tomb for a wife on such a scale was entirely without prece- dent: the only comparable structures anywhere are the pyramids and a few other grandiose monuments built by powerful rulers as tombs for themselves. Although the French traveler Tavernier's estimates of 20,000 workmen and twenty-two years for the Taj's construc- tion are greatly exaggerated (the main structure was actually completed in only about four years), the di- mensions of the entire tomb complex are truly impress- ive.9 The domed mausoleum is almost 250 feet high and is placed within a walled enclosure (see Fig. 29) measuring about 1,000 by 1,860 feet and containing an area of some forty-two acres. It is vast enough to in- clude all of St. Peter's, including Bernini's piazza.

Sid Harth • 16 mins ago

THE MYTH AND MEANING OF THE TAJ MAHAL 9 silhouette of the Taj in the distance, seeking solace in the poignant beauty of the mausoleum he had built for his one true love.7 Since the early nineteenth century, European visitors to the Taj-particularly the British-have been quite carried away by the sentiments that they felt the tomb expressed. In 1839, while on a tour with her husband, the wife of the government official W. H. Sleeman is reported to have said of the Taj: "I cannot tell you what I think, for I know not how to criticize such a building, but I can tell you what I feel.

Sid Harth • 17 mins ago

1 This interpretation is either implicit or explicit in almost all publi- cations dealing with the Taj, as, e.g., the relatively recent, popular book by David Carroll, The Taj Mahal, from which the quotation from Eleanor Roosevelt was taken. Although the literature on the Taj is extensive, only four books are worthy of serious mention: Moin-ud-Din, reissued in 1924 under the title The Taj and Its Envi- ronments, Chaghtai, which remains the best work on the Taj to date; Dietrich Brandenburg, Der Taj Mahal in Agra, Berlin, 1969; and Nath. A number of valuable articles on the Taj have appeared in the last few years, but will not be listed here since they do not discuss the question of the monument's meaning. 2 See C. A. Storey, Persian Literature, A Bio-Bibliographical Survey, i, London, 1970, 566ff. Qazwini's history of the first ten years of Shah Jahan's reign, which he was appointed to write in the eighth year, exists only in manuscript; the Persian text of Lahawri's history of the first twenty years of the reign has been published by Kabir al-Din Ahmad and Abd al-Rahim, eds., The Badshah Namah by Abd al-Hamid Lahawri, 2 vols., Bibliotheca Indica, Calcutta, 1867-68. For the historical information contained in this article, Lahawri's as yet untranslated history was consulted, along with Saksena. 3 Lahawri, I-A, 384ff.; Saksena, 309ff. The exact date of death was June 17, 1631 O.S.; it occurred in Burhanpur in central India, where Shah Jahan had been engaged for about a year and a half in a pro- tracted military campaign. 4 Although Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal (whose title means "Elect of the Palace") had become betrothed in 1607, they were not married until 1612, or two years after his first marriage, in 1610, to the daughter of Mirza Muzaffar Husain Safavi, a lineal descendant of Shah Isma cil of Persia. Shah Jahan's third wife, whom he married in 1617, was the granddaughter of the powerful Mughal noble, CAbd al-Rahim, Khan-i-Khanan. Of Shah Jahan's fourteen children by Mumtaz Mahal, only seven survived infancy, including four sons. Apparently his only other surviving child was a daughter by his first wife, born in 1611. All three marriages were obviously in- tended to effect alliances with powerful noble families, but Shah Jahan seems to have been romantically attached only to Mumtaz Mahal, who was the granddaughter of the Grand Vizir under Shah Jahan's father, the Emperor Jahangir (r. 1605-1627). s Lahawri, I-A, 384ff., where it is also stated that the Emperor put on white mourning clothes, abstained from music and other enter- tainments "for two years," and twice was heard to say that he felt like resigning his throne out of grief. Although Shah Jahan undoubtedly suffered considerable bereavement, it should be noted that the evidence of various surviving portraits does not support the claim that his beard soon turned white. Moreover, the one week of cancelled court appearances hardly seems to betoken excessive grief, when compared to the perio

Sid Harth • 20 mins ago

8 THE ART BULLETIN unparalleled marital devotion, a monument to undying love.1 The aesthetic qualities of the tomb are popularly believed to furnish proof of its builder's intense feeling: what else but great Love could have inspired such great Beauty? In fact, this "explanation" of the tomb can be shown to be essentially a myth--a myth which ignores a great deal of evidence to the contrary, that Shah Jahan was less noble and romantically devoted than we thought, and that the Taj Mahal is not purely and sim- ply a memorial to a beloved wife. A serious reassess- ment of this important monument is long overdue; and in the following pages I propose, first, to trace briefly the background of the myth of the Taj; and second, to present the broad outlines of a new interpretation of its various levels of symbolic meaning. I The origins of the notion that the Taj is a sort of love poem in stone may perhaps be traced back to the official accounts of the early years of Shah Jahan's long reign (1628-1658), written in Persian by the court- appointed historians Muhammad Amin Qazwini and cAbd al-Hamid Lahawri.2 Shah Jahan had been em- peror for only about three years when Mumtaz Mahal died suddenly in 1631, a few hours after giving birth to their fourteenth child.3 Although she was the second of Shah Jahan's three legal wives, Mumtaz Mahal--as her title implies--was obviously his favorite, being the mother of all (except one daughter) of his living chil- dren, as well as his constant companion during the nineteen years of their marriage.4 Since portraits were never made of high-born women, we do not know what Mumtaz Mahal looked like, but she is reported to have been extremely beautiful. The official accounts of her death describe Shah Jahan's grief with the elaborate rhetoric then in fashion in Persian literature. Lahawri, for example, extravagantly claims that the emperor's grief "crumbled his mountain-like endurance," that his beard turned white virtually overnight, and that he did not make a public appearance for one full week.5 In a similar vein, the seventeenth-century French traveler Francois Bernier records that Shah Jahan had been so enamored of his beautiful wife that "it is said that he was constant to her during life, and at death was so affected as nearly to follow her to her grave."6 Stemming from these highly exaggerated seventeenth-century accounts of Shah Jahan's grief, the notion of his undying love for his wife apparently as- sumed its present guidebook form sometime in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, during the heyday of Romanticism when emotion and intense feel- ings were exalted as ends in themselves. Over the cen- turies, Shah Jahan's reputation as a devoted husband has increased to the point that it is sometimes claimed that he remained sexually faithful to his deceased wife for the rest of his life. Since he lived to be seventy-four, this would make a grand total of some thirty-five years of supposed celibacy! In 1658

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1 Taj Mahal and its garden, Agra, begun 1632 The Myth of the Taj Mahal and a New Theory of Its Symbolic Meaning* Wayne E. Begley The Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore called it a "teardrop on the cheek of time"; world- traveler Eleanor Roosevelt felt that its white marble "symbolizes the purity of real love." Both writers shared the rather widespread romantic notion that the Taj Mahal (Fig. 1), the vast mausoleum built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (1592-1666) for his wife Mumtaz Mahal (1593-1631), is a noble embodiment of * This article is essentially the documented text of a lecture, pre- sented at various museums and universities over the past two years, that summarizes material to be dealt with at greater length in a forthcoming monograph on the symbolism of the Taj Mahal and its inscriptional program. The major portion of the research was accomplished during 1975-76, as part of a larger study of Mughal architecture during the reign of Shah Jahan, under a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The nu- cleus of the interpretation presented here was contained in a paper entitled "The Taj Mahal as a Symbolic Replica of the Throne of God," which I read at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the College Art Association of America, Washington, D.C. (January, 1975). The list of institutions and individuals who have facilitated my research is too lengthy to be included on this occasion, but I am especially grateful to Professor Richard Ettinghausen and numerous other dis- tinguished specialists in Islamic art who have been extremely generous from the outset in their responses to my persistent queries, but who of course are not responsible for the views ex- pressed here. Due to the unavailability of the type, the diacritical signs for certain Arabic and Persian letters have been omitted. Photographs are by the author unless otherwise indicated. N.B. A bibliography of sources, cited by author in the notes, follows this article.

Source: TOI

...and I am Sid Harth