Mughal Gardens and Water Design

From the Mughal Empire’s foundation in 1526 to its end in 1857, rulers used gardens as places to live, hold court, visit tombs and enjoy planted landscapes. Under emperors Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan, designs combined planted beds and paths with channels, terraces and water features. A charbagh means a garden divided into four principal parts; designers adapted the arrangement to different sites and purposes.

Dividing and shaping garden ground

Humayun’s tomb in Delhi, India, built in the 1560s under Emperor Akbar’s patronage, stands within a charbagh. Pools joined by channels divide its garden into four quadrants, while gateways open from the south and west and pavilions occupy the eastern and northern walls. The mausoleum rises above the planted ground on a broad, terraced platform. UNESCO interprets this specific garden’s four divisions as representing the rivers of paradise described in the Quran, Islam’s sacred scripture, linking the tomb’s burial setting to a religious landscape. Its four-part garden later received substantial conservation: from 1997 to 2003, restoration returned flowing water to its channels and repaired underground pipes, aqueducts and fountains.

Terraces let designers carry water and visitors along sloping sites. Emperor Jahangir’s Shalimar Garden in Kashmir, the Himalayan valley, was laid out in 1619 on a slope east of Lake Dal near Srinagar. It rose through three ascending terraces connected by a central canal and water chutes. The lower terrace, entered from the main gate, held a public audience hall; the middle terrace was a private garden for the emperor; and the upper terrace was a zenana, or women’s residential garden, with a basin fed by a fountain. The sequence made access and court rank part of the garden’s layout.

Emperor Shah Jahan’s Shalimar Gardens in Lahore, in present-day Pakistan, used three terraces in the opposite direction: they descended from south to north. The upper terrace was a zenana, or women’s garden, while the lower terrace was public; both were square and divided by watercourses. The narrower middle terrace held elongated beds, a large tank, marble pavilions and a raised stone platform; more than a hundred fountain jets played in its pool. A canal from the Ravi River supplied the garden and surrounding fields. On larger canals, water officials regulated diversions and arranged annual maintenance. This 1641–1642 garden plan shows how terraces and watercourses served different audiences and planting layouts.

Moving water through the site

Water shaped how people moved through a garden as well as how its plants grew. In some Mughal gardens, builders carved patterns into water chutes; ridged floors caught the light and made falling water sparkle and sound. Fountains, cascades and pools turned water’s route into a visible feature.

In Delhi, the Red Fort drew water from the Yamuna through the Shah Burj tower into the Nahr-i Bihisht, or “River of Paradise,” a channel that ran through the riverfront palace pavilions. Channels and a reservoir also served the Hayat Bakhsh Bagh, a garden with pavilions arranged around water. Its garden channels are now dry. British clearance after 1857 removed buildings and gardens, and later restoration changed the surviving landscape.

Plants, fruit and the work behind them

Mughal plantings included flowering shrubs and trees that gave shade as well as fruit. In the late sixteenth century, Abu’l Fazl’s account of Emperor Akbar’s court says horticulturists from Iran and Central Asia had settled in the emperor’s territories and that tree cultivation flourished. Seasonal fruit supplies arrived from Kabul, Kashmir and Samarqand, alongside fruits grown in Hindustan: Kashmiri grapes appeared in one season and Kabul grapes and other fruit later in the year. At court, attendants presented fruit, marked melons by quality with one or more lines around the top, and distributed much of it after Akbar had tasted some.

A copy of Babur’s memoir, the Bāburnāma, illustrated around 1595, decades after the Mughal founder’s death, depicts him directing masons who lined a garden pool with cut stone. Nearby workers mixed lime mortar for the masonry. In another version of the same scene, a water-skin carrier brought water for the mortar while workers straightened a small stream channel. The scene shows how water supply, mortar preparation and stonework combined in constructing a pool and shaping its flow.