But in Jaipur, I was buying fabric seven feet long, seven feet wide. And the silks! I usually buy the four-dollar grabs on the street corner when traveling and trot them out at stocking-stuffer time.

In Jaipur, it was all pink stone and stucco with beautiful Moghul tracery patterns-flat abstract arches, panels. My eye traveled again and again up to the silhouettes of the chhatri (the domes) crowning pavilions and used along the rooflines.Ĭity after city hummed in color and beckoned. The Moghuls worked with such intricacy and nuance on red sandstone, amazing detail and polish, so smooth to the touch it’s intoxicating. It was startling, beautiful, magical.Įn route southwest toward Jaipur, we witnessed the magic created from red sandstone at Fatehpur Sikri, the emperor Akbar’s massive, 16th-century palace complex. They were hunting! As it got darker, they were no more than six feet above the ground, circling the gardens. Kites (the bird kind), which had been wheeling high overhead, began descending as the sun went down, suddenly circling the dome. It was late in the day and although the sun was out, there was a mist in the air, and the whole thing glowed. You always see the photos of the Taj sitting there, but you don’t understand the experience of getting to it: You pass through a red sandstone gate into a formal courtyard divided by paths into quarters (a Moghul aesthetic), and then you pass through another gate, and all of a sudden you’re looking across this expansive garden-this sweep of green-and there it is in front of you. It was amazing to witness something with such mystique in person-like the first time you see the Eiffel Tower. The emperor Shah Jahān’s 17th-century marble mausoleum for his deceased wife was my introduction to the high culture of the Moghul Dynasty, which expanded into India from Central Asia in the early 1500s and dominated a vast region for three centuries. It might seem predictable, but it was utterly right to begin at a site so well known: in Agra at the Taj Mahal. Tom Kligerman The Surprising Magic of the Moghuls

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