Shalimar Bagh, Srinagar

The Shalimar Bagh is the most famous of Jahangir's gardens, across Lake Dal from Srinagar in Kashmir; its plan is dated 1619. ¹ John Brookes writes that Jahangir built it with his son Shah Jahan as a young man, the father bringing his flair for siting, the son his taste for building. ²

The emperors approached it by water, and its terraces rise from the lowest level to the highest, so that, for Brookes, the experience is like entering a mosque: one of progression. Water links the levels in unbroken sheets or rushes down broken-surfaced stone ramps called chadar, with stone and marble benches set across the stream. The garden also rises by function, from the Hall of Public Audience (Diwan-i Am) with its black marble throne to the Hall of Private Audience and the zenana, which only the emperor could enter, each building with its own garden. ¹

The garden culminates in Shah Jahan's black marble zenana pavilion, ringed with fine jets; its present wooden roof is later Kashmiri work over the original black marble columns, and the niches behind the cascade held flowers by day and candles by night. ^{3 2} A Persian inscription there reads, in Brookes's rendering: "If there be a Paradise on the face of the earth, it is here, it is here, it is here." ²