During my 1978 trip to India, having reached Agra by following Babur’s route, I thought I had come to the end of my adventure. I was due to fly back to the United States the next night. Before heading for the Delhi train, I made a farewell visit to the Ram Bagh, the oldest Mughal garden in Agra, and sat on the steps leading down to the bath to reread my favorite passages in the Baburnama (fig. 1). The dusty, old hammam is my favorite spot in that garden (fig. 2); the spaces are intimate, the vaulting is low, and the place is crumbling, but it’s where Babur’s words come alive for me. A garden may have been constructed there during Babur’s time but it was taken over later by Jahangir’s empress Nur Jahan, who created the Bagh-i-Nur Afshan. This history is laid out by Ebba Koch in her important article on the paintings in the garden pavilions. This fine scholar has written widely on and contributed so much to the history of Mughal India. She is as fascinated by Shah Jahan and his architecture as I am by Babur and his gardens.To Babur, baths were indispensable:
We suffered from three things in Hindustan. One was the heat, the other the biting wind, and the third the dust. The bathhouse was a refuge from all three. Of course, a bathhouse has no dust or wind, and in the hot weather it is so cool that one almost feels chill. One chamber of the bath, the one [with] the warm-water reservoir …, was finished completely in stone. The dado was of white stone; otherwise the floor and ceiling were of red stone from Bayana. (Baburnama, f. 300)
After completing the well at the river’s edge, Babur began building a charbagh on the bank of the Jumna [Yamuna] River; it had a hot-water bath, as did the neglected ruin where I was sitting.
On the Road to Dholpur
As the Baburnama mentions, a hot-water bath was also one of the first things completed at the Lotus Garden in Dholpur. Babur provided more details about creating this garden than he did about any of his other gardens. He visited and referred to it frequently. Given the urgent matters demanding his attention, it is surprising how often he returned to the Dholpur ridge. It was a full day’s ride from Agra, and he usually stayed a few days, overseeing the carving of the pools, designing the aqueduct, or checking the water channels (fig. 3). On two occasions he measured the time it took to make the round trip from Agra: ten hours, twenty minutes each way. He seemed so drawn to that part of the ridge and so committed to the unusual garden he was creating. I became convinced he had constructed something very special there.As I reread the Dholpur passages in the Baburnama, I referred back to the section describing Kabul in 1522, when Babur took Khandahar for the second time; he ordered a rock-cut chamber to be excavated in the limestone cliff. That room, known as Chilzina or Forty Steps, still exists, its walls incised with Persian inscriptions. But then Babur shifted his attention to India, and that high, barely accessible space has remained isolated through the centuries. The construction of Chilzina may have been inspired by his time in Afghanistan. In 1506–7, during his dangerous winter trek back to Kabul from Herat, he spent Ramadan in Bamian (Baburnama, f, 195b). Throughout the Mahanuwara area, he would have seen rock-cut sculptures, edicts, and monuments and recognized the possibility for similar carving in the large sandstone outcropping at Dholpur.
[August 24, 1527] That night I slept somewhere along the way and stopped the next morning at Sikandar Lodi’s dam. Below the dam, where the mountain ended, there was a mass of red building stone. I had Master Shah-Muhammad the stonemason brought and ordered him to carve a chamber from this single block, if possible. If it was too low for a building, he was to level it down into a pool. (Baburnama, ff. 330–330b)
Intrigued by these instructions to Shah Muhammad, the stone cutter, I felt I must go to Dholpur. I had to see if any trace of the Lotus Garden remained. After following Babur’s tracks across Central Asia, I couldn’t let the journey end without finding the answer to such an intriguing question.
I changed my ticket home and was lucky that a friend was willing to accompany me. Harmit Singh, an excellent photographer, became a fearless Sikh warrior behind the wheel of his Peugeot. My first stop was at the Agra office of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) to inquire if any of the staff knew about Babur’s Lotus Garden. At the time, the director of the ASI’s Agra Circle was Dr. W. H. Siddiqi, who was most courteous despite his discouraging response to my inquiry: he’d never heard of the Lotus Garden, but he wished me well, and hustled me out of his office.
