Agra

• 1. Introduction

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  Agra sits on the banks of the Yamuna river, about 230 km south-east of Delhi, and it holds within its borders a monument that has become a symbol of an entire nation. That monument is the Taj Mahal, a mausoleum built between 1632 and 1648 by a grieving emperor for a wife he could not bear to forget. But Agra is far older than the Taj Mahal, and far stranger. Its name may derive from a Hindi word for salt pan, because the soil here was once so brackish that people extracted salt from it by evaporation. Or it may echo a Sanskrit word meaning the forefront of the sacred groves where the god Krishna played with the women of Vrindavan. A city shaped by legend before it was shaped by empire. What made Agra the foremost city on the Indian subcontinent for more than a century? How did a place of such imperial grandeur fall to a provincial railway town under British rule? And what does it mean today that the marble of the Taj Mahal is slowly turning yellow and green?

• 2. Before the Mughals

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  Sultan Sikandar Khan Lodi, the Afghan ruler of the Delhi Sultanate, rebuilt Agra in 1504-1505 and made it the seat of government. He reigned from 1489 to 1517, and his choice of the left bank of the Yamuna transformed what a 17th-century chronicler named Abdullah had described as merely a village into a flourishing town of officials, merchants, scholars, theologians, and artists. Sikandar Lodi appointed a commission to inspect both banks of the Yamuna from Delhi to Etawah, and the commission chose the eastern, left-bank site as optimal. The city that grew there became one of the most important centres of Islamic learning in India. Sikandar Lodi also founded the village of Sikandra in the northern suburbs. He built there a red sandstone structure in 1495, which was later converted into a tomb and now stands as the Tomb of Mariam-uz-Zamani, Akbar's empress. The ancient city on the east bank had itself been a place of importance under various Hindu dynasties before the Muslim invasions, but the destruction brought by Mahmud of Ghazni had degraded it considerably. The poet Masud Sa'd Salman claims to have been present when Mahmud assaulted Agra, and records that the Raja Japal surrendered after a nightmare, only to see the city pillaged anyway. When Sikandar Lodi died in 1517, the city passed to his son Ibrahim Lodi, who ruled until he was defeated and killed by the Mughal emperor Babur at the First Battle of Panipat in 1526.

• 3. The Mughal Golden Age

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  Babur took Agra immediately after Panipat and sent his son Humayun ahead to occupy the town without opposition. The family of the Raja of Gwalior, slain in the battle, presented Humayun with a quantity of jewels in gratitude for his protection, and among those jewels was the famous diamond Koh-i-nur. Babur himself was almost deterred from settling at Agra by the landscape. In his memoir, the Baburnama, he wrote that he was repulsed and disgusted by the country's ugly and detestable appearance, and that the absence of artificial watercourses was one of the chief defects of Hindustan. He overcame his distaste and laid out the first formal Mughal garden in India, the Aram Bagh, or Garden of Relaxation, on the banks of the Yamuna. The English traveller Ralph Fitch, visiting Agra in September 1585 during the reign of Akbar, reported that Agra and the nearby city of Fatehpur Sikri were each greater than London. The twelve miles between the two cities were, he wrote, a continuous market of victuals and other things, so crowded with people that a man might imagine himself still inside a town. Another European visitor, William Finch, confirmed that the lanes were so congested a person could hardly pass through. Akbar built the modern city of Agra on the right bank of the Yamuna, raised the towering ramparts of the Agra Fort, and also constructed an entirely new capital at Fatehpur Sikri, about 35 km away, though that city was later abandoned. By the time of Akbar's death, Agra had become probably one of the biggest cities in the east. Jahangir, writing in his autobiography the Tuzuk-e-Jahangiri, described Agra's inhabited area on the west bank alone as having a circumference of seven kos, with multi-storey buildings so dense that movement through the lanes and bazaars was difficult. The city's peak came under Shah Jahan, who reigned from 1628 to 1658. Shah Jahan gave Agra the Taj Mahal, the Jama Masjid, and a series of marble buildings within the fort, including the Diwan-i-Am, the Diwan-i-Khas, and the Moti Masjid. He also renamed Agra as Akbarabad, in honour of his grandfather Akbar. Shah Jahan shifted the capital to Shahjahanabad in 1648, and his son Aurangzeb moved the entire court to Delhi in 1658, triggering a rapid decline from which Agra never fully recovered.

• 4. The Taj Mahal

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  Mumtaz Mahal died in childbirth in 1631. She had been Shah Jahan's inseparable companion since their marriage in 1612, and her death prompted the emperor to build the finest mausoleum in the world. Construction commenced in 1632, with more than twenty thousand workers drawn from India, Persia, the Ottoman Empire, and Europe. The mausoleum itself was completed by 1639, the adjunct buildings by 1643, and decoration work continued until at least 1647. The entire 42-acre complex, spanning 22 years of construction, was probably designed by the Persian architect Ustad Ahmad Lahori. At the top of the main gateway, 22 small domes signal the number of years it took to build. The largest dome has a diameter of 60 ft and rises 80 ft; directly beneath it lies the tomb of Mumtaz Mahal. The Taj Mahal is distinguished as the finest example of Mughal architecture, combining Indian, Persian, and Islamic styles. The complex includes twin mosque buildings placed symmetrically on either side of the mausoleum, a formal garden, and a museum. In 2018-19 it attracted nearly 6.9 million visitors, making it the most visited tourist site in India. Shah Jahan did not die a free man. His son Aurangzeb had him confined to the Agra Fort from 1658 until his death in 1666, so for the last eight years of his life the emperor could only gaze at his wife's tomb from across the river. Aurangzeb later erected Shah Jahan's tomb beside Mumtaz Mahal's, inside the monument itself. The Taj Mahal and the Agra Fort both received UNESCO World Heritage Site status in 1983. World leaders including US Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1959, Bill Clinton in 2000, and Donald Trump in 2020, as well as Queen Elizabeth II in 1961, have made the journey to stand before it.

• 5. Agra Fort and the Baby Taj

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  The Agra Fort was commissioned by Akbar in 1565, taking roughly eight years to build on the site of earlier fortifications associated with Islam Shah Suri, son of Sher Shah Suri. The red sandstone walls of this roughly semi-circular structure rise 21 metres, enclose a perimeter of about 2.5 km, and are surrounded by a moat. Inside, Akbar built the Jahangiri Mahal as a private palace for his Rajput wives. Jahangir later added many gardens and a love of flora and fauna that is evident in the fort's decorative work. Shah Jahan overlaid much of the fort with marble and added the Moti Masjid, built entirely in white marble, and the Musamman Burj, an octagonal tower that served as the residence of Mumtaz Mahal. The famous Peacock Throne stood in the Diwan-i-Khas before Aurangzeb removed it to Delhi. The Sheesh Mahal, whose walls and ceilings are inlaid with thousands of small mirrors, and the Khas Mahal, whose marble walls were once decorated with flowers in precious gems, illustrate how each successive emperor layered new refinements onto Akbar's original structure. About a mile downstream along the Yamuna stands a much smaller but equally intricate building. Nur Jahan commissioned the tomb of her father, Mirza Ghiyas Beg, who served as Chief Minister to Emperor Jahangir. Sometimes called the Baby Taj, the structure is set in a large cruciform garden. Its white marble from Rajasthan is encrusted with cornelian, jasper, lapis lazuli, onyx, and topaz, arranged in images of cypress trees and wine bottles. Its garden layout and its use of pietra dura inlay presaged many of the design choices that would later define the Taj Mahal.

• 6. Conquest and Rebellion

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  On the 12th of June 1761, Maharaja Suraj Mal and the Hindu Jat forces of Bharatpur conquered Agra after a month-long siege, forcing the Mughal defenders to surrender. After the victory, the Jats melted the silver doors of the Taj Mahal. Agra remained under Jat control until 1774, when the Mughal commander Mirza Najaf Khan recaptured it. The city changed hands again in 1785, falling to the Marathas, before the British East India Company took it in 1803 after the Second Anglo-Maratha War. In the years 1834-1836, Agra briefly served as the capital of the short-lived Presidency of Agra, governed by a President, and then became the capital of the North-Western Province from 1836 to 1858. During the Indian rebellion of 1857, news of the mutiny at Meerut reached Agra on the 14th of May. On the 3rd of July, some 6,000 Europeans and associated people moved into the Agra Fort for safety. British forces sallied out on the 5th of July to attack an approaching rebel force but were defeated and retreated back inside. The Lieutenant-Governor, J.R. Colvin, died in the fort and was buried in front of the Diwan-i-Am. A relief column under Brigadier Edward Greathed arrived on the 11th of October and was itself surprised by a rebel attack shortly after entering the city; the British defeated that force in what was named the Battle of Agra. The capital of the North Western Provinces was shifted from Agra to Allahabad in 1858, and the city settled into what one observer of the period called the monotonous life of a mere provincial town, though it did become a major railway centre.

• 7. The Threat to the Marble

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  The white marble of the Taj Mahal is turning yellow and green. Air pollution from foundries, vehicle exhaust, and the burning of waste, combined with sewage discharge into the Yamuna, have been steadily corroding the monument. Agra ranked as the 8th most polluted city in India in a study by the World Health Organization using data from 2010-2016. The Yamuna itself is one of the most polluted rivers in the world, and Agra is the second largest contributor to that pollution after Delhi. As many as 90 drains open into the river; the municipality claims to have blocked 40 of them, but the larger nalas at Bhairon, Mantola, and Balkeshwar continue to discharge untreated wastewater unchecked. Leather cuttings from shoe factories, polythene, plastic waste, and construction material are dumped into the riverbed between Itmad-ud-Daula and the Taj Mahal. Insect infestations fed by the polluted river have left green slime on the marble. In 1996, a ruling by the Supreme Court of India established the Taj Trapezium Zone, a 10,400 km2 protected area around the monument where strict industrial pollution restrictions apply. Some foundries have been closed, pollution-control equipment installed at others, nearby vehicle traffic banned, and a parkland buffer zone created around the complex. A technique called mud pack therapy has also been applied to the facade to draw out discolouration. Despite these measures, the threat has not been eliminated, and the Yamuna's 90 drainage channels remain a standing risk to the monument's foundation.

• 8. Agra Today

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  Agra's leather and footwear industry produces more than 1.5 lakh pairs of shoes per day across its various manufacturing units. Tourism contributes substantially alongside this manufacturing base, with upwards of 9.5 million tourists visiting Agra and its surrounding monuments in 2019. The city also carries on Mughal craft traditions in pietra dura marble inlay, carpets, and zari and zardozi embroidery. Agra is the birthplace of the Din-i-Ilahi, a religion founded by Emperor Akbar that is now extinct, and also of the Radhaswami Faith, which has around two million followers worldwide. The Taj Mahotsav, a cultural festival and craft fair held annually from the 18th to the 27th of February in Shilpgram near the Taj Mahal's eastern gate, has been running since 1992 and reached its 28th edition in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic forced its cancellation in 2021. A metro rail project is underway to link the city's major monuments; a priority corridor connecting the Taj East Gate to Jama Masjid, with six stations and a stretch of 6 km, began operations on the 6th of March 2024. The full Phase 1 project, estimated to cost approximately 8,379 crore rupees, is expected to complete in 2026 and is partially financed by a 450 million euro loan from the European Investment Bank. The Aram Bagh, the garden Babur planted in 1528 on the Yamuna's east bank, still stands today about 2.3 km north of the Taj Mahal, its remnants a quiet echo of the first Mughal emperor's determination to make beauty out of land he once found repulsive.