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Updated: May 11, 2025
The Princess Arjamand has little place in history, but a devoted, loving husband has rescued her name from oblivion, and has immortalized her by making her dust the tenant of the most majestic and beautiful of all human monuments.
Arjamand Banu Begum was a Persian princess of rare beauty and of great personal charm. She died in giving birth to her eighth child, and through all the years had held the supreme place in Shah Jahan's life; despite the Oriental custom of having other wives, she had won for herself the title of Mumtaz-i-Mahal, "The exalted of the Palace."
Was it probable that Arjamand and her Emperor had loved fastidiously, and yet how they had loved!
Shah Jahan ruled from 1628 to 1658, and had been on the throne only two years when death took from him his adored Arjamand. Then came the resolve to erect to her memory a monument that might measure his love and grief. Since Akbar's time, the best architects, artists, and skilled workmen of India, Persia, and Arabia had been attracted to Agra and neighboring Delhi.
Agra's Taj Mahal is the most exquisite building ever erected by the hands of man, and is a romance as deftly wrought in marble as any writer ever fashioned in words. It marks a great man's love for a woman Arjamand Banu Begum, his wife. Shah Jahan was a Mohammedan despot who led a magnificent life, and had other wives; but in his eyes the peer of her sex was Arjamand.
Arjamand had many titles of rank and endearment, but poets like Sir Edwin Arnold preferred to speak of her as Mumtaz-i-Mahal, meaning the "Exalted of the Palace," when extolling the charms of this splendid niece of Nur-Mahal, who likewise had been famed for beauty and charity.
Well, upon the walls of the tomb of the Princess Arjamand are about two acres of surface covered with such mosaics as fine and as perfect as if each setting were a jewel intended for a queen to wear turquoise, coral, garnet, carnelian, jasper, malachite, agate, lapis lazuli, onyx, nacre, bloodstone, tourmaline, sardonyx and a dozen other precious stones of different colors.
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