LOVE MYTH: TAJ MAHAL WAS MEANT FOR SHAH JAHAN TOO
Vipul
Singh
Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Delhi, Delhi 110007.
Email:
vipulsingh.history@gmail.com
The Taj Mahal has always been in news for its mesmerizing beauty, and a symbol of love. Whenever a foreign dignitary visits India, he would go to the monument’s famous platform to get photographed with his partner. Recent few days have brought the shrine to lime light for wrong reasons. The politically motivated groups are propelling the mythical stories as historical reality. As a child when I first visited the monument with my parents in late eighties, the tourist guide would tell us with routinely certainty that after the completion of the beautiful Taj Mahal, its builder Shah Jahan (1592-1666) got the hands of the labourers chopped off so that they could not contribute in the construction of a matching beauty in future. The second claim by the guide was that it had been constructed in the memory of his beloved queen Mumtaz Mahal (1593-1631) by the Mughal emperor.
Let us try to understand the first common theory, which insinuates that the hands of the artisans were cut. No one would imagine that this kind of shoddy narrative would be used one day to claim with authenticity that thousands of Hindu labourers sacrificed their lives because of the coercion of a powerful Mughal emperor. As a practitioner of history I have no objection to the use of the term Hindu labourers. It is quite possible that majority of the non-Islamic subjects from the surrounding region of Agra were employed to work under the guidance of the master craftsmen and engineers. The huge amount of Persian influence suggests that many of these master craftsmen came from Iran. The problem arises when one tends to qualify such term with sacrifice. The historical documents would suggest that the monarchs from ancient and medieval past undertook such construction projects to generate employment among the non-agrarian population. It was one way of redistributing the surplus that the rulers accumulated from land revenue and war booty. Apart from that, the splendid monuments were also symbols of authority. The huge number of temples constructed in dravida, nagara and Vesara styles were not possible without massive use of human and animal labour. The gigantic Vimana and gopuram of South Indian temples, the large pillared verandas of the Hoysalesvara temple, and the beautiful carvings on the exterior of high sikhara of Khajuraho temples were not possible without material prosperity and massive use of the accessible workforce. So the use of paid workers was a common characteristic in yester years, and it is true in the case of the Taj Mahal as well.
For
Shah Jahan, the Taj Mahal was only an early major project, and after this
he went on to construct the Peacock
throne for himself, a new capital city
Shahjahanbad or the Lal Quila and Jama Masjid. It is hard to believe
that a builder like him would kill the
goose that laid golden egg. Further, none of the historical documents suggest of such ghastly measure
against the artisans, who contributed in
the construction of the Taj. An English traveller, Peter Mundy, who visited
Agra in 1632 informs us that the
construction of the mausoleum was in full swing with ‘excessive labour and cost’. He also writes
in his account that huge amount of
marble was being used. The work at the mausoleum had already started in
1631. The French traveller Tavernier was
witness to the construction of the mausoleum
and its completion “with heavy expenditure and use of some twenty
thousand workers”. Later, another French
traveller Francois Bernier, who visited the Mughal court in the later half of the seventeenth
century, praised the astonishing work of
architecture by the Mughals. The myth of hand cutting must have cropped
up in later centuries in order to give
weight to the love myth.
TAJ
MAHAL FOR WHOM?
It is generally believed that the term Taj Mahal is actually a derivative of Mumtaz Mahal , wife of Shah Jahan. Mumtaz Mahal was originally named Arjumand Banu Begum who was married to Shah Jahan in 1612. She always accompanied the emperor in his campaigns, and was supposedly the closest to Shah Jahan among his many queens. She died at Burhanpur in June 1631. A popular legend recorded in the early nineteenth century Persian text of Qasim Ali Afridi suggests that at the time of her death when she gave birth to Shah Jahan’s fourteenth child, the emperor promised to construct a mausoleum for her “which was not to be found anywhere else”. For the time being Mumtaz’s body was kept on the bank of the Tapti river at a garden called Jainabad. A plot of land was demarcated as a suitable location to the south of Agra city on the bank of the Yamuna river. The land belonged to Raja Jai singh, the grandson of Raja Man Singh. The emperor purchased from Raja Jai Singh the entire plot along with the house and gave him four houses in the city of Agra. The body of Mumtaz Mahal was taken to Agra in December 1631 and was kept in a small building before being shifted to the mausoleum. However, the work of the Taj Mahal continued for many more years and it was finally completed in 1642.
Shah
Jahan did not wish to live in Agra anymore, and so within few years began
the construction of another city called
Shahjahanbad (Delhi). He lived there till 1657,
when he fell ill and his son Aurangzeb imprisoned him in Agra fort. From
there he used to watch the Taj Mahal
across the Yamuna. In 1666 Shah Jahan died and his body was buried next to Mumtaz Mahal in the
mausoleum under the floor of the central
dome. From the positioning of Shah Jahan’s cenotaph it appears as if it
was a later decision to accommodate him
as well in the mausoleum. The cenotaph of
Shah Jahan is the only disharmony in the impeccably symmetrical planning
in the central dome. Even Travernier
mentions in his travel account that Shah Jahan
during his lifetime had begun to build his own tomb on the other side of
the Yamuna. However, the war with his
sons interrupted his plans. This has led
historians to argue that the Taj Mahal was only meant for Mumtaz Mahal,
and was thus a perfect symbol of love.
It was a common practice to place wife's cenotaph in the exact center if she died earlier than the
husband. The bodies were buried with
faces towards Mecca and legs towards the south. The grave of a husband
was always placed on the right side.
This is also evident in Itmadudaula's tomb of Agra, wherein the cenotaph of Asmat Begum is in the
exact center, and that of Mirza Ghiyas
Beg (Nurjahan's father) is placed asymmetrically on the right side. The asymmetry in Itmadudaula is not very apparent
because the cenotaphs there are not
enclosed by screens. In the Taj Mahal the two cenotaphs are enclosed by
the screen and the passage inside the
enclosed area gets blocked by the positioning of Shah Jahan. So it is because of the presence
of the screen that the asymmetry is so
noticeable. It is quite possible that the screen would have been a later
day erection.
The love myth is based on the official historical account of Abdul Hamid Lahawri. He wrote in Badshah Namah that Shah Jahan was so grieved by death of his beloved that his beard turned white and he did not come out of his chamber for a week. Later foreign travellers of the seventeenth century like Travernier and Bernier also worked on the same theory of undying love. Bernier was so influenced by the mausoleum’s symbolic beauty that he believed it “deserves much more to be numbered among the wonders of the world than the pyramid”. Later writings also started writing about Shah Jahan as the exemplar of devotion who maintained bachelordom for the next thirty-five years of his life. These claims perhaps stemmed from the overstated description given in Badshah Namah. Shah Jahan’s political and courtly activities after Mumtaz Mahal’s death, specially after he moved to Delhi does not support these claims of an affectionate husband in grief for life. He proved to be much matured and intense ruler during the later part of his reign.
After reading the historical sources more critically I would argue that Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal also for his own burial. Travernier’s statement that Shah Jahan had planned another mausoleum for himself is not corroborated by any other contemporary account. Secondly, it is difficult to believe that a ruler who was such a prolific builder would have been ineffective in constructing his own tomb. It was a common practice among the Mughal emperors to build their own tomb in their lifetime. Humayun was not able to do that because of his sudden death from the fall of library building. So his wife Hamida Banu Begum later constructed his tomb. His contemporary Afghan ruler Sher Shah also got his tomb constructed at Sasaram during his lifetime. Akbar too had already planned and designed his mausoleum in Sikandara that was later completed by his son Jahangir. Following these traditions Shah Jahan too had planned something for himself. The very fact that he never erected an independent tomb for himself during his long reign is also a proof that he always understood the Taj Mahal to be a magnificent and gorgeous edifice for his own burial. After all, the complex was the result of his assimilation of more than hundred years of architectural evolution that the Mughal empire had witnessed. From Babur’s char bag to hasht bihist and double dome concept of Humayun’s tomb it was the culmination of various architectural marvels.
The
common belief that the word Taj is a shorter version of Mumtaz Mahal is doubtful. Taj Mahal consists of two Persian
words Taj and Mahal, the literal meaning
of which is “Crown Palace”. In fact, the tomb is mentioned in the
contemporary account as rauza-i
munauwara. Further, the repeated references in the engravings on the walls of the Taj Mahal to the Garden
of Eden in all the inscriptions, and
verses relating to Throne of God are suggestive of the fact that Shah
Jahan imagined the monument to be his
own.