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MUGHAL ARCHITECTURE
Babur (1526-30 A.D.), the founder of the
Mughal dynasty in India, also made a modest beginning of the
architectural style which was later developed, on a massive scale,
by his grandson Akbar (1556-1605) and Akbar's grandson Shah Jehan
(1628-58). This dynasty is popularly called "MUGHAL', though Babur
descended as a Miranshahi-Timurid and, racially, he was a Chaghtai-Turk.
Their architectural style, and other art styles, also bear the
dynastic appellation : MUGHAL.
With its own constructional and ornamental techniques, norms and
concepts, grown from a sound historico-cultural and geo-physical
background, and a transparent evolutionary process, Mughal
Architecture was a fully developed style and a perfect discipline,
as none was prior to it, in medieval India. It had a time-span of
132 years, practically from 1526 to 1658, and Agra-Fatehpur Sikri,
Lahore-Kashmir- Kabul, Delhi, Allahabad, Ajmer, Ahmedabad, Mandu
and Burhanpur are its major centres. Nearly 400 monuments of this
style have survived, including city-walls and gates, forts,
palaces, tombs, mosques, hammams, gardens, minarets, tanks,
step-wells, sarais, bridges, kos-minars and, of course, the Taj
Mahal which marks that zenith of an art from where it could only
decline.
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