Free A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal by Michael Preston Diana Preston Page A

appeal to all five senses – sight, scent, sound (that of water and of birds and insects attracted to the fruit and pollen), touch (the texture of leaves, the smoothness of marble and the coolness of water) and taste (through the consumption of the fruit).
    Like Timur, the Moghuls often conducted their business in the open air. In one miniature painting Babur sits in his garden, enthroned beneath a canopy and surrounded by blossoming trees and flowers, to receive ambassadors. Other paintings show emperors and nobles besporting themselves with their scantily clad concubines in secluded bowers within their gardens, bright flowers in full bloom, fertile trees laden with ripe fruit ready to drop and phallic fountains shooting plumes of water skywards.
    In one of the best-known portraits of Shah Jahan, he is surrounded by flowers, among them irises, tulips, daffodils, hollyhocks and campanula. To him, the design of the gardens of the Taj Mahal would have been as important as that of the buildings and would have combined with them to create a coherent, exquisite whole. A court poet wrote of the emperor’s desire to create in the Taj Mahal complex a perfection that would endure
So long as the words flower and garden remain,
So long as there are residues of cloud and rain .

     
    Shah Jahan and his planners designed the Taj Mahal garden as a classic walled garden to be laid out on the char bagh , or quadripartite, plan. Two marble water channels – one of which is the north–south channel which forms the central axis of the whole complex – cross at right angles in the middle of the garden, halfway between the tomb and the gateway, and divide it into four squares. The water channels are raised, as in most Moghul gardens, to allow them to be used for irrigating the surrounding planting. To reaffirm the bilateral symmetry, the architects designed identical red sandstone pavilions to be built into the boundary walls at the two ends of the east–west cross channel. They topped each pavilion, where musicians are said to have played, with an octagonal chattri . At the intersection of the channels they placed a large square white marble pool perfectly positioned to reflect the Taj in its waters. Such pools, which were a feature of Moghul gardens, apparently have their origins in the ablution tanks of mosques where the Islamic faithful undertake a ritual cleansing prior to prayer. * The designers set the pool in a marble platform sixty-four feet square, decorated with lotus patterns. At certain times of day, five fountains within the pool shot jets of water into the air. Around the edge of the pool were a further twenty-four fountains, with another twenty-four playing on each side of the pool in the broad central channel running between the gateway and the mausoleum. The gardeners stocked the pool with lotus flowers, the symbol of fertility, and with goldfish. (Today, guides none too convincingly claim that some of the fish in the pool are direct descendants of the originals.)
    The designers further subdivided the garden, quartered by the channels, into four equal squares, producing sixteen squares in all. What the Moghuls planted in the Taj gardens is not clear in detail. Today’s arrangements are much influenced by British planting just over a century ago. For example, although the Moghuls introduced to India the cypress – which originally came from Persia and Asia Minor – as a symbol of eternity, including the eternity to which the dead were destined, the avenue of cypresses now leading to the tomb from the gateway is unlikely to have been original. Cypresses did, however, probably feature among ‘the trees and rare aromatic herbs’ that the court historian Salih mentions being planted. Perhaps, as often in their gardens, the Moghuls originally alternated cypresses with fruit trees. The latter provided shade as well as symbolizing earthly life renewed each spring, in contrast to the more sober associations of the cypress.