From a distance the Taj Mahal is white. Close up it is not: the marble is covered in flowers, vines and lines of script, in red, green, yellow and black. None of it is paint. Every petal is a piece of coloured stone, cut to shape and set into a recess carved in the marble so exactly that the join is hard to find with a fingertip. The technique is called parchin kari, and it is the craft Agra is still known for.
In this article
Two Names for One Craft
Pietra dura is Italian for “hard stone”, and is the name of a closely related technique that flourished in Florence from the sixteenth century, where the Medici set up a court workshop for it. The term used in India is parchin kari.
How much the Mughal work owes to the Italian has been argued over for a long time. European objects and craftsmen did reach the Mughal court, and there are Florentine panels set into the wall behind the throne in the Red Fort in Delhi. But stone inlay in India is older than that contact, and the designs on the Agra buildings — the flowers, the arabesques, the calligraphy — are Mughal. It is safest to say the two traditions met, not that one was copied from the other.
How It Is Made
The method has changed very little. A design is drawn on the marble. Thin slices of coloured stone are shaped, piece by piece, against a hand-turned grinding wheel until each matches its part of the drawing. The marble is then chiselled out to the same outline, to a shallow depth, and the pieces are fixed into the recess with adhesive. When the whole surface is filled it is rubbed down and polished until stone and marble are level.
A single flower can be made of many separate pieces, with different shades of the same stone chosen to give a petal its shading. That is the mark of good work: the colour changes across a petal the way it would in a painting.
The Stones
The white marble of the Taj Mahal came from Makrana in Rajasthan. The inlay stones include carnelian, lapis lazuli, jade, turquoise, jasper, agate and malachite, along with black marble and yellow limestone. Accounts of the building describe them arriving from across India and from well beyond it, which is plausible — lapis lazuli, for one, has been mined in what is now Afghanistan for thousands of years.
Carnelian is the one to look for. It is translucent, and in the right light a carnelian petal glows where the stones around it do not.
Where to Look at the Taj Mahal
The finest inlay is inside, on the two cenotaphs and on the octagonal marble screen that surrounds them. It is dim in the chamber and the crowd keeps moving, so look at the screen first, where you can get close.
Outside, the long bands of script around the great arches are inlay too: black marble set into white. They are passages from the Quran, and the calligrapher, Amanat Khan, is one of the very few people whose name appears on the building. Our guide to visiting the Taj Mahal covers the practical side of the visit.
Where Else to See It in Agra
The best place to study the technique is not the Taj at all but Itimad-ud-Daulah, the smaller tomb across the river that was finished shortly before the Taj was begun. It is covered inside and out, it is quiet, and everything is at eye level.
There is more in the marble apartments of Agra Fort, which were rebuilt under Shah Jahan, and at Akbar’s tomb at Sikandra, where the inlay is bolder and more geometric, set into red sandstone.
The Story About the Craftsmen
You will be told that Shah Jahan had the hands of the craftsmen cut off so that they could never build anything to rival the Taj. It is one of the most repeated stories in Agra and there is no historical evidence for it. Historians treat it as legend. The same workshops went on to work on Shah Jahan’s later buildings.
The Craft Today
Parchin kari is still made in Agra, by hand, in small workshops, and many of the families who practise it say the skill has come down to them through generations. The work is slow and the wheel is still turned by hand. Watching a piece being made is worth half an hour of anyone’s time in the city.
Buying it is another matter, and there is a good deal sold as marble inlay that is neither. Our Agra shopping guide explains how to tell the difference. Tajnuma, our pure vegetarian Mughlai restaurant, is on Fatehabad Road, the same side of town as the Taj Mahal.
