Bagh-i Nilufar (Lotus Garden), Dholpur

The Bagh-i Nilufar or Lotus Garden is a garden laid out by Babur at the end of a beaked hill by Sikandar Lodi's dam, two miles west of the town of Dholpur, now called the Shahi Bagh in the village of Jhor on the Dholpur-Bari road. ^{1 2} Babur built tanks, step-wells and gardens across the forty miles from Agra to Dholpur on the Chambal, wishing to change the face of this hot, dry country at the edge of the desert. ^{4 1}

Babur relates that he visited Dholpur on 24 Dhu al-Qa'da 933 (24 August 1527) and ordered Ustad Shah Muhammad the stone-cutter to cut a house out of the rock in one piece if it was high enough, or else to level it and cut a tank in one piece; as it was not high enough, he was told to cut an octagonal roofed tank. ¹ He also ordered a seat and four-pillared platform cut in the rock, a mosque on the western side, and a water-chamber cut in the solid rock with a small tank inside. ^{1 5} By 23 December 1528 the stone well, the twenty-six rock spouts, the rock pillars and the water-courses cut in the slope were ready; Babur afterwards called it the Lotus Garden and ordered a bath there. ^{5 2}

Nath reports that Sikandar Lodi's dam, probably built between 1500 and 1505 to store rain water, still stands and works, and that Babur had a shallow channel cut in the rock from its eastern edge to bring its water to his garden. ⁶ There remain a covered room with a small rock-cut octagonal pond, a large tank outside it, a channel to a set of apartments on a lower terrace, and a cascade to a third terrace with a large lobed octagonal pond cut in the rock in the shape of a lotus. ⁶ Lotuses still grow in abundance in the dam, justifying the name. ³ For Nath, this was the one place where Babur found a hillside for his ideal of a terraced garden, and the first rock-cut architecture of Muslim India; the seat, the mosque, the water-chamber and the rock spouts have not survived. ³