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Updated: June 7, 2025
Time annulled Akbar's achievements, but those of his grandson stand to-day, and the structures of his era are beautiful enough to attract admirers from every corner of the earth. A famous critic once said that Shah Jahan built like a giant and finished like a jeweler. His works have made Agra, of all cities in India, the place of unrivaled interest.
After the Halls of Audience we come to the seraglio and accompanying buildings, where everything is perfect and nothing is on the grand scale. The Pearl Mosque could hardly be smaller; and it is as pure and fresh as a lotus. Every inch is charming and distinguished. All these rooms are built along the high wall which in the time of Shah Jahan and his many lady loves was washed by the Jumna.
"Oh! no, it's so pleasant, so beautiful, to walk straight on like this.... All I desire is to go on for ever and ever with Antoine." The others laughed, and Jahan exclaimed in his good-natured way: "Let us hope that he won't take you so far. You've reached your destination now, and I shan't be the one to prevent you from being happy."
A Mogul ruler who did things was Shah Jahan, and he came of a race not content with ordinary achievements. His grandfather, Akbar, was probably the greatest personage ever born in India. He it was "whose saddle was his throne, the canopy of which was the vaulted dome of heaven." Akbar made Eastern history, made it fast, blazoning it with proud records of conquest and empire extension.
The princess became the mother of a son who succeeded his father as the Emperor Sháh Jahán. In him the Rájpút blood acquired a position theretofore unknown in India.
Khuram, the second son of Jahangir, who succeeded his father under the title of Shah Jahan, had a Hindu mother, and two Hindu grandmothers. All his sons, however, were by a Persian consort the lady of the Taj.
His three visitors found him there in a blouse, watching a couple of assistants, who were rough-hewing the block of stone whence the angel was to emerge. Jahan was a sturdy man of thirty-six, with dark hair and beard, a large, ruddy mouth and fine bright eyes. Born in Paris, he had studied at the Fine Art School, but his impetuous temperament had constantly landed him in trouble there.
Standing on a scaffolding they were rough-hewing its symmetrical wings, whilst Jahan, seated on a low chair, with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and his hands soiled with clay, was contemplating a figure some three feet high on which he had just been working. "Ah! it's you," he exclaimed. "Antoine has been waiting more than half an hour for you.
Never forgetful, it would seem, of a childish adventure when the little Nur Jahan in temper and pride set free his two pet doves, twenty years later the Mughal Emperor won her from her soldier husband by those same swift methods that David employed to gain the wife of Uriah, the Hittite. And when Nur Jahan became queen she was ruler indeed, "the one overmastering influence in his life."
Austin de Bordeaux, a French goldsmith, who was employed by Shah Jahan in making the celebrated Peacock throne, may possibly have executed some of this metal-work in the Taj; but there is no evidence worthy of consideration to support the common Anglo-Indian belief that he designed or superintended the pietra dura, or inlaid marble decoration of the building, which is entirely of the Persian school.
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