2 - Cityscape

Summary

Urban historians have too often ignored plan and build in their studies of towns and cities. This is unfortunate for, as a number of scholars have shown, the shape of architectural space is often suggestive of political, social, and economic relationships. For a city like Shahjahanabad that suffered long years of pillage and anarchy, years in which records, diaries, memoirs, and other written materials were destroyed, remains of the urban fabric constitute a major form of evidence.

The Mughal Emperors were interested, as practitioners and patrons, in all of the arts, including architecture. Babur was a poet, a prose writer of distinction, and a man who took delight in a skillfully designed and well-stocked garden. Akbar maintained poets, musicians, calligraphers, painters, and architects in his household. He built the palace-fortresses in Agra and Lahore and encouraged the rejuvenation of both cities, and he constructed Fathpur Sikri, that magnificent but short-lived capital near Agra. Like Babur, Jahangir was an accomplished prose stylist and exhibited an acute appreciation of painting.

Of all the Mughal rulers, however, the one who displayed the most intense and sophisticated interest in architecture was Shahjahan. He had decided opinions on style and once told the faujdar of Sirhind to build his mansion with a garden on one side and a pool on the other.