The architecture of the Mughal emperors: Persian planning and double domes married to Indian stone-craft, chhatris and brackets, in red sandstone and white marble, from Humayun’s Tomb to the Taj Mahal.
Babur, a Timurid prince from Central Asia, conquered Delhi in 1526 and founded a dynasty that ruled most of the subcontinent for two centuries. The Mughals brought with them the Persian and Timurid culture of their homeland (the four-part garden, the double dome, the pishtaq, the refined geometry of plan) and found in India a long tradition of Islamic building under the Delhi Sultanate and an immensely skilled tradition of stone carving among Hindu and Jain masons. Mughal architecture is the synthesis of the two.
The first great Mughal monument is the tomb of the emperor Humayun at Delhi (1560s), designed by the Persian architect Mirak Mirza Ghiyas: a red sandstone block inlaid with white marble, with a double dome and an irregular octagonal plan of chambers round a central tomb, standing at the centre of a vast charbagh. Akbar (r. 1556–1605) built in a more Indian manner, in red sandstone with beams, brackets, carved pillars and chhatris, at the palace-city of Fatehpur Sikri (1571–85) and in the great gateway, the Buland Darwaza.
Under Jahangir and Shah Jahan white marble replaced red sandstone for the most important buildings, and surfaces were inlaid with semi-precious stones in pietra dura. The Taj Mahal at Agra, built by Shah Jahan as the tomb of his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died in 1631, is the culmination: a white marble tomb on a high plinth, its four identical faces each dominated by a pishtaq, crowned by a bulbous double dome and four chhatris, framed by four free-standing minarets, and set at the end of a great charbagh by the river Yamuna. The work was directed by a team of architects, among whom Ustad Ahmad Lahauri is traditionally named as chief.
Shah Jahan also built the Red Fort and the Jama Masjid at Delhi, and his son Aurangzeb the Badshahi Mosque at Lahore (1671–73). Later Mughal architecture became lighter and more ornate, and its forms (bulbous domes, cusped arches, chhatris, jali screens) passed to the Rajput courts, to the regional sultanates and, in the nineteenth century, into the Indo-Saracenic style of British India.