Have you ever wondered what was the actual cost of building the Taj Mahal which by built by Emperor Shah Jahan in the 17th century?
Have you ever wondered what was the actual cost of building the Taj Mahal? Came across this interesting piece of info on Page XXVI in the ‘Introduction’ section of the book ‘Babur: The Chessboard King’ written by Aabhas Maldahiyar which I had reviewed on the 12th of April, 2024.
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Babur: The Chessboard King written by Aabhas Maldahiyar - Book Review
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The Taj Mahal - Monument of Love or Power?
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Coming up: What is the actual cost of the Taj Mahal?
Namaste Friends. My name is 'Shinil Subramanian Payamal' and you are listening to the Historylogy podcast.
Have you ever wondered what was the actual cost of building the Taj Mahal? Came across this interesting piece of info on Page XXVI in the ‘Introduction’ section of the book ‘Babur: The Chessboard King’ written by Aabhas Maldahiyar which I had reviewed on the 12th of April, 2024.
It is recorded that when the Taj Mahal was built (AD 1631), it cost around 41.8 million silver rupees. To set things in perspective, the author has provided some mathematics for the readers. On average, the mean income of a farmer’s family was ‘one Dam (copper coin) per day.’ One silver rupee was equivalent to forty Dams, and a single rupee would get you around 280 kilograms of general-grade rice during Shah Jahan’s reign. Now, the question arises as to why this analysis was important and how it brought more shocks in the author’s NCERT-history-educated life.
This was the time when the great Deccan Famine (AD 1630-31) had occurred, and around 7.4 million had succumbed to the same. It may sound strange, but this famine was created by the Timurid Prince Shah Jahan himself. In AD 1631, the army under Shah Jahan marched to Malwa as one of his commanders stationed there had rebelled and joined hands with Adilshahis of Bijapur and Nizamshahis of Hyderabad. The army intended to teach the rebel commander a lesson. The records state that Timurids (distorted as Moghuls) extracted an annual revenue of not less than around ten million rupees from the Malwa province in the seventeenth century.
The fertile belt of Malwa was a hen with the golden egg for the Timurids. The rebellion had eclipsed this massive income and the attack on Malwa as well as Deccan had become inevitable. Two years before it, commander Khwaja Abu Hasan had invaded Malwa. These acts briefly led to the massive famine of 1630-32. The destruction of crops in Malwa and Deccan by Shah Jahan’s Regal armies has been well recorded by court chroniclers and foreign travellers. For example, Inayat Khan, in Shah Jahanama, talks about how Shah Jahan had ordered the imperial army to ‘ravage the country from end to end.’ The order of Shah Jahan was carried very comprehensively, and Inayat writes, ‘There is scarcely a vestige of cultivation left in this country.’ Like his ancestors, Shah Jahan didn’t leave his wives during the war campaigns. And it was during his campaign of Burhanpur that Mumtaz Mahal died from a post-partum haemorrhage while struggling to give birth to their fourteenth child. She suffered around thirty hours of labour. And it was here that he decided to dedicate the tomb to her corpse which is known to the world as the Taj Mahal.
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