LORD CURZON served as viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905. One of the accomplishments of which he was proudest was the preservation and restoration of India’s ancient monuments during his watch and with his active participation. And of none was he prouder than those in Agra—first and foremost, his beloved Taj Mahal (see Pl. 16). “If I had never done anything else in India, I have written my name here [in Agra],” he declared in 1905, “and the letters are a living joy.”1 Today’s visitors to the Taj are apt to be so transfixed by the mausoleum itself that they remember little of the gardens, but this was far from the intent of its creators; for the Mughals, the garden setting was as important a statement as the tomb itself. “Restoration” is at best a slippery term, all the more so when applied to as ephemeral an art form as a garden. What did Curzon know of classic Mughal garden forms and to what extent did he set out to replicate them faithfully? If literal authenticity was not his goal, what sort of a garden did he aim to re-create, and why? While the viceroy’s project was undoubtedly a labor of love, it was as freighted with imperial implications as Shah Jahan’s original monument to his beloved wife.
At the same time, too, the restoration of the gardens of the Taj set the pattern for landscaping other Indian monuments.
The Taj Restored
Curzon had first fallen in love with the Taj on a visit to the East in 1887–88. Writing to his friend St. John Brodrick, he could scarcely contain his enthusiasm: “The Taj is incomparable, designed like a palace and finished like a jewel—a snow-white emanation starting from a bed of cypresses and backed by a turquoise sky, pure, perfect and unutterably lovely. One feels the same sensation as in gazing at a beautiful woman, one who has that mixture of loveliness and sadness which is essential to the highest beauty.” In the same letter, he added, “I stood there and gazed long upon the entrancing spectacle, the singular loveliness of it pouring in waves over my soul and flooding my inner consciousness till the cup of satiety was full, and I had to shut my eyes and pause and think.”2
So taken with the Taj was the young traveler that he devoted fourteen pages of his diary to it, viewing the monument in the early morning light, in the waning gleam of evening, and “under the full effulgence of the moon.” He rhapsodized that it was “the most beautiful building raised by human hands in the world,” adding that it is “difficult to exaggerate the extent to which the beauty of the garden contributes to and enhances that of the Taj. Alone it would be one of the loveliest gardens anywhere to be seen, being divided into numerous parterres, and detached lawns & plots, planted with brilliant flowers & shrubs, and gloriously shaded by the foliage of ancestral and umbrageous trees.” Remarkably, he found the Taj in “perfect condition,” as “free from blemish or defect as the day on which it was completed.” Whatever damage the years had wrought, he observed, had been “studiously repaired . . . under the watchful supervision of the British government,” which had spent several lakhs (hundreds of thousands) of rupees on its preservation, so that “we are able to gaze in its perfection upon the most perfect structure in the world.”3 Over and over he finds no other word to express his admiration but “perfect.”
Curzon made three more trips to India before becoming viceroy, visiting the great monuments of the subcontinent. Small wonder, then, that their restoration became from the first an imperative of his administration. Small wonder, too, that he should have retreated to the tomb garden of the Taj Mahal one last time before leaving India under a cloud in l905: “I have learned to love this place more than any other spot in India. Here it is always peaceful and always beautiful.”4
The actual work of restoring the Taj and its gardens was entrusted to the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), but Curzon subjected its officials to a steady stream of directives. The mausoleum itself required little work except for the crypt, which had been despoiled of much of its inlay work during the Uprising of 1857,5 but the viceroy had clear ideas about what needed to be done with the gardens and with the “dusty wastes and . . . squalid bazaar” outside the Taj Ganj, the main entrance to the complex. “A beautiful park takes their place; and the group of mosques and tombs, the arcaded streets and grassy courts that precede the main building are once more as nearly as possible what they were when completed by the masons of Shah Jahan” (Fig. 36). He made the same claims to authenticity with the garden itself: “Every building in the garden enclosure of the Taj has been scrupulously repaired, and the discovery of old plans has enabled us to restore the water-channels and flower-beds of the garden more exactly to their original state.”6 The reference to “old plans” seems to be to the one drawn up in 1828 under the supervision of Colonel J. A. Hodgson, surveyor-general of India, but this is quite schematic and does not provide any detail about the plantings (Fig. 37). Curzon was familiar with François Bernier’s valuable but incomplete description of the Taj garden in 1663 (discussed later in this chapter), nearly contemporary with its creation, as well as with the 1844 account of the British officer William Sleeman, for we find him citing both in debating the fine points of parterres of flowers and avenues of cypresses with Sir Antony MacDonnell, the lieutenant governor of the United Provinces, within whose jurisdiction Agra lay. At one point the exasperated official exclaims “I wish [Bernier] had told us what flowers were grown.”7 Curzon’s proclaimed mantra was “to restore nothing that had not already existed, and to put up nothing absolutely new.”8 Did he in fact practice what he preached?
Fig. 36. Taj Ganj
[Photograph by Jim Glickman]
Fig. 37. Col. J. A. Hodgson’s plan of the mausoleum and garden of the Taj Mahal
[Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1843]
As far as architecture and its accoutrements were concerned, he and his lieutenants score high marks, except for the blatant example of the “Saracenic” lamp he commissioned in Cairo to hang above the crypt within the tomb and the “Mogul” uniforms decreed for the custodians of the site.9 But the Taj garden was quite another matter. It has been “very capriciously treated in the past,” he declared, “and what is wanted is continuity of treatment and artistic lines.”10 In consequence, “Agra . . . knew the fearful joy of five Viceregal inspections in six years,” and after every visit, Curzon bombarded the ASI with instructions, micromanaging their restoration down to the last cypress tree and flower pot.11 Already in December 1899, he wrote:
I expressed a wish that the cypresses should be replanted, not, as before, at the sides or edges of the beds on either side of the stone causeway, nor in the two rows on each side, but in a single row on either side, the trees being placed in the middle of the beds. Thus there will be a single cypress avenue framing the Taj at the end. The garish English flowers which now fill these beds should be removed, and suitable dark shrubs or plants should be planted round the base of the cypresses. On either side of the central tank trellised archways have been made, the sides of which consist of red sandstone blocks standing on end, and the roof of creepers trained on wires. A visitor to the Taj, subsequent to my tour, told me that it was in contemplation to remove these. This should not be done. I never even hinted at their removal, and they are pretty, even if not very correct.12
So the barrage of memos continued: “I think the removal of the flowers and the substitution of simple grass in the plots bordering the water-channel in the Taj is an improvement; but I think the cypresses are planted too thickly”; after a subsequent visit, the approving comment: “The Taj and its gardens were looking more beautiful than I have ever seen them; the green of the lawns was superb.”13 Nevertheless, adjustments were still needed: keep the cypresses as they are, he advised, with two instead of one in the longer beds, but they do seem small—isn’t it possible to find larger ones? When MacDonnell appeared to look askance at Curzon’s liberties, the viceroy bristled and the governor hastily retreated, assuring him that “the changes are all for the better” and that in his opinion “the present arrangement of a greensward is infinitely to be preferred [to that described by Bernier].”14 Even as his term of office wound down, Curzon was still fiddling with the palms and debating whether more large trees should be removed to open up the view, as well as what to do with the quadrangles outside the gateway. His general principle seemed to be: when in doubt, plant grassy lawns, then decide whether shrubs or flowers should be added.
As the work neared completion, J. H. Marshall, chosen by Curzon as director general of the ASI, proclaimed with satisfaction: “The Taj Mahal, in particular, with its gardens and surrounding buildings, can hardly have looked more effective in the days of the Mogul Emperors than it does now.” Echoing Curzon, he noted that “squalid bazaars have been cleared away from its gates, the colonnades flanking its approach have been opened out and repaired, and the untidy quadrangle that precedes its main entrance has been converted into a well grassed and peaceful court. Within the precinct of the tomb itself the gardens with their watercourses, fountains and flowerbeds have been restored more exactly to their original condition, and the stately mosque and jawab [guest house] have been structurally repaired and beautified by the renovation of their encrusted ornaments and sculptured panels.”15
And yet Marshall himself acknowledged a different yardstick with regard to gardens as opposed to architecture. In his Conservation Manual (1923) he insisted that although it was important “to preserve the essential character of the original” in restoring Indian gardens, “it is not necessary to attempt to reproduce with pedantic accuracy the original appearance of the garden in all its particulars”—it was perfectly all right to substitute modern varieties of roses, for example, or “a far more beautiful lawn of grass” for “the old fashioned Indian beaten earth.” In the final resort, “archaeological officers should therefore endeavor to observe the happy mean between antiquarian accuracy on the one hand and aesthetic beauty on the other.”16
In truth, the garden was profoundly altered at the hands of the Curzonites. Before the restorations, it was much more densely shaded, it contained many more flowers, it was full of exotic fragrances, and it produced bountiful crops of fruits for the market. In 1792 the garden contained “thousands of orange trees, with their ripe fruit upon them,” and a fortunate visitor was able to make his camp in this “grove of perfumes.”17 Fanny Parks, visiting the Taj forty years later, extolled the beauty of the gardens and the fine old trees. She noted that when the fountains were playing “of an evening . . . the odour of exotic flowers is on the air, the fall of the water has a delightful effect both on the eye and ear,” and commented that “the produce in fruit is very valuable.”18 Or, as Edward Lear exclaimed in 1874: “What a garden! What flowers!” concluding simply, “The garden is indescribable.”19
We can also illustrate the appearance of the gardens before and after Curzon visually. William Hodges was the first British artist to paint the Taj in 1783 (Fig. 38). He was followed six years later by Thomas and William Daniell (uncle and nephew) (Fig. 39). In both renderings the Taj is framed by dense foliage, partially blocking the view of the minarets and completely obscuring the mosque and jawabs flanking the mausoleum. In the foreground the clear water channel and its bordering walks lead the viewer’s eye directly to the monument; Hodges’ vantage point is closer to the Taj and, unlike the Daniells’ versions, does not show the raised chabutra at the intersection of the waterways with its fountains.20 The Daniells published a small book to accompany their prints of the “Taje,” which includes a plan by James Newton. This lists beds of flowers along both the north–south and east–west channels of water, that is, within the lozenge-shaped parterres, while simply labeling the main squares as “gardens.” The text refers to gardens “intersected with canals, paved walks, and avenues of umbrageous trees of various kinds; embellished likewise with alcoves, fountains, pavilions, &c. and interspersed with all the beauties of Flora.”21 A watercolor illustration entitled The Taj Mahal with European Sightseers from an Indian manuscript of about 1815 is more fanciful in its depiction of dense bushes, trees, and flowers. In Edward Lear’s own watercolor of 1874, the Taj is an almost fairylike apparition at the end of lines of shrubs and tall cypresses dissolving into masses of dark woods. When the celebrated illustrator Marianne North visited the Taj in 1877, she chose an angle that emphasizes even more the exuberance of the bosky growth that blocks out the view of everything except the dome and minarets (see Pl. 17).22
Fig. 38. William Hodges, The Taj Mahal, c. 1783.
Gray wash and graphite on laid paper
[Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection]
Fig. 39. Thomas and William Daniell, The Taje Mahel, Agra,
Taken in the Garden, 1789.
Aquatint
[The British Library Board, P 395]
Fig. 40. The Taj Mahal at Agra, 1880s. Curzon Collection, photographer unknown
[The British Library Board, Photo 430/5(23)]
By the late 1850s the new art of photography reached India, and from then on there are abundant black-and-white illustrations of the Taj. A photograph from Curzon’s own collection dated to the 1880s was probably made during his first visit to the monument.23 Taken from a raised point in the gateway, it shows masses of foliage that would have almost obscured the mausoleum when seen from ground level (Fig. 40). Nevertheless, this was the view that inspired such ecstasy on the part of the future viceroy.
Fig. 41. The Taj Mahal Agra, general view. Archaeological Survey of India, 1918–19
[The British Library Board, Photo 1007/16(3890)]
Little more than a decade later, however, Curzon set out to turn the Mughal garden into an English park, with a low avenue of cypresses and shrubs leading the eye along the primary, north–south water channel to the mausoleum, and above all with large expanses of lawn dotted with occasional trees and only modest beds of flowers, primarily roses (Fig. 41).24 To be sure, the garden as he found it in 1899 was no longer the garden laid out by Shah Jahan, since the trees and shrubs had grown with tropical abandon—the poet Edwin Arnold referred to it as an “orderly wilderness”—barely kept in check, it appears, by the legions of gardeners.25 While we do not know exactly what the original garden looked like, we can reconstruct its main outlines with reasonable certainty from what is known of other Mughal gardens, from contemporary miniature paintings, and from descriptions and plans recorded by European visitors.
The Mughal Garden
Mughal gardens in India, as we have seen, were always walled. The basic plan was that of the Persian charbagh or quadripartite garden. These were strictly geometric, laid out on a grid, divided literally into four parts or multiples of four; in the case of the Taj, there are four main squares each subdivided into four.26 Water channels run at right angles, marking off the main divisions and meeting in a large tank in the center. Symbolically this layout invokes the garden of Paradise as described in Qur’an, with its intersecting rivers. Water is paramount in the design of the Taj as in all Mughal gardens, with lotus blossom–shaped fountains playing the length of the main canal. In the Taj garden a large stone platform (chabutra) rises at the confluence of the canals, around which runs the water channel; there are also chabutras on the east and west sides of the garden. Such raised platforms and pavilions were the social center of the Mughal garden. Here a ruler could entertain his guests, refreshed by the cool spray of the fountains and inhaling the perfumes of the garden. Scenes of pavilions spread with carpets were a beloved staple of Mughal miniature painters. They display an antiphony of art and nature: rugs depicted gardens, gardens invited rugs, and miniatures depicted both rugs and gardens.
The main walks of the Mughal garden were lined with trees, especially alternating cypresses and fruit trees, symbolizing life, death, and rebirth. The walks were always raised well above the channels of water and above the parterres planted with turf, flowers, and often a flowering tree at the corner. Looking down on the blossoms from above was like looking down on a floral carpet. Writing some twenty or more years after the garden was completed, François Bernier, the French physician who attended Aurangzeb, describes the main walk of the Taj as about eight French feet (about 2.5 meters, or 8.2 English feet) above the garden and so wide as to admit six coaches abreast (surely an exaggeration). It runs on either side of a canal “ornamented with fountains placed at certain intervals.” To the left and right there were further pathways “covered with trees and many parterres full of flowers.”27 The East India Company agent, Peter Mundy, visiting the gardens of Agra even earlier (1632–33), notes that they are square, and then “againe devided into other lesser squares, and that into other like beds and plots; in some, little groves of trees, as Apple trees . . . , Orange Trees, Mulberrie trees, etts. Mango trees, Caco [cocoanut] trees, Plantan trees, theis latter in rancks, as are the Cipresse trees.” Among the flowers to be found in the squares, Mundy lists roses, marigolds, poppies, carnations, and “divers other sortes of faire flowers which we knowe not in our parts, many growinge on prettie trees, all watered by hand in tyme of drought which is 9 monethes of the Yeare.”28
The repertoire of flowers would also have included tuberoses, balsam, cockscomb, anemones, violets, and sunflowers, as well as the aromatics referred to in the Mughal chronicles. Sometimes homogeneous groups of flowers were massed together in a single parterre beneath a cypress or plane tree. Not surprisingly, flowers and trees were a favorite subject of Mughal artists as well as of poets, just as floral designs would dominate the decoration of the Taj Mahal. Mughal artists show us how bursts of flowers softened the strict geometry of a garden’s layout: “Spring flowers grow informally from the exact turf plot, roses spray over the water-tanks, trees branch in their natural forms. The intellectual concept of the geometric order is wedded to the freedom of organic growth.”29
The Mughal garden was intended to appeal to all the senses, but most of all to the sense of smell, with its fragrant trees, shrubs, and plants. Referring to one of the Babur’s gardens, a contemporary chronicler burst into verse: “Sweet basil and fragrant hyacinth are in embrace with each other, / Rose flowers and Jasmine are shoulder to shoulder.”30 Emperor Jahangir declared: “From the point of view of herbs and fragrant flowers, India is preferable to anywhere else in the inhabited part of the world.” The blossoms of one champa (white jasmine), he claimed “could perfume a whole garden.”31 The A’in-i Akbari, a compendium of everything imaginable related to the Emperor Akbar’s household, listed twenty-one “fine smelling flowers,” along with directions for making perfume.32 In 1640 the Portuguese priest Fray Manrique strolled through the gardens of the Agra fort: “I saw several trees exhaling the sweetest odour and laden with many and varied flowers, whose sweetness fell most pleasingly on the sense of smell of all who entered.”33 When it came to scent, artists and poets could not match nature itself.
Curzon, to be sure, kept the core plan of the walled garden with its quadrants outlined by the channels of water with their lines of lotus-shaped fountains. But where the Mughal garden would have had patches of green, especially clover, with an overlay of flowers—the flowers and turf that give the impression of a carpet to the viewer on the raised walkway—and low fruit trees clearly marking off the corners of the quadrants,34 the walkways now are only slightly raised and one looks down primarily on carpets of grass. Gone are the perfumes that delighted visitors from Peter Mundy in the 1630s to Fanny Parks two centuries later, the fruit trees with their abundance, the cacophony of birds, and the splashes of floral brilliance. The effect is to preserve the Mughal plan, exaggerating the rigidity of its geometry, without the softening effects of thicker plantings. As one writer comments, the seventeenth-century garden, “densely planted with beds of flowers and trees of different varieties, . . . must have had a greater sense of intimacy as well as greater color.”35 True, the new openness favors “endless beautiful views of the marble dome, the marble walls, and the marble minarets” but with the loss of the multisensory exuberance of the original.36
The reconstruction of the Taj Ganj, the entryway to the Taj Mahal, further alters the experience of the whole. Contemporary documents and the plan of 1800 make clear that the forecourt and series of serais and bazaars beyond it were intended as an integral part of Mumtazabad, the urban center at the heart of which was the tomb of Mumtaz Mahal. The forecourt or jilokhana provided a place for the faithful—rich and poor—to gather to observe the anniversary of the empress’s death, the ‘Urs.37 Even in the 1830s Fanny Parks reported that the court was still used regularly for fairs, including the Muslim festival of Eid.38 The gateway looks both backward and forward, bounding this public space and framing the view of the Taj. An unbroken line of sight stretches more than nine hundred yards along the main water channel, which itself is much wider than those of earlier Mughal gardens (as Bernier suggests) and allows for the reflection of the entire edifice in its shimmering water. The garden lies at a lower level than either the Taj Ganj or the mausoleum. The eye of the visitor is drawn along the watercourse to the raised marble reflecting pool in the center, following the rows of cypresses and the star-shaped parterres in which they are set.
In dismissing the Taj Ganj as little more than an Augean stable to be cleared as quickly as possible in order to focus on what really mattered, Curzon essentially decontextualized the monument, isolating the Taj from its original surroundings. John Dixon Hunt has emphasized the importance of the entrance to any garden: ideally, it fosters the “liminal” experience of “entering a special zone.”39 This was no doubt what Curzon himself aimed for in clearing the Taj Ganj, but he projected his own aesthetic perspective on the experience. The quite different purpose of Shah Jahan’s builders was beyond his comprehension—that they very much intended the privileged visitor to enter from the noisy, dusty, bustling public space of bazaar and caravanserai, and then abruptly to be transported into a private world, a realm of quiet, the solemnity of the garden tomb as a foretaste of the Paradise promised to the faithful by the Qur’an.
Gardens and Empires
So much for the changes. The gardens as they once were and as they became under Curzon’s guiding, even autocratic, hand offer clues to different visions of empire. For the Mughals gardens came first, historically speaking, followed by architecture, rather than the other way around. Much as the garden was a center of conviviality, it also played a highly political role. Armies camped in gardens; rulers were proclaimed in gardens; state visitors were received there with pomp and circumstance; Sufi poets declaimed their verses and musicians played their airs to the delectation of the elite. In the always separate zenana garden, the women of the court led a parallel but secluded existence. Under successive Mughal emperors the trend was toward increasing magnificence and complexity, mirroring the same evolution in government and imperial pretensions.
The progression began with Babur, the Mughal conqueror of India, hailed as the “Prince of Gardeners.”40 So great was his delight in gardens that he founded them wherever he went despite a life of constant warfare—legend had it that he would even pause in the midst of military campaigns to stake out gardens.41 “He converted the world into a rose garden,” commented a later Mughal chronicler.42 A miniature depicts him dictating his memoirs in a garden,43 a detail we may accept as metaphorically if not literally true. Another shows him directing work on the Garden of Fidelity in Kabul (see Pl. 18). When he first came to Agra, he wrote, “[I] scouted around for places to build a garden, but everywhere I looked was so unpleasant and desolate that I crossed back [over the Yamuni] in great disgust.” Unpromising as the place was, however, “there was nothing to do but work with the space we had,” and so he did.44
For Babur, always on the move, gardens marked out extensions of territorial control, imposing an alien sense of order on the landscape. Religious symbolism, however, was little emphasized.45 Explicit associations of gardens with Paradise appeared only during the reign of his son, Humayun (1530–1556). Obsessed with mysticism and religious symbolism, Humayun had few opportunities to translate these into gardens before being forced into a life of exile.46 In situating his father’s tomb in a garden, Humayun’s son Jahangir combined associations of sovereignty, manifest in Babur’s gardens, with statements of dynasty and its claims to permanence.47 The garden was not conceived of as public space, just as government was not a public matter. It was imperial space, accessible only to the ruler, his court, and distinguished visitors. Nobles emulated the ruler by building their own gardens on a lesser scale, as a representation of their place in the imperial hierarchy. Where Babur had enjoyed the pure sensuality of his gardens—the luscious fruits and the exquisite blossoms—his great-grandson Shah Jahan, ruling a century later, was far more preoccupied with their symbolism, both political and religious, and with matching them to an imperial architecture. Indeed, Shah Jahan’s reign (1628–1658) marked the apogee of imperial pretensions.
True to his Mughal ancestry, the emperor’s gardens became a favored canvas for expressing this ideology—one writer refers to Shah Jahan’s “flowermania.”48 A curious example of this: When Shah Jahan arrived in Srinagar in Kashmir in April 1640, he was disappointed to find that storms and heavy rain had destroyed all the almond blossoms he had looked forward so eagerly to seeing. But he took comfort in an iris plant in the garden on which he counted 212 flowers, both open and still in bud. The day before he had gloried in a red rosebush in the Shalimar gardens on which there were no fewer than 4,500 flowers and buds.49 Of course, this is imperial hyperbole, but what is truly surprising is that the official chronicler of the emperor’s reign deemed these tales worth recounting.
Although Babur himself wished only to be buried in a garden, his grave open to the skies, tomb building was part of the Timurid heritage of the Mughal dynasty. It is generally agreed that Humayun’s tomb in Delhi provided the immediate model for the Taj Mahal as for other great Mughal tombs. Begun by his eldest widow after his death in 1560, it is the earliest Mughal garden plan that has survived without alteration: a classic Persian charbagh or four-part garden, in this case enlarged and divided by causeways so that there are thirty-two smaller plots or parterres (Fig. 42). Future tomb gardens would gradually widen its narrow rills of water until at the Taj Mahal the waterways are eighteen feet across.50 How the parterres were planted we do not know, but we can imagine that, like other contemporary gardens, they were dotted with fruit trees and flowers according to the season.
Fig. 42. Humayun’s tomb, Delhi, c. 1820. Opaque watercolor on paper
[The British Library Board, Ms.Add.or.1809]
Rulers and notables often designed their tombs during their lifetimes, enjoying the pleasures of the gardens while they lived. Then after their death a mausoleum replaced the pavilion at the center of the garden. The suddenness of Mumtaz Mahal’s death at a relatively young age made this sequence impossible; her funerary garden was thus intended less to evoke the delights of this life than of the one to come. The architect of the Taj, however, introduced a radical innovation, one for which there was no precedent: The mausoleum is set not in the middle of the garden at the confluence of the water channels but at the far end, at the river’s edge on a marble plinth, itself set on a raised sandstone platform. There are four freestanding minarets at the four corners of the tomb, and, flanking it, a mosque on the left and an almost identical building on the right, the jawab or guesthouse.
The positioning of the tomb at the end of the garden achieves several effects. First of all, it emphasizes the garden in all its forty-two-acre majesty, not just as setting for the tomb. Further, it shapes the visitor’s experience of the architecture: as one progresses through the garden, the tomb itself appears to change, at first rising ethereally in the distance and then looming larger and larger as one approaches the plinth on which it sits. Finally, the siting makes the tomb visible from the Agra Fort, from the river itself, and from the opposite bank, a view much favored by painters and then by photographers (see Pl. 19). These multiple and shifting visions, so different from Humayun’s tomb, for example, surely account in some measure for the unique place the Taj holds in the world’s imagination.51
The architectural forms reflect the symbolism of the garden with their interplay of the square platform, circular dome, and octagonal base. “The square,” writes Susan Jellicoe, “stands for the terrestrial order and man’s earthly condition, the circle for unity, perfection and the eternal order; man’s struggle for regeneration and his striving from the first state to the second is symbolized by the octagon—the circle squared.”52 The decoration of the buildings reinforces these themes. The walls of the Taj Ganj are covered with Qur’anic inscriptions. The last before one enters the garden reads:
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!53
The mausoleum, too, is decorated with Qur’anic inscriptions, as are the mosque and guesthouse flanking it.54 The spandrels of the arches of these two buildings and of the Taj Ganj are decorated as well with floral arabesques of semiprecious stones (pietra dura) inlaid in the white marble that then burst into full bloom on the white marble walls of the Taj itself. Here a profusion of floral inlays and carvings alternates with borders of black calligraphy to cover almost all the surface (Fig. 43). Most exquisite of all are the two cenotaphs, that of Mumtaz Mahal and of Shah Jahan himself. Contemporary sources are silent as to whether he had from the start intended that the Taj should also be his tomb; his rebellious son Aurangzeb decreed it so. Nevertheless, the fact that he chose no other site during his lifetime may mean that this was his intention all along.55 Other evidence reinforces this interpretation, as we will see.
Fig. 43. Taj Mahal: Floral relief and inlay, detail
[Photograph by author]
The flowers represented are above all spring flowers: bluebells, daffodils, tulips, lilies, irises, crown-imperials. The floral motifs are continued within the tomb, on the walls, the interior of the dome, and the delicately carved marble screen. Here, too, carpets would have covered the floor. The dome itself invokes the lotus through its form and decoration—the lotus a symbol of creation appropriated from Buddhist and Hindu iconography and repeated in the fountains along the watercourse. In essence, then, the Taj Mahal embodies a three-way conversation between architecture, garden, and decoration, all offering their testimony to the iconic themes of life, death, and regeneration and converging in the memorial to an empress who died in the act of giving birth.
Mausoleum and garden were paralleled by an equally audacious project: a mirror image of the Taj garden on the opposite bank of the Yamuna River, the Mahtab Bagh or Moonlight Garden. This garden was apparently abandoned when it proved too prone to flooding. It was only rediscovered in the late twentieth century, thanks to the work of Elizabeth Moynihan and her colleagues from 1996 to 1999, and was therefore unknown to Curzon (it is intriguing to think what he might have done with it had he known) or other visitors throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries. Although the entire site could not be excavated, and in any case much of the brick and stone have long since been removed from the site and recycled by local people, the dimensions of the waterfront wall correspond almost exactly to the north wall and platform of the Taj. Above the landing and retaining wall was a raised terrace, in the center of which a large octagonal pool was so positioned that it reflected the Taj in the light of the full moon.
The primary purpose of the garden was to view the Taj. “One imagines the royal barge carrying the emperor from the fort to the garden, where he could sit in an airy pavilion and embrace the dramatic view of the Taj and its ethereal likeness,” writes Moynihan. “Magically the image was disembodied by the fountain jets as they fell back in the pearl drop pattern—portraying water as a precious gift from the heavens. . . . Facing [Shah Jahan] was the north portal of the Taj with Sura 84 [of the Qur’an] ‘Rending Asunder’ wherein this world and the next are sundered by death. Here in his earthly paradise he could enjoy the pleasure of sorrow.”56
The existence of the Mahtab Bagh lends support to those who argue that the Taj was intended to be Shah Jahan’s tomb as well as that of his wife. The epitaph engraved in luminous calligraphy on his cenotaph refers to the emperor as “Rizwan,” the guardian of paradise. The Taj complex “is his image of paradise, and he is the gatekeeper of that paradise. Surely Shahjahan envisaged this ultimate tomb at the ultimate crossing of the Four Rivers of Paradise.”57 Not only is the Taj complex anomalous in the canon of Mughal art if it ends with the tomb at the northern end of the garden, “it lacks the symmetry essential to the Mughal sense of order.” This symmetry is restored if we look at the tomb instead as a centerpiece: the water channels in the two gardens are so aligned that they provide a single, long north–south axis, extending from below the Taj gateway to the raised tank in the center to the base of the plinth. There it disappears, once again to “[rise] joyfully in the fountains of the octagonal pool of the Mahtab Bagh, from which it falls in a cascade to the lotus pool, and overflows into a channel that runs into the central tank of the charbagh, an image of the pool within the Taj enclosure.” Seen thusly, the river joins rather than separates the two gardens. “[W]hen reflected in the river, the Taj, as axis mundi, is transformed into an evanescent image above the crossing of the Four Rivers of Paradise. Only someone with [Shah Jahan’s] vainglorious sense of himself could conceive such an audacious plan.” The plan of the Taj is a “scheme of truly imperial proportions,”58 nothing less than the emperor’s “cosmic diagram,” materializing the final lines of Sura 54 of the Qur’an, the “Moon”:
Surely the godfearing shall dwell amid gardens and a river
in a sure abode, in the presence of a King Omnipotent.59
This was a hard act for Curzon and the British to follow. At every turn, they were conscious of the glory that was Mughal India, of living in the shadow of past greatness. To a degree that is difficult to define, Curzon identified himself with the Mughal emperors. Touring the monuments of Agra and Fatehpur Sikri with him one last time before he left India and noting his extraordinary absorption in every detail (he was still measuring the growth of the cypress trees at the Taj Mahal), his old friend Valentine Chirol suggested laughingly that were he, Chirol, a Hindu, he would “almost believe that in a former stage of existence [Curzon] must have been Akbar himself.” Without a trace of humor, the viceroy responded, “I know nothing of former stages of existence, but I may tell you, my dear Chirol, that I can always feel myself to be living the very life of all the great men of whom I read in history.”60
Both Mughal and Briton came from nations almost obsessively attached to their gardens. Both saw them as instruments of civilization, bringing order out of the chaos of nature. When Curzon boasted to the secretary of state for India, “What were then dusty wastes are now green parks and gardens,” he was echoing the words of Babur as he set to work to tame the arid plains of Agra. On a visit to the Taj Mahal in 1834, Lord Bentinck, then governor-general of India, had reflected: “In a country where we have erected no monuments, it is a satisfaction to see that the Taj at least is cared for.”61 Lord Curzon was not content to be a caretaker. Nevertheless, however much might be spent on restoration of the Taj—and the viceroy had allocated the then enormous sum of £50,000 for the monuments of Agra (nearly half the budget destined for restoration in the subcontinent as a whole)—he had neither the resources nor the power to match the opulence that has made “mogul” a byword for both.62
Of necessity, then, his imperial aspirations took quite different form. His interest in preserving the archaeological and architectural heritage of India was genuine, but it was not disinterested; it was part and parcel of demonstrating the greatness of British civilization, its appreciation for the past of all peoples, and its civilizing role in India. During his viceroyalty he visited virtually every monument that fell under the aegis of the ASI. He saw himself not just as a “pilgrim at the shrine of beauty . . . but as a priest in the temple of duty . . . charged with their reverent custody and their studious repair.”63 One of his great triumphs was the passage of the Ancient Monuments Bill in 1904, “expiating the carelessness of the past, and escaping the reproaches of posterity.”64
Nowhere was this more conspicuous than with Agra and the Taj Mahal, although he unfairly minimized the role of his predecessors;65 virtually all nineteenth-century visitors remark, like Bentinck, that the Taj and its gardens had been well maintained, whatever may have been the case with other monuments.66 Curzon came to identify himself with these monuments and to bask almost personally in their greatness. As he wrote to Lord George Hamilton at the India Office: “The whole of the principal mosques, tombs, etc. have been surrounded with exquisite gardens or parks, and, by the time I leave India, I believe it may be said with truth that the Agra Monuments will be the best tended, just as they are also the best and most beautiful body of architectural remains in the world. [Excelling Egypt? Greece? Rome?] I have supervised and given orders upon every single detail myself for the local engineers who have to carry them out are destitute of the faintest artistic perception; and, if left to themselves, will perform horrors that make one alternately laugh and weep.”67 So possessive was he of the Taj that when Sir Herbert Baker, one of the primary architects of New Delhi, proposed to make alterations to the gardens long after Curzon had ceased to be viceroy, Curzon barked, “I won’t have that African Baker interfering with my Taj garden.” Baker backed off, wondering, however, whether Curzon felt for the Taj as a “lover or a child.”68
But why did he change the plantings so radically? It is true that the trees had become so overgrown as to block many of the views, and yet at the moment he first fell in love with the Taj on his visit in late 1887, when the foliage was at its densest, he had praised the gardens without qualification, both for their own beauty and for their enhancement of the Taj itself. And he couldn’t resist adding, “It is to the credit of England that this garden is mainly the product of English hands, a burly Yorkshireman named Smith having been its custodian for some 20 years.” Rather smugly he noted, “Had I not been made aware of this, the existence of a rose garden and the universal prevalence of that plant would have been sufficient to prove the dominion of English ideas”—quite unaware, it appears, of the Mughal passion for roses.69
The Taj as Curzon first saw it was much the same as that which had captivated artists from the Daniells to Edward Lear and Marianne North. It was quintessentially “picturesque”—one might even label it “oriental picturesque,” with the ethereal form of the white marble sepulcher rising bit by bit out of the mass of semitropical vegetation. “Nothing is lost,” Lord Hastings insisted in 1815, “by this temporary interruption of a distinct perception of all the parts.” When the pure white marble of the dome became visible at last, it contrasted “advantageously” with the green of the treetops.70 As The Times’ war correspondent William Russell described the experience in midcentury:
Before us lay beautiful walks, lined by dense rows of umbrageous cypress trees, which divided the ground into squares filled with flowers and fountains, rose and orange trees, and an infinity of oriental shrubs. A few native gardeners moved quietly along among the bushes, drawing water from the long reservoirs and canals which run by the side of each plot of ground. . . . We started onwards towards the Taj, which was now altogether hidden by the trees. But suddenly striking to the right we came out in front of it, and there it stood in its queenly beauty and astonishing perfection, rising above us from a lofty platform of marble, of dazzling whiteness.71
Clearly what had appealed to the youthful Curzon (he was in his late twenties when he first saw the Taj) no longer appealed to the proconsul; “picturesque” was not the image he wanted to project. For a view of the mausoleum and other structures that revealed itself only gradually through the foliage as one moved along the central axis, he substituted the starkly uncluttered vista of today.72 At best one can only speculate on the factors at play, both cultural and personal, in this change of attitude toward the Taj garden.
First of all, there was the residue of eighteenth-century landscape design in England, the legacy of Capability Brown, which emphasized expanses of lawn dotted with a few majestic trees that swept right up to the great houses, relegating gardens to the margins.73 Curzon himself was raised at Kedleston, one such great house, and perhaps saw it as a model—the proper way to integrate nature and the works of man. Both house and grounds had been designed by Robert Adam in the Palladian manner, intended to rival Chatsworth, the home of the dukes of Devonshire. But unlike Chatsworth, Kedleston has never been noted for its flower gardens; rather, the estate seems even today frozen in eighteenth-century time, with its sweeping park, artificial pond, sheep grazing beyond the “ha ha,” and the iron gates leading to the austere entry way (see Pl. 20).74
Victorian England, however, had moved away from the artificially contrived nature of the preceding period. Conservatories made of iron and glass abetted the passion for growing exotic plants from all over the world just as peripatetic colonials were carrying their gardens to the corners of empire. Like Akbar watering his apple tree for nine months of the year, the British in India could count on an army of malis to water and trim each blade of grass— to force it to grow against all odds. But nineteenth-century England was also marked by a succession of battles over competing historical styles, bedding plants, topiaries, and herbaceous borders. Curzon, however, seems to have been quite oblivious of the garden wars raging around him. There is no evidence that he was familiar with the work of William Robinson or Gertrude Jekyll or of any other prominent English gardeners—none is mentioned in the back-and-forth about the Taj and other Agra gardens; indeed, his approach seems to have been entirely empirical and personal, not beholden to any contemporary theories of landscape or garden design.
A. E. P. Griessen, who worked closely with Curzon in the restoration of the Taj gardens, later defended the decisions taken. He insisted that they had “gone into the matter very carefully in an attempt to get back to the historical gardens of India,” but that the problem had been a difficult one. They were perfectly aware of the importance of fruit trees in the old gardens of both Muslims and Hindus, the fruit trees that Bernier and Tavernier had so much admired. But these visitors saw the garden only in its infancy, when the trees were small and did not obscure the causeway and the views of the mausoleum. “If big trees had had to find their way there, as they had found their way in the early nineteenth century the whole of the beautiful vista of the Taj and adjoining buildings would have been masked.” They chose therefore to plant trees which would not replicate the earlier “afforestation which some people had admired and blamed Lord Curzon for not adopting.”75 View trumped historical exactitude, a subordination of garden to architecture that might well have baffled the Mughals. Besides, the produce from fruit trees had defrayed the costs of maintaining Mughal gardens, something the British did not even consider.
Curzon had other champions as well. One of his correspondents, for example, commended Curzon for substituting lawns for the “tiresome little flower beds of no particular form or beauty” at one of the other Agra sites.76 Defending him against charges of overrestoration, especially of Mughal monuments, his obituarist declared: “Lord Curzon, had all the cultivated Briton’s love of clearing away incongruous accretions which make a comprehensive view of a monument, and of setting the jewel again in an environment of greenery. This praiseworthy passion can be over indulged. But what Lord Curzon did to open out the Taj and restore its garden is generally approved.” Perhaps all too revealingly he added: “Indian accretions are usually neither medieval nor picturesque, but recent, squalid, and noisome. The Viceroy was very well aware at the outset that in dirt and stench the spirit of the East finds little incongruity or offence.”77
The problems faced by Curzon in Agra were dwarfed by those with other antiquities. At least at Mughal sites—not only the Taj but also the tombs of Humayun, I’timad ud-Daulah, and Akbar—there was an outline of the original and historical sources to draw on in restoring gardens. In the case of non-Muslim monuments, such as the Buddhist site at Sarnath or the great Hindu temple complex at Khajuraho, there was little to go on. Sarnath is sacred as the place where the Buddha preached his first sermon to his five companions in a deer park. Over time it became a center of Buddhist learning. Under the patronage of local rulers a great stupa or dome-shaped shrine was built, as well as extensive monasteries for disciples and pilgrims. Buddhism declined in India in the later first millennium c.e., and the site was gradually deserted. Muslim invaders delivered the coup de grâce in the twelfth century. An engraving from the 1840s shows a desolate brick stupa with rank vegetation growing out of its cracked crown and sides.78 Excavation and restoration have been ongoing for over a century, but there has been no attempt to re-create a Buddhist meditation garden, which would typically have featured large shade trees and water; instead the landscaping is that of an archaeological site, with open lawns (such as they are), a circuit of walkways, and a few trees, but adjoining all this is a large deer park and a splendid museum housing Buddhist sculpture from the site, including the great lion capital. If not a meditation garden, Sarnath is a welcome island of serenity only a few miles from the hurly-burly of Varanasi.
At Khajuraho in what is now Bundelkhand, a vanished dynasty created a stunning assemblage of Hindu and Jain temples, many of them featuring a dazzling array of sculptural ornamentation.79 The Chandella kings dominated the region from the eleventh through the fourteenth centuries, successfully repelling Muslim invaders from the north. Legend has it that they built some eighty-five temples, devoted to the entire constellation of Hindu deities. With the decline of the dynasty, the entire area reverted to bush. In spite of this it was recognized as a major monument and documented by an eminent Indian photographer as early as 1886. The accompanying text describes it as “a wretched deserted place,” showing that the task of clearing had barely begun. Nevertheless, the writer pronounced the surviving group of some thirty temples to be “the most beautiful in form as well as most elegant in detail of any of the temples now standing in India,” a judgment not wide of the mark. Excavation and restoration are still in progress more than a century later; there is, in fact, a thriving workshop nearby where artists keep alive the craft of stone carving. The main temple complex comprising the western group is more extensively landscaped than Sarnath: there are large swaths of green, trimmed hedges along stone walks, low bushes and flowering shrubs, and a few shade trees to provide some refuge in the intense heat of summer (see Pl. 21). The guiding principle seems to be to maintain open, unobstructed views of the temples. Of course we have no idea what the surroundings would have looked like during the golden age of Chandella rule—when the temples were rediscovered by a British army engineer in 1838, they had long since been swallowed up in jungle—but one suspects that originally the precincts would have included more tanks than at present and certainly gardens to provide the flowers indispensable to Hindu worship.
Overwhelmed by the sheer number of the country’s monuments, the ASI has had its hands full with the Herculean task of rescuing them from ruin and restoring them as best they could. As for showing them off to best advantage, what could surpass an inviting greensward and a few trees for shade?
The Taj as English Park
For the British, the Taj Mahal was always a place of enchantment. Captain Sleeman’s wife declared, “I would die to-morrow to have such a tomb.” An awestruck official could only invoke the cliché that “the Moghuls designed like Titans and finished like jewellers.” Nonetheless, this did not stop Britons from turning the Taj and its gardens into an oriental Vauxhall (not unlike the Lucknavi palaces they so deplored) throughout much of the nineteenth century. Fanny Parks found it detestable that European ladies and gentlemen danced quadrilles in the garden with a band playing on the marble terrace of the tomb, but hers seems to have been a minority opinion. Emily Eden describes “a pretty fête” given for the hundred people in her party. They dined in what once had been a mosque. She explains that it had been “desecrated” years earlier. “Still I thought it was rather shocking our eating ham and drinking wine in it, but its old red arches looked very handsome.” She does not seem to have minded that on another occasion two gentlemen played hopscotch “with all their old Westminster rules” in the gardens, one of them “the image of Pickwick,” whose hopping and jumping and panting “filled the afternoon very well.” The visit of the Prince of Wales in 1876 inspired far grander entertainments: “Seven thousand guests came to look at the Prince of Wales looking at the Taj!” A band entered the illuminated precincts playing “Vedrai carino” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and then struck up dance music, which was accompanied by the “clank of spurs and sabers on the complaining marble.” Yet none of this, Russell claims, marred the loveliness of the peerless mausoleum—but, thank goodness, no fireworks!80
Mercifully, Lord Curzon put an end to these revelries. Constance Villiers-Stuart, one of the first to write authoritatively about Mughal gardens in India, rightly gave Curzon his due for rescuing “many magnificent old Indian buildings and works of art.” But while she was glad that he had cleared Mughal gardens of “much accumulated overgrowth and rubbish,” she tactfully regretted the lack of any “serious attempt to revive the old garden-craft in its artistic and symbolic aspects.”81 Above all, she deplored the sacrifice of Bernier’s “gay parterres” in favor of “the fixed belief [of English landscape gardeners] in the universal virtue of mown grass” and their penchant for substituting “grassplots and scattered trees” for the brilliance and fragrance of the old gardens.82 What was lost was any semblance of intimate gatherings on carpeted turf where one could listen to the poet, breathe the fragrance of fruit trees, and enjoy the cool spray of the fountain. In their place were emblems of a past fitted into the Procrustean bed of British hegemony. Where Shah Jahan could invoke the Qur’anic template of Paradise itself for his gardens, Paradise was, for his successors, only a metaphor, a metaphor often translated into what William Dalrymple has dismissed as “sterile English lawns.”83
At the same time, the viceroy looked upon the Taj, like other great monuments of India, as a historical site, fixed forever in a past time. He recognized that control of history is in some measure control of the present. Historical monuments were also public spaces; they became a variant of the public park, an innovation in nineteenth-century England.84 Vast numbers of tourists would come, whose gaze could be carefully directed from the moment they approached the entrance. When he ordered that mahogany trees, palms, and other trees be removed or pruned, it was to open up specific vistas of the mosque and jawab and most of all to present a “glorious view” of the Taj itself from all angles.85 They would see what he chose to have them see and how he chose to have them see it, just as Shah Jahan had aligned the Mahtab Bagh to direct the gaze of his nobles across the river to his soaring funerary memorial or marvel at its inverted reflection in the octagonal pool.86 If Curzon could not create a comparable tour de force nor redesign a whole imperial city such as Paris or Rome—to say nothing of Shahjahanabad—he could put his improving stamp on single sites.
To be sure, Curzon was at a further disadvantage. The Mughals knew what a garden should look like, smell like, and sound like. By Shah Jahan’s reign the model had been in place for a century. Its rules were malleable enough to fit terrain as mountainous as Kashmir and as flat as Hindustan, and they allowed for the imperial embellishments that culminated in Shah Jahan’s fluidity between architecture and garden. They invoked an age-old love of flowers and fruits, enhanced by Sufi ideas of oneness with nature and Qur’anic visions of Paradise. Shah Jahan could even draw on a recently imported European vocabulary for more realistic visual representation of the natural world. By contrast, Curzon was a child of a more secular time, in which notions of what made a proper garden were constantly in flux and prey as much to individual taste as to cultural traditions. In focusing on a single sense, sight, he ignored the appeals to nose and ear that played such a large part in Mughal (and Hindu) kingship and made gardens so central to its expression.
What Lord Curzon shared with Shah Jahan, however, was a genuine love of beauty wherever it might be found. “After every other Viceroy has been forgotten,” declared Jawaharlal Nehru, “Curzon will be remembered because he restored all that was beautiful in India.”87 They also shared an unquestioned faith in empire. Three years before he became viceroy of India he dedicated his Problems of the Far East to “those who believe that the British Empire is, under Providence, the greatest instrument for good that the world has ever seen.”88
Postscript: The Victoria Memorial
For most of his viceroyalty, Curzon had to content himself with a vicarious imperial glory from the restoration of the Taj. But Fate provided the opportunity to rival Shah Jahan in the creation of a funerary monument when Queen Victoria died in January 1901. Within weeks Curzon had conceived of a memorial to her in Calcutta, a memorial to symbolize the greatness of British India and at the same time to legitimize British rule by incorporating the Indian contribution. This became the Victoria Memorial Hall, supported, Curzon always maintained, entirely by voluntary donations from both British and Indians.
The parallels with the Taj are intriguing. Both honor a dead queen, indeed an extremely fertile queen, although Queen Victoria did not die in childbed. While Curzon stoutly resisted Indianizing the Victoria Memorial—the Taj was of course on everyone’s mind—there are a few resemblances. At the viceroy’s insistence, it was built of the same marble as the Taj, hauled from the distant quarries of Rajasthan at great expense. The great dome, the octagonal chhatris, the plinth on which the building stands, even the domed corner terraces—all echo the Taj Mahal. Well satisfied, he extolled it as “by far the finest structure that has been reared in India since the days of the Moghuls, and the most splendid concrete monument of British rule.” A later viceroy remarked that “although nominally a memorial to Queen Victoria,” it was “a no less striking memorial to himself [Curzon], as exemplified by his statue placed in front of the memorial and overshadowing all the statues of previous Viceroys” (Fig. 44). Or, as another commentator remarked, it was “the nearest the British ever came to erecting a funerary monument to their rule.”89
Fig. 44. Statue of Lord Curzon, Victoria Memorial Hall, Calcutta
[Photograph by author]
Whatever the case, the gardens bear no resemblance whatsoever to Mughal models. True, there are two pools of water to reflect the brilliance of the marble facade, but the hall, built in Italian Renaissance style by William Emerson, is set in an expanse of green. Entering from the south, one passes first through the Curzon lawn (with its statue of the viceroy) and then the Edward lawn, named for Edward VIII. Both are edged with neat strips of shrubbery and flowerbeds, very much like the approach to an English manor house. In front of the great entrance archway looms the seated bronze figure of the Queen-Empress as she was at the time of the 1897 Jubilee.
The most ironic parallel lies in the fact that just as Shah Jahan moved his capital to his new city of Shahjahanabad (“Old Delhi”) even before the Taj Mahal was completed, so the Government of India moved its capital to a new city, New Delhi, before the Victoria Memorial could be finished. Curzon had hoped with the memorial “to have bequeathed her [England] something that will conquer Death, and be better than gold,” a reference to Kipling’s poem on Calcutta.90 When it was dedicated by the Prince of Wales in 1921, twenty years after the queen’s death, however, the Victoria Memorial was already a relic of fading empire.
A century earlier, the British surveyor J. A. Hodgson, gazing upon the Taj Mahal through the long vista of trees that bordered its canal of fountains, had pronounced it “one of the most perfect and beautiful buildings in the world.” But when he reflected that only 130 years had passed since the death of Aurangzeb, the son of Shah Jahan, he was inspired to reflect on the “instability of dominion in Hindostan” and the fleeting “power of the mighty monarchs who erected so many magnificent buildings in their dominion.”91 Curzon might well have pondered his words.