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MUGHAL ARCHITECTURE
Babur (1526-30 A.D.), the founder of the Mughal dynasty in India, also made a modest beginning of the architectural style which was later developed, on a massive scale, by his grandson Akbar (1556-1605) and Akbar’s grandson Shah Jehan (1628-58). This dynasty is popularly called “MUGHAL’, though Babur descended as a Miranshahi-Timurid and, racially, he was a Chaghtai-Turk. Their architectural style, and other art styles, also bear the dynastic appellation : MUGHAL.
With its own constructional and ornamental techniques, norms and concepts, grown from a sound historico-cultural and geo-physical background, and a transparent evolutionary process, Mughal Architecture was a fully developed style and a perfect discipline, as none was prior to it, in medieval India. It had a time-span of 132 years, practically from 1526 to 1658, and Agra-Fatehpur Sikri, Lahore-Kashmir- Kabul, Delhi, Allahabad, Ajmer, Ahmedabad, Mandu and Burhanpur are its major centres. Nearly 400 monuments of this style have survived, including city-walls and gates, forts, palaces, tombs, mosques, hammams, gardens, minarets, tanks, step-wells, sarais, bridges, kos-minars and, of course, the Taj Mahal which marks that zenith of an art from where it could only decline. More…
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