The Taj Mahal India – Enduring Masterpiece

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The Taj Mahal India is famous as an enduring monument to love and Shah Jahan’s real intention was to create a monument that would be unrivalled in beauty and grandeur and to leave an enduring legacy, a masterpiece for the ages to come, to assure his place in history and his immortality. His objectives were superlatively achieved.

In the words of his court historian Muhammad Amin Qazwini " It will be a masterpiece for ages to come, increasing the amazement of all humanity."

The Taj Mahal was the ideal vehicle for his ambition and Shah Jahan set about planning and constructing it with utmost deliberation, taking six months alone to make his final selection of the site on which it would stand..

The prevailing fashion in the royal capital, Agra, at the time was to convert river-front havelis into garden tombs. The noblemen were erecting these to evade the property laws which decreed that a haveli would revert to the state after the noble's death.

Shah Jahan had two aims, firstly to construct the largest mausoleum in the world and the complex he designed was almost a kilometre long. Secondly, his aim was to produce a masterpiece of classical symmetry. He succeeded in both. Every element in the tomb complex played a vital role in its composition. Take away even one element from it and the whole harmony is destroyed.

Shah Jahan took great care to ensure that his Taj would be an enduring monument that would last forever. Contemporary sources have recorded how wood-lined wells were sunk into the ground to replace the sand with gravel and concrete to reinforce the foundations of the building. So well did he succeed at erecting a building that could withstand earthquakes and floods that today conservationists are amazed by its extraordinary stability.

The Taj Mahal was constructed using materials from all over India and Asia. More than 1,000 elephants were used to transport building materials during the construction. The translucent white marble was brought from Rajasthan, the jasper from Punjab and the jade and crystal from China. The turquoise was from Tibet and the Lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, while the sapphire came from Sri Lanka and the carnelian from Arabia. In all, 28 types of precious and semi-precious stones were inlaid into the white marble.

Then there is the extraordinary appeal the Taj makes to our senses. Shah Jahan had the entire tomb faced in white marble, so that every hour, as the sun moves across the sky, the light changes the colour of the marble. Before dawn, it is a pearly grey, which quickly turns to pink as the sun rises. In the mid-day sun it is a dazzling white which turns to fiery gold as the sunsets.

The Taj is a seamless fusion of many different architectural traditions. There is the Hindu concept adapted from the vaastu shastras of using only two colours: brahmanical white and kshatriya red.

With this Shah Jahan was declaring that the Mughals were the new brahmins and kshatriyas of India. Then there's the European pietra dura work that surpasses in its ingenious crafting the original from Italy. Finally, the Islamic elements.

One of the most interesting discoveries to be unearthed is that the original plans included a caravenserai— four open-air squares, where travellers could pitch their tents and unhitch their animals, and surrounded by arcades of shops. This must be the only monument anywhere in the world of its age to have had this facility for visitors. The plan being to use the revenue from the shops to finance the upkeep of the Taj Mahal India.