Humayun's Tomb

Before the Taj Mahal there was Humayun's Tomb. Built in Delhi in the 1560s for the second Mughal emperor, it was the first great garden tomb on the Indian subcontinent and the first building there to use red sandstone on such a scale, and it set the pattern that the Mughals would refine for the next century. Seen from the western gate across its gardens, the tomb rises on a broad arcaded terrace, its white marble dome lifted high on a drum above walls of red stone picked out in white and black marble.

Humayun died on 27 January 1556. His widow, Bega Begum, paid for his memorial and chose its architect, Mirak Mirza Ghiyas, brought from Herat; he died before it was finished, and his son Sayyid Muhammad completed it. Construction ran from 1565 to 1572. The design is Persian in its bones: the tomb stands 47 metres high on a terrace eight metres high and 91 metres wide, and its dome was the first in India built double, with an outer shell for the silhouette and an inner one for the chamber below. Inside, eight two-storey chambers surround the central octagon in a ninefold plan, and the whole building holds 124 vaulted rooms. The cenotaph in the central hall marks the emperor's grave, which lies directly beneath it in an underground chamber.

The tomb became a dynastic mausoleum. Bega Begum lies here, as do Dara Shikoh, son of Shah Jahan, and later emperors including Jahandar Shah, Farrukhsiyar and Alamgir II. In 1857 the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, took refuge here and was captured by the British. The garden around it is a charbagh, a paradise garden divided by walkways and water channels into squares; it decayed for centuries, was let out for vegetables, and housed refugee camps after Partition in 1947. A restoration by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the Archaeological Survey of India brought the fountains back to life in 2003, after centuries without water.

The complex rewards a slow walk. Near the entrance stands the octagonal tomb of Isa Khan Niazi, an Afghan noble who fought the Mughals, built in 1547, twenty years before the emperor's. Other structures include the Barber's Tomb of about 1590 inside the garden, the Arab Serai built for the workmen, and, just outside, the blue-tiled Nila Gumbad. The tomb also stands close to the shrine of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya, the reason the site was chosen. UNESCO listed the complex in 1993.

Getting there

The tomb is in Nizamuddin East in south-central Delhi. Hazrat Nizamuddin railway station is close by, and JLN Stadium station on the Delhi Metro Violet Line is about 2 km away, a short auto-rickshaw ride. Indira Gandhi International Airport (DEL) is about 16 km away.