The many moods of the Taj Mahal

As soon as you enter the epitome of love, the Taj Mahal, Quranic inscriptions at the gateway of the tomb, translating to “Enter thou, my paradise,” welcomes you pretty warmly. The last verse of the Surah Fajr (chapter 89 of the Quran) is inscribed on it. “As I studied the inscriptions I realised that it was an architectural depiction of mortality, resurrection, redemption and eternity,” says Rana Safvi, author of popular histories, and the curator of the exhibition, ‘The Mute Eloquence of the Taj Mahal’ currently on view at DAG, Delhi. 

Viewing the many shades of the Taj Mahal at this Delhi exhibition

The exhibition featuring around 200 artworks — from late 18th-century paintings to early 20th-century photographs and rare archives of the monument — will be on display till December 6. 

Safvi has spent nearly two decades studying Islamic architecture and Sufism. “From the very beginning of Islam, there was a tendency to create geometrically ordered and symmetrical spaces centred around a focal point,” she explains. “I found it reflected in medieval and early modern mosques and palaces in the Islamicate lands during my travels, be it in Iran, Iraq, Spain or more recently in Morocco.” This made Safvi rethink the Mughal mosques and tombs in India, especially the Taj on which she has written in the past. “I revised my teenage ‘a teardrop on the cheek of time’ image and then my later understanding of it only as an architectural representation of the Mughal empire which controlled almost a quarter of the world’s GDP at that time,” she adds.  

Forms and florals

In Padshahnama: Volume 1, Shah Jahan’s court historian Abdul Hamid Lahori, describes the mausoleum as ‘Ba-zaban-e Be-zabani’. WE Begley and ZA Desai’s Taj Mahal: The Illumined Tomb, An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Mughal and European Documentary Sources, translates the phrase to “mute eloquence”, from where the title of the exhibition has been taken.

Divided into two sections — the sacred and the quotidian — the exhibition explores the spiritual essence of the Rauza-i Munawwara (The Illumined Tomb as the Taj Mahal was originally known) and its evolution.

The Company School paintings from Delhi and Agra have been majorly displayed in the exhibition, showing the monument’s intricate pietra dura work. The artists who made these precisely carved floral motifs, says Safvi, were trained in court paintings, and quickly mastered the single-point perspective and watercolour technique. They were commissioned by European patrons to produce detailed drawings of the architectural and decorative features of the monuments such as flower motifs, geometric patterns, and calligraphic inscriptions. 

For instance, Patna artist Chunni Lal’s watercolour paintings of pietra dura on the screen around the cenotaph at Taj Mahal, contain red flower-patterns, with green leaves growing out of the stem. Symmetrically delineated geometrical figures and floral patterns are particularly suggestive of this type of inlay works at the monument. 

Taj and history 

Foreign artists featured at the exhibition are Thomas Daniell, Hiroshi Yoshida, and Charles William Bartlett, while modern Indian painters include Abanindranath Tagore, L. N. Taskar, and S. Bagchi, and others. 

Apart from the paintings, the exhibition covers photographs, prints, postcards, and other archival material. Among these, according to Safvi, A.E.P. Griessen’s archives are important. “Griesson was the Superintendent of the Taj and Government Gardens,” Safvi tells us, “who planned and executed the extensive replanting and redesign of the Taj gardens from 1902 to 1905, and ended up radically changing it from the Charbagh theme of fruit and flower bearing trees to the present-day grand avenues and manicured lawns that are more representative of British taste of the early 20th century.” 

Hence, Safvi adds, the exhibition displays the “many moods of not just the Rauza itself but of those documenting it too.”

(Written by Pankil Jhajhria)