curzon nostalgia: landscaping historical monuments in india

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Curzon nostalgia: landscaping historical monuments in India

eugenia herbert

When ages grow to civility and elegancy men come to build stately, sooner than to

garden finely.

Sir Francis Bacon

Soon after my book Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India appeared, an Indian

newspaper took me to task for speaking ill of Lord Curzon and his restoration of

the gardens of the Taj Mahal.1 As viceroy of India 1899–1905 with a great

love—one might even call it an obsession—for Agra’s monuments and most

especially the Taj Mahal, he took an unusually personal role in remedying what

he saw as the calamitous state of the gardens of that great monument. An Indian

blogger likewise defends Curzon’s restorations and, moreover, applauds the

‘Raj’s green legacy’ in general, lamenting misbegotten efforts to replace the

tried and true flora of that era with such monstrosities as the ‘greyish palms that

sprouted on traffic islands all over Delhi’ before the Commonwealth Games of

2010. Unlike the imported lantana of another era, they did not last a summer.

Sadly, today’s youth, ‘SilkStalking’ claims, may flirt with environmentalism, but

they scarcely know one plant from another and have no hands-on experience of

greenery itself. ‘Like my nostalgia for lantana hedges, it has to get personal.’2

Ask those who have visited the Taj Mahal what they remember of the

gardens. If your experience is like mine, they will offer only the vaguest

description, or, more likely, draw a complete blank. And yet when the Taj

was conceived in the seventeenth century, the garden would have been con-

sidered just as important as the tomb of Shah Jehan’s beloved wife, both a

memorial to the living empress and the embodiment of the Paradise promised to

the Faithful by the Qur’an. Now, the gardens are little more than an inoffensive

backdrop for the architecture, intended to direct the viewer’s gaze to the

mausoleum and incidentally provide a pleasant experience of greenery (figure 1).

To all intents and purposes, the landscaping of the Taj remains essentially as

Curzon decreed it over a century ago. Even more intriguing, it has to a large

extent become the template for subsequent landscaping of India’s historical

monuments from Sarnath to Khajuraho, Bhubaneswar to Srirangapatnam, just

as Edwin Lutyens ‘green city’ vision of New Delhi has been to a somewhat lesser

extent the model of urban planning.

The Archaeological Survey of India

The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) was founded in 1861 in the wake of the

1857 Uprising, but traces its spiritual ancestry back to William Jones and the

creation of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta in 1784. The ASI has the daunting task

of overseeing hundreds, in fact thousands of historical monuments and archae-

ological sites (3650 as of 2011), from the Himalayas to Cape Cormorin—some

even underwater. Under the provisions of the Ancient Monuments and

Archaeological Sites and Remains Act of 1958, an ‘ancient monument’ is defined

as a structure or site that is at least 100 years old and has ‘historical, archaeological

or artistic interest’. More monuments can be added after giving public notice over

a two-month period and considering any objections. They date from the pre-

historic to the colonial and include ‘temples, mosques, tombs, churches, ceme-

teries, forts, palaces, step-wells, rock-cut caves, and secular architecture as well as

ancient mounds and sites which represent the remains of ancient habitation’.

These require preservation, restoration, and maintenance, drawing on a Science

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Branch headquartered in Dehradun and a Horticultural Branch with its main

office in Agra and subsidiary outposts in New Delhi, Mysore and Bhubaneswar.3

In addition, the ASI is responsible for over 40 museums containing the fruits of its

labors. Twenty-one of its sites have also been designated UNESCO World

Heritage Monuments, a designation that carries with it a great deal of prestige

along with some strings — witness the public outcry and rebuke when it was

discovered that developers and politicians had connived to illegally deposit tons of

sand behind the Taj Mahal in order to build a mall on the riverbank.4 Then, too,

there can be costs to those unfortunate enough to be living in the midst of a

heritage site, who stand to lose their homes and businesses.5

Individual states also have their own Archaeological Departments that can

designate sites as historical monuments on their own or step in when they think

the ASI has been remiss about maintaining local antiquities. In Mandu, for

example, the state drew up its own list of 52 additional sites that needed

protection and began clearing the tangle of vegetation from the Jali Mahal, a

fifteenth-century palace built by the Sultan of Mandu, claiming that the once

glorious building ‘is on the verge on turning into ruins’.6 Adding to the

jurisdictional complications, the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural

Heritage was founded in 1984 by Rajiv Gandhi and others as a non-

governmental, non-profit organization with worldwide links to engage in a

more comprehensive agenda of protecting the physical, cultural, and natural

heritage of India. Among the sites INTACH has restored are the gardens of the

Scindia Chhatris (cenotaphs) in Shivpuri.7 With three organizations involved in

the heritage business, there is bound to be friction,8 especially since the ASI has

custody of most of the plums. To be sure, the vast majority of its sites are of

interest only to scholars, but a select few attract tourists in huge numbers—some

three million or more visit the Taj Mahal annually. While these bring in the

most revenue, they also require the most care: not only restoration and pre-

servation but also ‘beautification’, as INTACH puts it apropos of Shivpuri —

i.e. landscaping to show monuments off to their best advantage.

In 1902 Lord Curzon appointed John Marshall (later Sir John) director-

general the ASI. One of Marshall’s first acts was to inaugurate a series of annual

reports as an ‘attempt to do for India something of what the volumes issued by

the Egypt Exploration Fund during the last 20 years have done for the Land of

the Pharaohs — to attract wider and more abiding attention to India’s grand

treasure-house of historical relics’.9 The reports were in two parts, one dealing

with administrative matters, the other with the actual archaeological work of the

Survey. When Sir Mortimer Wheeler took over in 1944, he determined to

streamline the publication and present its operations in more attractive form.

This was at last achieved in 1953–54 with the launch of a new journal, Indian

figure 1. The Taj Mahal (Photograph Jim Glickman).

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Archaeology — A Review. It appeared annually, albeit usually tardy by a couple of

years, until the 2000–2001 issue, published in 2006. In spite of promises of more

issues in press, it seems to have ground to a complete halt for now.

In the preface to this last issue, the first of the new century, Director General

C. Babu Rajeev declared that Marshall’s tenure as head of the ASI marked the

beginning of a new era in Indian archaeology and that ‘his principles on archae-

ological conservation guided all of us in the Survey throughout the century, and

are still relevant’.10 While there have been minor changes in layout and font, the

Review over its almost 50 years of publication bears out to a surprising degree

Rajeev’s claim that Marshall’s priorities are still those of the ASI, making allow-

ances, to be sure, for advances in scientific tools now available to archaeologists.

Excavation still dominates the agenda of the Survey as well as the pages of the

Review with summary reports from the many sites in play (Rajeev chides his

fellow archaeologists for their failure to produce the full reports without which

their excavations remain incomplete). The most recent issue of the journal

devotes 160 of its 328 pages to ‘Explorations and Excavations’ and 83 to

‘Preservation of Monuments’. Much less space is devoted to reports on epigraphy,

museums, palaeobotany, chemistry, the temptingly titled ‘Numismatics and

Treasure Trove’ — and gardens. The rubric ‘Archaeological Gardens’ comes

next-to-last in the table of contents, just before Publications. Material is supplied

by the main Horticulture Branch of the Survey in Agra and regional offices, along

with occasional entries from state departments of archaeology acting as agents.

Gradually the ASI horticulturists have taken over more and more gardens from

the states until by the turn of the century, they were maintaining 165 gardens,

with some 86 more ‘under development’. In the first few years there were only

three headings: Delhi, Agra, and ‘Other Gardens’. A typical entry ran:

The operations in the Delhi group consisted of proper maintenance of the standing

plants, shrubs, creepers and trees by judicious watering, overall weeding and hoeing

operations. A large number of ornamental plants, collected from all over the

country, received individual attention in the central nursery in the Central Asian

Antiquities Museum compound with a view to planting them in the open with the

advent of rains. The propagational activities in the nursery were in full swing all

round the year, meeting the requirements not only of the archaeological gardens at

Delhi but of a few Circles. A new shade-house was completed.11

As more and more areas of the country were added, the format was adapted to

list sites individually by district and state with brief entries about the activity of

the Survey in each during the ‘period under report’. Just how brief these entries

are fluctuates wildly. They are most extensive in the mid-1970s. Thereafter they

are often perfunctory in the extreme, telling us only that particular gardens have

been maintained ‘nicely’, ‘properly’, or in ‘presentable condition’. New listings

tend to be more substantial than the ‘usual suspects’ that have been included for a

longer period.

In the most recent issue the format has been pared down even further to the

point of listing gardens tersely under the three headings ‘Garden Development

Projects’, ‘Improvement in Irrigation’, and ‘Rejuvenation of Old Gardens’.

‘Irrigation improvements’ covers very basic work such as construction of deep

tube wells, and makes considerable use of dittos. The aim of the development

projects is to ‘improve and beautify’ the sites in question. Indeed, ‘beautifica-

tion’ has become the buzzword of choice for both new and old gardens with

almost no detail about how this is being achieved. Since the harried editor of the

Review complains constantly about the difficulties of extracting reports from his

contributors in a timely fashion (a trial familiar to any editor), one suspects his

horticultural informants have been among the delinquents. Consequently it is

often very difficult to reconstruct much of what has actually been going on in

the gardens except by visiting them in person.

Nonetheless several refrains run through the entire half-century of the

Review. The first is that Delhi and Agra continue to receive the lion’s share of

attention, hardly a surprise. The second is the same problem faced by Babur in

the wake of his conquest of northern India in 1526: how to irrigate gardens in

the flat dusty wastes of Hindustan? Coming from Afghanistan and Kashmir, he

was used to channeling the streams and springs cascading down hillsides as the

centerpiece of his gardens. In India the Mughals solved the problem by creating

their gardens on riverbanks with elaborate systems of wells, tanks, aqueducts,

and pipes to carry water to the channels and fountains, parterres and flowers, that

were the life blood of any garden. By the 1950s these waterworks had long since

fallen into ruins. The most important task facing the Survey in all its gardens,

Mughal and otherwise, was therefore the provision of water. Entries are replete

with notices of motor pumps, wells, and new pipes to replace broken ones of

terra-cotta. Once in a while gardens suffered from the opposite problem: flood-

ing from excessive monsoon rains. The third theme that jumps out is the

centrality of lawns in all the gardens tended. Over and over, these need to be

weeded, irrigated, fertilized, mown, and periodically ‘re-turfed’ or ‘regrassed’

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(figure 2). Often dub grass was imported from Calcutta, but even this seems to

have had a limited lifespan.

As for the plants, shrubs, and trees chosen for archaeological gardens,

entries range from the vague — ‘seasonal flowers’, ‘suitable plants’,

‘annuals’, ‘hardy plants’, ‘ornamental’ trees and shrubs — to the more

specific. Exceptionally, a few entries give a precise list of botanical

names, complete with binomials. Among the most common flowers,

shrubs, and trees are cannas, roses, hibiscus, jasminum, crotons, lantanas,

verbenas, bougainvillea, cypress, palms, acacia, Thuja (akin to arbor-vitae),

and champak. Fruit trees and orchards are listed only rarely. Many of the

plants intended for monument gardens were grown in nurseries nearby,

such as the Khan-i-Alam in Agra. The Delhi nursery occasionally won

prizes at the annual Flower Show.

What is frustratingly absent from these volumes is any exposition of the

principles underlying the notion of ‘archaeological’ gardens. What did it actually

mean to create or restore a pleasing/charming/beautiful garden? How much

attention was paid to’ authenticity’ and what would this have meant in any case?

In a departure from its usual purely factual reporting, the heading of the

section in the next-to-last published issue of the Review offers a mission state-

ment of sorts:

The Horticulture Branch, of the Survey, with five Horticulture Divisions located

at Agra, Delhi, Mysore and Bhubaneswar is responsible for environmental devel-

opment of centrally protected monuments through the language of nature,

keeping in view the background of the monuments such as Temples, Churches,

Mosques, Mausoleum [sic], Cemeteries, Forts and Palaces, etc. Horticulture

Branch [sic] gives life and sole [sic] to the deserted memories of the past. In

addition to the sites and monuments below, the Horticulture Branch is maintain-

ing one hundred and fifty-nine archaeological gardens spread over the country in

a presentable manner.12

Fortunately, the language of the website for the Horticulture Branch of the ASI is

more informative. It distinguishes between two categories of gardens that fall

within its purview: ‘those pertaining to monuments which had gardens around

them as a part of their original design and those, usually not as elaborate, which are

intended to beautify monuments originally without the appendage of gardens’.

Mughal monuments clearly come under the first category inasmuch as the

Mughals were ‘renowned for their love of ornamental gardens and orchards. In

such cases, traces of the old flower-beds and alignment of water-channels, both

for decoration and irrigation, are in many cases still extant’. There follows a list

of the most prominent of these gardens: Humayun’s Tomb, Safdarjung’s Tomb,

the Red Fort in Delhi, Bibi-ka-maqbara at Aurangabad, the palaces at Pinjore,

Akbar’s Tomb in Sikandra, I’timad-ud Daula’s Tomb, the Ram Bagh at Agra,

and most importantly of all, the Taj Mahal. ‘The maintenance of the gardens

attached to these monuments is indeed a difficult task, for any new lay-out has to

fall in line with the original design and must be in consonance with what the

master-builders had in mind. The maintenance of these ornamental gardens is a

necessity’, the website declares, ‘second in importance only to the maintenance

of the monuments themselves, for without them the monuments are incom-

plete’. As for non-Mughal gardens, only two examples are cited: the Qutb and

Lodi monuments in Delhi. Here greater freedom is allowed since the gardens are

primarily intended ‘to provide a setting for the monuments and to make the

surroundings attractive’.

In fact, the Branch’s categories seem too restrictive, for it has in practice

recognized the indispensability of temple gardens (even if we have no idea

figure 2. ‘Regressing’ the lawn, Diwan-i-Khas, Red Fort, Delhi (Photograph author).


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what they looked like) and made provision for them at several temples in

Bhubaneswar and at the Lord Jagannath Temple in Puri. The aim was to have

cut flowers available all year long for puja purposes — without specifying what

these flowers would be. Landscaping at the Sun Temple in Modhera (Gujurat)

and the Sun Temple in Konark was based on ‘period flora’ (?).13 It is a pleasant

surprise, then, to come upon more detailed entries for two temples in Karnataka.

Hoysalesvara Temple in Halebid has been landscaped with new plants such as

Areca catechu (supari), Michelia champaca (champak), and Plumeria alba (frangipani,

temple tree). The first is a variety of palm that produces nuts, often chewed with

betel pepper, while the other two are particularly fragrant. This would have been

equally true for the trees planted at the Amrutesvara Temple in Amrutapur, which

featured the Michelia at the entrance, Ixora singaporensis (jungle flame) along the

approach road, jasmine in front of the temple, as well as a plumeria, known as

Krishna Champaca.14 For seaside temples at Konark and Mahaballipuram tree

plantations served the practical purpose of preventing saline winds.15 Incidentally,

Tamil Nadu appears in the annual report only in reference to the creation of a

garden at the eleventh century Chola Brihadesvara Temple in Thanjavur.

Clearing the site in preparation for the garden, archaeologists came upon irriga-

tion channels and ‘star shaped flower beds’ on the northern side, which strongly

suggest that there ‘might have been [an] existing garden in olden days’.16

The aridity and ruggedness of many sites has posed serious problems. Here

‘environment is developed through raising lawns and a few trees and hedges’.

Khajuraho is a prime example. From the early issues of the Review one can follow

the efforts of the ASI to supply water to the great temple complex so that there are

now indeed lawns, hedges along the gravel paths, and a scattering of trees and

shrubs, above all a brilliant bougainvillea (figure 3). To compound the difficulties,

these sites are often distant from large cities. Cities, on the other hand, present

their own challenges thanks to the large number of visitors. While ‘more ambi-

tious gardens’ are generally planned for these monuments, the ASI warns that they

are not intended as public parks. For all of its sites, the Horticulture Branch

emphasizes that ‘caution is taken against modernising the gardens’.

Throughout the 50 years of the Review’s publication, the term ‘Mughal’ is

invoked with some frequency. Gardens are maintained or developed or reor-

iented in the Mughal style or manner; sometimes the word ‘Charbagh’ is used as

a synonym. Let us look more closely at the Mughal gardens, the stars of the

antiquities firmament, most of them located conveniently in big cities, to see

how these terms were actually translated on the spot.

The Mughal garden always had a wall around it, in theory high enough to

prevent voyeurs on elephants from peering over (lower in Kashmir due to the

absence of elephants). The Ur-model, derived from Persian antecedents, was

laid out as a square with intersecting channels of water that divided the garden

into quadrants — hence the term ‘Char Bagh’ or four-fold garden. The quad-

rants were often subdivided geometrically so that a garden such as that of the Taj

is composed of sixteen separate units. Walkways along the water channels and

parterres were always raised well above the individual parterres, both for irriga-

tion by means of gravity and for viewing the beds of clover, flowers and small

trees from above, creating the effect of looking down on a richly patterned

carpet. At the intersection of the water channels, a raised pavilion served as the

focal point of the garden. After the death of the owner, the pavilion could be

reconstructed as a full-fledged tomb (allowing the family to circumvent the

ruler’s right to claim the land of the deceased).

figure 3. Temple complex at Khajuraho (Photograph author).


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The main variants of the canonical charbagh were terraced gardens and

riverfront gardens. Terraced gardens took advantage of hilly terrain and flowing

water, creating a series of garden squares from higher to lower. A classic example

is the Nishat Bagh in Kashmir with water cascading down the hillside through a

series of pavilions at each level to gardens below (figure 4). The riverfront garden

was laid out on the level but placed the main building not in the center of the

garden but on a terrace running along the river’s edge. Practically, these gardens

could draw on the river as a source of water; esthetically, they offered a lovely

view from across the river or as one approached by boat as well as an equally

lovely landward view of the garden from the raised pavilion. Babur himself is

supposed to have constructed the first of these along the Yamuna in Agra,

making the best he could of the flat terrain, and others soon followed suit.17

To refer to these gardens as ‘ornamental’ is a huge understatement. They were

every bit as important as the buildings they accompanied. Babur was known as

the ‘Prince of Gardeners’, so great was his delight in gardens; in the words of a

later chronicler, he ‘converted the world into a rose garden’.18 For the Mughals,

gardens served as the hub of social, political and military life. Here men gathered

of an evening to smoke their hookahs and drink wine, to listen to poets and

musicians, to watch dancing girls. Here emperor and court entertained visiting

dignitaries, ensconced on rich carpets, perhaps under a marquee. Here rulers

were crowned and armies gathered. During military campaigns temporary

gardens would be laid out along the route of march for the courtly entourage

and the troops. Always gardens held the promise of perfumed breezes and the

cooling sound of water after the heat of the day. The four channels and the raised

platform had symbolic as well as social and political significance. They repre-

sented the axis mundi, the four intersecting rivers of Paradise as described in the

Qur’an, with lotus blossom-shaped fountains playing in the channels (the lotus

taken over from Hindu and Buddhist) — hence the significance of building

tombs on the raised platform at the confluence of the waterways. The alternating

cypresses and fruit trees that lined the main walkways reinforced the message,

symbolizing as they did life, death and rebirth.

The Taj Mahal as palimpsest19

Gardens change. Trees run rampant in the Indian climate, flowers wither, tastes

and uses alter. The fortunes of the Taj Mahal are among the best documented

over the centuries since it was created and during its transformation into an

figure 4. Nishat Bagh, Kashmir (Photograph author).


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‘ancient monument’. Some twenty years after the garden was completed in

1643, Francois Bernier, the French physician who attended Emperor

Aurangzeb, described the main walk of the garden as about eight feet above

the garden, running on either side of a canal ‘ornamented with fountains placed

at certain intervals’. To the left and right were further pathways ‘covered with

trees and many parterres full of flowers’. The Taj garden, like others in Agra, was

subdivided into lesser squares. These would have been planted with ‘little groves

of trees, as Apple trees . . ., Orange trees, Mulberrie trees, etts. Mango trees,

Caco [cocoanut] trees, Plantan trees, theis latter in rancks, as are the Cipresse’, as

well as with flowers such as roses, marigolds, poppies, and ‘divers other sortes of

faire flowers which we knowe not in our parts, many growing on prettie trees’.

All of these grew informally on their turf plots, wedding ‘the intellectual

concept of the geometric order . . . to the freedom of organic growth’. The

net effect of such a garden was to appeal, even overwhelm, the senses: sight,

smell, the welcome spray of water, even sound, with the cacophony of birds

attracted to tree and flower.20 A foretaste of Paradise, indeed.

There is only a little information about the fortunes of the Taj and its gardens

between the death of Shah Jahan in captivity in 1666 and the arrival of European

travelers in the later eighteenth century, even before the British conquest of

Agra and Delhi in 1803. After the conquest it became immensely popular. It

would be misleading to charge the British with neglecting either the monument

or the garden before Curzon. By all accounts they maintained both with care

but according to a different rationale than that which followed — a rationale that

is apt to jar our present sensibilities, just as it did Curzon’s. True, soldiers were

for a time quartered on the grounds and some clambered over the tomb,

gouging out precious bits of pietra dura as Jat invaders had done before them,

but this was stopped and attempts made to repair the damage. The complex,

however, took on the aura of an oriental Vauxhall cum orchard (fruit trees

helped defray the costs of upkeep as they had earlier). It became a kind of

fairground, frequented by Indians and Europeans alike. On Sundays and holi-

days it filled with pleasure-seekers, all in attire appropriate to their nationality

and status; vendors sold sweetmeats in the Jilaukhana, the forecourt of the Taj;

vandals inscribed their names on walls and jalis. Fountains played in the center

channel and its raised pool, others on the sides of the tomb before the facing

mosque and guesthouse.

For many visitors it was a place of enchantment, for others it was a travesty.

Fanny Parks found it detestable that European ladies and gentlemen danced

quadrilles in the garden with a band playing on the marble plinth of the tomb.

One lady paid the penalty for such insensitivity by falling to her death from the

parapet. Less censorious, Emily Eden noted in passing that her party dined on

ham and drank wine in the mosque that flanked the mausoleum. Nor does she

seem to have minded when two gentlemen played hopscotch ‘with all their old

Westminster rules’ in the garden, one of them ‘the image of Pickwick’, whose

hopping and jumping and panting ‘filled the afternoon very well’. All of this was

far overshadowed by the visit of the Prince of Wales in 1876: ‘Seven thousand

guests came to look at the Prince of Wales looking at the Taj!’ A band entered

the illuminated precincts playing ‘Vedrai carino’ from Mozart’s Don Giovanni,

then struck up dance music to the accompaniment of the ‘clank of spurs and

sabers on the complaining marble’. None of this seemed out of place to the

journalist William Henry Russell who chronicled the royal visit.

The Taj was also a favorite of artists, beginning with William Hodges 1783,

followed by Thomas and William Daniell a few years later, and then a steady

stream throughout the nineteenth century. Their work provides a visual record

of the gardens over more than a century, supplemented by legions of verbal

descriptions. From the 1850s the Taj became a favorite of photographers as well.

What is most obvious from picture and word is how overgrown the garden had

become — even ‘jungly’, to use an Anglo-Indian term;21 what is most curious is

how nobody seemed to mind, to view it as an impediment to experiencing the

Taj. ‘Nothing is lost’, declared Governor General Lord Hastings in 1815, ‘by this

temporary interruption of a distinct perception of all the parts’. The painter

Marianne North deliberately chose a vantage point in the southeast quadrant of

the garden where the luxuriant trees and shrubs blocked the lower parts of the

tomb entirely, the white dome and minarets rising ethereally above the rich

greens. Indeed, the extravagant growth could be seen as an advantage, heigh-

tening the dramatic effect, as Russell described it at mid-century:

Before us lay beautiful walks, lined by dense rows of umbrageous cypress trees,

which divided the ground into squares filled with flowers and fountains, rose and

orange trees, and an infinity of oriental shrubs. A few native gardeners moved

quietly along among the bushes, drawing water from the long reservoirs and canals

which run by the side of each plot of ground . . . . We started onwards towards the

Taj, which was now altogether hidden by the trees. But suddenly striking to the

right we came out in front of it, and there it stood in its queenly beauty and

astonishing perfection, rising above us from a lofty platform of marble, of dazzling

whiteness.22


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For the young Curzon himself, seeing the Taj for the first time in 1887–88, it was

love at first sight — love for the monument and love for the garden. He visited at

all hours of the day, hardly able to fill ‘the cup of satiety’. Not only was the Taj

‘the most beautiful building raised by human hands in the world’, it was ‘difficult

to exaggerate the extent to which the beauty of the garden contributes to and

enhances that of the Taj. Alone it would be one of the loveliest gardens

anywhere to be seen, being divided into numerous parterres, and detached

lawns & plots, planted with brilliant flowers & shrubs, and gloriously shaded

by the foliage of ancestral and umbrageous trees’ (figure 5).23 And yet as viceroy

of India, this same Curzon radically altered the garden barely fifteen years later.

Curzon had a profound appreciation of Indian antiquities. One of the

accomplishments of which he was proudest during his tenure as viceroy was

the preservation and restoration of India’s ancient monuments. ‘While I was in

India’, he wrote, ‘I devoted . . . an immense amount of time and labour to the

restoration and conservation of the old mosques, and temples, and palaces, and

fortresses, and tombs. These form a collection with which, regarded as a whole,

whether for grandeur or for beauty, no other country can vie.’ The government,

he felt, had a duty ‘to the peoples of whom they had assumed the rule — a duty

all the more binding because it had been consistently neglected by the rulers of

their own race and creed’ to restore and maintain ‘these priceless relics’. The

work of his administration would in turn provide an example that the Native

States might emulate. He revitalized the Archaeological Survey of India (which

had been without a director for more than a decade) with the appointment of

John Marshall ‘who came to India as my coadjutor’ — a telling phrase — and

vastly increased the funds available for its projects. Marshall was a Cambridge

scholar only twenty-five at the time of his appointment.24

Agra was to be the showcase and the Taj Mahal its prize. Little needed to be

done as far as the mausoleum was concerned, but the garden was a different matter

in Curzon’s eyes. It had, he declared, ‘been very capriciously treated in the past;

and what is wanted is continuity of treatment and artistic lines’.25 He didn’t defer

to Marshall (or anyone else) or issue general guidelines, he micromanaged the

facelift personally down to the last cypress and flowerbed and made no bones

about it: ‘I have supervised and given orders upon every detail myself; for the local

engineers who have to carry them out are destitute of the faintest artistic percep-

tion; and if left to themselves will perform horrors that alternately make one laugh

and weep.’26 He had very definite ideas about what he wanted, even if he

occasionally changed his mind when the results were not to his liking after all.

His annual visits to Agra were a ‘fearful joy’, always inspiring still another deluge

of instructions. And woe betide local officials who might cross him.27

Curzon and his colleagues were familiar with Francois Bernier’s valuable but

incomplete description of the Taj garden in 1663 and with Capt. William

Sleeman’s 1844 account, for they cite both in their correspondence.28 Curzon

also speaks of ‘old plans, presumably a reference to that drawn up in 1828 under

the supervision of Colonel J. A. Hodgson, surveyor-general of India (figure 6).

This shows clearly the divisions of the garden into sixteen squares with the

intersecting channels of water and the raised pool (chabutra) at their center. The

plantings within the squares are rendered very schematically, as are those of the

figure 5. The Taj Mahal at Agra, 1880s (Curzon Collection, photographer unknown. The

British Library Board, Photo 430/5[23]).


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Jilaukhana, the forecourt outside the main gateway. In an accompanying article

Hodgson notes the long vista of trees that border the canal of fountains leading

the eye to the mausoleum itself, indicating the garden beds along the water

channels with their alternating star-shaped patterns.29 While the basic layout of

the gardens with their accompanying structures was clear, the plantings were less

so, and it is here that Curzon took the most liberties in spite of his professed aim

‘to restore nothing that had not already existed and to put up nothing absolutely

new’.30

In fact what he did was to sweep away almost all that was there — the

jungly accumulation of centuries — replacing it not with geometric par-

terres with their patches of clover, flowers and fruit trees, but mostly with

lawn and a few flourishes of his own (figure 7). Already on a visit to Agra

in 1899 he gave directives about the repositioning of the avenue of

figure 6. Col. J. A. Hodgson’s plan of the mausoleum and garden of the Taj Mahal (Journal

of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1843).

figure 7. The Taj Mahal, general view. Archaeological Society of India, 1918–19 (The

British Library Board, Photo 1007/16[3890]).


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cypresses bordering the main channel. The ‘garish English flowers’ filling

the beds around the cypresses should be removed in favor of ‘suitable’ dark

shrubs or plants. He approved trellised archways of red sandstone placed on

either side of the central tank, with a roof of creepers trained on wires:

‘They are pretty, even if not very correct’. When the lieutenant governor

of the United Provinces ventured to quote Bernier about the ‘many

parterres of flowers’ at the Taj, he quickly beat a retreat in response to a

viceregal rebuke, allowing that ‘the present arrangement of a green sward is

infinitely to be preferred [to Bernier’s]’. The acknowledged purpose of

Curzon’s long campaign of restoration was to open up an uninterrupted

vision of the mausoleum. This meant, and continues to mean, a minimum

of trees and shrubs and a maximum of lawn; walkways are only slightly

raised, and the geometric divisions have been de-emphasized — in fact it is

impossible to discern the sixteen original squares, the parterres that were

the modules of design of the Taj and other Mughal gardens. The visitor’s

eye is drawn along the north–south channel, along the line of cypresses

(not allowed to become too tall or too bushy) without distraction.31

In a letter to St John Brodrick, his companion on his first visit to the

Taj, Curzon declared triumphantly apropos of the Agra restorations as a

whole, ‘What were then dusty wastes are now green parks and gardens;

neglected & half-tumbled down ruins are as perfect as on the day when

they first left the builder’s or mason’s hand’. He repeated this in a speech

in support of the Ancient Monuments Bill, insisting not only that the

buildings in the Taj enclosure were restored to their original condition, but

that ‘the discovery of old plans has enabled us to restore the water-channels

and flower-beds of the garden more exactly to their original state’.32 It is to

Curzon’s undying credit that he made a lasting impact on preserving

India’s antiquities. But gardens apparently follow another law: the Taj

garden and the gardens of other Agra monuments had been transformed

into what are essentially English parks, heavy on lawns, with hedges along

the walkways, and random flower beds. As Curzon’s obituarist put it, ‘Lord

Curzon had all the cultivated Briton’s love of clearing away incongruous

accretions which mask a comprehensive view of a monument, and of

setting the jewel again in an environment of greenery’.33

What has been lost at the Taj as with other Mughal gardens of the plain that

have followed its lead is the gaiety of the originals, Bernier’s ‘gay parterres’ —

the brilliant colors, the rich perfumes, the chorus of sounds. The gardens seem,

as Sheila Crowe observes, more palace than garden, the geometry and sense of

enclosure overwhelming, the white marble blinding in the sun’.34 And yet at the

Taj it was the garden — not the tomb — that symbolized the Paradise awaiting

the faithful.

Further complicating the story of the Taj was the discovery and excavation of

the Mehtab Bagh or Moonlight Garden by Elizabeth Moynihan and a team

from the Archaeological Survey in the mid-1990s. This garden has the same

dimensions as the Taj and lies directly across the Yamuna River. It was appar-

ently created by Shah Jahan to complete the original scheme by providing a view

— especially a nighttime view — from boats crossing the river and then from the

raised platform with its pavilion on the river’s edge. On the landward side the

complementary garden stretched out from the pavilion. The existence of the

Moonlight Garden helps to explain the apparent anomaly of the Taj itself, that is,

the location of the tomb at the end of the garden rather than in the middle, as

was the custom from Humayun’s Tomb onward: it was in fact in the middle of

this extended garden. At the same time the Moonlight Garden followed the

pattern of the riverfront gardens that once lined the Yamuna. A brilliant tour de

force on Shah Jahan’s part, but he had overreached: it soon became apparent that

the currents of the river made it unstable and inclined to disastrous flooding. It

appears to have been abandoned a short time later; the pavilion and corner

towers crumbled, local villagers ‘recycled’ the building materials, and the

Moonlight Garden passed into oblivion.35

This doubling of the garden would have had several effects. Situating the

mausoleum at the end of its garden rather than in the middle offered a longer

sightline — twice as long — which would have given added emphasis to both the

garden and the tomb. The view of the tomb is made more dramatic; it seems to

grow larger the closer one approaches. At the same time the perfect square of

garden (which one experiences as rectangular) is itself uninterrupted by anything

larger than the central pool. The mirror image of the garden on the opposite

bank, assuming its layout replicated that of the Taj itself, would have had the

same effect. In its present state (2012), however, the Mehtab Bagh is little more

than a pathetic strip of sickly grass with flowerbeds running down the middle,

flanked by hedges, trimmed bushes and lines of trees, all in ascending heights

(figure 8).36 For most visitors its only attraction is the view of the Taj rising

majestically on its marble plinth on the opposite bank of the river — and for

guides a chance to retail the hoary myth of the Black Taj to unsuspecting

tourists.


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Garden-craft versus horticulture

What molded Curzon’s views on landscaping historic monuments and why have

they continued to dominate for the past century with only modest tweaking?

Curzon’s own family seat of Kedleston Park in Derbyshire was, and still essentially

is, stuck in an eighteenth-century time warp, with its Capability Brown-inspired

winding stream, copses of trees, and above all its sweeping vistas of green

(figure 9). But that is not enough to explain his garden aesthetic or its lasting

legacy. Curzon’s love of India’s antiquities and his sense of stewardship for them

were part and parcel of his imperialist agenda. It was his ‘priestly duty’ to charge

himself with their ‘reverent custody and repair’, while at the same time such

devotion would redound to his own credit and to that of the Empire he served.

Presciently, he observed that he was much more likely to be remembered in India

for having preserved its monuments than for his administrative achievements.37

Moreover, as some of his friends and colleagues observed, Curzon identified

personally with the many monuments whose preservation and restoration he

oversaw, almost as if he himself had brought them into existence.38

When he first saw the Taj Mahal as a young man, Curzon was infinitely

susceptible to the picturesqueness, even romance, of its mausoleum and garden

setting. As proconsul, both his sensibilities and his goals had changed. The focus

was now on the architecture of this and other monuments to support his claim

that they were the greatest of mankind’s creations, bar none. As long as the

gardens set off the monuments to best advantage, it did not matter that they were

not quite authentic. Marshall concurred. In his Conservation Manual of 1923 he

declared: ‘In laying out or restoring ancient Indian gardens it is all important to

preserve the essential character of the original, whether that character expresses

itself in the symmetrical handling of the design as a whole, in the careful balance

maintained between its component parts, in the schematic arrangement of

parterres, causeways, watercourses, and the like, or in the formal treatment of

other features’. Then the escape hatch:

But it is not necessary to attempt to reproduce with pedantic accuracy the original

appearance of the garden in all its particulars by banishing from it any trees, flowers

figure 9. Kedleston Park, Derbyshire (Photograph author).

figure 8. The Mehtab Bagh (Photograph author).


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or fruits, etc., which were not grown by the ancients. Since the days of the

Mughals (to which period most of the old Indian gardens belong) horticulture

has made immense progress, and now-a-days it would be as absurd to refuse to

grow Marechal Niel or other modern roses in a Mughal garden on the ground that

such roses were not known to the Mughals, as it would be to substitute the old

fashioned Indian beaten earth [?] in place of a far more beautiful lawn of grass. In

these matters concessions are rightly to be made to modern taste and the wishes of

the community who frequent the gardens. Archaeological officers should there-

fore endeavour to observe the happy mean between antiquarian accuracy on the

one hand and aesthetic beauty on the other.39

In 1913, only a few years after Lord Curzon departed from India, Constance

Villiers-Stuart published the first serious study of Mughal gardens. While she was

generous in her praise of the Viceroy for his labors in rescuing ‘many magnificent

old Indian buildings and works of art’ in so short a time, she was blunt in her

criticism of his baleful influence on the restoration of Indian gardens. She framed

this in terms of a more general failure of the British to appreciate — even

understand — ‘the old garden craft in its artistic and symbolic aspects’. In their

‘mistaken zeal for English landscape gardening [they] have swept away the

avenues of alternating cypress and fruit trees. Gone are the glowing parterres,

carpets of colour’. Only the terraces, fountains, and narrow watercourse remain.40

Mughal gardens needed to be cleared of much accumulated overgrowth

and rubbish, she acknowledges, but those responsible seemed to have been

so enchanted with the beauty of the Taj itself, for example, that they didn’t

realize ‘the close connection of the whole group of buildings, and that the

garden as originally planned formed an integral part of one great design’.

Where are the groves of fruit trees, the orange, pomegranate and lemon,

she asks? Where are the masses of poppies, lilies and anemones to be seen

from the raised chabutras and walkways? The Mughal gardens of the plains,

she laments, ‘are sad for want of flowers’. This she ascribes to ‘our English

gardeners, and their fixed belief in the universal virtue of mown grass’.

Where the Mughals would have set out a small parterre of clover, ‘keeping

that little perfect, like some square of precious emerald green carpet’, the

British have laid down acres of greensward, dotted at best with ‘mean-

ingless small flower-beds’. To underscore her insistence that gardens were

‘integral’ to the single design, she points to the antiphony between the

actual flowers in the garden and the flowers depicted in the marble dados

and pietra dura of Mughal monuments, most gloriously in the Taj Mahal.41

Little has changed in the century since Villiers-Stuart wrote: horticulture still

trumps garden-craft, architecture trumps garden. The writings of Villiers-Stuart

and subsequent historians of Indian gardens seem to have had little impact on the

practices of the ASI for whom Sir John Marshall remains the patron saint.

Photographs of the Taj over the years show only minor changes. It remains an

overwhelmingly beautiful sight (Curzon’s repeated use of the word ‘perfection’

comes to mind), but owes little of its impact to the garden — mostly a park-like

expanse of lawn with the occasional ‘meaningless flower-beds’ Villiers-Stuart so

lamented, along with a few scattered trees and bushes, and the slightly raised

walkways providing views not of flora carpets but of nothing in particular

(figure 10). Other garden settings for ancient monuments continue to follow

the general pattern laid out for the Taj. Landscaping of Sikandra has changed

drastically over the years, in fact since the original sketch by Peter Mundy in the

seventeenth century (figure 11). Now it sits in a deer park with an avenue of

figure 10. Taj Mahal: lawn with flowers (Photograph author).


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figure 11. Peter Mundy, Akbar’s Tomb at Sikandra, c. 1632.


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palms along the causeway leading to the mausoleum (figure 12). Hindu temples

in Orissa (figures 13 and 14) have the obligatory lawns, with gravel or cement

paths lined with hedges and a smattering of trees on the fringes. Even the

Buddhist stupa at Sarnath (with its interloping Hindu temple) is landscaped in

much the same way (figure 15). The problem of supplying water to Khajuraho,

the spectacular complex of eleventh- and twelfth-century temples far from an

urban area, has over the years been particular difficult for the ASI, but it has

succeeded at last in providing a green setting on the familiar model (see figure 3).

In most cases there seems to be a basic formula for ‘beautification’, namely open

vistas and greenswards, whatever the monument.

Now, to the defense of the ASI. India has so many ‘ancient monuments’, they

present an almost insuperable challenge. Inevitably, perhaps, archaeology and

architecture have always had top priority, far overshadowing horticulture

(let alone ‘garden-craft’) — it was exceptional that Curzon even took such a

strong interest in the gardens of Agra and Delhi monuments. The autocratic

viceroy could also prize unheard of sums of money from the coffers of the

government of India (paid for by levies on Indians themselves since India had to

be self-supporting). At a lecture by Villiers-Stuart in 1914, a former colonial

official pointed out that ‘the Mughal garden was essentially a ‘‘millionaire’s

garden’’, and could only be successfully carried out where money galore was

forthcoming for its accomplishment’. Such a use of public funds would not be

popular in the present climate, while any attempt to create Mughal gardens on

the cheap would inevitably result in failure. Furthermore, he argued, it would

require the diversion of a great deal of water in a thirsty land.42

Sir Richard makes some valid points. The Taj was maintained originally by an

endowment (waqf) set up by Shah Jahan, drawing revenues from several sources,

including the bazaars and caravanserais of the Taj Ganj, south of the garden

complex itself. The British did away with the waqf (later Curzon did away with

figure 12. Akbar’s Tomb at Sikandra, 2012 (Photograph author). figure 13. Lingaraj Mandir, Bhubaneswar (Photograph author).


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the Taj Ganj, as well), and for a time at least were able to use money from the sale

of fruit from the orchards.43 Curzon found to his dismay that while he was away

in England on leave, a frugal administration had let out Humayun’s Tomb in

Delhi to a turnip farmer: ‘The work of four years is thrown away!’44 As for

water, the Mughals were ingenious engineers, but their network of wells,

aqueducts, and pipes was a costly affair to build and to maintain. Jahangir writes

that at the main large well in one of his gardens as many as 32 pairs of oxen were

kept for drawing water (figure 16). A rare manuscript from the mid-sixteenth

century details just how many workers and draft animals were required for

certain imperial gardens in Agra. The standard ratio was one gardener per bigha

(0.6 acre) of land and three oxen for each rope-and-bucket chain.45 Akbar’s new

capital at Fatehpur Sikri apparently defeated even the Mughals and had to be

abandoned for lack of water. Small wonder that the annual reports of the Review

are replete with irrigation projects and problems even in an age of motor pumps

— not least the attempt to restore Fatehpur Sikri to something like its former

splendor.

Ironically, the greatest quasi-Mughal garden in India nowadays is that

created for the Viceroy’s Palace, now the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the center-

piece of Edwin Lutyens’s New Delhi. For a few weeks in February and

March it is open to the public. And what a dazzling display it offers! There

is a riot of color, a huge array of roses, beds of spring and early summer

flowers, and pollarded trees, all beautifully laid out amidst a manicured

lawn. An army of malis tends to weeding, mowing, trimming, and water-

ing. But this makes Temple’s point: if not a ‘millionaire’s garden’, it is the

garden of the president of India.46

The brief season when the Rashtrapati garden is open corresponds to the peak

of spring bloom before the scorching heat descends on the plains from the end of

March till broken by the monsoon in June. Winter is understandably the peak

figure 14. Temple of the Sun, Konark (Photograph author). figure 15. Stupa, Sarnarth (Photograph author).


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season in northern India for foreign tourists. This poses a dilemma: the spring

flowers familiar to both Mughals and Europeans are at their best at a different

season from the deep-rooted Indian trees and shrubs which put out leaves and

brilliant sweet-smelling blossoms in April and May and during the summer

rains.47 If one is designing a garden for a monument, what season does one plant

for? Ideally one would plant for both, but this is hardly feasible. The default

position at most sites seems to be to demote flowers to Villiers-Stuart’s ‘mean-

ingless beds’ in favor of lawns, even though it is a struggle to keep them green in

the dry months.

True, the Taj Mahal garden was only open to the public on the ‘Urs’, the

anniversary of Mumtaz Mahal’s death — and that ‘public’ would have been

minute compared to the several million visitors a year nowadays. Perhaps the

unspoken view is that they will trample anything more elaborate than lawns. I

can only testify from my own — limited — experience and that of friends, that

visitors seem instinctively to stick to the causeways rather than swarming over

the grass, in contrast, say, to the Mughal gardens in Kashmir. Is it awe alone that

accounts for this restraint?

Both Curzon and Marshall give scriptural dispensation for applying different

standards to architectural and garden restoration, to improvise with the latter in

ways that were impermissible in the former. Moreover, ‘authenticity’ in the two

cases poses quite different problems. In architectural restoration one can draw

sandstone and marble from the same quarries as the originals. Bricks can be fired

to repair crumbling walls. At Khajuraho a workshop trains artists in stone

sculpture to replace the missing and damaged figures from the hyperactive reliefs

of the temple walls. But plants? Over the centuries they have been hybridized

beyond recognition. To take Marshall’s case of roses alone, a favorite of the

Mughals (and the British): more than a hundred species are now available to

stock the gardens of the Rashtrapati Bhavan and ancient monuments alike.

If exact restoration of gardens is unrealistic, there are imaginative alternatives.

In Kashmir after decades of neglect because of its turbulent politics, a number of

Mughal gardens have been lovingly revived. Here, to be sure, the abundance of

water and the temperate climate make it much easier to suggest something of

what the glorious gardens would have looked like in the seventeenth century

(although the flowerbeds have a pronounced English cast). As for Mughal

gardens in the plains, the Anguri Bagh (Grape Garden) of the Khas Mahal infigure 16. Oxen drawing water from a deep well (Photograph author).


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the Agra Fort suggests another approach (figure 17). Supposedly Shah Jehan had

the soil for this garden brought from Kashmir.48 While the walkways are no

longer raised very much above the low plantings and the garden lacks trees for

shade and variety, the geometry of the garden playfully replicates the patterns of

the marble railing. Deeg and Amber, too, have received steady attention from

the ASI over the years. The gardens are eighteenth century and attached to

Rajput rather than Mughal palaces, but show strong Mughal influence. Deeg is

too far off the beaten track to attract many tourists, which may explain why its

original plan survives, with walkways raised well above plots of grass and

flowers. Unfortunately the watercourses that were so central to the design are

only filled for a brief period in the year (as is true of many monuments),

presenting a forlorn appearance the rest of the time. This is ironic since the

Jats of Bharatpur carried off many of the marble fountains and tanks from the

Agra Fort to embellish the Deeg gardens (figure 18).49 The Sukh Niwas garden

in the Amber Fort-Palace, on the other hand, is a little gem. Its plants are more

varied and interesting than those of the Anguri Bagh and water runs through the

axial channels culminating in the central fountains (figure 19).

In the outrage stirred up by the plans to surround the Taj with cyber cafes and

shopping malls, a leading Delhi architect argued that the whole development

plan be scrapped, and furthermore that the Taj gardens be radically redone: the

manicured lawns should be dug up and the bougainvillea planted by ‘misguided

and ill-informed’ British restorers replaced with the original Mughal shrubs,

trees and plants.50 This is not likely to happen, although mercifully the shopping

mall project was blocked. What might be possible would be the restoration

along classic Mughal lines of the garden of a more modest Agra monument such

as the lovely tomb of I’timad-ud-Daula on the opposite riverbank from the Taj

(figure 20). It is not only smaller but also receives far fewer visitors than the Taj,

so that the upkeep might be more manageable.

figure 17. Anguri Bagh, Agra Fort (Photograph author). figure 18. Deeg (Photograph author).


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Curzon nostalgia

‘After every other viceroy has been forgotten, Curzon will be remembered

because he restored all that was beautiful in India’. Jawaharlal Nehru’s words

continue to be quoted in his homeland: an article in the Times of India as recently

as 6 May 2012 recalled that if the tablet of Sidi Syed Mosque ‘is the symbol of

present day Ahmedabad’, it is because Curzon stepped in to save the mosque and

its great lattice-work.51

One might amend our epigraph from Sir Francis Bacon to read: ‘When ages

grow to civility and elegancy, men come to restore stately sooner than to garden

finely’. Nevertheless, to the extent that the Viceroy not only preserved and

restored India’s built heritage but also decreed that it be set in park-like surround-

ings, the citizens of the country’s teeming cities are bound to be grateful. The

public park as distinct from the park associated with a great estate was an

innovation in England in the nineteenth-century and unheard of in India before

the Raj — the blogger is quite right to laud the ‘Raj’s green legacy’. What is more

problematic is that the dominant template is Western, not indigenous. It is not just

Mughal gardens that have lost their distinctiveness; Indians have largely forgotten

that their literature is replete with references to palace gardens, gardens of

seduction and the heavily perfumed air of moonlit nights. Petals and garlands

for household and temple pujas were homegrown long before there were flower

markets. English gardens had a long history in India, carrying with them the stamp

of the civilizing mission itself, icons of modernity and status. In a sense Curzon

codified their main elements, made them the norm. Whether out of inertia or

lack of imagination about alternatives, his aesthetic continues to influence the

landscaping not only of ancient but also of contemporary monuments.52

Most of all, the ‘Curzon nostalgia’ expressed by the Deccan Chronicle and the

blogger SilkStalkings may reflect the human tendency to look to the past as

somehow a Golden Age and to lament what has been lost more than to value

what has been gained, ironic as that may seem in a post-colonial nation.

figure 19. Sukh Niwas, Amber Palace (Photograph author). figure 20. Tomb of I’timad ud Daula, Agra (Photograph author).


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notes

1. http://www.deccanchronicle.com/editorial/op-ed/

tetchy-brits-and-their-tantrums-436.

2. http://blogs.economictimes.indiatimes.com/

SilkStalkings/entry/not-just-your-garden-variety-

concerns.

3. asi.nic.in/asi_monuments.asp.

4. India Today, 7 July 2003: archives.digitaltoday.in.

5. For example, the World Heritage Area Management

Authority and ASI have forced the removal of local

inhabitants from the bazaar at Hampi: ‘India’s Hampi

heritage site families face eviction from historic

ruins’, The Observer, 27 May 2012.

6. http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/

NM18/Protected-Mandu-monuments-in-ruins/

Article1-160874.aspx. The site became further

entangled in controversies over the role of a private

company headed by an influential jeweler in leasing

land adjoining the ruins: http://times of india.india-

times.com/city/jaipur/Government-to-decide-if-

Jal-Mahal-land-verdict-to-be-challenged-CM-

Ashok-Gehlot/articleshow/13282550.cms.

7. www.intach.org/about-mission.asp?linksabout1.

8. See for example INTACH’s charge that the govern-

ment of Odisha is not caring properly for the temples

in the state: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/

city/bhubaneswar/Government-passes-the-buck-

on-public-for-heritage-conservation/articleshow/

12727813.cms. The Times of India recently carried an

article about the disastrous condition of many of

Andhra Pradesh’s 550 protected monuments, claim-

ing that many have ‘either become drunkards’ para-

dise . . . or converted into public urinals’: http://

timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/hyderabad/

Heritage-languishes-with-protector-chasing-gold/

articleshow/12385634.cms.

9. A. Ghosh, Preface to Indian Archaeology — A Review

1953–54 (New Delhi, 1954).

10. Rajeev, Preface to ibid. 2000–2001 (New Delhi,

2006).

11. Review 1953–54, p. 36.

12. Review 1999–2000, p. 378.

13. Review 1976–77, p. 145; 1977–78, p. 154; 1981–82, p.

148; 1982–83, p. 152; 1984–85, p. 220. The 1977–78

issue notes that ‘sacred trees mentioned in Buddhist

literature have been planted’ in the back sector at

Sarnath, the site where the Buddha delivered his

first sermon: p. 157. Even more enigmatic is a refer-

ence to ‘plants sacred to the Muslims’ in the gardens

of Humayun’s Tomb: 1980–81, p. 167.

14. Review 1986–87, p. 192; 1989–90, p. 213; cf. 1980–81,

p. 167, listing the new plants introduced at the Siva

Temple, Baijnath, in Himachal Pradesh.

15. Review 1986–87, p. 192; 1989–90, p. 213.

16. Review 1985–86, p. 211.

17. Ebba Koch, The Complete Taj Mahal and the Riverfront

Gardens of Agra (New York: Thames & Hudson,

2006), pp. 24–25.

18. Eugenia W. Herbert, Flora’s Empire: British Colonial

Gardens in India (Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp. 207–210. On Mughal

gardens see also Koch; Constance Villiers-Stuart,

Gardens of the Great Mughals (New Delhi: Cosmo,

1983 [1913]; and Sylvia Crowe, Sheila Hayward,

Susan Jellicoe and Gordon Patterson, The Gardens of

Mughal India (London: Thames & Hudson, 1972).

19. For fuller accounts of the Taj in later centuries, see

Herbert, ch. 6, ‘The Taj and the Raj’, and Koch,

ch. V, ‘Everybody’s Taj’.

20. Quoted in Herbert, pp. 207–208.

21. The poet Edwin Arnold referred to it as ‘an orderly

wilderness’. India Revisited (Boston: Roberts Bros.,

1886), p. 211.

22. On the Taj and its gardens in the nineteenth century,

see Herbert, ch. 6 passim, and Koch, p. 237ff.

23. Quoted in Herbert, p. 198. Fanny Parks had admired

these same ‘fine old trees’ a half-century earlier and she

too reckoned them already to be ‘very ancient’. From

her tent pitched just in front of the great gateway, Parks

was able to wander about the garden at all times of the

day—once, ‘longafter theusual hour, theyallowed the

fountains to play until I quitted the garden’. Begums,

Thugs&WhiteMughals:The Journals ofFannyParkes [sic],

selected and introduced by William Dalrymple

(London: Sickle Moon Books, 2002), p. 190.

24. Lord Curzon, British Government in India, 2 vols.

(London: Cassell, 1925), Vol. II, pp. 136–137.

Curzon capped his accomplishments with the passage

in 1904 of the Ancient Monuments Bill, the model

for subsequent legislation. By the end of his term,

£120 000 had been spent on preservation and restora-

tion of monuments, half of it in Agra and Fatehpur

Sikri: David Dilks, Curzon in India (London: Hart-

Davis, 1969), p. 246.

25. Curzon to Sir A. P. MacDonnell, 7 April 1900,

Curzon Papers, Mss Eur F111/621, India Office

Library, London.

26. Curzon quoted in The Earl of Ronaldshay, The Life of

Lord Curzon, Being the Authorized Biography of George

Nathaniel, Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, 2 vols

(London: E. Benn, 1928), Vo. II, p. 211.

27. See Curzon Papers, Mss Eur F111/620, India Office

Library, for correspondence on the subject. See also

the obituary by D. G. Hogarth, ‘George Nathaniel

Curzon, Marquess Curzon of Kedleston,

1859–1925’, Proceedings of the Royal Asiatic Society,

11, 1925, pp. 502–524.

28. It was Sleeman’s wife who famously declared of the

Taj: ‘I would die tomorrow to have such a tomb’.

Quoted in Herbert, p. 222.

29. Col. J. A. Hodgson, ‘Memoir on the Illahee Guz, or

Imperial Land Measure of Hindostan’, Journal of the

Royal Asiatic Society, 7, 1843, pp. 42–63.

30. Curzon, speech to the Legislative Council on the

Ancient Monuments Bill, 18 March 1904, reprinted

in Thomas Raleigh, ed., Lord Curzon in India, Being a

Selection from His Speeches as Viceroy and Governor-

General of India (London: Macmillan, 1906), p. 198.

31. Curzon Papers, in Herbert, pp. 199–202, italics mine.

A. P. Griessen, who worked closely with Curzon on

the restoration of the garden, defends the departure


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from the Mughal plan, including the absence of

fruit trees, by emphasizing the importance of

keeping the sight lines to the mausoleum as open as

possible. He also insisted that ‘eastern trees did not

stand shaping out as fully as trees of Western climes’:

Remarks on a talk given by Mrs Patrick Villiers-

Stuart, 17 July 1931. Journal of the Royal Society of

Arts, 79/4104, 1931, p. 807.

32. 17 December 1903, Curzon Papers, Mss Eur F111/

620, p. 139; Raleigh, p. 199.

33. Hogarth, p. 517.

34. Crowe, p. 45. Janice Leoshko notes the irony that,

overgrown though they were, the Taj garden pre-

Curzon probably more closely captured its original

ambience than it did after his restorations:

‘Mausoleum for an Empress’, in Pradapaditya Pal,

Janice Leoshko, Joseph M. Dye, III and Stephen

Markel, eds, Romance of the Taj Mahal (Los Angeles:

Los Angeles County Museum/London: Thames &

Hudson, 1989), p. 57.

35. Elizabeth B. Moynihan, ed., The Moonlight Garden

(Washington, DC: The Smithsonian Institution/

Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000). An

aquatint by the Daniells shows a view of the Taj from

across the river, with the ruins of one of the towers of

the Moonlight Garden in the right-hand corner.

36. The Review (1996–97, p. 325) states apropos of the

Mehtab Bagh: ‘A project report has been prepared in

collaboration with the Agra Circle of the Survey. For

[sic] complete revival of the garden in the Mehtab Bagh

area on Charbagh pattern for which action has been

initiated to select the flora for plantation besides prepar-

ing the layout of the garden, based on various historical

records and plans’. The report for 1997–98 adds that

‘about twenty-five different species of the tress and

shrubs were planted in ascending order from main axis

[sic] on either side to enhance the visual effect:’ p. 363.

37. Curzon speech in support of the Ancient Monuments

Bill, 18 March 1904, in Raleigh, p. 198.

38. See Herbert, pp. 216–217.

39. Quoted in James Wescoat and Joachim Wolschke-

Buhlmahn, ‘Sources, Places, Representations and

Prospects’ in James L. Wescoat and Joachim

Wolschke-Buhlmahn, eds, Mughal Gardens

(Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1996), p. 20.

40. Villiers-Stuart, p. 43.

41. Villiers-Stuart, pp. x, 32, 73ff, 199, 208, 213 and

passim.

42. Sir Richard Temple, Bart., C. I. E., comments on

Villiers-Stuart, ‘Indian Water Gardens’, Journal of the

Royal Society of Arts, No. 3,203, Vol. LXII, 10 April

1914, p. 462. Sir Richard also chides Villiers-Stuart

for her ‘severe’ views on modern British taste in

Indian gardens.

43. Koch, pp. 100–101.

44. Letter to Lady Curzon in April 1905, quoted in

Ronaldshay, p. 337.

45. Irfan Habib, ‘Notes on the Economic and Social

Aspects of Mughal Gardens’, in James L. Wescoat

and Joachim Wolschke-Buhlmahn, eds, Mughal

Gardens (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks,

1996), pp. 132–133.

46. Unfortunately visitors are not allowed to take

photographs, but detailed views are provided

on the website: www.presidentofindia.nic.in/

mughalGarden.html.

47. See especially Pradip Krishen, Trees of Delhi: A Field

Guide (Delhi: Dorling Kindersley India, 2007) who

includes large shrubs as well as trees.

48. Crowe, Hayward, Jellicoe and Patterson, caption

p. 164.

49. Crowe, Hayward, Jellicoe and Patterson, p. 164.

50. Mita Rai, interview in the Daily Telegraph (London),

8 July 2001.

51. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/

ahmedabad/When-Curzon-rescued-Ahmedabads/

icon/articleshow/13015110.cms.

52. See Herbert, ch. 9.


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curzon nostalgia: landscaping historical monuments in india

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