The lowest terrace was the public one

Mughal gardens were built as a gradient — public at the water, private at the summit. Indian cities now hold them as monuments. There is a better use for them.

Paradise is a wall

The word is not a metaphor. Paradise originally means a walled, enclosed estate. Its root, daeza, comes from a verb meaning to construct from the earth. The wall in a Persian garden is not defensive: it divides and separates, and in doing so it produces space.

That is where the Mughal garden begins — not with planting, but with an enclosure that declares what belongs to the dominant power and what does not.

What Babur found

Babur took Hindustan in 1526 and spent a good part of his memoir being disappointed by it. He admired the rivers, the fine rain, the three seasons, the workmen of every kind. Then:

Hindustan is a country of few charms. … There are no running waters in their gardens or residences. These residences have no charm, air, regularity and symmetry. — Babur-nama

He had grown up in Ferghana among Timurid gardens with names like The Perfect Garden and The Heart-Delighting, in a tradition where flowers carried an entire literature of meaning. What he missed in India's gardens was not lushness. It was the precise planting of meaning inside a formal structure — a vocabulary he could read.

So he imported one. The char-bagh — four squares formed by water channels intersecting at right angles and culminating in a central tank — arrives with him and never leaves. Beneath it sit three Persian inheritances: an arid geography that made an enclosed green a form of mercy; a Zoroastrian preoccupation with the power of four; and a society in which a ruler who made a fertile garden out of barren ground demonstrated authority, fertility and legitimacy in a single move.

The Qur'an contains 166 references to gardens. All but nineteen use jannah, which means garden and paradise at once.

Three emperors, three appetites

The standard telling flattens two centuries into one golden age. The reigns are more usefully separated by what each ruler actually wanted: Akbar the Builder. Jahangir the Gardener. Shah Jahan the Town Planner.

Humayun, between Babur and Akbar, preferred productive orchards and built few gardens of his own. Aurangzeb, at the end, did not consider garden design central to ruling at all.

Kashmir breaks the enclosure

The gardens of Delhi and Agra are flat, single-plane and inward-looking. Kashmir changes that. Akbar, mesmerised by the place, still builds behind walls — but on stepped terraces, and the terraces do something the earlier gardens refuse to do. They encourage the view outward.

Nasim Bagh, Akbar's first in Kashmir, is revived by his son Jahangir and planted by his grandson Shah Jahan with twelve thousand chinar, set at the corners of a square grid so that a person is always in shade. Three generations, one garden. Char-Chenar Island is four chinar and a pavilion on an island in Dal Lake — the smallest possible statement of symmetric order imposed on a natural landscape.

Shalimar Bagh is the argument

On the eastern bank of Dal Lake, Shalimar Bagh is approached by boat. The wide lake narrows into a canal flanked by chinar. The garden then rises in three terraces, and this is the part worth holding onto: each terrace becomes more private as it is approached.

The lowest terrace, met first from the water, is the Public Garden. Above it sits the Diwan-i-Shah, the emperor's terrace. Above that, the Zenana Garden. Jahangir built the garden as far as the emperor's terrace; Shah Jahan added the most private terrace above it.

So the Mughal garden, at its most developed, is not a single enclosure with a wall around it. It is a sequence — a graded transition from public ground at the water's edge to the most private ground at the top, separated by level and approach rather than by a line on a plan.

Four elements develop. The fifth moves and moves back.

Set the elements of the garden against the reigns and four of them — divisions, planting, water, trees — develop continuously. Water is the clearest: narrow rills meeting at right angles under Babur, broader streams running to a central tank under Akbar, terraced falls and captured springs in Kashmir. Each reign inherits a working system and refines it.

Function does not develop. Private under Babur and Akbar. Public and private under Jahangir and Shah Jahan. Private again under Aurangzeb.

Who was actually let in

Not many people. These gardens were rarely publicly accessible and were entered by invitation — noblemen, their wives, and the emperor. The Public Garden at Shalimar is public relative to the Zenana Garden above it, not public in the way a park is public.

That is the honest reading, and it is still the interesting one. The device is a gradient of access held inside a single design, on private ground, worked out four hundred years ago and then abandoned.

What the gardens are now

Monuments. Conserved, ticketed, walked through, photographed, left. Thirty-three sites are catalogued in this study across six reigns, and the ones that survive inside Indian cities are among the largest pieces of held open ground those cities have.

Restoration keeps being framed as a conservation question. It is not only that.

Heritage is not a passive activity of conserving monuments but also enhancing the quality of urban spaces. The focus here is to re-vision the public spaces that were once an integral part of Delhi and to resurrect them. — A. G. K. Menon, Convenor, Delhi Chapter, INTACH

Passively conserving these gardens does not benefit the people who live around them, and tourism alone is not a development model. What is needed is a new relationship between the private and the public — one that uses the gradient these gardens already contain, rather than freezing them at the moment access stopped.

The study that has not been done

Before any of that: how do people use these gardens today? Who arrives, when, how long they stay, what they do at the edges rather than along the axis. That has not been recorded at the level the question deserves.

Once intended as exclusive gardens for the elite, there is now an opportunity to bring them back to the everyday user. That is work we would like to do.

Drawn from "Mughal Era Garden Design in the Indian Mainland," Shruthi Padmanabhan, Architectural Association, 3 May 2021.