Akbari Architecture

Few architectural landmarks are as familiar as the Taj Mahal, the sweeping white marble mausoleum completed nearly five centuries ago just outside the city of Agra in northern India. With its distinctive fusion of elegance and mathematical symmetry, its daunting combination of both function and haunting beauty, the stately tomb epitomizes the achievement and vision of the Akbari School, a hybrid expression of bold ideas that consciously sought to bring together architectural elements of both Persian and Indian traditions. Akbari architecture was perhaps the last architectural form to embody the medieval concepts of grand interior spaces, an immodest sense of scale, and splendid artifices built consciously to last for centuries and to represent an entire culture. In its most sumptuous and daring creations—forts, public buildings, massive tombs, even entire cities—Akbari architecture sought to express on the Indian subcontinent the concept that a culture can be summed up by the majesty of the buildings it elects to create.

History

To appreciate the vision of Akbari architecture is to come to terms with the complex cultural identity of the political and military empire that engendered it. The Mughal Empire, by the early sixteenth century, extended more than a million square miles, incorporating much of the Indian subcontinent as well as a generous rim of Asia to the north and east. However, its population of more than 150 million represented a wide cross section of Indo-Asian cultures, including Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Sikh, and Persian. It was a wide cultural mix of peoples that historically had long been at odds. Politically the region was directed by the war-mongering Timurids, a Persian dynasty with deep historical roots in the Mongol regions of China—they counted the great Khans among their ancestors.

But if the Timurids had imposed military and political unity on the area, culturally the region lacked a cohesive identity, indeed was quite factitious and sectarian. With the ascendancy in 1556 of Akbar, an unprecedented era of internal stability ushered in a golden era in which literature, music, and painting flourished under the lavish patronage of the court. Akbar himself was virtually illiterate and had no education in the arts, but he recognized the beauty and the joy that art embodied. More importantly, he recognized the ability of art to bring together a people. Hailed as Akbar the Great, he reigned for close to a half century, and like England’s Elizabeth I, who ruled during the same time, Akbar strove to create for his nation-state a sense of political unity and national pride. He spearheaded efforts to reform the corrupt tax system; he built schools; he financed agricultural projects to feed his vast population; he codified laws to create an equitable legal system. But, most importantly, Akbar recognized the need to bring together the disparate cultures of his empire. A Muslim and essentially a foreign conqueror, he reached out to representatives of other religions, sought their counsel in public matters, and refused to prohibit any religious practices.

Impact

In financing a series of ambitious building projects, Akbar directed his court architects to synthesize elements of the diverse cultures represented by his subjects, hoping within that fusion to create a broad cultural signature that would represent his kingdom in all its diversity. Although the court sponsored significant literary endeavors and commissioned extravagant works of ornamental art, most notably jade sculptures and tapestries, the vision of Akbar was most completely realized in these building projects, most notably the massive forts at Ajmer, Agra, and Allahabad; the garden tomb of Akbar’s father, Humayun, and his own tomb; and in the planned capital city of Fatehpur Sikri, a complex of both public buildings and residences constructed into the side of a forbidding rocky moraine. (The magnificent city was abandoned shortly after its construction because its visionary architects had not factored in the lack of an accessible water source.) That so many massive architectural projects were conceived and executed within a fifty-year period indicates both the daunting scale and the grand vision of the Timurid dynasty itself and to Akbar’s dedication to bringing together function and beauty, the majesty of scale, and careful attention to the minutest of details.

Although the most remarkable edifices of the Akbari Period survive today largely as tourist sites, they were realized initially to serve as functioning sites, a practical value that, despite their lavish ornamental decoration, reflected Akbar's dream of literally building a working empire. These public building projects were designed to both represent the empire’s grandest vision and serve its people. Akbari architecture is notable for its rich use of local red sandstone rather than more elegant imported stonework, a reflection of Akbar’s belief that a culture’s buildings should reflect that culture’s geographical area. The buildings themselves expressed the Persian sense of mathematical balance, the buildings carefully symmetrical in both design and ornamentation. Even the gardens, given depth and spatial dimension by broad reflecting pools, were themselves laid out in great squares divided further into squares using walkways or flowing water channels. The outside of the buildings themselves were enhanced by signature chhatris, small domed canopies that created a sense of military precision as well as understated symmetry. Drawing on the ideas of Buddhist temples, the Akbari buildings offered sweeping entrance gates that gave the buildings, whether courthouses or temples, a feeling of spiritual sweep. The interiors were characterized by cavernous vaulted ceilings and by smooth stone walls that were sumptuously decorated with layers of dressed stone or by exquisite mosaics or by hanging tapestries embroidered with elegant calligraphy.

The vision and confidence of the Akbari school did not survive long after the collapse of the Timurid dynasty itself in the mid-seventeenth century. Its sense of grandeur and delicacy, of strength and grace mark its century of influence as one of the most remarkable and productive eras of Indo-Islamic art.

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