Mumtaz and the emperor
Arjumand Banu Begum married prince Khurram in 1612; when he took the throne in 1628 as Shah Jahan, “king of the world”, she became Mumtaz Mahal, “chosen one of the palace”. By every account — including hostile ones — theirs was an unusually close political marriage: she travelled with him on campaign, held the imperial seal, and bore fourteen children in nineteen years. The fourteenth killed her. She died in 1631 in a war camp at Burhanpur, in the Deccan; the court chronicles say the emperor’s beard went grey within months, and that he emerged from a week of seclusion having resolved to build her the finest tomb ever raised. Construction began at Agra in 1632. The mausoleum itself was substantially complete by 1643 and the full complex by around 1653 — some twenty thousand workers, a thousand elephants hauling marble from Makrana, three hundred kilometres away in Rajasthan, and semi-precious stone from as far as Tibet, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka.
The ending is the part the building doesn’t show. In 1657 Shah Jahan fell ill, his four sons fought a war of succession, and the winner — Aurangzeb — had two brothers killed and his father confined to Agra Fort. Shah Jahan spent his last eight years a prisoner in his own palace, with a view down the river to the tomb, and when he died in 1666 he was carried the two kilometres by boat and buried beside her. The story that he planned a matching black-marble tomb for himself across the river is almost certainly a later legend — no serious evidence supports it — but his actual grave produced the complex’s one asymmetry: Mumtaz lies at the exact centre of the chamber, and his cenotaph sits beside hers, off-axis, the only unbalanced element in a building otherwise obsessed with symmetry.
What the design is doing
The building rewards knowing a few of its tricks. The four minarets lean outward by a few degrees — deliberately, so that in an earthquake they would fall away from the tomb, and so that from the ground they read as perfectly vertical. The Quranic calligraphy framing the great arches grows larger the higher it climbs, so it appears uniform from below; the calligrapher, Amanat Khan, is the only artist whose signature appears anywhere on the building. The flowers on the lower walls are pietra dura — pictorial inlay of carved semi-precious stones set into the marble, some blossoms made of dozens of individually shaped pieces of carnelian, jasper, jade and lapis. This is where standing in front of it beats every photograph: the detail is invisible at any distance, and the craft tradition behind it still operates in Agra’s workshops today.
The layout is a Mughal garden tomb, the form you saw at Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi, brought to its final version: a walled charbagh garden quartered by water channels, with one crucial change — the tomb sits not at the centre but at the far end, on the riverbank, so nothing stands behind it but sky and the Yamuna. It is flanked by two matching red sandstone buildings: a working mosque to the west, and to the east its mirror image, the jawab (“answer”), which faces the wrong way for prayer and exists mostly to balance the composition. The marble cenotaphs in the main chamber, behind an openwork marble screen carved from single slabs, are markers only — the real graves are in a plain crypt directly below, closed to visitors.
The visit, practically
Your Taj day is Sunday 8 November — Diwali itself. The Taj is closed on Fridays, so the day works, but book the time-slot ticket online ahead (the official ASI site), including the mausoleum entry supplement, and take the sunrise slot: gates open about 30 minutes before sunrise, roughly 6:00 at that time of year. Enter by the East Gate, which generally has the shortest queues at dawn. Security is airport-style and the prohibited list is long — no tripods, no drones, no food, no large bags; carry essentially a phone, camera, wallet and water. Shoe covers for the marble platform are included with the foreign ticket, and visits are capped at three hours, which is enough.
The classic sequence: through the great red sandstone gate, the Darwaza-i-Rauza, which frames the first full view down the gardens — the photograph everyone takes, and the view the architects composed; then the long approach, the platform, the chamber, and time on the riverside terrace. The Diwali wrinkle is air quality: fireworks over the preceding nights can leave a haze that softens the dawn light, and the following morning is usually worse — one more argument for sunrise on the day. In the evening, Mehtab Bagh, the garden directly across the river, gives you the Taj at dusk from 300 metres with a fraction of the crowd; it closes at sunset, and the view improves as the light drops.