Tomb of Nur Jahan

Listen first. Trains pass close by here, their horns carrying across the open ground. Underfoot, the path is warm and dusty, and the brick and sandstone around you take on a soft red glow in the afternoon light. Pigeons settle on the ledges. Ahead of you stands a low, square building on a raised platform. It is quiet, a little worn, and far plainer than its famous neighbours. That plainness is part of the story.

You are in Shahdara, on the far bank of the Ravi River from old Lahore. This is the resting place of Nur Jahan, the empress of the Mughal emperor Jahangir. The Mughals were the dynasty that ruled much of South Asia from the sixteenth century onward. Her name means Light of the World. For a time in the early seventeenth century, she was one of the most powerful people in the empire... and almost certainly its most powerful woman.

She was born with the name Mehr-un-Nissa, into a family of Persian origin that had come to serve the Mughal court. She married Jahangir later in life, after the death of her first husband. The emperor first gave her the title Nur Mahal, Light of the Palace. Later he raised it to Nur Jahan. The change was not just poetic. It marked her growing place at the very centre of power.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. Coins were struck carrying Nur Jahan's name alongside the emperor's. In the Mughal world, coinage was a public statement of sovereignty. Very few women anywhere in that era had their names on currency. Historians also note that she issued orders and decrees in her own name. When Jahangir's health declined, much of the daily business of the court passed through her hands.

She was more than a political figure. Jahangir himself wrote in his memoirs about her skill as a hunter, describing how she shot tigers from the back of an elephant. She was known for her taste in textiles, perfume and design. Her family also shaped Mughal architecture. She commissioned the tomb of her father in Agra, a delicate white marble building that many see as a step on the road towards the Taj Mahal.

That connection runs deep. Nur Jahan's brother, Asif Khan, was the father of Mumtaz Mahal. She was the empress for whom the Taj Mahal was built. So the woman buried here was the aunt of the most famous queen in Mughal history. After Jahangir died in 1627, power passed to his son Shah Jahan, Mumtaz Mahal's husband, and Nur Jahan's long political career came to an end.

She spent her final years in Lahore, away from the court. She died in 1645, and was buried here, close to her husband. Jahangir's own tomb lies a short distance away, and so does her brother Asif Khan's. Together they form a family landscape of the dead across the river from the city. It is widely believed that Nur Jahan planned this tomb herself during her retirement.

Now look at the building itself. It sits on a broad platform and rises only a single storey. The walls are built of red sandstone, with a series of arched openings running along each side. There is no great dome. Originally, the surfaces were richly decorated. Marble and inlaid stone once covered much of the structure, with floral designs set into the stone in the Mughal manner, called pietra dura, where cut coloured stones are fitted together like a mosaic.

Most of that decoration is gone. Over the following centuries the tomb was stripped of its marble and precious stone. Much of the damage is usually linked to the period of Sikh rule in Lahore in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when materials from several Mughal monuments were carried away for other buildings. What you see today is largely the structure underneath — the bones of the building rather than its skin.

Here is the second surprise. Those trains you hear are not a coincidence. In the British colonial period, a railway line was laid straight through this area. It cut Nur Jahan's tomb off from the complex of her husband and her brother. The emperor and empress, once part of one planned landscape, now sit on opposite sides of the tracks. Many visitors only notice this when they try to walk between the two sites.

The tomb once stood in a formal Mughal garden, laid out in four parts with water channels and walkways. This style is called a charbagh, and it was meant to suggest a garden of paradise. Traces of that plan remain in the open ground around you. Restoration work in the twentieth century and in recent decades has repaired parts of the platform and interior, but the garden is much simpler than it once was.

Inside, at the centre, lies a marble cenotaph. A cenotaph is a memorial marker; the actual grave is in a chamber below. Tradition holds that her daughter, Ladli Begum, is buried here with her. A Persian verse is often attributed to Nur Jahan, asking that no lamp and no rose be placed on her grave, so no moth burns its wings and no nightingale sings. Whether she wrote it or not, it fits this quiet place.

Before you leave, stand back from the platform and take in the whole building again. Notice the rhythm of the arches, the weathered red stone, the patches where decoration once sat. Listen for the next train. Then think of the woman who once signed imperial orders and hunted tigers, now resting under this modest roof. As you walk away, look back once more. The tomb is small. The life it holds was not.