The Building of the Taj Mahal

In June 1631, Shah Jahan was camped near Burhanpur, finishing a military campaign against the Deccan sultanates, when his wife Mumtaz Mahal went into labor with their fourteenth child. She was 38 years old and had already borne thirteen children before this one. The labor stretched on for many hours, and on 17 June 1631 she died in the camp. Word reached Shah Jahan inside his own tents, in the middle of a war he had come south to win. Court chroniclers, who normally filled their pages with troop movements and sieges, turned instead to describing an emperor undone. Within weeks his hair had turned white. He withdrew from the business of the court into seclusion, refusing the company of ministers and generals for nearly a year. When he finally reappeared, he had a permanent stoop in his back, and the only person who could draw him out of his rooms was his eldest daughter, Jahanara Begum. She became his closest companion in the months that followed, managing what he could not. The men around him had watched him plan campaigns and command armies without visible strain. None of them had recorded him like this before. It was this grief, catalogued in such unusual detail by the men who wrote his court's history, that turned into the decision to build something permanent for the woman he had lost in a military camp far from home.