Shalimar Gardens, Lahoreਸ਼ਾਲੀਮਾਰ ਬਾਗ, ਲਾਹੌਰ

What are the Shalimar Gardens of Lahore?

The Shalimar Gardens are Shah Jahan's great paradise garden at Baghbanpura in Lahore, built in 1641 and 1642 and still the most complete Mughal charbagh in Punjab. Across 16 hectares, three terraces step down a gentle slope, carrying marble pavilions, audience halls, baths and one of the most elaborate water systems of any Mughal garden: 414 fountains playing into wide marble pools, fed by cascades that pour over carved marble curtains. In 1981 UNESCO inscribed the gardens, together with Lahore Fort, as a World Heritage Site, as Mughal garden design at the height of its development.

A paradise engineered on flat land

Shah Jahan's father Jahangir had made the famous Shalimar of Kashmir, and the Lahore garden answers it on the flat Punjab plain, where no hillside stream could be borrowed. The engineer Ali Mardan Khan cut a canal of about 100 miles from the Kashmir foothills to bring river water to the site, and the project, managed by the courtier Khalilullah Khan, rose with astonishing speed: begun on 6 June 1641, it was finished in seventeen months. The land at Ishaq Pura belonged to the Arain Mian family of Baghbanpura, whose head, Mian Muhammad Yusuf, gave it to the emperor; in return the family kept the gardens' custodianship, which it held for more than 350 years.

Three terraces of water

The gardens form a rectangle 658 metres long and 258 wide, enclosed by a high brick wall with fretwork, and each terrace stands four to five metres above the one below. You enter at the lowest level, the terrace open to nobles and at times to the public. Above it lies the middle terrace, the Emperor's garden, with the densest waterworks of all: 152 fountains on this level alone, part of the garden's total of 414, divided between the terraces as 105 above, 152 in the middle and 153 below. The highest terrace, Farah Baksh, the Bestower of Pleasure, was reserved for the imperial harem. Five cascades link the levels, including the great marble cascade and the Sawan Bhadoon, water sliding over patterned marble chadars into broad pools called hauz, each with its pavilion: audience halls, sleeping chambers, a royal bath, the Naqar Khana, and baradaris set to catch the cool air off the water in Lahore's fierce summers, when the temperature can pass 49 degrees.

Emperors, the Mela, and the Maharaja

For centuries the gardens doubled as Lahore's festival ground: the great Mela Chiraghan, the festival of lamps, was celebrated here until it was banned in 1958. The Sikh era left harder marks. Much of the garden's marble was pillaged to decorate the Golden Temple and the Ram Bagh palace in Amritsar, and its costly agate gate was stripped and sold by Lehna Singh Majithia, though Maharaja Ranjit Singh ordered repairs in 1806 and loved the place enough to argue about its name, briefly renaming it Shahla Bagh. The Arain Mian family's long custodianship ended when the gardens were nationalised in 1962.

Even the name carries a Punjab story. The gardens were first called Farah Bakhsh, and the name Shalimar itself was argued over at Ranjit Singh's court: his courtiers explained it as a Turkic phrase for a place of pleasure, but the Maharaja, unconvinced, read it in Punjabi as a curse of God and ordered the gardens renamed Shahla Bagh, the garden of the black-eyed sweetheart, in all public correspondence. The courtiers praised the wit of the new name, as courtiers do, but history quietly kept the old one, and Shalimar is what the world calls the gardens today.

Visiting the Shalimar Gardens

The gardens stand beside the Grand Trunk Road at Baghbanpura, about five kilometres east of the Delhi Gate of the Walled City, an easy pair with Lahore Fort on the same day. Go early or late, when the light is low on the marble and the fountains are running, and walk the full axis from the public terrace up to Farah Baksh to feel how the design climbs from the world to the emperor to paradise. Between the fort's marble courts and this garden's water terraces, Lahore keeps the twin masterpieces that explain why UNESCO lists them together.