The Mughal Empire

The Mariam-uz-Zamani Palace at Fatehpur Sikri

The large red-sandstone palace in the south-east corner of the imperial court at Fatehpur Sikri has been known to visitors, guides, and most secondary literature for at least a century as the Jodha Bai Palace. The label is almost certainly wrong. The contemporary Mughal sources, including Abu’l Fazl’s Akbarnama and the inscriptions on the building itself, do not give the palace any personal name; the only Hindu wife of Akbar securely attested in the Mughal documentation is the Kachhwaha princess known in Persian sources as Mariam-uz-Zamani (“Mary of the Age”), and her residential building at Fatehpur Sikri is identified on grounds of layout and location, not by inscription. The “Jodha Bai” attribution appears to be a nineteenth-century construction, associated with the colonial-era effort to assign a single recognisable name to Akbar’s chief Hindu consort, and it is rejected by most specialists today (Truschke, Aurangzeb, 2017; Lal, Empress, 2018).

This page therefore uses the more defensible name Mariam-uz-Zamani Palace. The contested label is, however, so widespread that it is still the most useful search term for visitors, and the page retains it in the URL.

What the building is

The Mariam-uz-Zamani Palace is the largest of the residential buildings in the imperial harem quarter of Fatehpur Sikri. It is built of the local red sandstone, with carved and inlaid ornament that draws on both Hindu and Islamic traditions. The plan is a rectangular arrangement of three courtyards, with residential blocks, a small Hindu shrine in the east and a small mosque in the west. The principal façade, facing north, is articulated with a central iwan-like opening flanked by carved pillars and crowned by a row of chhatris; the south façade, by contrast, is comparatively plain. The total floor area is roughly 2,400 square metres, distributed over a single storey plus the open courtyards.

The building’s most discussed feature is the carved ornament. The columns, brackets, and ceiling panels carry motifs drawn from the Hindu and Jain architectural traditions of Gujarat and Rajasthan — the bell-shaped finial, the chhatri, the lotus, the jharokha, and figures including Surya, Brahma, and Ganesha — alongside motifs from the Islamic tradition, including the pointed arch, the geometric arabesque, and bands of Quranic calligraphy. The coexistence of these motifs in a single decorative programme has made the building the standard example cited in the secondary literature for the syncretic character of Akbar’s architectural patronage (Asher, Architecture of Mughal India, 1992, pp. 38–42; Koch, Mughal Architecture, 1991, pp. 37–40).

The contested identification

The Mughal court kept no list of harem apartments of the kind that would let us assign a particular building to a particular wife. The identification of this palace with Mariam-uz-Zamani rests on three arguments, none of them conclusive:

  1. Location. The building is the largest of the residential buildings in the harem quarter, and Mariam-uz-Zamani was Akbar’s principal Hindu consort and the mother of his heir, the future Jahangir. The largest residential building is, in the absence of contrary evidence, the most plausible candidate for her residence.
  2. Hindu ornament. The carved Hindu motifs are conspicuous, and the imperial harem included Hindu, Muslim, and (probably) Christian wives, each of whom maintained a domestic religious space. A palace with a Hindu shrine is a natural candidate for a Hindu consort.
  3. Popular memory. The palace was associated with Mariam-uz-Zamani in the local tradition at Fatehpur Sikri, and the name “Jodha Bai” is the form in which that tradition was transmitted through the nineteenth-century guides and the colonial-era literature.

The arguments are suggestive but not decisive. The same building could have been a more general residential block; the Hindu ornament could reflect a different Hindu resident, or a deliberate imperial programme, or the religious pluralism of Akbar’s court as a whole; the popular name was almost certainly assigned retrospectively. The defenders of the identification (most recently the official site signage of the Archaeological Survey of India) have the better of the practical case, but the scholarly case is open.

The carved programme

Whatever the identification, the carved programme of the palace is of the Fatehpur Sikri complex. The columns, more than 80 of them across the building, are each carved with a different pattern; no two are identical. The brackets carry representations of Hindu deities, including Surya (the sun god) on the south side, Brahma (the creator) and Ganesha (the elephant-headed god) on the east, and a range of apsaras and yakshas in other positions. The central iwan is crowned by a row of small chhatris and a parapet of carved merlons; the inner face of the iwan carries a long inscription in Persian, in the nasta’liq script, that has been read as a Qasida in praise of the emperor.

The interior surfaces were originally painted. Traces of pigment survive in the more sheltered parts of the building, and the modern restoration has stabilised rather than reconstructed the surviving decoration.

The religious spaces

The palace contains a small Hindu shrine in its eastern part and a small mosque in its western part, both accessible from the principal courtyard. The two spaces are of similar size and similar decorative restraint; both are functional rather than monumental. Their coexistence in a single imperial building is the strongest architectural expression in the complex of the religious pluralism that Akbar cultivated in the 1570s and 1580s, and it The two spaces should not, however, be over-interpreted: the architectural conventions of the imperial harem had long allowed for the maintenance of separate religious spaces for wives of different faiths, and the Fatehpur Sikri arrangement is best read as a particularly elaborate instance of a pre-existing convention rather than a dramatic departure from it (Asher, 1992, pp. 38–42).

The place in the Fatehpur Sikri complex

The palace stands in the south-eastern part of the imperial palace area, on higher ground than the Diwan-i-Aam and the Diwan-i-Khas. It is approached through a series of gates and courtyards, and it is in visual alignment with the Buland Darwaza to the south and the Jama Masjid complex. The integration of the building with the wider complex is a clear indication of the breadth of the imperial patronage of the period, and the building is one of the most visited buildings in the Fatehpur Sikri complex.

Sources

  • Catherine B. Asher, Architecture of Mughal India, The New Cambridge History of India I.4 (1992), pp. 38–42.
  • Ebba Koch, Mughal Architecture: An Outline of Its History and Development (1526–1858) (1991), pp. 37–40.
  • Ruby Lal, Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan (2018), pp. 19–25 (on the household of Akbar’s Hindu consort).
  • Audrey Truschke, Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India’s Most Controversial King (2017), pp. 18–22 (on the problems with the name “Jodha Bai”).
  • R. Nath, History of Mughal Architecture, vol. I, Fatehpur Sikri (1982).
  • Giles Tillotson, Mughal India (1990), pp. 24–30.