Tags:
Journalism of Courage
The Complete Taj Mahal
by Ebba Koch
Koch, professor of art history at the University of Vienna, has worked on Mughal monuments for three decades and has studied the Taj Mahal for 10 years. Her book, published a year ago, is a comprehensive introduction to every building in the Taj complex and amounts to a guided tour through its gardens. To properly depict the making of the monument, she recreates the Agra of Shahjahan’s time, and traces the making of its design and construction. All of this comes lavishly illustrated with photographs and drawings. Also recommended as a backgrounder is Koch’s earlier book, Mughal Architecture and Imperial Ideology.
A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time
by Diana Preston and Michael Preston
Oxford historians Diana (previously author of a splendid history of the race to develop the atomic bomb) and Michael Preston put the Taj Mahal in the context of the Mughal dynasty. They begin with Babar’s exploits and connect the personal sagas of his descendants with various facets of the Mughal rule. Also, in this telling, the story of Shahjahan and Mumtaz Mahal turns out to be somewhat less romantic than what guides at Agra would have visitors believe. The Prestons explore the local, European and Persian influences in the design and architecture of the Taj, and the extraordinary human labour that went into its more than two-decade-long construction period. The title, incidentally, comes from a description by Rabindranath Tagore.
The Moonlight Garden
by Elizabeth Moynihan
The Moonlight Garden, or Mahtab Bagh, refers to the development across the river from the Taj Mahal. For long, it was speculated that Shahjahan had plans for construction across the Yamuna. Moynihan — an expert at Persian and Mughal gardens — led a long research project, and concluded that, contrary to unsubstantiated belief that the emperor had envisioned his own tomb on the site (the so-called black Taj casting a shadow on his marble wonder), Mahtab Bagh was in fact designed as a pleasure garden. Basing her conclusions on satellite imagery, excavations and plant analysis, Moynihan presents a picture of what was a wondrous composite plan for the Taj complex, with the river itself becoming part of the compound. She writes: “This plan of the Taj transcends all others as the vision of paradise on earth, Shahjahan’s own cosmic diagram.” Incidentally, on the idea of a mirror Taj across the river, some believe that it did not refer to the plan for a tomb in the Moonlight Garden, but to the planned reflection of the white Taj in a large pool. The recent discovery of what are believed to be signature etchings of artisans who worked at the site add magic to all this speculation.
