parveentalpur

Taj Mahal is the symbol of the great love story of Prince Shah Jehan (1592-1666) and Arjumand Bano. He was the grandson of Akbar the Great Moghul King; she the fourteen year old daughter of Asaf Khan, a highly influential official in the Moghul court. Arjumand was also the niece of Queen Noor Jehan, the most renowned wife of emperor Jehangir, the father of Shah Jehan.

Shah Jehan fell in love with Arjumand on the first sight. He saw her at a Meena Bazaar ( a marketplace run by ladies) when she was only fourteen years old. In five years time they got married and Arjumand Bano came to be known as Mumtaz Mahal. Shah Jehan had other wives also but she became his favorite. She was beautiful, intelligent and a good chess player who dared to accompany her husband even on his military campaigns and eventually died in one of those in Burhanpur in Central India.

Mumtaz Mahal died in 1631 while giving birth to Shah Jehan’s fourteenth child, a girl. It is said that on her deathbed she asked Shah Jehan for two things, first that he will not marry again and second that he will build a grand mausoleum in her memory. Her death devastated Shah Jehan it is said the grief had grayed his hair soon after.  He ordered to exhume the body of his beloved wife from Burhanpur and bring it in a gold coffin to Agra. Shah Jehan may have eventually found some consolation in devoting about two decades and 20, 000 workers for the construction of the promised mausoleum on the banks of River Jamuna. In the last years of his life fate deprived him of all the splendor. His son, the austere emperor Aurangzeb, imprisoned him in the Fort of Agra, allowing him a window to watch the Taj and finally getting him buried under its dome next to his beloved wife.

Much has been written on Taj Mahal, poems and plays even movies have been made in India and Pakistan. Here is a documentary , here is a song from an old movie and here are a few glimpses from the last movie (2005) made on Taj Mahal.