Taj Mahal

Where it sits. The Taj Mahal occupies a bend of the right bank of the Yamuna in Agra, about two and a half kilometres downstream of Agra Fort and 230 kilometres south of Delhi. The siting is the least appreciated part of the design: the mausoleum is pushed to the northern edge of its 17-hectare walled complex rather than placed at the centre, so that the river runs directly beneath the plinth and the building reads, from the far bank, as rising straight out of water. Directly across the Yamuna lies Mehtab Bagh, a Mughal garden aligned on the same axis, from which the whole composition can be seen in one frame.

The story behind it. Shah Jahan commissioned the tomb in 1631 for Mumtaz Mahal, who had died at Burhanpur giving birth to their fourteenth child. The mausoleum was finished in 1648 and the rest of the complex about five years later, at a cost recorded at roughly 32 million rupees of the period. A board of architects led by the court's Ustad Ahmad Lahauri directed more than twenty thousand workers and specialists, among them the calligrapher Amanat Khan Shirazi, whose signature appears discreetly in the inscriptions, and finial and dome specialists brought from Persia and the Ottoman lands. Marble came from Makrana in Rajasthan; the inlaid stones — carnelian, jasper, lapis lazuli, turquoise, jade — were traded in from as far as Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Central Asia. Shah Jahan was deposed by his son Aurangzeb in 1658 and buried here beside his wife in 1666, his cenotaph the single asymmetric element in an otherwise perfectly balanced building.

What you actually see. The dome stands about 73 metres above the terrace, its bulb slightly pinched at the neck so that it holds its shape when viewed from the garden. The four minarets are built with a barely perceptible outward lean, a precaution so that any collapse would fall away from the tomb. The pietra dura is finer than photographs suggest — single flowers on the dado panels can carry sixty or more inlaid pieces — and the marble jali screen around the cenotaphs was carved from single blocks. Flanking the mausoleum are a working mosque to the west and its mirror-image jawab to the east, built purely for symmetry. The charbagh in front is quartered by water channels with a raised central tank, replanted by Lord Curzon's administration in the early 1900s in a manner tidier than the original orchard planting.

On screen. For all its fame, the Taj is a difficult film location, and the record shows it. Commercial feature filming inside the complex is tightly licensed by the Archaeological Survey of India, tripods and lighting rigs are restricted, and the crowd load makes a controlled shot near-impossible after 8am — which is why most productions use the monument in wide establishing plates or shoot from Mehtab Bagh across the river. Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (2008) is the best-known exception: the sequence in which the teenage Jamal and Salim run a fake-guide racket on foreign tourists, inventing history as they go, was shot on location in Agra, a short excursion from a production otherwise based almost entirely in Mumbai. Hindi cinema, meanwhile, has generally preferred to evoke Mughal Agra on sets — the tradition that runs from Mughal-e-Azam (1960) to Jodhaa Akbar (2008) is one of meticulous studio replication rather than location work.

Getting there and timing. Agra is reached from Delhi in about 100 minutes on the Gatimaan or Shatabdi trains to Agra Cantt, or in three hours by road on the Yamuna Expressway. Three gates serve the complex — west, south and east — and the shortest queues are usually at the eastern gate near the Taj East Gate Road hotels. Sunrise is the serious visitor's slot: the gates open around 30 minutes before dawn, the marble shifts from grey through pink to white in the first half hour, and the crowd is a fraction of the midday load. The monument closes to sightseers on Fridays for congregational prayer, and separate night viewing runs on five nights around each full moon in half-hour slots. Tickets are timed and capped at three hours. December and January bring fog that can hide the dome until mid-morning; October, February and March are the reliable months. Wheelchairs are available and the garden paths are level, but the tomb plinth is reached by steep steps, and shoe covers are compulsory on the marble.