Humayun Tomb Mughal Garden Architecture Delhi

Humayun's Tomb in Nizamuddin East, Delhi, built between 1562 and 1572 CE by the Mughal Empress Bega Begum (wife of the second Mughal emperor Humayun) under the direction of the Persian architect Mirak Mirza Ghiyas, was the first garden-tomb (char bagh) on the Indian subcontinent and the direct prototype for the architectural program that culminated in the Taj Mahal eighty years later, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993. The tomb's innovation was the formal char bagh (four-garden) layout: a large walled square garden divided by four axial water channels into four equal quadrants, with the central tomb elevated on a platform at the intersection, allowing the tomb to be viewed from all four approaches with perfect symmetry. The tomb's double-domed structure — an outer shell of white marble rising to the bulbous finial and an inner dome visible from inside — was another innovation adopted by the Taj Mahal. The red sandstone and white marble banded surface, with the marble providing the dome covering and archway panels, was the formal vocabulary of the following century of Mughal architecture. The Aga Khan Trust for Culture undertook a major restoration of Humayun's Tomb complex and surrounding Nizamuddin basti between 2007 and 2013, one of the most successful heritage conservation projects in India that also included community development programs in the adjacent settlement.