The Wooden Audience Halls of Shah Jahan: Sources and Reconstruction 351
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THE WOODEN AUDIENCE HALLS OF SHAH JAHAN: SOURCES AND RECONSTRUCTION 351 EBBA KOCH THE WOODEN AUDIENCE HALLS OF SHAH JAHAN: SOURCES AND RECONSTRUCTION The court of Shah Jahan (r. 1628–58) was highly con- architecture and were of considerable importance in the scious of architecture. Not only are a large number of realization of his new program of palace buildings. But buildings preserved that were commissioned by the they lasted only ten years and by 1637 were replaced by pādshāh, his family, and the nobility, but we also have permanent stone halls at Agra and Lahore. In the new detailed descriptions in primary sources to match them. palace of Delhi (completed in 1648), a stone hall was This evidence allows us to understand the form, func- built following the same pattern but without a wooden tion, and meaning of the buildings, as well as the his- precursor. No trace is left of the wooden halls that are torical context in which they were created. Besides the here the subject of my investigation, and their ephem- great mausoleum project of the Taj Mahal (1632–43/48) eral nature necessitates a reconstructive exploration of and the tomb for his father, Jahangir, at Lahore (1628– the primary sources. The issue is, indeed, quite complex, 38), Shah Jahan’s interest was directed towards palaces since it involves considering the sources on different and gardens. The palace was a major focus of his urban levels. projects at Agra and Shahjahanabad. The emperor com- I understand these sources in two different ways: first missioned mosques on a large scale only in his later in the conventional manner, as textual records that reign and the madrasa as a building type of its own never speak about the inception and development of the halls. played a great role in Mughal India. And, since I am an art historian, I also devote much at- Since the middle of the 1970s, I have been engaged in tention to the visual records, which confront us with the documenting and analyzing all the palaces and gardens problem of the representation of the halls in contempo- of Shah Jahan.1 The large number of preserved buildings raneous history painting. Second, I understand “source” as a starting point from which to consider where the and the evidence about them in the primary sources give idea of the wooden halls came from as they appear in us unique insights into a building type about which Shah Jahani palace architecture. much less is known elsewhere in India and the Islamic Lastly, I would like to distinguish “source” from world.2 “origin” when I look at how Shah Jahani audience halls In this paper, I reconsider the audience halls of Shah became a model of architectural inspiration for the Sa- Jahan. Previously, I discussed the stone halls as we see favids. An idea that had its origin in the Achaemenid them today in the Mughal fortress palaces of Agra, dominions was reformulated at the Mughal court and Lahore, and Delhi (figs. 1–3), exploring them from the came to be an incentive for further architectural explo- perspective of their design, purpose, and symbolic sig- ration back in Iran. nificance.3 But this left several questions open, and I ad- dressed only briefly the immediate sources of the halls, namely, their wooden precursors, which were construct- I. Textual sources ed by Shah Jahan soon after he came to the Mughal throne on February 14, 1628. The wooden halls repre- In Shah Jahan’s time, we observe the emergence of rich sented his first expression of official ceremonial palace texts on architecture. They do not, however, form a 352 EBBA KOCH genre of their own—the Mughals had no written archi- sioned to write the Pādshāhnāma in 1636). Shah Jahan tectural theory. In India one would have expected the ultimately settled, in about 1638, on ʿAbd al-Hamid La- Mughals to have become interested in this genre be- hawri (d. 1654), an elderly historian from Lahore who by cause treatises on art and architecture, the shilpa then had retired to Patna.8 The emperor expected him shāstras and vāstû shāstra, represent an ancient tradi- to compose a history that would rival the Akbarnāma, tion of the subcontinent. It is surprising that the exten- the great historical work that Abu’l Fazl (d. 1602) had sive Mughal translation program of Sanskrit texts under created for Shah Jahan’s grandfather Akbar. In his Akbar (r. 1556–1605) did not include works of this type— Pādshāhnāma Lahawri covered the first twenty-six the more so since the Mughals, like the Muslim dynas- years of Shah Jahan’s reign, that is, two cycles of ten ties before them, continued to absorb Indian traditions years and six years of the third cycle. When he had to into their art and architecture, and even reinvigorated retire from the task because of his declining health, Mu- them. hammad Warith (d. 1680) continued the remaining four Despite the lack of written evidence, theory was not years of the third cycle. Muhammad Sadiq Khan (of absent from Mughal architectural thinking, and in Shah whom little is yet known) wrote a Shāhjahānnāma/ Jahan’s time we have clear evidence that it was ex- Tavārīkhi Shāhjahāni or Pādshāhnāma,9 and Muham- pressed in the buildings themselves, the most telling mad Salih Kanbo (d. 1674/75) authored the ʿAmali Ṣāliḥ, example being the Taj Mahal.4 also called the Shāhjahānnāma, a parallel history.10 The circumstances of the last work’s composition are not Historiography as a forum for architecture quite clear, although recent research by Saqib Baburi has suggested that it might also have been an imperial Although no theory of architecture was written down, commission. Kanbo’s style is highly panegyrical and we do have detailed Mughal texts dealing with architec- metaphorical, which makes him a principal source for ture, namely, descriptions that inform us about the con- establishing the symbolism and program of imperial struction history, form, and function of a building. They buildings. He also points out the function of architec- begin to appear in the official historiography (tārīkh) ture, pomp, and show as an instrument of rule.11 Lastly, after the accession of Shah Jahan. These texts are not there was Chandar Bhan Brahman (d. 1662–63), the concerned with how to build, but rather give an assess- munshi and poet who wrote the Chahār Chaman (The ment of the status quo, of a finished building and its use. Four Gardens). This work, which is difficult to classify, They may also describe what a building will look like, a describes, inter alia, activities and ceremonies of Shah kind of project study, as it were. While these texts have Jahan’s court and also contains eulogizing accounts of attracted the attention of art historians like Wayne provinces, cities, and buildings of the Mughal empire.12 Begley and myself,5 they have largely been ignored by historians and scholars of Indo-Persian literature, since Architecture in poetic works the historiography and poetry produced for Shah Jahan has, in general, received little attention.6 There were also the poets Abu Talib Kalim Kashani (d. The appearance of architecture in the historiography 1650), Hajji Muhammmad Jan qudsi Mashhadi (d. 1646), gives expression to a distinct interest of Shah Jahan. The and Mir Muhammad Yahya Kashi (d. 1653), who all em- construction of his own history was one of his driving barked on the project of a versified Pādshāhnāma in the concerns, the intention being to leave to posterity the style of the Shāhnāma of Firdawsi, although none of image of an ideal ruler and an ideal state. His search for these versified histories gives a full account of Shah Ja- a suitable historian took over ten years, and several can- han’s reign.13 The work by Kalim, Shah Jahan’s most didates were considered for the part, including ʿAbd al- eminent poet, covers the ruler’s ancestry and prince- Latif of Gujarat, Hakim ʿAbd al-Haziq of Fatehpur, Mir hood, as well as the first decade of his reign.14 Its descrip- Jalal al-Din Tabataba’i of Isfahan (d. 1636; commissioned tions of imperial building projects contain a surprising in 1632),7 and Muhammad Amin of qazvin (d. 1646/47; amount of factual information. Kalim is, for instance, in imperial service as a munshi since 1632 and commis- the only one of Shah Jahan’s authors to give us the tech- THE WOODEN AUDIENCE HALLS OF SHAH JAHAN: SOURCES AND RECONSTRUCTION 353 nical details of how the foundations of buildings at Agra, of the vocabulary, with terms assimilated from Indian including the Taj Mahal, were laid by means of wells languages applied to architectural forms derived from sunk into the sandy terrain of the river bank.15 older Indian architecture.21 Shah Jahan wanted to have Kalim, qudsi, and Kashi also wrote eulogies of Shah his architecture—the monument of his reign—record- Jahan’s buildings and poetic chronograms on the occa- ed in exact terms for posterity; he directed the scientific sions of their completion. Panegyric poetry with its interest in the visual world, which he had inherited from metaphors and epitheta ornantia (specific glorifying his predecessors, toward his own artifacts. Babur and phrases repeatedly used for the emperor or his build- Jahangir described the works of nature, the flora and ings) represents a potential source for establishing the fauna of Hindustan, in long passages in their complex meaning of a building, though as I have pointed out else- autobiographies; Shah Jahan had his architecture as- where, the greatest problem is to recognize which sessed in a corresponding manner through the genre of themes and concepts were merely literary conventions historiography (tārīkh).