There's a story you hear in Agra, India — right in the shadow of the Taj Mahal. When Emperor Shah Jahan's masterpiece was finished in 1653, he supposedly ordered the hands of all twenty thousand workers chopped off. So no one could ever build anything this beautiful again. Some versions say he took their eyes too. It's one of the most famous legends in the world. It's also completely made up.
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Builders & Wonders·2/3·1′
The place
Taj Mahal
The Hands That Built Eternity
The dark legend of the mutilated workers, the universal myth of the punished creator, and the truth about the master builders of the Taj Mahal
1632–1653 (construction of the Taj Mahal); myth origins uncertain, popularized 19th–20th centuryTaj Mahal
Moral of the Story
“The real story of the Taj Mahal is not that beauty requires suffering but that beauty requires freedom — and the greatest monument to love on earth was built not by slaves or prisoners but by free hands, well paid, proudly signed, and passed from father to son.”
Characters
S
Shah Jahan (Emperor)U
Ustad Ahmad Lahori (chief architect, 'Wonder of the Age')A
Amanat Khan Shirazi (master calligrapher, born Abd ul-Haq)L
Lutfullah Muhandis (Ahmad Lahori's son, poet and mathematician)A
Ataullah Rashidi (Ahmad Lahori's son, architect of Bibi Ka Maqbara)E
Ebba Koch (art historian, University of Vienna)Source
Abdul Hamid Lahori, Padshahnama (c. 1648); Lutfullah Muhandis, Diwan-i-Muhandis (manuscript, Mahmud Banglori collection, Bangalore); Ebba Koch, The Complete Taj Mahal and the Riverfront Gardens of Agra (2006); Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (1955-58), motifs W181.2 and S165.7; S. Irfan Habib, Jawaharlal Nehru University; Rana Safvi, 'The Architect of the Taj Mahal' (2019)