The Other Side of the Taj Mahal Treasures of the Indus

The Indus river is where I started a journey that is taking me

thousands of miles, deep into the Indian subcontinent

to which the river gave its name.

A journey that will help me discover some of its most hidden treasures

and reveal secrets from its distant past.

In the last programme, I travelled back five millennia in time to

the ancient civilisation that first grew up on the shores of the Indus,

and explored the lost Buddhist culture of northern Pakistan.

Now, I want to see what happened

when the Muslim invaders who had occupied modern-day Pakistan

moved further south, and produced an extraordinary flowering of art

and architecture, and some of the world's greatest treasures.

As an art historian and museum curator,

I've looked after these treasures for most of my life.

In this series, I want to explore their stories

and the people who created them.

For hundreds of years, India was ruled by a foreign empire.

These invaders came from the north and spread their influence

right across this vast land, from the peaks of the Himalayas,

to the plains of the Punjab, to the jungles of central India.

They were the Mughals.

The Mughals were a race of Islamic warrior kings

from Central Asia who were also poets, scholars and traders.

In matters of religion and philosophy, they were

more progressive and liberal than most European rulers of the time.

They made some of the world's most beautiful art.

They presided over advances in science and technology.

They brought war, but also great prosperity,

freedom at first, but later, intolerance.

In modern India, the Mughals remain controversial.

The question is, did their impact

change India for the better or the worse?

Where do you come from?

Well, my parents are from Kolkata but I was born in England,

so India is one of my homes.

Very nice.

Yes. My ancestral home. Being in India always feels like coming home.

-Very nice.

-Yeah.

'To tell the story of the Mughals will take me

'not just to India, where they created an empire,

'but also to Pakistan, where that empire began.'

The Mughals originally came from the mountains of Central Asia,

what is now Afghanistan and Uzbekistan.

Then, at the beginning of the 16th century,

they moved south towards the riches that lay beyond the River Indus.

In 1526, just as King Henry VIII began to woo Anne Boleyn in England,

the Mughal king Babur

arrived at the outskirts of the great city of Lahore.

Babur had been a king since he was 12 years old.

He was descended from Genghis Khan and Tamerlane.

By 17 he had conquered Samarkand and by 22 he had Kabul.

He was 43 by the time he got to Lahore,

and deeply unimpressed with what he found.

In his diary, Babur wrote,

"Hindustan is a country of few charms.

"Its people are ugly, rude and have no artistic talent.

"There are no good horses, no good dogs, no grapes, musk-melons

"or first-rate fruits, no ice or cold water, no good bread

"or cooked food in the bazaars,

"no hot baths, and not even any candlesticks."

It seems that the only thing that impressed him about India was

that it was a large country and that there was masses of gold and silver.

Homesick for the ordered beauty they knew in Central Asia,

the Mughals transformed Lahore into a garden city.

These Mughal gardens were nothing like India had seen before.

They were grand in scale,

and their emphasis on symmetry and balance was completely new.

Flowing water was as important as greenery.

It helped to cool the gardens on hot days,

and showed off the wealth and ingenuity of the new rulers.

In Islam, like Judaism and Christianity,

Paradise is often represented as a garden.

The creation of beauty and order in these gardens

was about more than just making pleasant spaces.

It was symbolic of the arrival of the Mughals.

By the end of their rule, these gardens had been constructed

in all major cities and towns throughout India.

These warriors turned gardens into a symbol of their power.

But they also brought gardens and flowers into their buildings,

together with a sensuous love for the pleasures of life

that they had left behind in the valleys of Central Asia.

Although one pleasure, they had brought with them.

The Mughals created exquisite drinking vessels,

but they had a very complex relationship with alcohol.

They consumed it publicly,

and yet it always remained an illicit pleasure.

For Babur, on the one hand, he was descended from

the very public drinking culture of Genghis Khan,

and, on the other, he wanted to be a good Muslim.

Babur knew his drinking was controversial

amongst his orthodox Muslim army, and if he was to continue

his invasion further into India,

he would need to inspire his tired troops.

Particularly if he was to capture the fort here in Agra,

the second capital of Hindustan, whose sultan was fabulously wealthy.

A year after he had conquered Lahore, Babur arrived in Agra,

600km to the south.

He now took a vow in front of his men never to drink wine again,

and also not to trim his beard.

And he told them that the war they were engaged with,

with the Hindu kings of India, was a holy struggle.

"If we fall in the field, we die the death of martyrs. If we survive,

"we rise victorious, the avengers of Allah's sacred cause."

He then had his jewel-encrusted

gold and silver drinking goblets destroyed

and distributed amongst the poor.

According to legend, Babur's men were deeply moved by his vow

and the following day, they won a stunning victory

over the Hindu king.

We know an unusual amount about Babur

because he detailed both his struggles with alcohol

and his conquests in a remarkably frank autobiography.

In it, he described how once he had crossed the Indus,

he had found himself in another world,

of fakirs, magicians and exotic animals.

LAUGHTER

And how India was ruled by a whole set of Hindu Rajput princes,

consumed by petty infighting.

Babur's army swept these princes aside

to lay the foundations of the Mughal Empire in Northern India.

But he didn't only bring war.

He and his successors brought elements of culture

and architecture from Central Asia.

And this magnificent monument is the earliest example

of Indo-Persianate architecture in Mughal India.

It takes the shapes and forms of Central Asia and Persia,

in the cusped arches and the domes,

and marries them with the red sandstone of India.

And then you have these small flourishes on top of the chatris,

which is a Sanskrit word meaning umbrella, or pavilion.

You see this glistening tile work which is, of course, reminiscent

of the architecture of Samarkand and other places in Central Asia.

So they brought to bear all these different influences.

And for the first time you see a new kind of architecture in India.

Babur would only briefly enjoy the new kingdom

he had conquered. Four years after arriving in India, he died,

aged just 47, still homesick for the gardens of Central Asia.

And some say the greatest of all the Mughal emperors

who followed him was his grandson, Akbar.

Akbar came to the throne early, at just 13,

and inherited his grandfather's driving ambition and focus.

During Akbar's rule, India became one of the most powerful

and richest empires on the face of the earth.

He expanded it beyond even the vast lands of his grandfather Babur.

One reason for the Mughals' startling military success

was that they brought their Central Asian skills

as fast-wheeling horsemen down to the plains of India.

These descendants of Genghis Khan often had five times as many cavalry

as they did foot soldiers in their army,

so they could run rings around the slow-moving Hindu forces.

Traditionally, and given their nomadic roots,

Mughal emperors had lived most of their lives under canvas

and were constantly on the move, but as his military campaign

went from strength to strength, Akbar could indulge in the luxury

of a new, more permanent city to rule from.

Here, at Fatehpur Sikri, Akbar built a fabulous pop-up capital

out of red sandstone in the middle of nowhere.

It remains one of the most tantalising

and bizarre architectural sites in the whole of India.

English traders first arrived in the 1580s, when Elizabeth I

was on the throne back in London, lured by tales of its grandeur.

They had never seen a city so large or magnificent

as Fatehpur Sikri in their lives.

There was nothing in the world like it,

and certainly not in their own relatively poor nation.

Here courtiers wore the finest fabrics,

dripping in gold and jewels.

The palaces were cooled by continuous motion

of the punkahwallahs, waving peacock-feather fans.

Akbar created his own perfumes

and had the air scented with precious ambergris

and aloeswood.

Servants burned incense in gold and silver censers.

So the sun is setting in this beautiful open courtyard

with this central pool, with four paths leading to it

and a platform for musicians, who would have performed,

usually as the sun was going down and the heat of the day was passing.

And just up there,

a viewing gallery for the emperor to get the best view.

And this whole courtyard would have been filled with

the sound of music and dance.

All across this palace complex,

Babur's roving entourage of encampments and tents

has now been translated to stone,

and you have this series of spaced-out, beautiful pavilions.

One tradition that the Mughals had brought with them

from the steppes of Central Asia was a passion for the hunt.

As a young man, Akbar kept a thousand cheetahs,

trained for the chase like dogs were in Europe.

North India was rich in wildlife and the Mughal emperors

built hunting pavilions like this across their domains.

But it was during one of these hunts that something happened

that changed the entire course of Akbar's reign.

Hunting was a great sport during the Mughal emperors' time.

And Akbar, in a hunting lodge much like this one,

gathered his courtiers, who for ten days

drove animals from a circumference of 80km surrounding this lodge.

But just at the moment when the hunt was ready,

all the animals were gathered, he stopped.

Because he'd had an epiphany.

His biographers described it as an epileptic seizure

or some kind of delusion, but whatever it was,

it was the moment of complete change for Akbar and he cancelled the hunt.

One witness described how, "Suddenly all at once a strange state

"and strong frenzy came upon the Emperor, and an extraordinary

"change was manifested in his manner and everyone attributed it

"to some cause or other. But God alone knows such secrets."

He set the animals free and he declared that none of them

were going to be hurt henceforth.

This strange experience seems to have been the turning point

in Akbar's reign.

Because after this, nothing was the same again.

After the hunting incident, Akbar became a much more spiritual man.

He stopped eating meat, shaved his head

and started to ask questions of himself and of others.

In the middle of this whole complex, of this magnificent pop-up city

called Fatehpur Sikri, there is this real conundrum.

A hall of public audience, but architecturally it suggests...

Well, it remains enigmatic.

Why? Because in the middle you've got this central column which is

really reminiscent on the one hand of the pillar that you see

outside every Hindu temple, which represents

the axis of the universe, the cosmic axis, if you like.

But then it doesn't, the space doesn't lend itself to conversation,

because the seating area is up above.

There's a theme in Persian painting of the treehouse,

which is a space that's elevated, it's actually not public,

it's private, and really there is greater licence

when you're above the realm of the everyday

to engage in the kind of discussions or activities

that might not otherwise be allowed.

As soon as you step up here you get a real sense, of course,

that you're elevated in a rather unusual fashion, above the ground.

There are these very low balconies and wonderful ventilation

all around, which would have made this a fantastic little hideaway,

in a sense, from the world, for Akbar to come up with whomever

he pleased, to sit and discuss affairs of the heart or state.

I can imagine Akbar sitting here,

inviting certain people from all four corners,

to come and join him in the centre for intimate conversation.

It doesn't really give a sense of public audience,

it's a much more private space.

It's elevated above the ground and you really get a sense here

that you need to be invited up to the emperor's treehouse

in order to converse with him in the most intimate fashion.

For the rest of his 50-year-long reign,

Akbar now dedicated himself to the exploration of other religions.

OK, I'll take one from each.

One, 25.

'When the Mughals had first arrived in India,

'they found a country of many other religions.'

Mm, they smell beautiful.

'Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism all flourished.

'Akbar decided he would not try to suppress any of these

'but rather embrace and encourage them.

'It is this open-mindedness that above all distinguishes Akbar

'from his successors.

'I'm on my way to the Sufi shrine of Nizamuddin in Delhi,

'one of the most important in India.'

It lies at the heart of a labyrinth of narrow alleyways

and stalls selling rose petals to scatter on the grave of the saint.

RHYTHMIC CLAPPING AND MUSIC

SINGING

Sufism is a mystical form of Islam

that believes there are many different pathways to God.

Some stricter interpretations of Islam

forbid music and dancing entirely,

but for Sufis, music is the expression of religious ecstasy.

Akbar came to just such a Sufi shrine

to pray for the birth of a son and heir to the throne.

It worked - he got three - and after the hunting incident,

he became intensely drawn to Sufism and its openness to all people

and all faiths.

The traditional music still played at Sufi shrines like this

is called qawwali, and fuses Indian musical styles with Arabic poetry,

which is why the Mughals loved it.

As they sought to integrate themselves into their new

Indian domains, Akbar looked for other ways to combine Islam

with elements of Hinduism, in song, in imagery and in architecture.

Sages, gurus and spiritual leaders of all sorts were now

welcomed at Fatehpur Sikri, although they did not always agree.

Giles Tillotson has written about how the peculiar architecture

of Akbar's palace both facilitated and reflected his new tolerance

to religions other than Islam.

According to Akbar's court historian, Abul Fazl,

these discussions had, as it were, their own institution.

He describes the discussions taking place in a palace

that contained four interlocking rooms

with concurrent discussions going on in each.

And that the emperor used to move from one room to the other.

-To the other.

-..to participate in the discussions as they were...

Taking place.

Taking place. Exactly.

So, how exactly did the discussions go?

I mean, what sort of format did they take?

Well, I think, actually,

there's a hint in Abul Fazl that they didn't always go terribly well.

I think Akbar's hope was that by getting the most learned people

from different religions together,

that he would solve some of the central, eternal questions...

Of the universe!

..of the universe, as it were!

But to his frustration, though perhaps not to our surprise,

the priests often took entrenched positions

and refused to really... to exchange ideas at all.

So, how unusual was it for Akbar to have such an expansive vision

of all these different religions?

I think this was probably the first time that a Muslim court

had been so open to the investigation of religious matters

from the perspective of other religions around them,

rather than simply pursuing different schools within Islam itself.

Akbar's new openness to different religions can be seen

also in his playful approach to architecture.

When you encounter some of these buildings,

as you approach them, there is a sort of Christmas cake effect,

where different elements are sort of plonked on top of the other.

Yes, it's clearly a design school, if you like...

Slightly unresolved.

Yes, it's a design school

that's used to working with certain traditions.

But very different traditions have come in to the same space

and the designers have thought,

"Well, how can we play with the new material that's available to us

"in the hope of creating something different?"

The experimental nature of the design is very clear here,

for example, where you have above a line of ornamental niches,

and then below them,

this line of dado panels with the decorated border.

But these are features that you would normally

-expect to find on the interior of a room.

-Right.

Here, they're expressed on the exterior of the building.

It would be rather like, in modern terms,

putting wallpaper on the outside of your house.

Clearly, this is meant to be experimental. It's playful.

It's not to be taken entirely seriously.

They're trying new things out and, as with the mixture of motifs from

different sources, it's like, again, to put it in modern-day terms, like

producing a design in Photoshop, to see whether it works or not.

But after only 14 years,

this fantasy city of Akbar's was abandoned as impractical,

some say because there was a shortage of water.

The ever-restless Akbar moved on,

leaving Fatehpur Sikri like an abandoned Las Vegas in the desert.

Despite his many other achievements,

modern Indians often think of Akbar as a romantic hero,

as in this Bollywood box office smash,

Jodhaa Akbar, about the emperor and Jodhaa, a Hindu princess.

'It was huge.'

I think it was a big hit mainly because Hrithik Roshan is so cute

and Aishwarya Rai is very beautiful

and both of them really light up the screen.

There's a scene in which he's waggling a sword and he's got

a belt also, and Aishwarya's looking at him from behind.

She's totally giving him the eye and there is, you know,

you can actually feel, you can feel the frisson.

So, I think the film did very well, essentially because it was,

it had great music, it had these two very lovely-looking leads

and the fact that they got together really well.

What has always given the story of Akbar and his Hindu wife Jodhaa

such box-office appeal

is that this is a West Side Story of Montagues and Capulets -

Akbar, the Muslim emperor, marrying a Hindu princess, a subject

that still has controversial resonance in India today

and has helped make Akbar a talismanic figure in history.

Do you think that Akbar, the historical figure,

makes a good hero?

I think he makes a wonderful hero because of the fact of what he did.

Because he had Jodhaa as his wife, who was a Hindu.

Nobody else before that had actually made one of his prime ranis a Hindu.

And he was steadfast.

He stuck to that position despite the kind of,

the conflict that happened as a consequence of his act.

He stuck firm to his guns and I think it was Akbar who gave India

of the medieval era its first taste of what it was like

to be a unified country, despite the fact that it had all these

little, you know, principalities and kingdoms fighting on the side.

-But he really brought it together.

-He really unified and...

-And celebrated.

-And the unity.

Yes, because Akbar did what he did,

it became, it became a country that it wasn't before.

Akbar also married Hindu and Islamic styles in art, to great effect.

He initiated an immense expansion of the imperial studio and recruited

artists from all the conquered kingdoms of northern India.

These brothers can trace their lineage directly down from

one of the greatest of the Mughal artists, who achieved an intense

saffron yellow in his paintings with the urine of mango-fed cows.

His descendants still use

the same painstaking technique,

using tiny squirrel-hair brushes,

which can take many months just to finish a single picture.

Nitin Bhayana is a leading art critic and collector

who is an expert on how native Rajput painting

changed with the arrival of the Mughals.

A sequence of Mughal emperors

brought artists from the courts of Persia,

and then later developed a school of painting in India

by enrolling various artists, and made karkhanas, or factories,

where they would produce huge numbers of paintings.

And you see, slowly but surely in a span of 50 or 100 years,

paintings moving from styles like this, cruder styles like this,

to something like that. You still see Rajput elements.

-Yeah.

-And then you see them

really melting away into a painting like that from the state of Bikaner,

which was closely aligned to the Mughals.

-Yeah.

-And this could be a Mughal painting.

Couldn't it!

I mean, look at the hills, look at the distance,

look at the perspective on the buildings and look at the faces.

If you look at the difference in the faces you could almost,

you know, you can tell who these people are.

Absolutely.

So, as we went along, I think it became more and more,

more and more Mughal.

Yeah.

Akbar commissioned his artists to do increasingly ambitious scenes

of the spectacle of court life, as here, where the Emperor

is seen riding an elephant, one of his great passions.

And here Akbar is now heroically trying to tame an escaped elephant,

and this picture exemplifies how the Mughals brought a new sense of

verve and dynamism to Indian art in their use of space and perspective.

One of the things that really first drew me towards Indian art

was its completely different conception of space.

Ever since the Renaissance,

in European art there's been this ambition to recreate reality

on the canvas, to effectively punch a hole through it.

For Indian artists, you've got reality in spades,

so what did they do?

They made space and they would use as many different viewpoints within

a single painting as they needed to tell the story they wanted to tell.

And those multiple viewpoints

were necessary for the stories Akbar commissioned,

large-scale illustrations of court life and history,

often with scenes of violence or boisterous energy,

like hunts, battles or sieges.

But under his successors, the painting style became more intimate.

You can start to see individual portraits emerge,

as in this picture of the most famous Mughal emperor of them all,

Akbar's grandson, who when he came to the throne

took the name Shah Jahan, "Glory of the World".

Patronage of the arts continued under Shah Jahan.

And you see the Emperor here on his imperial elephant

clomping through a very elegant landscape.

The devil is really in the detail.

You can see each of these individually painted flowers here.

And behind him there are geese flying through the sky

and the billowing clouds.

What's interesting about Mughal painting is that you have

the flatness and the palette of the indigenous Rajput courts

married with attention to detail in everyday life.

I mean, look at the way the Emperor's features are portrayed,

they're highly naturalistic.

And then, the halo around his head, of course,

comes from the European tradition.

So, the many different influences converging in a single painting.

When Shah Jahan came to the throne,

Mughal architecture changed dramatically.

All his predecessors had used red sandstone for their buildings,

as here at the aptly-named Red Fort in Agra,

where generations of Mughal emperors had lived,

so it's a good place to see the spectacular difference

when Shah Jahan decided to build in a new area of the palace.

He started to cover everything in dazzling white marble.

Unlike the roving entourage of Babur

and the outward-looking symposium of Akbar's court, the rituals

of Mughal India were literally set in stone under Shah Jahan.

Like the architecture, they elevated and framed

the impossible grandeur of the great Mughals.

The Mughals were really interested in gardens

but they weren't only concerned in their formal beauty

and in them as spaces for relaxation and enjoyment, but also in flora.

They were great botanists and they famously collected

specimens of different flowers, and had them painted,

but what you see here,

in Shah Jahan's magnificent private quarters,

is the transposing of that interest in flora into stone.

And they used this technique called pietra dura which was then

current in Renaissance Italy, so it was absolutely a la mode,

but made it a very Indian experience.

And using semi-precious stones like lapis, carnelian, jasper, jade,

and setting them into the marble to create these incredible designs.

So it wasn't about botanical representation any more,

it was about taking that interest

and creating something completely new and unique.

This technique was, of course, derived from Italy

but we see it here

transposed to a whole new context under the patronage of Shah Jahan.

In the nearby city of Agra,

there are still traces of the craftsmanship that was

brought to a peak under Shah Jahan's rule - although you have to

look hard to find it in the busy sprawling streets.

The thing about India that, even with the massive boom

that's driving its economy today, and throwing up skyscrapers

in Mumbai and Delhi, you just need to step back from that for a moment

and wander down some of the back streets and find life

pretty much unchanged for a large majority of the population,

and hidden away there you'll find practices,

crafts and techniques that are still cherished.

TAPPING

GRINDING

Just off the maze of back streets is a stonecutters' workshop.

It's a family business that seems to have been going for more generations

than anyone is able to remember,

and they specialise in decorative marble inlay.

Designs are traced out and like some kind of beautiful jigsaw,

individual elements are crafted to fit the master pattern.

It's very reminiscent of the emperor's quarters

up on the nearby hillside

You really get a sense of when the water is applied

and the dust is cleaned away, that these incredible range

of colours emerge, and how they stand out against the white marble.

They may not be big on health and safety,

but it's shown me how incredibly painstaking this work is

as they chisel away at these intricate forms and then inlay them

with precious stones - and how many thousands of man-hours

it must have taken to create these fantasy buildings

of white marble for Shah Jahan.

I first came here when I was about eight years old

and remember how amazed I was then at the sheer amount

of white marble, a fairytale wedding cake of a palace.

And of course I already knew the story of how its builder,

Shah Jahan, the grandson of Akbar and Jodhabi,

had his own passionate love affair - a marriage which had its final

consummation in one of the most famous buildings in the world.

Like all Mughal rulers, Shah Jahan

was married to several women at once.

Yet the love of his life was unquestionably Mumtaz Mahal,

here portrayed with the spring flowers

and cherry blossom of Kashmir that Shah Jahan loved so well.

Sadly in 1631, she died giving birth to their 14th child.

And Shah Jahan was so distraught his beard turned white overnight

and he kept the court in mourning for over two years.

He also vowed to build her the greatest monument to love

the world has ever seen.

Anywhere else, this incredible gateway would be a destination

in its own right, but here it serves as a magnificent reveal.

Every time I come here, it absolutely takes my breath away.

Rising like a mirage out of the early morning sunshine.

The Taj Mahal was built by the finest artisans

from across the Islamic world, stonecutters from Baluchistan,

architects from the Ottoman Empire and calligraphers from Persia.

Native Indian craftsmen also brought their own cultural influences

to bear on the design and detail

and in so doing honoured the Hindus of India as well as the Muslims.

A British poet, Sir Edwin Arnold, described it as,

"not a piece of architecture, as other buildings are,

"but the proud passion of an emperor's love

"wrought in living stone,"

and it is still largely thought of as a monument to love.

Whenever I come to this place, I feel love.

So if I sit somewhere by myself, I just,

I can't express my feeling for the Taj Mahal.

The Taj, it symbolises only affection and love.

So that is the main motto of our life, so the Taj symbolises that.

I mean, India is generally known for the Taj.

People from outside come, so we thought we must.

My first visit was invited by Mrs Gandhi. Indira Gandhi, yeah, 1979.

This was the building of love.

A husband built this beautiful building for his beloved wife.

So we can all live in hope.

Exactly!

It's known as one of the seven wonders of the world

and is the only reason I've come and, yes, we are very close to it

so we should have seen one of them.

As Indians, what do you feel it represents

and symbolises for you as Indians?

I guess it symbolises love.

But in thinking of the Taj Mahal as mainly a monument to love,

have we completely misunderstood what the Mughals were trying to do?

-Giles! Hi.

-Hi, Sona. I hope you've had your photograph taken,

there are certain important rituals in this place.

Absolutely, as you can see.

So there are a number of mythologies that one grows up with.

When I first came here when I was eight, I was told by a guide

that the architect's hands were cut off so that he couldn't

reproduce a monument such as this again, and I grew up believing that.

I think of all the myths about the Taj

that is perhaps the most objectionable.

I mean, one can't debunk all of them, people will have their myths.

But that one does seem particularly inappropriate.

In fact, the architect was busy,

by the time the building was completed,

was busy designing the Red Fort in Delhi,

so he didn't do another Taj but he did another great Mughal masterpiece.

I think it's impossible for us today

to approach the monument from any perspective other than

that of the legend or famous love story between Shah Jahan and Mumtaz.

We're all told so emphatically that it's a symbol of love

that it's impossible to see it in any other light.

But there's a sense in which I think we have to try

to get beyond that, to see it more as the Mughals saw it,

not as a symbol of love but as a symbol of Paradise.

-Recreated on earth.

-Sort of thing, yes.

I mean, the tomb itself is actually the mansion of the departed soul

-in Paradise.

-Right.

And that Paradise imagery extends not just to the building,

but to the whole of the garden, the layout of the garden.

So, have the gardens changed since Mughal times?

Oh, I think very considerably, yes.

A lot of the mature planting that we see now

is of much more recent times.

From contemporary accounts, it's clear that the garden

originally was mostly occupied by flowering trees and by fruit trees.

-Ah.

-And indeed the produce was marketed.

It was collected and sold in the market

in order to raise money to pay the salaries of the tomb attendants.

So really quite pragmatic and sensible.

Yes, you had, as it were, a form of market gardening, if you will.

Tourists often make the mistake of thinking that

the gardens around the Taj are just a municipal park

to frame the jewel at their centre.

But Shah Jahan, like all his ancestors,

thought of the Mughals as children of the high mountain valleys,

of his beloved Kashmir which he visited every year,

and these gardens were

an attempt to recreate such a paradise on earth

for the tomb of his wife.

The Taj Mahal is often said to be one of the greatest monuments

to love.

And it is without doubt one of the greatest achievements

of Mughal architecture.

But while it signals the climax of the Mughal Empire,

in some ways it was also the start of its decline and fall.

You only have to travel a short distance from the Taj

to find yourself in another world,

with ruined Mughal buildings abandoned in the countryside.

These are the old palaces and gardens of Mughal nobles.

Stretching for miles up the river bank, they are not

protected by the Indian government and are simply rotting away.

BUZZING

This eerie, dilapidated building, which today seems only to be

home to a swarm of bees, was once the home of Mumtaz's eunuch,

and has this magnificent view of the Taj just across the water there.

And there's actually some graffiti here on the wall, which says,

"Hindu-musalman ekta jindabad" - "Hail to Hindu-Muslim Unity."

Quite appropriate for an old Mughal monument.

The Taj Mahal is the height of Mughal achievement,

the crowning glory of a great, if controversial, empire.

But the Taj also marked the beginning of a terrible end.

Shah Jahan and Mumtaz had many sons.

However, unlike in Europe,

the eldest son wasn't necessarily the heir and if the strongest son

could seize power he too could rule legitimately as any of his brothers.

Shah Jahan named his eldest son, Dara Shikoh, as his heir.

There were high hopes for him.

Like his great ancestor, Akbar,

Dara Shikoh was a progressive, tolerant and intellectual man,

with interests in all the world's religions.

Dara Shikoh, as you can see, is a pretty dressy kind of guy.

He's got a little string of pearls across his face.

-Yes.

-He's dressed up in the finest Mughal kit.

All his jama and he's on horseback.

He's absolutely dripping in jewels.

-Yes.

-And the contrast between this man settled at court, getting on

with his dad, living a family life, revelling in everything the capital

had to offer, is in stark contrast to Aurangzeb, the younger brother.

Aurangzeb is hated by his father and this sort of twists him.

-Er, he becomes this very... a child who is rejected.

-Right.

Becomes crabbed in some way,

and Aurangzeb is determined to destroy the existing rulers.

-Mm.

-His father and his obvious heir, Dara.

-Mm.

And Aurangzeb has the advantage, of course,

because he's been in the field.

He's been a general, he's a puritan, he is ruthless, he's Machiavellian.

The whole thing is very like in King Lear,

where you have the two sons, Edgar and Edmund.

-And Edgar's the beloved son of Gloucester.

-Sure.

-And grows up weak and hopeless.

-Yeah.

While Edmund is the illegitimate one,

who is never given any love, but is ruthless.

But has to fight for his position, yeah.

And there's a great Shakespearean quality, I think,

in the way that these two sons battle it out.

Dara, for all that he represents,

he represents everything that we find most attractive in the Mughals.

Not only does he have exquisite taste,

does he commission beautiful art, is he responsible

for extraordinary architecture, he also has this wonderfully

tolerant attitude he inherits from the tradition of Akbar.

And Aurangzeb is this tough guy who's had to make his own way,

who's been ignored by the court, ignored by his father and...

-Who's frankly fed up.

-He's frankly fed up.

And the more that his father and his brother indulge in jewels

and manuscript illumination, the more he rejects that whole world.

And yet, when it comes to the final battle, when Aurangzeb advances from

the Deccan with his battle-hardened troops, although they are

a fraction of the size of the Imperial Army,

which Dara Shikoh leads into battle,

the spoilt, silly young prince doesn't know how to fight a battle,

and Aurangzeb, with his small crack force, makes mincemeat of them.

Aurangzeb's war of succession was short and brutal.

He took his father and brother prisoner,

killing most of their generals and men.

He then began planning his coronation, to be held here,

in Delhi.

Dara Shikoh was brought back to Delhi

and paraded through the streets in rags and chains.

He was sat mockingly on top of an old, broken-down elephant.

Francois Bernier,

who worked as a doctor at the court of Shah Jahan, witnessed the event.

"I could not divest myself of the idea

"that some dreadful execution was about to take place.

"The crowd assembled upon this disgraceful occasion was immense,

"and everywhere I observed the people weeping,

"and lamenting the fate of Dara in the most touching language.

"For the Indian people have a very tender heart.

"Men, women and children wailing as if some mighty calamity

"had happened to themselves."

Aurangzeb was shocked that the people had wept for Dara,

and decided that his brother must be put to death.

On the 30th August 1659, he was attacked by four assassins

who held him down and hacked off his head.

Dara's head was brought to Aurangzeb, who had to

wash the blood away in order to recognise his brother's features.

Then he wept and exclaimed, "Let this shocking sight

no longer offend my eyes, but take away this head

"and let it be buried in Humayun's Tomb."

So Dara Shikoh was buried here, in an unmarked grave

amongst his ancestors,

and with him was buried the liberal era of Mughal rule.

At the end of his life, Shah Jahan was imprisoned

here at the Red Fort by his own son, Aurangzeb,

and you can imagine how he would have felt looking out at the Taj.

The very monument he built to his beloved Mumtaz,

that was later described as a teardrop on the cheek of time.

Aurangzeb changed the face of Mughal rule in India.

With fire and sword, he conquered even more territory

for the Mughal Empire, which had nearly doubled in size by the 1700s.

The generous treatment of non-Muslims,

which had begun under Akbar, came to an end.

It is said that Aurangzeb forced Hindus to convert to Islam,

and demolished some Hindu temples.

To symbolise the importance and dominance of Islam, Aurangzeb

built the huge Badshahi mosque in Lahore, positioned opposite

the fort to emphasise the unity of Islam and power.

Here in Delhi, too, Islamic prayer was now a very public

and political statement of faith.

But even though Aurangzeb now forbade the use of music

and discouraged the arts at his court,

the Mughal influence continued to live on elsewhere in India.

We've been given privileged access to this exquisite and rare

18th-century manuscript from Bikaner...

..where all the script is in Sanskrit.

It's been handwritten and it's got this beautiful illustration.

So, it's a real treasure to be able to view this at such close quarters.

Aurangzeb, as a more traditional Muslim,

did not patronise the arts in the way that his ancestors had done,

and the court atelier dispersed.

And artists moved away from the royal court

to the regional Hindu and Deccani courts, where they began practising,

but bringing the skills they had learnt in the Mughal courts

to the regions, such as at Bikaner,

which is where this manuscript is from.

And I've just found a snakeskin inside,

which is a traditional conservation technique

for deterring termites from eating one's paintings.

And what's wonderful about this manuscript is that you really

see the coming together, the joining of the great,

two great Indian traditions of Hindu and Mughal art.

Such as Shiva here, sitting on top of Mount Kailash.

And the mountains are painted in exactly

the tradition of Mughal painting.

And this painting in particular,

you have a very naturalistic landscape which would sit very

comfortably in a Mughal painting as much as it would in a Gainsborough,

with this elegant marble pavilion on the left-hand side.

Painted in full perspective,

and then two Shaiva yogis sitting, one of them

with a halo around his head, which again comes from European painting.

And they're holding audience with one of the princes of Bikaner,

who has arrived, dressed very simply apart from the crown upon his head.

It's a great sadness that artistic endeavours like these would not

have survived at Aurangzeb's court under his new austerity regime.

Music, painting and poetry held no interest for the Emperor.

Instead, he was a man whose fervent wish was to leave the legacy

of a well-ordered Islamic state.

Yet his heavy-handed rule led to resentment

and ultimately rebellion, and unlike his forbears it was a regime

that had no room for consensus.

After almost 50 years on the throne, he died, and the Mughal Empire

weakened, leaving the way clear for India's new conquerors, the British.

During the British empire, a far more short-lived one than

the Mughals, the rulers of the Raj tried to emulate

the grandeur of Mughal ambition.

However, the British, unlike the Muslims, never became Indian.

They capitalised on existing tensions between Hindus and Muslims,

befriending some communities, and fighting others.

This imperial strategy worked for a while, but by dividing

and ruling, by pursuing a strategy so different from Akbar's,

the British essentially created division in India and applied

so much pressure that eventually the country was ripped in two.

The prologue to agitation for Indian independence

caused great tensions between Hindus and Muslims

which resulted in communal riots across India.

By the time of Indian independence in 1947, the liberation

from British rule was short-lived, as India was brutally split.

And millions of lives were lost, brutalised, families were severed

as Hindus rushed over the border into India

and many Indian Muslims

moved north into what was to become the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

And the tragedy today, is that there hasn't been any public,

national acknowledgement, on either side of the border,

of the great loss that happened at Partition.

Families were torn apart.

In my own family,

on the one hand people had to give up their lands overnight

and rush across the border into what's now West Bengal and Kolkata.

And the people who were living in Kolkata had to give up

their lands overnight for the millions of refugees

who were coming over the border.

Which they did.

It's one of the reasons why today Indians don't really know

what's happening over the border in Pakistan, and vice versa.

And the real tragedy of that

is that they have an incredible shared history.

And you can't really understand one country

without looking at the other.

So I've left India and come back to Lahore in Pakistan,

where the Mughal Empire began, to talk to leading journalist

Ahmed Rashid about the lasting divide left by the Mughal emperors.

So, I was interested in what the imprint,

or historical memory of Akbar and Aurangzeb is in Lahore.

Well, it's very, very sharp.

I mean, if you read the school textbooks,

which were really rejigged by Zia-ul-Haq,

the military ruler of Pakistan in the '80s,

who was an Islamist, he was a great admirer of Aurangzeb

and he saw himself as a kind of Aurangzeb-type figure.

Remember, under him

Pakistan helped the Mujahideen in Afghanistan fight the Soviets.

And under him, we had this whole revival of the war in Kashmir,

and the use of extremists in Kashmir

and a great belief in Islamic fundamentalism

and going back to the precepts of law, and all the rest of it.

So, in fact, I mean, the real lesson of Akbar,

which we desperately need now, in Pakistan, the message of tolerance,

of, you know, accepting other religions, accepting minorities,

you know, letting them pray as they wish which was, of course,

also the message of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan.

-Of course.

-In all his famous speeches he said, you know,

"Now you can go to your mosques and your temples and your churches

"and your synagogues, and you are free to pray as you like," you know.

All that is, unfortunately, forgotten.

And the originator of that was really Akbar.

For over 300 years, the Mughals united India, and then divided it.

They gave the country some of its greatest monuments,

but also cut some of its deepest scars.

They were often liberal and tolerant, but also laid

the foundation for a much stricter interpretation of Islam.

Even today, their legacy is extraordinarily controversial

as Mughal history has become the battleground for a new India,

as it struggles once again with its religious and cultural identity.

In the next episode, I will be travelling

even further down into India to explore the temples of Tamil Nadu

and the exuberant art of the Hindu heartland.