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Reviving the moonlight garden

Shanthi Shankarkumar

"It has the fragile delicacy of a soap bubble; no other building I have ever seen has conveyed to me quite that degree of airy grace, of absolute purity."

S J Perelman, 1947

Yet one solitary tear
Would hang on the cheek of time
In the form
Of this white and gleaming Taj Mahal

Rabindranath Tagore

When the Taj was built 350 years ago, a moonlight garden called Mehtab Bagh grew in resplendent splendour across the Yamuna on the northern waterfront. From this 25-acre garden filled with pavilions, pools and fountains, and the most beautiful, sweet-smelling flowers and trees, Shahjahan got a spectacular view of the mausoleum.

Over the centuries, floods, neglect and pillage have virtually destroyed the garden. But excavations, which began in 1994 and which still continue, reveal a magnificent four-quartered garden [charbagh] that was designed and positioned to complement the architectural beauty of the Taj Mahal.

As the site is being reclaimed, scientists, historians and botanists from all over the world are joining in the journey to go back in time, to unravel and record for posterity a magnificent garden that reflected the Mughals' passion for beauty and their great engineering skills. It is all part of an attempt to preserve and maybe even recreate the once pristine beauty of the Taj and its environs.

The interest in Mehtab Bagh was triggered by concern for the Taj and its surroundings, which are being threatened by high pollution levels and haphazard urban growth. The structure of the Taj is being threatened by acid rain, which if not controlled will eventually corrode the marble.

In 1994, the Supreme Court of India ordered the Union ministry of environment and forests to plant a green belt around the Taj. It also recommended that a massive tree planting drive be carried out within a radius of 100km.

Just what shape the green belt should take is a matter of much international interest. In 1995 a Blue Ribbon Commission on the Agra heritage project was set up. Elizabeth Moynihan, wife of New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, former United States ambassador to India, was asked to be the American chair. Former Indian ambassador to the US Abid Hussain was the Indian chair.

Moynihan is an architectural historian with special interest in 16th century Mughal architecture. She is also author of Paradise As A Garden: In Persia and Mughal India (1977). She shares a special relationship with India, which she visits every year. "I know people keep leaving India, but I just love it and keep going there every year," she laughs.

The Blue Ribbon Commission suggested that there be a scientific study of at least one riverfront garden in Agra -- Mehtab Garden. The project got underway in 1997 with the Archaeological Survey of India, the Smithsonian Institute and the New York Botanical Gardens jointly conducting research.

The study has been completed and will be available in a book, The Moonlight Garden: New Discoveries at the Taj Mahal, edited by Elizabeth Moynihan and published by the University of Washington Press and the Arthur M Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, in October. "Our whole focus has been totally historic. The very first scientists to work on a Mughal site were on this team," says Moynihan.

The historians are not sure when exactly Mehtab Bagh was created, but it is known that the garden was created to view the Taj from across the Yamuna. "I had the very first notion about the site being a place to view the Taj in 1973, so it was exciting for me to see that in 1995 the ASI had excavated a large pool on the riverfront terrace. The important thing about the pool was that it reflected the Taj Mahal," says Moynihan.

What was even more exciting to discover was that the Taj was reflected in the water even though it was outside the normal reflective length. "This is a very big finding. The Mughals were wonderful engineers. The positioning of the Taj was deliberate," says Moynihan.

The excavations also debunked the myth that Shah Jahan had plans to build a black Taj across the river. "All you have to do is stand on the terrace of the Taj and look across the river and any sensible person could see that the area would flood. You could never build a big tomb there. It is almost an oxbow in the river at that point," says Moynihan.

Mehtab Bagh complemented the Taj. Its layout conformed to a typical Mughal garden. It was a four-quartered garden in which the quarters were separated by walkways in white plaster that could be seen easily at night. There was a large octagonal pool at the front and probably a ramp leading into the river, where the emperor could land his boat and enter the garden.

To the Mughals, a garden was more than just a place of visual and olfactory enjoyment -- it was an extension of life. "Mughal gardens were palaces without roofs," says Moynihan. "The term garden is almost a misnomer; they're not gardens in the Western sense at all."

In her book Paradise As A Garden, Moynihan speaks in greater detail about this subject. "The extensive walled and terraced charbaghs Babur built were delightful open palaces and included baths and a mosque. In his gardens Babur planned military campaigns, held public audiences, wrote his memoirs, composed poetry and music, entertained and revelled with his friends. The life of the rulers within the confines of the palaces was thus transposed to the gardens."

She writes, "The Central Asia Mughals were the world's most elegant nomads. It is precisely this nomadic characteristic which explains the importance that their gardens held for them. The Mughals used their charbaghs as no other great dynasty has used gardens. Neither decorative adjuncts to a palace nor intended simply for visual enjoyment, gardens were used in place of buildings."

Babur, the first Mughal emperor, would lay down gardens as markers of his territorial conquests in India. Instead of palaces, he preferred to live in gardens with their pavilions, terraces, water channels, cascades and tree groves. His gardens and those of his courtiers on the eastern bank of the Yamuna made Agra a garden city in the early 16th century.

An early 18th century map of Agra shows a continuous array of gardens on both banks. Historian Ebba Koch of the Institute of Art History, University of Vienna, describes the typical riverfront pleasure garden as terraced, with the main building placed on the highest terrace on the riverbank to take advantage of views and cool breezes, framed by corner towers of enclosure walls. They provided picturesque views along the river, as well as a backdrop to the charbagh arrayed below.

The three main types of Mughal gardens -- pleasure, palace and tomb -- were based on the archetype of the mythical garden of Eden with four rivers (milk, honey, wine and water), trees and tanks as described in the Koran and Hadith literature, and were strongly influenced by the Persian charbaghs. The inscription on the southern gateway (the entry to the garden) ends with the words from the Koran, "Enter thou my Paradise!"

The Agra riverfront has examples of all three garden types. Of the surviving gardens, Ram Bagh and Mehtab Bagh are examples of pleasure gardens, while the tomb garden is represented by the Taj, Itmad-ud-Daulah and Chinni-ka-Rouza.

Taking into account the passion and painstaking care with which the Mughals planned their gardens, would it be possible to restore Mehtab Bagh?

"We've not discussed recreating the Mehtab Bagh with the ASI. My own view is that the site has been pillaged over the years and the stonework removed, so you cannot accurately recreate what it was, simply because you don't know what it looked like. We know the purpose, the placement, the waterworks and things like that. What you don't know is what the buildings looked like," explains Moynihan.

While history has shown without doubt that the Mughals were wild about flowering and fruit trees and painstakingly planned their gardens, there is no direct historical information about the plantings at the Mehtab Garden. David Lentz, director of graduate studies at the New York Botanical Gardens, one of the world's leading botanical research institutions, was in Agra for two seasons. Each stint was for six weeks, which he spent collecting pollen samples and charred remains from the excavated Mehtab Bagh. This was the first time botanical research was done of a Mughal garden.

When Lentz first visited the Mehtab Bagh site in October 1996, all he saw was tall, coarse grass that had grown in river sediments deposited over centuries of periodic flooding. "We learned quickly that most of the Mughal activity surfaces were one or two metres underground," he says.

Working in temperatures of over 120 degrees Fahrenheit, he and his colleagues from the ASI dug down to the planting beds, waterworks and walkways of the Mughal era and collected soil samples for traces of plant materials.

Back in New York, Lentz studied the samples under an electron microscope to identify the species. Most of the plant material he recovered was from trees, because wood fibres keep better than the soft tissues of petals, stems or leaves. The only annual he identified was the cockscomb, which came from the northeastern corner of the garden where it grew next to a member of the magnolia family called champak and another tree, the jujube, that produces edible fruit.

From that corner and a rectangular pool at the centre of Mehtab Bagh, Lentz recovered the remains of the chirunji, a relative of the pistachio. At the southern end of the garden, which faces the Taj and was accessible from a river landing, Lentz found cypress and red cedar.

According to Lentz, each of these plants had obvious advantages in a moonlight garden. The cockscomb has bright red flowers and plenty of seeds to attract songbirds, the champak and red cedar bloom at night with fragrant white and yellow flowers, and fruits and nuts from the jujube and chirunji could be picked and eaten on the spot.

To the Mughals, as with the Persians, flowering trees represented renewal. The cypress represented eternity and bordered the walkways and water channels of the gardens. Lentz's research also suggests that mango, palm and fig trees were part of the garden, then as now. The jujubes that grow at the Mehtab Bagh site today may even be direct descendants of the ones planted by the Mughals, he says.

Another interesting finding of Lentz's research was that the plantings at the Mehtab Bagh were more Indian than Mughal. "The plants they used were from the Indian subcontinent, they were not plants the Mughals had brought with them down the Khyber Pass. Cypress is the only import," he says. He attributes this willingness of the Mughal emperors to incorporate Indian elements in their gardens to the influence of the Hindu princesses the Mughals were fond of marrying.

While Lentz's painstaking research is ready to go into print as part of the Smithsonian study, he was a little disappointed to find that the ASI had started planting at the site last year. "They are not telling me what they are planting. I hope they will incorporate the findings of the research in their restoration. If they planted a garden in authentic style, reflecting what was actually there in Mughal times, it would be of interest to Western tourists. And that's a big part of the object, to have Westerners stay longer at the Taj Mahal," says Lentz, carefully choosing his words so as not to tread on any fragile egos.

Lentz says utmost care must be taken to ensure that no further damage is done to what remains of Mehtab Bagh. "The Taj Mahal is a tourist Mecca. What is necessary to the Taj experience is an educational component. Right now, you just walk in and there are a few signs, which tell you how and when it was built, but there is no interpretative centre. I'm not saying that anything big should be built, but a nice, planted garden would be a nice counterbalance to the beautiful architecture of the Taj."

Like Moynihan, Lentz feels it would be impossible to restore Mehtab Bagh to its original Mughal stature. "We don't know enough to rebuild the garden, but a lot could be done to make it look attractive. You could reconstruct the shoreline, there was a large tower in each corner, now there is only one left intact. If the others could be reconstructed, it would give you an idea of how the garden was constructed, that would be a nice sight from the Taj," he says.

Lentz is naturally not very enthusiastic about the Uttar Pradesh tourism department's plans to put up a golf course across the Taj. "I don't think the Mughals were into golfing," he quips dryly. "I don't think a golf course is compatible with the setting of a historical monument. They should do some basic restoration of the site, stabilise the existing architecture at the site, plant the charbagh at the north end of the site in a manner we know about and plant the rest of the area in orchards. That would be compatible with the economic needs of the community and also recreate a pleasant vista from the Taj," he suggests.

Lending his expertise to the series of studies begun by the ASI is noted geographer and landscape architect James Wescoat, assistant professor, department of geography, at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He made two trips to Agra to conduct his studies and says it is a city he "loves". "The important finding was that there is a very close connection between Mehtab Bagh and the Taj Mahal. We believe they were a unified design," says Wescoat.

Wescoat has documented many of the major features of the waterworks in Mehtab Bagh, including wells, cisterns, pipes, channels, cascades, fountains and pools.

His findings also showed that the garden's water supply and distribution might have begun at riverfront wells filled by leather buckets lifted from the river by rope and oxen. According to his calculations, Mehtab Bagh could have consumed as much as 70 acre-feet of water annually -- the equivalent of the water needed for a modern 70-home subdivision in the United States. Now that the Yamuna's waters are depleted, it would be too much to expect a modern reconstruction of such a water-guzzling project, he says.

"How do you link the conservation of historic places with the new environmental realities, which include declining groundwater tables and severe water quality problems? One would have to think very carefully about that," warns Wescoat.

Though he is hopeful that the garden will be revived to some extent, Wescoat feels that many important questions are still not being addressed. Besides, neither he nor Lentz have got clear signals from the ASI about how their reports will be used.

"There are some fundamental questions to be asked. What are the types of conservation that make the most sense to the people and culture of Agra? International approaches might be useful, but the people of Agra are the most significant, it is part of their life and livelihood, so what do they envision? Local people should be involved in how the garden should be," stresses Wescoat.

Even as attempts are being made to recreate Mehtab Bagh, other grandiose plans to beautify the Taj and its surroundings and make them more attractive to tourists are underway. The ASI's ticket sale data has shown that visits to the Taj are 2.5 times more than at the Agra Fort and 55 times more than at Itmad-ud-Daulah's tomb less than a mile away. The focus on one or two major monuments results in 50 per cent of international tourists and 65 per cent of domestic tourists taking a day trip or spending one night in Agra. Obviously the city of Agra is not benefiting as much as it could.

Past studies and proposals have pointed to ways to address this issue, but nothing concrete emerged out of all those suggestions. The potential for increased tourism in Agra combined with the need to address critical environmental issues motivated the Uttar Pradesh tourism ministry to invite the department of landscape architecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, to draw up a master plan and guidelines for the Taj National Park.

The department had done a project at Sarnath, so this was the second time Uttar Pradesh sought its expertise. The team made two visits to the site, one in August 1999 and the other in January 2000 and studied the relationship of the Taj to the other monuments and open spaces along the river bank.

In January 2000, a team of faculty and students from the department of landscape architecture surveyed the site and developed a preliminary development plan, which was presented to UP Tourism and the Agra Development Authority. The project was developed in a sixteen-week studio in spring 2000 in UIUC and the report, which has gone to print, should be out any time now.

A symposium was held at the UIUC in April this year, where all interested parties presented their findings. Wescoat, Lentz, Ebba Koch and the UIUC team presented papers on their research. The Indian side was represented by Deepak Verma, secretary, Uttar Pradesh Tourism.

According to Amita Shah, associate professor, department of landscape architecture, "We are suggesting that the Taj Mahal be considered part of the larger landscape, which was what it was in the 17th century. We were told to design the Taj National Park, the area before the Taj Mahal. We came up with the idea of the Agra Cultural Heritage Zone, which will include the Taj, the area on both banks, and other monuments in the vicinity of the Taj. That doesn't include Sikanderi or Fatehpur Sikhri."

The draft of the development plan suggests that a promenade be developed from Mehtab Bagh to the Taj, continuing north up to Ram Bagh and to the south side and then going from the Taj to the Agra front along the river. "The inspiration for the plan is Mughal, but the final outcome is very much related to the site and functions for tourists," says Shah.

Some of the other guidelines include restoration of Mehtab Bagh in accordance with specifications developed by the ASI in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institute's research team. Subsidiary gardens on the western and eastern sides should be developed as tourist destinations so that the mausoleum can be viewed from many directions in the day as well as at night. It has also suggested that the project be divided into five phases for the landscape around the Taj and Agra Fort to be redesigned to make the tourist -- international and domestic --aware of riverfront Agra as a city of gardens.

The plan has also identified 16 views of the Taj Mahal from various spots and used them as key elements in planning for visitor access and circulation. The river front promenade links historic monuments and gardens. Land management strategies are proposed keeping in mind the interests of the townsfolk and the need to promote ecological balance in the long run.

"The whole proposal is based on the understanding that the level of the Yamuna will be raised. They are going to build a weir 2.5 km down that will raise the river's level at the Taj Mahal site. With the Yamuna widened, one can take a boat from one side of the river to the other -- that's how the Mughals travelled. They took the boat to the Taj Mahal," says Shah.

Like Lentz and Wescoat, Shah is hopeful that the tourism department and the ASI will follow the guidelines given by their study. "We did the project at Sarnath, so if they don't take our suggestions they are going to lose."

She too was critical of the haste with which planting had been started at Mehtab Bagh even before the Smithsonian report was out. "When we visited the site, it looked like a nursery plantation, not a Mughal garden. The trees were planted at close intervals. The right thing to do would be to wait for the report and take into account all the suggestions. A garden is not just trees, there are so many sides to it like waterworks etc," she explains.

Centuries of neglect and pillage have transformed a once beautiful, historic city into a town battling to save its surviving monuments from the rampage of pollution and urban decay. Much water has flowed down the Yamuna. But nobody can deny that the ASI and the Uttar Pradesh tourism department are serious about giving back to Agra some of the splendour of the Mughal era. After centuries of neglect, surely, a few months of patience, and international and local collaboration in the true sense of the word, will not undermine their efforts.

The Taj might be India's very own jewel, but its historical significance and unmatched architecture make it a global treasure too. Not just India, the world will be poorer if we don't save the Taj and its surroundings. "The issue is not how fast, but how well the restoration is done -- it should be done right," says Lentz.

Maybe the spirits of Babur and Akbar, Jahangir and Nur Jahan, Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal need to be invoked to help and bless this gargantuan task! Then, in the words of historian Ebba Koch, "The people of Agra and tourists alike will be able to speak of the city in the words of Shah Jahan's poet Kalim: 'What a wonderful city! It is a sweet-smelling garden, with new blossoms'."

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