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Updated: June 7, 2025
It is just possible that the Delhi elephants were intended to be copies of those placed by Akbar at Agra. Shah Jahan is not likely to have intentionally perpetuated the memory of the Rajput chiefs, but popular tradition or imagination may have fastened the story told by Bernier on to the Delhi statues.
Plate I. reproduces part of a letter, addressed by Shah Jahan to an ancestor of the present Maharajah of Gidhour. In this letter the Raja Dalan Singh is informed that "the auspicious impress of the royal hand" is sent as a mark of royal favour, and he is commanded to proceed to Court to participate in the festivities and to pay homage to the Emperor. Bernier's "Travels" Constable's translation.
Shah Jahan next appointed a council of the best architects of his empire for preparing the design for the building. Drawings of many of the most celebrated buildings of the world were shown and discussed.
This was carried off by the Amir Husein Ali Khan, in 1720, as part of his share of the spoil of Agra. The total expenditure, according to native accounts, amounted to nearly 185 lakhs of rupees. It is said that Shah Jahan had intended to construct a mausoleum for himself opposite to the Taj, on the other side of the Jumna and to connect the two by a great bridge.
They are not exactly decadent, but they suggest sweetness rather than strength. The Empire had been won, and Shah Jahan could indulge in luxury and ease. But Akbar had had to fight, and he remained to the end a man of action, and we see his character reflected in his stronghold Fatehpur-Sikri, which one visits from Agra and never forgets.
After his death disputes between various claimants to the throne led to Agra Fort being besieged and captured by Husein Ali Khan, a partisan of one of them, who looted the treasury of all the valuables deposited there during three centuries. "There were the effects of Nur Jahan Begum and Mumtaz Mahal, amounting in value, according to various reports, to two or three crores of rupees.
Yet when it was being built so modern a masterpiece as Hamlet was being written and played. Those interested in the Great Moguls ought really to visit Fatehpur-Sikri before Delhi or Agra, because Akbar was the grandfather of Shah Jahan. But there can be no such chronological wanderings in India. Have we not already seen Humayun's Tomb, outside Delhi? and Humayun was Akbar's father.
These Jahan removed, and then she stood forth with her rounded figure, her broad hips and her wifely, maternal bosom, full of the milk which nourishes and redeems. "Well, what do you think of her?" asked Jahan. "Built as she is, I fancy that her children ought to be less puny than the pale, languid, aesthetic fellows of nowadays!"
The French traveller Tavernier, who has left a complete record of the time, writes of this event: "It is most surprising that not one of the servants of the grand King offered to assist him; that all his subjects abandoned him, and that they turned their eyes to the rising sun, recognizing no one as king but Aurangzîb. Shah Jahan, though still living, passed from their memories.
No doubt she still remained very delicate, with such poor health that one ever feared that she might expire in a faint sigh; and her legs, moreover, were still too weak to admit of her walking any distance. But all the same, she was no longer the little wilding, the little ailing flower of the previous spring. Jahan, who marvelled at the incipient miracle, drew near to the young people.
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