Chauburj and the Bagh-i Zar Afshan, Agra

The Chauburj ("four towers") is a square building with octagonal corner towers on the east (left) bank of the Yamuna at Agra, near the tomb of I'timad al-Dawla. ^{1 2} R. Nath identifies it with the "Chaukandi" that Gulbadan Begum says Babur built on the river bank — a square building with towers at its corners — and the garden round it with the Bagh-i Zar Afshan (Gold-Scattering Garden) that Babur founded and loved most, where he once said he would retire and hand the kingdom to Humayun. ^{1 4 5}

To its east are its water-works: a big well and three interconnected overhead tanks, from which buried clay pipes ran to the building; four lily-ponds survive before its four facades, though the stone channels and paths have gone; it was planned as a four-quartered garden. ² The towers are now two-storeyed, but there seems to have been a third storey and an octagonal chhatri. ² Inside is a square hall with square corner chambers and oblong side rooms; the fabric is brick and mortar cased in stone outside, the ceilings carried on a network of massive stone beams, with the emphasis on strength rather than effect, closer to the so-called Pathan style than to the taste of Akbar's age. ² Slightly to the west is the "Baburi Masjid", so often repaired that little of its original fabric remains. ^{1 2}

Gulbadan Begum records that Babur was buried at Agra in a tomb for which Humayun appointed sixty reciters, endowed with the whole of Sikri and five lakhs from Bayana, and that Kamran visited "the tomb of Firdaws-Makani" at Agra in 1539. ^{6 7} Nath presents Mrs Beveridge's view that the body was taken to Kabul before 1544, then questions it: no will for the transfer is recorded in Babur's memoirs or by Jauhar or Gulbadan, no source states the transfer, and a tomb at Kabul is first mentioned under Akbar. ^{8 4 5 1} From the broken edges of a raised dais on the terrace he infers that the building was a domed tomb, and suggests that the Chauburj is Babur's tomb at Agra and that his body may never have been moved, while admitting that the matter needs further research from the Afghan side. ³ This is his argument against the received account that Babur lies in his garden at Kabul. ^{8 4}