Tombeau d’Itimad-ud-Daulah

Mirza Ghiyas Beg was a Persian from Tehran whose father had served the Safavid shah Tahmasp, and he entered the service of Akbar^3,5. When Jahangir came to the throne in 1605, he made him a vizier with the title I'timad-ud-Daulah³. In 1611 his daughter, later known as Nur Jahan, married the emperor, and his granddaughter Mumtaz Mahal later married Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal for her^3,5,9. His wife died a few months before him⁶. He died in the royal camp near Kangra at the end of January 1622, and his body was taken to Agra and buried beside the Yamuna^3,6.

Nur Jahan built the tomb for her parents between 1622 and 1628^2,7,8. It stands on the left (east) bank of the Yamuna, near the Chini-ka-Rauza^1,7. The historian Mehreen Chida-Razvi groups it with Jahangir's tomb at Lahore as a platform tomb (takhtgah), a type favoured by Jahangir and Nur Jahan, and calls it a small precursor of that tomb⁸. Inscriptions once painted in gold leaf did not survive later vandalism⁵. Between 2014 and 2019 the World Monuments Fund and the ASI restored the garden's plantings and water features and built a visitor centre in its forecourt¹⁰.

The tomb stands at the centre of a walled charbagh, on a sandstone terrace 149 ft (about 45 m) square^1,2. The building is about 21 m square and divided into nine chambers, with a tower at each corner crowned by a marble kiosk^1,2. Each facade has a central arched doorway between two arches filled with marble screens (jali)². Instead of a round dome, a square pavilion with a curved roof and wide eaves rises over the central chamber, its sides closed by marble screens^2,5,7. Havell saw the corner towers as a first hint of the Taj Mahal's minarets⁷.

The platform and the white marble walls are covered with mosaic and inlay of semi-precious stones^2,5. Havell lists cypress trees, flower vases, fruit, wine cups and rose-water vessels, motifs he traced to Persian tilework⁷. Stone inlay had long been practised in India, but Archnet and the University of Washington's Silk Road Seattle describe this as the first Mughal building to use pietra dura extensively^2,5,7. Some designs show animals and, in at least one case, subtly drawn human figures, which Chida-Razvi calls unheard of in Mughal tomb decoration^5,8. The garden is entered from the east through a red sandstone gateway decorated with marble mosaic².

Inside, rooms and corridors are arranged around a verandah that surrounds the central chamber². There the cenotaphs of I'timad-ud-Daulah and his wife, of a yellow stone described as porphyry, stand side by side; Silk Road Seattle notes that the wife's grave lies at the exact centre^2,5. The walls carry painted stucco and painted panels with motifs of Persian origin, and muqarnas decorate the vaults of the hall and the corner rooms^2,5. Wall inscriptions quote the Quran and other texts, while those on the cenotaphs give the names and titles of the dead¹. Other relatives lie in the smaller rooms around the hall^1,7. Upstairs, the screened pavilion holds plain marble cenotaphs without inscriptions^1,7.