An emperor’s tomb on a high platform at the centre of a walled garden divided by walks and water channels into thirty-six squares, by a river and the village of a saint; a plausible place modelled on Humayun’s tomb, not a survey of it.
Babur, the first Mughal emperor, came from Central Asia to Hindustan in 1526 and complained that it had no running water and no gardens. He made them at Agra by raising water from wells into tanks and channels, and laying out regular plots round them, the fourfold garden of Persia, the chahar bagh, quartered by walks and water. When his son Humayun died in 1556, his widow built his tomb at Delhi in the middle of such a garden, near the shrine of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin; it was finished in 1572, to designs by Mirak Mirza Ghiyas, an architect from Persia.
The garden is a walled square entered by gates on the west and south. Raised walks carry narrow water channels along the two axes and divide each quarter again and again, into thirty-six squares planted with fruit trees and flowers. In the middle, on a broad arcaded platform where the family is buried, stands the tomb itself: red sandstone outlined in white marble, an arched recess on each face, a double dome of white marble on a tall drum, and small domed kiosks round it. It was the first great Mughal garden tomb and the model for the Taj Mahal.
Outside, the road from the city passes through a walled forecourt garden to the west gate; a caravanserai stands beside it, an earlier tomb in its octagonal enclosure to the north, and the village of the saint with its step well beyond. To the east the river ran below the garden wall; to the north lies a walled pleasure garden with its pavilion and tank.