9 Fascinating Facts About Taj Mahal You Didn’t Know
Taj Mahal stands tall as a living monument of love and devotion but shrouded in mysteries for centuries.
“Not a piece of architecture, as other buildings are, but the proud passions of an emperor’s love wrought in living stones.” — Edwin Arnold
The love epitome, the Taj Mahal, one of the seven wonders of the world, stands tall as a magnificent monument, testifying the love of great Mughal Emperor Shah Jehan for his beloved and beautiful wife, Arjumand Banu Begum, known as Mumtaz Mahal.
Shah Jehan commissioned the Taj Mahal to be built in 1631 on the southern bank of the river Yamuna in the beautiful city of Agra. When Mumtaz Mahal died on 17 June 1631 during labor by giving birth to her 14th child. Shah Jehan was grief-stricken and wanted to build an impressive monument for her burial that would stand tall testifying his love for centuries.
Taj Mahal is indeed an architectural wonder that left the world in awe for its immaculate work of art that attracts millions of visitors to India annually. However, various myths are associated with this impressive monument which is indeed the progenies of the imagination of the people. Still, there are facts about the Taj Mahal that are unknown to many of us.
Here are the 9 secret and fascinating facts you should know about the impressive Taj Mahal:
1. Shah Jehan built it to honor his beloved late wife
As an emperor of India, Shah Jehan loved and married many wives but his true love was his 3rd wife, Arjumand Banu Begum, whom he favored above all and everything.
She was the Empress consort of the great Mughal Empire and the chief consort of Mughal Emperor Shah Jehan from 19 January 1628 to 17 June 1631. She was famously known as Mumtaz Mahal and together they spent 19 years of marriage with 14 children.
She died during the delivery of her 14th child at the age of 39, leaving Shah Jehan grief-stricken. The emperor didn’t expect the untimely death of his beloved which shook him to the core.
To pacify his grief, he ordered to build a magnificent Taj Mahal, unbeknownst to the world, to immortalize his love for Mumtaz Mahal. The construction started in 1632 and carried on for almost two decades and finally completed in 1653.
2. Shah Jehan amputated the artisans who created the Taj Mahal
Among other stories, one of the most circulated and widely believed myths is that Shah Jehan ordered to amputate the artisans who created the fascinating Taj Mahal.
They provide the reason to support their claim is that the emperor didn’t want someone else to build such an unsurpassed architectural beauty. That’s why it was necessary to cut the hands of those who built it.
No matter what the people have believed throughout history, there is no such historical evidence to support this claim. But, it is a fact that thousands of people have lost their lives during the construction of this ambitious Mahal.
3. The emperor wanted to build a twin black Taj Mahal
The people believed that Shah Jehan wanted to build another Taj Mahal for his burial but that was intended to be black.
He wanted to build it across the white Taj Mahal in the Mehtab garden to mirror it, but this never happened. Whether the emperor truly wished to do so or is it also a myth is yet to be disclosed, but the abundance of black marbles in the Mehtab garden raised questions about the fictionality of the intention.
The presence of the deposit of the black marbles testify that yes, the emperor wanted to build another Taj Mahal, but, in the meantime, his son, Aurangzeb, dethroned him and put him in jail. Unfortunately, we would never know what the truth was and even if it was true, we have lost the opportunity to see another marvelous black Taj Mahal to the political turmoil of the Mughals.
4. The Taj Mahal changes its colors in the daytime
It’s no wonder that this marvelous architectural beauty is capable of changing its colors with the change in light in the daytime.
When you visit this grandeur of the past, you can testify it yourselves that indeed it changes its colors but for that to happen, you need to spend an entire day in front of the Taj Mahal, and who wouldn’t want that? So, the Taj Mahal put on a pinkish hue in the early hours of the morning, milky white during daytime till evening, and gives out light blue color during moonlit nights. It would be indeed a captivating sight to see the entire Taj Mahal shifts its colors and seem completely different.
5. Mumtaz Mahal wasn’t buried in the Taj Mahal in the first place
Taj Mahal was commissioned to be built after the death of Mumtaz Mahal. The work on the project started almost a year after the death of Mumtaz.
Before being finally buried in the basement of the Taj Mahal, she was buried twice in other places. When she died, she was buried in Burhanpur, a city in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh for the first time.
Her body was then shifted to be buried in the complex of Taj Mahal for 12 years. Later on, her body was shifted to the basement of the Taj Mahal where she finally found a resting place.
Now, one can ask the question if her body was removed twice and that too after such a long period of 12 years, how come her body remained intact. The answer to this is that, according to popular belief, they mummified her body after her death. But there is no historical evidence, however, archaeologists can find the truth if they open her grave.
6. A Persian architect designed the Taj Mahal
Many would wonder that Indians would have built this marvelous piece of architecture, but the chief architect was Persian and his name is Ustad Ahmad Lahauri.
His name may contain the word ‘Lahauri’ that can raise questions that he might have been from Lahore, a famous city in Pakistan, but he was actually from Iran. The other reason is that his designing skills are not similar to the Muslim of the Indian Sub-continent but reflect the essence of Iranian architecture.
This doesn’t mean that Indians were not involved during the construction. According to various sources, 20,000 to 22,000 Indians were hired to build this spectacular building.
7. The Taj Mahal is taller than the Qutub Minar
The construction of Qutub Minar was initially started in1192 by Qutb-Ud-din Aibak, who established the Dehli Sultanate after the death of Muhammad of Ghor.
Originally Aibak built its first story, but later on, his successors and other great emperors like Firuz Shah Tughlaq, and Sher Shah Suri contributed to building more stories on the Minar. The Qutub Minar rose to be 72.5 meters in height and that made it the tallest minaret in the world to be built from bricks.
However, the height of the Taj Mahal is 73 meters, thus surpassing the tallest brick minaret in the world by 5 feet.
8. The minarets of the Taj Mahal are not perpendicular
When you visit the Taj Mahal for the first time, you won’t notice right away that the minarets are actually not standing upright.
Yes, this is true, they seem to be standing perpendicular but they aren’t. Now the question arises that is it a flaw on the part of the architect or no one noticed it at that time? To your amazement, the architect intentionally made them tilting slightly outward.
When you closely look at them, the four minarets are tilting slightly outwards and the reason was to protect the main area of Taj Mahal if the minarets fall during a natural calamity such as flooding or earthquakes. The modern architects have proved that if anything happens the minarets will fall outwards and not on the magnificent dome to destroy the Taj Mahal.
9. The Taj Mahal is enlisted as one of the seven wonders of the world
In 2000, a campaign was started with the name “New 7 Wonders of the World” for the selection of new wonders from around 200 old monuments.
Bernard Werber, a Canadian-Swiss by origin, led the campaign however, it was the largest voting poll that ever happened. The seven winners were announced on 7 July 2007 in Lisbon, at Estádio da Luz.
During the voting, millions of people across India and the world voted for the Taj Mahal which thereby secured a place in the list of seven new wonders of the world.
