Housing, Water and Living Conditions in Mughal South Asia

Mughal living spaces ranged from small mud-and-thatch dwellings to merchant houses and imperial apartments. The materials, room arrangements and water supply of a home depended on its setting and resources. François Bernier’s account of Delhi in the 1660s describes bazaar buildings, merchant residences and cooling practices; Akbar’s court record shows a separate water department for the emperor’s household.

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Shops, houses and sleeping spaces in Delhi

Bernier describes Delhi’s main bazaar as a working and residential street. Brick arcades shaded open shops where artisans worked, bankers handled business and merchants displayed goods. Small doors behind the stalls opened into warehouses where merchandise stayed overnight. Merchant homes stood over or behind these stores, separated from street dust but connected to roof terraces. Families slept on those terraces at night and moved bedding into adjoining rooms when rain, dust, cold or heavy dew made the open roof uncomfortable.

Elsewhere in the city, Bernier saw houses made from clay and straw, with roofs carried on strong cane supports and walls coated in white lime. He describes many smaller mud-and-thatch dwellings as homes for common troopers, servants and people following the imperial army. Better-appointed houses had courtyards and gardens; wealthy residences might also include basins, trees and shaded rooms. Bernier’s translated account of Delhi’s shops and dwellings appears in Travels in the Mogul Empire, pages 245–248.

Cooling rooms in hot weather

Bernier describes underground rooms with large fans as cool places to rest from noon until four or five in the afternoon, when the Delhi air grew suffocatingly hot. Some residents instead used kas-kanays, small garden pavilions made from straw or fragrant roots and set near a water reservoir. Servants carried water in skins and wetted the pavilions’ outer surfaces. As the damp plant material dried, evaporation carried heat away; the shaded, airy garden setting and repeated wetting helped maintain a cooler retreat through the hottest part of the day.

Water for Akbar’s household and travelling court

Akbar’s abdar khana was the household department responsible for drinking water. In the late-sixteenth-century Ain-i Akbari, the court historian Abu’l Fazl describes trusted agents filling sealed jars at the Ganges and dispatching them to the emperor. When the court was at Agra or Fatehpur Sikri, the jars came from Sorun; when it moved to Punjab, they came from Haridwar. The sealed jars let the royal drinking supply travel with the court between its residences and camps.

The same account distinguishes cooking water from the emperor’s drinking supply. Cooks used rainwater, or water from the Yamuna and Chenab mixed with a little Ganges water. On journeys and hunting parties, Akbar appointed experienced water-tasters. Such officials and sealed jars allowed the imperial household to carry a preferred supply as the court moved between capitals and camps. Abu’l Fazl records these arrangements in the section on the Ain-i Akbari‘s water department.

The Red Fort’s royal apartments

Shah Jahan’s Red Fort in Delhi offers a distinct example of palace infrastructure. Built for his new capital in the seventeenth century, its private pavilions were connected by the Nahr-i-Behisht, a water channel supplied from the Yamuna. Pools and bathing rooms belonged to an imperial residence with resources far beyond an ordinary household. The surviving fort’s apartments and channel are described in the site’s article on the Red Fort.