Tomb of Anarkali

Listen first. Beyond the gates, Lahore keeps up its steady noise of rickshaw engines, horns and voices. Inside these government grounds, the sound drops away. Footsteps echo on worn paving. A crow calls from a tree. In front of you rises a pale, eight-sided building under a broad dome, with small domed towers at its corners. It looks calm and a little secretive. That suits it. This is the Tomb of Anarkali, one of the most argued-over buildings in the city.

The name means pomegranate blossom. Almost everyone in Lahore knows the story attached to it, and almost no historian accepts it as fact. So let us take the legend and the record one at a time. The legend first, because it is the reason most people come. Then the stone, the inscriptions and the long, strange afterlife of this building, which is in some ways more surprising than the tale.

Legend has it that Anarkali was a dancer at the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar. The Mughals were a dynasty of Central Asian origin who ruled much of South Asia for centuries. According to the tale, Akbar's son, Prince Salim, fell in love with her. The emperor would not accept a dancer as the beloved of his heir. In the most famous version, Akbar ordered Anarkali sealed alive inside a wall. Salim, heartbroken, later became the emperor Jahangir and built this tomb for her.

It is a powerful story, and it has travelled far. In 1922 the Lahore writer Imtiaz Ali Taj published a stage play called Anarkali, which fixed the romance in the modern imagination. In 1960 the Indian film Mughal-e-Azam turned it into one of the best-known love stories in South Asian cinema. But writers and filmmakers shaped those versions. Contemporary Mughal chronicles do not clearly describe Anarkali or her death, so the tale remains folklore.

So what does the building itself tell us? Inside lies a cenotaph, a memorial coffin of white marble. Its carving is fine and deep. The sides carry the ninety-nine names of God in Arabic, the traditional names used in Islamic devotion. There is also a short Persian verse. In it the writer says that if he could see the face of his beloved once more, he would give thanks to God until the Day of Judgement. Whoever wrote it was clearly grieving.

Here is the first detail most visitors miss. The verse is signed with a name that reads, roughly, Majnun Salim Akbar. Majnun is the madly devoted lover of a classic Persian and Arabic romance, so the phrase means something like the love-maddened Salim, son of Akbar. Two dates appear as well. One falls around the end of the sixteenth century, and the other around 1615, with Lahore named as the place. For believers in the legend, this signature is the proof.

Historians read it more carefully. The inscriptions show that Salim mourned a woman he loved, and that he marked her grave with real tenderness. They do not name her as Anarkali. Some scholars suggest the tomb belonged to one of Jahangir's wives, a woman recorded as Sahib-i-Jamal. Others keep an open mind. The honest answer is that the person in this tomb is still uncertain. The love in the verse, however, is written in the stone.

Now step back and look at the architecture. The plan is an octagon, an eight-sided shape that Mughal builders liked for tombs. Each side has a tall, recessed arch. At the corners stand octagonal towers topped with small domed pavilions. Mughal architects called these chhatris, which means umbrellas. The main dome sits above a raised drum. Originally this structure would have stood inside a walled garden, with paths and water channels around it, as Mughal tombs usually did.

That garden has gone, and so has much of the original surface decoration. What you see is largely plastered and painted. The second surprise is how many lives the building has had since the Mughals. In the early nineteenth century, Lahore was the capital of the Sikh ruler Maharaja Ranjit Singh. During his reign, the tomb became a residence for one of his European officers, an Italian soldier named Jean-Baptiste Ventura, who had served in Napoleon's armies.

Then came British rule over Punjab in the mid-nineteenth century. The colonial administration first used the tomb as offices. After that, remarkably, they turned it into an Anglican church. For decades, Christian services took place under a dome built by a Mughal prince for the woman he mourned. The marble cenotaph was moved from its original place during these changes. Later the church moved elsewhere, and the tomb began yet another life.

From the late nineteenth century, the building became a home for official records. Today it houses the Punjab Archives. Shelves and cases inside hold documents from the Mughal, Sikh and British periods, along with later papers. This explains the quiet compound around you. The tomb stands within the grounds of the Punjab Civil Secretariat, the seat of the provincial government. A building raised for private grief now guards the paperwork of a whole province.

Outside these walls, the name continues. The nearby Anarkali Bazaar is one of the oldest market areas in Lahore. It is crowded with cloth sellers, shoe shops, food stalls and street traffic. Many shoppers there have never seen this tomb. They know the name only from the story, the songs and the films. Walking from the market to this building, you pass from the legend as people live it to the place where it began.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment. Look at the arches and notice how the light falls deeper into some than others as the day moves. Think of the hands that carved those ninety-nine names, and of the prince who signed himself as a madman in love. Whether she was a dancer or a queen, someone was deeply missed here. As you walk back toward the noise of the city, that small, quiet fact goes with you.