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New Evidence for Mughal Agra as Waterfront City.

Presenter:

· Ebba Koch Vienna University (Vienna, Austria)

Timeslot:

07/28 | 16:30-16:50 UTC+2/CEST

Abstract

The riverfront at Agra once formed one of the great sights of Mughal India. In addition to the Emperor Akbar’s fort and the Taj Mahal, both banks of the River Jumna were lined with palatial garden pavilions, mansions and imperial gardens. The riverfront scheme thus gives us fascinating insights about imperial family connections, the Mughal court society, its ethnicities, social conditions and property rights. Today uncontrolled urban development has obliterated the Mughal riverfront city to a large extent. A map of Agra in the Jaipur City Palace Museum (1720s) shows the whole riverside on both banks lined with gardens and palaces from north of the city wall down round the great bend to the Taj Mahal itself. In my book The Complete Taj Mahal and the Riverfront Gardens of Agra (2006/2012) I reconstructed much of the Mughal riverfront city on the basis of the Jaipur map, later British maps, drawings and photos, ground surveys and textual sources. In the present paper I discuss a manuscript scroll of Agra (ca. 1827-31) which was recently added to the British Library’s collections. It shows the river as a blank straight path in the middle of the scroll, its great bend is ignored, while the buildings and gardens on either side are rendered in elevation strung out along a straight base line. Inscriptions in English and Urdu are written above each building, indicating the owners of the gardens, many still going back to the time of Shah Jahan. The new evidence of the scroll is of crucial importance in further recreating what had been one of the great imperial cities of the world as it appeared in the early nineteenth century.