Tumba de Jahangir

Jahangir, who reigned from 1605, died in late 1627 near Rajauri while travelling from Kashmir back to Lahore^6,7. His body was brought to Shahdara, across the Ravi from Lahore, and buried in the Bagh-i Dilkusha, a walled garden belonging to his wife Nur Jahan^3,5,6. The World Monuments Fund (WMF) says the emperor, a lover of nature, had wished to be buried there⁴. Shah Jahan's court historian Abd al-Hamid Lahauri records that Shah Jahan built the tomb as his father wished, for an orthodox Sunni burial, over ten years and for ten lakh (one million) rupees⁶. The historian Mehreen Chida-Razvi argues that Nur Jahan also had a strong part in its design and funding⁶.

The tomb was completed in 1637^3,4. Shahdara became a royal burial ground: Asif Khan, Nur Jahan's brother and Shah Jahan's father-in-law, died in 1641 and was buried nearby in a tomb built by Shah Jahan, and Nur Jahan was buried in her own tomb there in 1645^3,6. Between Jahangir's tomb and Asif Khan's lies the Akbari Sarai, which Lahauri called the court attached to the tomb^1,3. Under Sikh rule much of the decoration and the marble railing of the roof were stripped³. The Ravi washed away part of the site in the 19th century and flooded the tomb for days in 1988⁴. In 2022 the WMF placed it on its World Monuments Watch⁴.

The tomb is a single-storey square platform tomb (takhtgah), 81.3 m on each side, with an arcaded verandah round all four sides and a projecting entrance bay in the middle of each^1,2,6. Four octagonal minarets stand at the corners; they rise in five stages to about 100 ft (30 m) and end in white marble cupolas^1,5. The facades are faced with red sandstone from Sikri and inlaid with white marble panels and motifs^1,4,5. The minaret shafts carry zigzag bands of marble, white and yellow in UNESCO's description and pink and white in Archnet's^1,5. Chida-Razvi notes that this platform-tomb type was favoured by Jahangir and Nur Jahan, and that his is the largest of them⁶.

The tomb stands at the centre of a walled charbagh of about 55 acres, divided into quarters, and each quarter again into four, by water channels and paved walks with fountains where they cross^4,5. Water raised from wells outside the walls ran in channels built into the tops of the enclosure walls and flowed down by gravity to the fountains⁴. Chida-Razvi notes that the building is incomplete today: an upper storey on the roof terrace once held the emperor's cenotaph within some form of pierced railing⁶. Archnet describes the surviving platform with remains of a marble screen and traces of a second cenotaph, and records the belief that Jahangir, like Babur, wanted his tomb open to the sky⁵.

From the middle of each side a long vaulted corridor leads to the central burial chamber^2,3,5. The ceilings and walls of these bays are painted with floral frescoes, the lower walls carry tile mosaic, and the floors are laid with cut pieces of different stones, including black and white marble^1,3. In the chamber a white marble cenotaph on a platform marks the grave below^3,4,5. It is inlaid with precious and semi-precious stones in floral designs, and its black inscriptions give the 99 names of God and the date of Jahangir's death^1,3,5.