#ShahJahan was imprisoned in this portion of the fort

Once upon a time, the banks of the River Yamuna was lined with forty five beautiful gardens as per the map in Jaipur City Museum. It is in the garden mansion of Raja man Singh that Emperor Shah Jahan built the grand mausoleum for his wife Mumtaz Mahal- the Rauza e Munawwara or as its known today the Taj Mahal.

Not many of the gardens remain but we can see the pavilions and burjis scattered along the bank. One of them houses a tomb with glazed tile ornamentation called Chini ka Rauza.

Visitors to Agra invariably end up in front of the Taj Mahal, or Itmad-ud Daula’s tomb and venture out to Fatehpur Sikri.

It’s only a few who go to the Chini ka Rauza. Rauza is a Persian word which means garden and is used to describe a tomb of a saintly person. This is the Rauza of Afzal Khan, a Persian poet who was the wazir of Shah Jahan. He was the brother of Amanat Khan , the famous artist who designed the calligraphy on the Taj mahal

Though Afzal Khan died in  Lahore 1639, he had already built this tomb for himself and was brought here for burial. It was built around the same time as the Taj Mahal was being built.

It stands out because it is not built in the usual marble or red sandstone style of architecture prevalent in Agra but in the Persian style with beautiful glazed tiles. Most of the tiles covering the exterior have been destroyed but the interior gives clues  of its grandeur. It is three storied. Today there is just one pavilion standing near the ghat and its approach gate from the ghat has vanished.

Since porcelain is known as chini (chinese) in many parts of India it got the name Chini ka Rauza.

The plan is square with a proportionately small dome on it with the inverted lotus and finial. There are arched central  bays on each side, which form the large entrance arches  (iwans). On the corners aresmall minarets known as guldastas.

The exterior is now a muddy brown and hardly prepares one for the glory of the interior. One can only imagine what it must have looked like in the 17th century.

It has calligraphy from the Quran on the band bellow the drum of the roof and many arched windows above it. The interior is painted and was probably repaired in the 19th century.

The entrances are honeycombed

There are two graves inside it without any inscription. If there was one it has got lost in time.

The lone surviving burji of some garden.

It is one km  on some crowded lanes from the tomb of Itmad ud Daula and is governed by the ASI timings. Entry is free.

This beautiful Jama Masjid was built by Akbar in 1571 when he was building the city of Fatehpur Sikri. It is next to the dargah of Khwaja Salim Chisty and entered through the Buland Darwaza

Opinion: 30th September 2018

The Hindu

Imagining the Mahtab Bagh as it was supposed to be

The most visited monument in India is the Taj Mahal in Agra. Guides and locals tell you stories of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan’s love for his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, when they walk you up to the main chamber housing the cenotaphs of the emperor and his wife. As they walk you towards the back of the monument, where the Yamuna flows, they point across the bank and tell you in hushed tones that this was where Shah Jahan dreamed of a mausoleum in black marble for himself, but he was imprisoned by his son Aurangzeb before he could build it. French traveller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier was the first to mention the story of a black Taj Mahal, and it caught the popular imagination in later centuries. However, archaeological excavations have found no evidence of any foundation on which such an edifice could have been built.

The emperor’s vision

I have also heard this story many times. Though I never believed it, I didn’t realise the importance of that piece of land across the Yamuna, known as Mahtab Bagh, till a friend, Roshna Kapadia, gifted me The Moonlit Garden: New Discoveries at the Taj Mahal, edited by Elizabeth B. Moynihan. This book describes the India-U.S. project undertaken by the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution, of which Moynihan was a key member, along with the Archaeological Survey of India. The researchers concluded that the Bagh’s proportions are similar to the Taj, and it is also aligned with the monument, which means that Shah Jahan had built it as a part of the main tomb complex.

Soon after the Taj Mahal was ready, Shah Jahan moved to the new city of Shahjahanabad in present-day Delhi, and possibly did not visit Agra for some years. Aurangzeb, who did visit Agra in 1652, said in a letter, which is quoted by Moynihan, that the dome of the mausoleum had developed a leak and needed repair. He got it repaired. He also said that though the octagonal pool and pavilions of the Mahtab Bagh were in good shape, the garden was inundated and had to be restored. This establishes the connection between the two parts separated by the river. The Bagh’s position on the lower bank of the Yamuna made it prone to flooding. It was lost in the sands of time till it was discovered in the 1990s.

On a recent trip to Agra, I read a few more books on the Bagh. A discussion with a PhD student from Cambridge University, Sarthak Malhotra, whose MPhil thesis was on the Taj Mahal, led me to another wonderful resource: Taj Mahal: Multiple Narratives, by Amita Baig and Rahul Mehrotra. It was while reading this book that the entire picture unfolded before my eyes, and I was able to reimagine the Mahtab Bagh as it was supposed to be.

The first tomb to be built on the Persian charbagh plan of paradisiacal tombs was Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi. According to that plan, the tomb is placed squarely in the centre of the charbagh. The Taj Mahal, also modelled on the same theme, is at an edge of the garden. It is only when we understand the emperor’s grand vision that we understand the reason for its position: this vision had a river flowing in the charbagh over the illusory streams that flow from the main gate of the Taj and are in complete alignment with Mahtab Bagh’s water channels

Looking at the Taj’s reflection

Most tourists don’t visit Mahtab Bagh as it is a relatively long drive from the Taj and they don’t realise its importance. This is where the grief-stricken emperor came by boat from his palace and sat in the now-destroyed pavilions to look at the reflection of the teardrop in the octagonal pool.

The pool was discovered in 1993 under two or three meters of sand. When it was full, the reflection of the Taj would fall in it, in perfect symmetry. The beautiful garden, which was once home to many trees, has been redone and is a shadow of its former self. But the reflection of the Taj Mahal in the river, and in the pool if you visit during the monsoon, makes you forget everything else. As the pool was dry, I sat on the edge of the low wall that forms a boundary on the riverbank, to watch the sunset. As the sun came down and flooded the white marble beauty on the other side of the river with every imaginable hue, I could empathise with the emperor who would have sat in quiet contemplation of his lost love.

( this photo taken in a small puddle of water in the octagonal tank)

A ‘Taj Mahal’ for a husband

Rana Safvi

02 SEPTEMBER 2018 00:00 IST

In Agra’s Roman Catholic Cemetery lies a ‘Red Taj’ built for a Dutchman by his wife

The Taj Mahal has unnecessarily become a standard for all tombs in India. Each monument is unique, yet the comparisons continue. The tomb of Shahnawaz Khan, son of Abdur Rahim Khan-e-Khanan, in Burhanpur is called the ‘Black Taj Mahal’. The tomb of Ibrahim Adil Shah II in Bijapur is called the ‘Taj Mahal of the Deccan’. And I discovered recently, much to my horror, that the exquisite tomb of Itmad-ud-Daula in Agra, also made of marble, is called the ‘Baby Taj’!

So, when I was informed of a ‘Red Taj Mahal’ in Agra, I was curious, not because of the comparison, but because it is located in the Roman Catholic Cemetery and was built for a Dutchman, Colonel John William Hessing, by his wife Anne. This seemed like an interesting reversal of the story that we are familiar with, and when I went there, I discovered that it was.

Comparisons with the Taj

Hessing was born in Utrecht, Holland, in 1739, and came to India as a 24-year-old. He served under the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Marathas, and was later given the command of the first two battalions of the newly raised Scindia army. After the death of Maharaja Mahadaji Scindia, he continued to serve under Maharaja Daulat Rao Scindia. When he could no longer actively serve due to ill-health, Hessing was made the Commandant of Agra Fort by Scindia. He died in 1803, and was buried in the Roman Catholic Cemetery in Nehru Nagar, Agra.

I entered the wooden gate of the premises with excitement as I had seen the red dome from afar. To the right of the entrance was a red sandstone tomb. Of course, it is not like the Taj Mahal, but as it is domed, has vaulted doorways, was built in the Mughal style, and is in Agra, the comparisons are inevitable. It has four slender minarets, attached to the main tomb, its cupolas crowned by pinnacles.

The dome with its inverted lotus and finial rises from the centre. There are octagonal chabutras attached to the platform on all four corners. There is a fine carved panel running along the edge on the top and around the drum of the dome. Marble plaques at the main entrance have inscriptions in Persian.

As is the case with all Mughal tombs, the actual grave is underneath. There are many other graves in the corridor outside the crypt.

Hessing’s monument, said to have been built at a cost of one lakh rupees, is the most prominent. According to Mathura: A District Memoir by F.S. Growse, a French traveller named Victor Jacquemont, who visited Agra in 1829-1830, had said that the Taj, though pretty, was hardly elegant and that the only pure specimen of oriental architecture was the tomb of John Hessing in the Catholic Cemetery. There is no doubt that he was talking of the time when the Taj Mahal had fallen into disrepair. It was mainly due to the efforts of Lord Curzon at the turn of the 20th century that the Taj acquired its current splendour, but I agree with Growse that Jacquemont views are “warped”. Hessing’s tomb is definitely elegant, but it cannot be compared to the Taj Mahal even on the Taj’s worst day.

Fanny Parkes in her journal Begum, Thugs and White Mughals, edited by William Dalrymple, describes the Hessing tomb as “a beautiful mausoleum” which is “well worth a visit”. It was built by a “native architect, by the name Lateef, in imitation of the ancient Mohammedan tombs”. She writes: “The tomb is beautiful, very beautiful and in excellent taste.” Lateef was apparently an expert parchinkar who used to inlay marble with precious stones as well as draw pictures of the Taj Mahal and other monuments in Agra. Parkes bought a few of them.

In the cemetery

The cemetery is well kept, green, and peaceful. Not many people know of it, so I found no visitors there. The caretakers were cooperative and took me around.

(the tomb and tombstone of Walter Reinhardt known as Sombre or Samru : The inscription on his cenotaph says

“Aqui jaz o Walter Reinhard morreo aos 4 de Mayo no anno de 1778”)

The cemetery was originally built for the Armenian Christians who came during the reign of Emperor Akbar. The oldest grave belongs to John Mildenhall, an Englishman who died in 1614.

As I wandered around the cemetery, what struck me was the amalgamation of cultures. There was a grave with Allah and the cross carved on it. Many graves had Latin, English and Persian inscriptions on them. A small chapel had petitions to god by the faithful tied to its door, and window screens similar to what we see in dargahs.

He was Dutch adventurer, who was once the Commander of the Agra fort & died in 1803

Built by his wife Anne.

It’s also called the Red Taj Mahal

It’s located on Mahatma Gandhi Road, Agra in n area calked Padri Tola

At first glance the name seems an improbable name till you realise that Chini here isn’t sugar but glazed tiles which were imported from China.

It is the tomb of Allama Afzal Khan Mullah, a scholar and poet who was the Prime Minister of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan. It  was built in 1635. 

The facade of the monument was also known for one of finest examples of glazed tile work. Now one can only see it in patches.

When we hired an auto driver to take us there he said, ” Saheb wahan kuchh nahin hai.” ( saheb there’s nothing to see there). He must have thought we were crazy to go there instead of the exquisite Tomb of Itmad -up Daulah. But I had visited it on earlier trips and somehow always missed this.

Situated on the Riverside it’s got an enviable location. I don’t know how much land it occupied earlier but now there’s a narrow road which goes through a small mohalla and ends at its gate.

It’s very dark inside but once your eyes get used to it very beautiful. Beautiful floral and geometric designs brighten it up and the inside hasn’t fared as badly as the outside.

There are two pretty 3 storeyed octagonal Towers near it, one adjoining it’s boundary and the other a little far away. The one near it is in ruins and used as a lavatory from the smells and mess.

There are two pretty 3 storeyed octagonal Towers near it. One is built in its wall while the other is a little further down the river. 

These seem to be buildings associated with the ghat.

There was another tomb like structure on the left but in another compound and we didn’t visit it.