Most visitors walk through the garden of the Taj Mahal looking at the building at the end of it. The garden is worth a look of its own. It follows a plan the Mughals used everywhere they built, and once you can read that plan in one place you will see it across Agra: at the tombs, along the river, and in the oldest garden in the city.
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Four Gardens
Char means four and bagh means garden. A charbagh is a walled, rectangular garden divided into four quarters by raised walkways and channels of water that cross at the centre, where there is usually a pool, a platform or a building.
The plan came from Persia and Central Asia. It is commonly read as an image of paradise, which the Quran describes as a garden with rivers flowing through it. In a hot, dry country the appeal was also practical: shade, fruit, and the sound of running water.
Babur Arrives in Agra
Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty, took Agra in 1526. He had grown up among the gardens of Central Asia and his memoirs, the Baburnama, are frank about what he thought of his new territory: he complained of the heat and the dust and of the lack of running water and well-ordered gardens.
So he made them. He records laying out gardens on the bank of the Yamuna at Agra almost as soon as he arrived, and his nobles followed. Over the next century the riverbank filled with walled gardens on both sides, and Agra became a city that faced the water.
Ram Bagh
Ram Bagh, on the east bank of the Yamuna, is traditionally attributed to Babur and is generally regarded as the oldest surviving Mughal garden in India. The name is thought to be a later form of Aram Bagh, the garden of rest. Tradition also holds that Babur’s body lay here for a time after his death, before it was taken to Kabul for burial.
What you see today owes a good deal to the empress Nur Jahan, who remodelled the garden in the seventeenth century. There are raised terraces, water channels and riverside pavilions. It is a plain, quiet place and few visitors go.
Gardens With a Tomb at the Centre
When the Mughals began building monumental tombs they put them in the middle of a charbagh, where the water channels cross. In Agra you can see this at Akbar’s tomb at Sikandra, which stands at the centre of a very large walled garden, and at Itimad-ud-Daulah, where the same plan is used on a small scale beside the river.
The Garden of the Taj Mahal
The Taj Mahal breaks that rule. The garden is a charbagh, with a raised marble pool where the channels cross, but the tomb is not at the centre. It stands at the far end, on a terrace above the river, so that you see it across the full length of the garden with nothing behind it but sky.
The garden did not always look as it does now. Early accounts describe it thickly planted with fruit trees and flowers. The open lawns date from the restoration carried out under the British in the early twentieth century. Our guide to visiting the Taj Mahal covers the rest of the complex.
Mehtab Bagh, Across the River
Directly opposite the Taj, on the other bank, is Mehtab Bagh, the Moonlight Garden. It is the same width as the Taj complex and lines up with it exactly. Some historians argue that it was part of the design, which would make the river itself the central channel of one enormous garden, with the tomb in the middle after all.
Whether or not that was the intention, it is the best place to see the Taj at sunset.
Seeing Them
Ram Bagh, Itimad-ud-Daulah and Mehtab Bagh are all on the east bank and make a natural afternoon, finishing at Mehtab Bagh. These are Archaeological Survey of India sites, so check timings and ticket prices on the official ASI site. The gardens are at their best in the cooler months; see our notes on when to visit Agra. Tajnuma, a pure vegetarian Mughlai restaurant, is on Fatehabad Road, back on the Taj Mahal’s side of the river.
