A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal (29 page)

Architecture is said to be the marriage between art and engineering and one of the most pleasing aspects of both the minarets and the dome is their symmetry and proportion in relation to other parts of the complex. Such factors, rather than technical innovation, make the Taj Mahal stand out from all other Moghul buildings. Architects had to have a thorough knowledge of mathematics and geometry. Abul Fazl described them as ‘lofty-minded mathematicians’ whose designs could only be understood by the scientifically inclined. Moghul miniatures and evidence today preserved in Samarkand show that they used these mathematical skills to calculate the relationships between different features and to lay out their designs on large sheets of gridded paper. At a later stage they often made wooden models to demonstrate how the buildings would look. (Some later doubtful accounts mention the use of such models in the Taj Mahal, but, although likely, it is not referred to by contemporary sources.) It is therefore no accident, for example, that the architects made the first-storey gallery of the minarets level with the first floor of the mausoleum, the third-storey gallery level with the top of the drum on which the central dome sits, and the cupola of the minarets level with the maximum bulge of the dome.

The perfect balance and proportion of the Taj Mahal complex have been the subject of much detailed calculation and retrospective computation in recent years. One writer has suggested that the sight lines converge at a height of five feet six inches above a central point in the entrance gateway. This is just the level at which Shah Jahan’s eyes would have been, if the writer’s deductions about his height from his clothes are accurate. Others have deduced that the key measurement from which nearly all the rest derive is the diameter of the mausoleum’s octagonal hall, which is some fifty-eight feet. The octagon, with its symbolic reconciliation of man with eternity, is certainly key to the geometric design for the complex, appearing, for example, in the planning of the mosque, guesthouse, gateway and bases of the minarets as well as in the mausoleum itself.

The Taj’s designers also added to the harmony of the whole by their use of uniform architectural features throughout the complex. For example, they employed only one basic design of column, although varying the proportions and degree of decorative detail according to the significance of the location. A variant of what is known as the ‘Shahjahani column’, it is many-sided, with a base formed of arched panels and a capital ornamented with delicate vaulted webbing in what is called the
muqarnas
style. Similarly, the cusped or ‘piecrust’ arches supported by the pillars and the inset panelling throughout the complex are both of a single basic design.
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As soon as Shah Jahan had agreed the plans, construction began. According to the historian Lahori, this was as early as January 1632, while Shah Jahan was still in Burhanpur. First the site was cleared and, as Peter Mundy recollected from the time of his visit, hillocks in the surrounding area were ‘made level not to hinder the prospect’. Then, thousands of labourers excavated the deep foundations that were key to the stability of the monumental structure to be built above. These foundations had to resist erosion by the Jumna’s waters and conduct away any floods from the monsoon rains. The monsoon comes in Agra from June to September and rainfall of over eleven inches on a single day was once recorded.

Contemporary Moghul miniatures reveal that, just as in India today, the labourers, sweating in temperatures which in May and June can rise to over 110°F, would have included Hindu women as well as men, all of whom had only hand tools to help them in their tasks. Although the Chinese had invented wheelbarrows many centuries earlier and Europeans had used them for more than three hundred years, these labour-saving devices were then unknown in India. Both male and female labourers carried away the excavated material in baskets upon their heads. As well as laying drainage pipes, they packed a layer of gravel across the whole of the cleared and levelled site to facilitate water run-off.

To bear the main weight of the construction at the northern end of the site the workers dug deep shafts or wells. They lined them with bricks and a cement of lime and sand or brick dust and then filled them with rubble and more cement. For increased strength and adhesion they added materials such as jute and molasses to the cement. They connected these shafts – whose depth they varied to compensate for the slope of the Jumna’s banks – with numerous piers, on top of which they built arched vaults to support the main structure. Along the riverbank itself, they buried large boxes made of ebony in the subsoil and filled them with cement to provide added reinforcement against the rise and fall of the Jumna’s waters. Finally, they finished the foundations with more stones and cement. A Moghul chronicler exulted, ‘and when the spade wielders with robust arms and hands strong as steel had with unceasing effort excavated down to the water table, the ingenious masons and architects of astonishing achievements most firmly built the foundation with stone and mortar up to the level of the ground’.

The next step was the construction along the reinforced riverbank of the vast sandstone-faced platform, some 975 feet long and 364 feet wide, on which the mosque, guesthouse and mausoleum were to be built. By this time, 5,000 people a day (some sources say 20,000) were working on the site, both unskilled labourers and masons as well as other craftsmen. Some were local, but others, in the words of one of Shah Jahan’s chroniclers, came ‘from all parts of the empire’. They congregated in and around the area of secular accommodation Shah Jahan had ordered to be constructed at the south of the complex. It seems to have taken shape quickly and was popularly known as ‘Mumtazabad’. As well as the labourers’ sparse accommodation, the four caravanserais or travellers’ inns built around courtyards were soon alive with merchants and carriers bringing materials to the site by road or by boat along the Jumna.

To allow the sandstone to be transported by carts pulled by teams of oxen from local quarries, labourers constructed a ten-mile-long raised road of packed earth. Once the stone was at the site, masons cut the blocks using a series of small nail-like wedges, which they hammered in straight lines into the stone to split it. The stones were then lifted into place and held there with cement and iron dowels and clamps. The masons took such great care to finish off the facing stones that the chronicler records that they were ‘so smoothly cut and joined by expert craftsmanship that even close inspection fails to reveal any cracks between them’. The precision was achieved by measuring the stones again, marking any further cuts and trimming to the marked line with hammers and ever-finer chisels. Then the masons smoothed the stone by rubbing sharp grit, followed by finer grit, over them beneath a kind of large, flat iron trowel. Some of the masons were so proud of their work that they incised their marks into the stone. The 250 marks found so far on the Taj Mahal vary widely. Some are in the form of stars or Hindu swastikas (the latter represents the cosmos spreading in four directions). Others are geometric designs such as triangles or squares. There are also arrows and what looks like a lotus flower.

On top of the sandstone platform the masons built the massive square plinth for the mausoleum itself with sides measuring some 300 feet and standing 19 feet high. To emphasize its position on the central axis as the focus of the whole complex, Shah Jahan and his architects had agreed that the mausoleum with its minarets and its plinth would be the only structures entirely faced in white marble. The remainder would be in sandstone with, in the case of important buildings such as the mosque and guesthouse, key features such as domes clad in white marble or decorated with marble inlay.

The marble came from quarries 200 miles away, at Makrana, just southwest of Amber (Jaipur). An imperial instruction of 20 September 1632 from Shah Jahan to the Raja of Amber, whose quarries they were, commands:
‘We hereby order that whatever the number of stone cutters and carts on hire … that may be required by the aforesaid [Moghul official] the rajah should make them available to him; and the wages of the stone cutters and the rent money of the carts he will provide with funds from the royal treasurer. It is imperative that the pride of peers and contemporaries should assist in all ways in this regard; and he should consider this a matter of utmost importance, and not deviate from this order.’

Peter Mundy was certainly impressed both at the rate of the work and the disregard of the cost, writing:
‘The building … goes on with excessive labour and cost, prosecuted with extraordinary diligence, gold and silver esteemed common metal and marble but as ordinary stones.’
Another European traveller encountered some of the marble on its journey towards Agra from Makrana. He wrote,
‘Some of these blocks were of such unusual size and length that they drew the sweat of many powerful teams of oxen and of fierce-looking, big-horned buffalos, which were dragging enormous strongly-made wagons in teams of twenty or thirty animals.’

Because the marble was more fragile, less easily available and hence more costly, even greater care had to be taken to avoid cracks and chips when chiselling and smoothing the stones with successive layers of grit to achieve the high polish and meticulous finish that typifies the Taj Mahal. Shah Jahan’s court poet praised the precision with which the marble blocks had been joined:

Like milk with sugar they are so well blended
Not even a hair’s crack is to be found

The builders constructed the plinth to rise convexly towards the centre, cleverly offsetting the distorting effects of perspective that would otherwise have caused the mausoleum to appear to sit in a slight hollow. Once the builders had finished the plinth they began work on the mausoleum. Contrary to popular belief, the mausoleum is not solid white marble but brick faced with marble slabs that are mainly between fifteen and eighteen inches thick. The small flat bricks – on average seven inches long by four inches wide and only one and a half inches thick – that were used were baked in kilns close to the site to minimize transport problems. Also nearby were the kilns to break down chunks of limestone or ‘kankar’, earth full of limestone gravel, to make the quicklime for the mortar.

Scaffolding made from bamboo or wood is still used extensively throughout Asia and was the norm at the time the Taj Mahal was constructed. However, for some reason not clear but perhaps related to local scarcity of materials or to the enormous weights involved, the builders are said to have used brick scaffolding for the Taj Mahal. When the work was finished Shah Jahan was apparently told that the brick scaffolding would take five years to remove, but he had the bright idea of ordering that those who dismantled it could keep the bricks, with the result that it came down overnight. A myth suggests that this brick scaffolding was used to preserve the Taj from view before completion and one variant adds that a man who peeped over the wall was ordered to be blinded for his curiosity.

As the building of the mausoleum progressed, the marble and other materials had to be lifted ever higher up the scaffolding. As in the construction of the Pyramids, ramps are likely to have been part of the solution. But at a certain stage, the stones had to be hoisted. A system of beams, ropes and pulleys powered by men, oxen and even elephants seems likely to have been the solution. To secure the stones during lifting, either ropes were used or, in the case of the heaviest blocks, metal lifting claws were inserted into pre-cut holes in the marble. Once the blocks reached the required height, the masons employed metal crowbars to fit them into place after any further trimming.

The facing blocks were alternately placed horizontal to the brick core or inserted more deeply into the brick with only the smallest cross-section exposed. This technique, known to masons as ‘stretcher/header’, together with the use of iron clamps gave greater strength and adhesion. (The iron clamps have proved to be a problem over the years. Rusting and thermal expansion have produced cracks in the stone and let water into the structure.)

The fact that the estimated weight of the dome is over 12,000 tons gives one some idea of the labour and difficulty involved in construction. The load factor transferred from the dome, which functions as a series of arches, to the supporting walls is about 750 tons per square foot. A chronicler described how the builders topped
‘the heaven-touching dome’ with a gold finial, ‘glittering like the sun’
and over thirty feet high, rising from lotus petals, a common symbol of fertility in India and elsewhere.

The workers faced the interior of the mausoleum up to some three feet above the floor with marble. Above this level they plastered the brick as they did the other interiors within the complex. The main constituents of the plaster, which was up to two inches thick and sometimes applied over an initial coat of mud and straw, were white lime and marble dust. But the plasterers added other ingredients such as egg whites, gum and sugar, depending on the level of finish and adhesion required, and built up finer and finer coats, which they polished to produce a white sheen replicating marble. They even used a similar technique on some of the exteriors. What appears to be marble on some lower parts of the southern gateway is, in fact, polished white plaster. The curators have recently found that the back of the
iwans
, where they project above the main façade of the mausoleum, are also red sandstone faced with white lime plaster.