The Taj Mahal 
| The Taj Mahal |
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The Taj Mahal, situated at Âgrâ, in the brim of the Yamunâ river in the North India, is a mausoleum built by the Mughal emperor Shâh Jahân in memory of his wife Arjumand Bânu Begam, most known under the name of Mumtaz Mahal, which in Persian means "the light of the palace". She dies the 17th June 1631 in giving birth to their fourteenth child at a time when she came with her husband in campaign and finds a first temporary burial on the spot, in the Zainabad garden in Burhampur. |
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The construction begin in 1632. It exists however a polemic on the exact date of the end of works. A famous chronicler designates the Taj Mahal as finished end of 1643 or beginning of 1644. But in the principal entry an inscription indicates that the construction is drawn to a close in 1648. As for the state of the Uttar Pradesh, which has officially celebrated the 350th birthday of the building in 2004, it asserts that the works are drawn to a close in 1654. Among the 20 000 persons who worked on the building site, one finds master craftsmen coming from of Europe and of Central Asia.
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The Taj Mahal is built in using materials coming from diverse regions of the India and of the rest of the Asia. More than 1 000 elephants are employed to transport the materials during the construction. The white marble is extracted of the Rajasthan, the jasper come from of the Panjâb, the turquoise and the malachite of the Tibet, the sapphires and the lapis lazuli of the Sri Lanka, the coral of the Red Sea, the carnelian of the Persia and of the Yemen, the onyx of the Deccan Plateau and of the Persia, the garnets of the river Ganges and of the Bundelkhand, the agate of the Yemen and of the Jaisalmer, the rock crystal of the Himalaya. In all, 28 types of precious and semi-precious stones have been used to compose motives of inlaid work into the white marble. |
The central dome of the tomb, which measures more than 73 m, contains coranic inscriptions and carved reliefs which compose a decoration of an exceptional richness. It is raised on a square platform, which each corner supports a minaret, all identical, which yield towards the outside so that in case of earthquake, they fall down in the direction opposite of the tomb. On the left of the monument is a mosque, making of red sandstone, which has been built in order to sanctify the place and furnish a place of worship to the pilgrims. In the right side, is an exact symmetrical retort of the mosque, known under the name of jawab ("answer"), intended for keep the architectural symmetry but which isn't employed as mosque because it isn't orientated towards Mecca. At last, in front of the monument was the charbâgh ("four gardens") traditional Persan planted of trees where grow flowers plentifully. The english viceroy Lord Curzon has replaced this garden by lawns typically british.
The complex of the Taj Mahal is registered to the world-wide patrimony of the UNESCO since 1983.
The Taj, God's throne in the midst of the paradise
In his paper The Myth of the Taj Mahal and a new theory of its symbolic meaning, the historian Wayne Begley of the University of Iowa, makes an deepened study of the symbolical meaning of the Taj Mahal. He suggests that the organization of the complex, the buildings and the penmanship of Amânat Khân which decorate it form an allegory of the day of the resurrection, Yom al-Dinn, when the dead persons will get up and will go in the plain of the paradise, the garden of the Taj, to appear in front of Allah on his throne.
A palace of Jai Singh or a temple of Shiva
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Following the thesis developed by Purushottam Nagesh Oak, Shâh Jahân wouldn't have built the building, but would have bought a palace of red sandstone from the rajah Jai Singh of Jaipur, would have covered it of marble and transformed in tomb for his wife. Founder, in 1964, of the Institute for Rewriting Indian History, he does appear the next year his book "Taj Mahal - The True Story" where he exhibits a sales leaflet, sometimes disturbing, in 110 points that would prove that the Taj Mahal isn't, or rather, hasn't always been the mausoleum that we know, but that it was, before being transformed by the emperor, a palace and a temple dedicated to Shiva. |
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The porch of the complex of the Taj Mahal
There is the presence on the buildings of the complex of 22 passages of the Qur'an, which 14 complete suras, in penmanships of black stones inlaid in the white marble. If the presence of parts of the Qur'an seems completely natural, the choice of the texts seems to characterize with insistence the places like an image of the paradise. Thus the porch which permits to have access to the garden carries the penmanship of the sura 89 where Allah speaks to the believer by a direct command. The penmanships present on the principal building have especially for subjects the plain of the last judgement and the pleasures of the paradise.
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The plan of the plain of the paradise of the father of Shâh Jahân, superposes itself in a confusing way with the plan of the complex, privately the mausoleum occupying the place of the God's throne. Moreover, the plan of the gardens which lead to the Taj Mahal follows the description of the paradise with its four rivers of water, milk, vine and honey. At first, before the transformation effected by the British, they sheltered an orchard as described by the Qur'an. |
Shâh Jahân was a despot full of his person. His birth in the year thousand of the Moslem calendar has persuaded him of his importance, and he tended to identify himself with perfect man of the Sufism, to the master of the universe, who paraded and asserted "his" legitimacy to the Mughal power, on a country which didn't mainly share the same religion than him, in building "his" version of the paradise on earth. The complex will be then, rather than a mausoleum intended for a cherished wife, an instrument of power, like it could be the Versailles castle built in the course of the same century.
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