Agra: The Architectural Heritage

By Lucy Peck

Few people know just how much more there is to Agra than the Taj Mahal. A recent listing by INTACH has identified many beautiful ruined Mughal gardens, tombs and mosques, colonial buildings, and havelis along the winding lanes of the old city. For those who want to range wider than the normal tourist route, Lucy Peck's new book takes the visitor through historic Agra and Fatehpur Sikri, revealing the lesser-known buildings to be found in both places. It is illustrated with photos, line drawings and numerous maps, many of which feature walks through the historic areas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roli Books
• Release date: Apr 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9788174369420

Book preview

   Introduction   

Gateway to Itimad-ud-Daula’s Tomb

'Agra is scituated on the River Jemina; The Castle and great mens howses on th’one side, as [those of] Asaph Ckaun [Asaf Khan], Mohabutt Ckaun [Mahabat Khan], etts. Great Amrawes, and their Gardens (which are many and fair) on th’other side, yeildinge a most delectable prospecte.'

Peter Mundy, 1631

INTRODUCTION

The Taj Mahal in Agra is an iconic building, representing its country in the same way that the Eiffel Tower represents France. However, outside India, the vast majority of people will look blank if you mention Agra itself. An astonishing number of people make the trip from Delhi to Agra just to see the Taj Mahal, often being quite unaware of the many other glories of Mughal architecture in the city. Those who consult books and websites will be aware of places such as the Red Fort, the tombs of Akbar and Itimad-ud-Daula, and Fatehpur Sikri. They will also, it is hoped, allow time to visit them. They may even pick up rumours of other historic buildings, but while local taxi or auto-rickshaw drivers will be able to take visitors to the big five sites without difficulty, the other historic sites of the city can be frustratingly difficult to locate. This is a pity because there are other glories to be seen and they help to flesh out the history of the whole city, not just that which relates to the imperial Mughal edifices.

Agra is pre-eminently a Mughal city. Along with Delhi and Lahore it was one of the Mughal Empire’s capital cities, but while the other two had illustrious former histories and continued to be important political centres after the collapse of the Mughal Empire, Agra reverted to provincial status until the nineteenth century, when it became an important colonial administrative centre. It was also an important manufacturing and trading centre, and continues to be so even today. The built legacy of all this is visible in various forms, but from the Mughal period, as in other old cities, the buildings that remain are those that were intended to last for ever, and were therefore generally endowed with property for their upkeep. The Mughal emperors were of course Muslim, so the buildings they left in perpetuity were mainly mosques and tombs. The great houses and gardens built by the many noblemen who followed the court have mostly vanished, as have the numerous buildings housing the rest of the city’s population, although their imprint on the city still remains in the shape of the street pattern and small localities that have come up within the walled compounds of former gardens, mansions or caravanserais.

Taj Mahal, seen from Taj Protected Forest (see p.104)

More commonly found are nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury buildings and it is much easier to construct a picture of nineteenth-century Agra from what remains than for its Mughal heyday. In fact, on close inspection, nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Agra reveals itself as a city of some magnificence: the main streets of the old city were lined with extremely ornate house-fronts, while north and south were leafy colonial areas, containing large houses set in vast gardens. Large and now disused industrial complexes line the river north of the old city, the legacy of early industrialization, before it was realized what damage could be done to the fabric of the historic buildings (specifically the Taj) by pollution. Of course, like so many other Indian cities, these older areas are now being engulfed by the modern city, which has extended outwards, mainly to the west and north, but has also insinuated itself into the old city areas by the gradual redevelopment of traditional urban buildings by the type of crude modern city buildings that can be seen the world over.

Parts of the city are so full of old buildings that it is common to find fragments of demolished ones re-used in the most prosaic ways.

Buildings in Kinari Bazaar

In summary, Agra means much more than the Taj Mahal, and it is the total city and its growth that this book attempts to describe. The first two chapters give a very basic outline of the city’s history and its architecture. After that each chapter deals with a different part of the city, working forward chronologically as much as possible. The last chapter is about Fatehpur Sikri, which by rights comes near the beginning of the story of Agra, but it is some distance away and therefore there is no overlap with other chapters.

Typical narrow residential lane with front doors giving access to spacious courtyards. This area was developed from an out-of-town garden.

A WORD ABOUT VOCABULARY, SPELLINGS AND DATES

This book is written for the general reader and is based on observation and English language secondary sources. Because I am writing in English, I have chosen to refer to buildings by their English names if that seems to be most frequently used in English, thus Red Fort instead of Lal Qila. I have come across numerous variations for spellings of names and objects, all being transliterations from the original Persian, Urdu, Hindi, etc. This wild variation can, presumably, be ascribed in part to the very great changes in pronunciation of languages over the decades, so transcriptions accurate at one time become comical a hundred years later. I have decided to stick with the versions that occur most frequently in books that are widely read, on the basis that they will therefore be most familiar to the general reader. Some words are in common Hindi usage, in which case I have tried to follow the transliterated Hindi spelling. I have also tried to stick to one short name for individuals, although it is sometimes necessary to use the given name and titles of the Mughal emperors.

I have given dates as frequently as possible, but many are my own guesswork, based on stylistic details. Sometimes different sources give different specific dates; I have generally selected one date rather arbitrarily, but a few years either way makes very little difference to the general chronology. Again, because most dates are ‘transliterations’ from sources that use a different calendar with different year-ends, it means that the transliterations result in a year that might span over parts of two years of the Christian calendar, thus giving a date of, say, 1670 – 71. I have elected to quote the earlier year.

Finally, because I am writing for the general reader, I have concentrated on those buildings or aspects of buildings that are easily accessible. It is frustrating to read of the marvellous interior of such and such a building and then find, on arrival, that the door is padlocked and access is prohibited. However, it is highly unlikely that all the buildings that are open (or closed) at the time of writing will remain that way, so I apologize if some buildings are now closed or if others are omitted from description but are now accessible.

Map 1

Map 2

Map 3

Map 4

Map 5

AGRA FOR TOURISTS

It is an unfortunate fact that, for foreign tourists, Agra has contributed considerably to India’s not always deserved reputation for dishonesty, harassment and squalor. Compared with many places Agra certainly has more than its fair share of cheating and infuriating touts, and this situation is unlikely to change soon. Tourists, you are therefore advised to stand firm and stick to your plans, but not to forget that a slight difference in the rate means a lot more to ‘them’ than to you. As for the reputation for squalor, this is perhaps less deserved; its particularly bad reputation may arise from the dreadful conditions between the Red Fort and the old city, but elsewhere conditions are really no worse (but unfortunately no better either) than in most other Indian cities.

Some of the varied architecture that makes Agra such a fascinating city

   History of Agra   

Shah Jahan’s pavilions, Red Fort

‘Here the great lords far surpass ours in magnificence, for their gardens serve for their enjoyment while they are alive, and after death for their tombs, which during their lifetime they build with great magnificence in the middle of the garden.’

Francisco Pelsaert, 1626

HISTORY OF AGRA

Very little is known about Agra’s early history, except that it undoubtedly pre-dates the earliest historical record, from the eleventh century, which mentions the besieging of the Agra Fort by the governor of Hind (one of the incursions associated with Mahmud of Ghazni). It was described as being ‘built amidst the sand, like a hill, and its battlements are like hillocks’, and had the reputation of never having been captured. The only other early evidence is archaeological: digs have revealed some Mauryan bricks in the Fort, and silver coins and sculptures in the city. Some of the city temples are of ancient origin and there is much oral tradition of the city’s religious and mythological background. The Mughals were certainly aware of its antiquity, the emperor, Jahangir, later writing in his autobiography that it had been ‘one of the ancient and large cities of Hindustan’.

Other glimpses from records: in 1475 Badal Singh constructed a new or replacement fort, Badalgarh, probably built of bricks; in 1492 the so-described ‘walled town’ was captured from Haibat Khan. Another recorded event was a severe earthquake in 1505, which was so bad that ‘buildings fell down and hills began to shake’. Sikander Lodi had moved his court to Agra in 1504 and it seems likely that he took over the existing fort, although he might have constructed new buildings inside it. His successor, Ibrahim, is known to have constructed some sort of a palace there. Sikander’s name was given to the area around Akbar’s Tomb, some miles away from the city, and it is possible that this is where he had a pleasure garden, giving rise to the supposition that one of his buildings was converted into a tomb for a wife of Akbar. There was another suburb across the river with his name attached to it, but nothing remains of that. Akbar’s historian, Abul Fazl, wrote that during Sikander Lodi’s time Agra was a ‘village’ dependent on Bayana. Bayana was certainly a very important place, but the evidence is that, even before the Lodi court arrived here, Agra was already more than a village and was by some accounts talked of as ‘the Shiraz of India’ (Shiraz then being a centre of Persian culture). Another clue to the size of the pre-Mughal city is that on his first arrival at the city in 1526, the first Mughal emperor, Babur, stopped at a nobleman’s house in the suburbs, described as being far from the Fort, and the next day moved on to another nobleman’s palace before entering the Fort a few days later and occupying Ibrahim Lodi’s quarters. It would appear from this that the city was a substantial enough place to have had urban and suburban noblemen’s dwellings fit to house the conqueror.

THE MUGHALS

By the beginning of the sixteenth century, India was fragmented into several independent states and sultanates. The Lodi sultans in Delhi (and Agra) had started to enlarge their dominion but Sultan Ibrahim Lodi’s autocratic behaviour resulted in an invitation from one of his noblemen to the Kabul-based Babur to invade.

Babur’s is an amazing story, which he told himself in Turkic and which illustrates well the extraordinary fluidity with which kingdoms came and went in Central Asia. Babur was descended from both Genghis Khan (died 1227) and Timur (Tamburlaine, died 1405). It is difficult to be clear about the remoter origins of the Central Asian clans to which Babur’s family belonged but, to be brief, Genghis Khan was the globally successful Mongol warrior whose origins were in present-day Mongolia but who, by the time of his death, controlled a vast empire extending from China into northeast Persia. His descendants built on his successes: famously, the Mongol hordes caused great alarm when they reached Eastern Europe in the mid-thirteenth century. Timur was a successful Turko-Mongol leader who invaded India at the end of the fourteenth century and took Delhi at the end of 1398. Although he soon returned to Samarkand (taking Indian craftsmen with him), he remained the nominal overlord of the area, a position theoretically inherited by his descendants although their Indian governors soon, effectively, became independent.

Babur was well aware of his ancestry and had ambitions beyond the small princedom of Ferghana (now at the eastern end of Uzbekistan) which he inherited from his father in 1484 when only eleven years old. He had a difficult time as a teenager, capturing and losing Timur’s old capital Samarkand thrice and, in the meantime, losing Ferghana to his brother. However, he also took and held on to Kabul. After his third expulsion from Samarkand, Babur finally turned his eyes in the other direction – to India. He felt he had a claim to the country because of Timur’s success there, even though Timur himself had spent little time in India, leaving behind governors to rule the areas he had captured. Despite the Delhi Sultanate’s actual independence, Babur could, with some slight legitimacy, say that he was reoccupying his ancestor’s conquered lands. His first move was to send the Delhi sultan, Ibrahim Lodi, a goshawk and ask for ‘the country which from old had depended on the Turks’. Not surprisingly, he was rebuffed. He then set about acquiring guns and artillerymen, still a novelty in those days as far as north India was concerned. This was the one crucial advantage that Babur would have over the sultan’s forces when he finally marched into India in 1525.

His seventeen-year-old son Humayun distinguished himself in an early battle in the Punjab and, in the following year, fought in the battle of Panipat where Babur defeated Ibrahim Lodi. Babur immediately sent Humayun to Agra to secure the sultan’s treasury. There, Humayun found the Raja of Gwalior’s family, who presented him with a huge diamond in gratitude for his protection. This is thought in all likelihood to have been the Koh-i-Nur. Later he offered it to his father but Babur generously allowed him to keep it, despite his calculation that its value in money would feed the whole world for two and a half days! Babur advanced on Delhi and entered it three days later, on 24 April. He had the Friday Prayers read in his own name, as Timur had before him. He arrived in Agra on 4 May and spent several days in the suburbs before entering the Fort and occupying Ibrahim Lodi’s quarters.

Baoli at Fatehpur Sikri, possibly part of Babur’s construction there (see p.158, 175)

Babur made Agra his capital, logically, because it had recently been the Lodi capital, but he and his men, from Kabul and similar places, found the summer climate in north India disagreeable; Babur particularly disparaged the quality of the gardens. He was equally dismissive of most of the buildings, complaining that ‘there is no making of houses or raising of walls. They simply make huts from the plentiful straw and innumerable trees, and instantly a village or city is born’. However, during the necessary consolidation of his state, Babur took the forts at Chanderi and Gwalior and was impressed by the architecture at both places. Although he does not record having added much to the city or fortifications at Agra, he laid out several gardens, here and at Sikri and Dholpur. At Agra alone he employed 680 people for his palaces, presumably built inside the Fort, as well as his riverside pleasure gardens. He also constructed several wells and hammams (baths).

In 1527 Humayun left Babur’s court to govern the remote province of Badakhshan, beyond the Hindu Kush. He did not want to go so far away, but the appointment was routine. Powerful Mongol or Turkish rulers often had their provinces governed by their sons, the oldest being furthest away and the youngest often ruling at the centre of power under his father’s eye, hence the frequency with which the youngest son became the most powerful. After his departure from