I travelled to Agra for the second time, after eleven years. The return felt less like a trip and more like a quiet reckoning, not only with the city, but with its long, layered history. After all, so much has been said and written about this former Mughal capital that one cannot help but feel awed, I would say even burdened, by its grandeur.

The city seems to live in our collective imagination as if frozen in the calendar-picture image of the Taj Mahal. And yet, when you walk its streets, you are reminded that Agra is still a living, breathing city, far more than flattened images on paper.

So I did what I would naturally do as a historian to satisfy this impulse to “revisit”: I picked up a book. One that approached Agra (and other Mughal cities) through poetry—Sunil Sharma’s Mughal Arcadia: Persian Literature in an Indian Court—fitting, since my trip itself felt like a poem. It brought me back to an innocent time when I was barely out of college, when the romance of my twenties mingled easily with the romance of history. I wore my heart on my sleeve and let it be monumentally—pun intended—broken.

And now, in my more “practical thirties”, I found myself facing Agra again, wondering: how do you see the Taj Mahal, so long held up as the epitome of yearning, when your own sense of romance has shifted?

In the Mughal poetic imagination

Before Shahjahanabad (Delhi) became the Mughal capital in 1648, Agra remained the imperial seat for over a century. In the words of Muhammad Arif, one of Akbar’s historians, Agra of the 1560s had a strikingly cosmopolitan character:

The multitude of foreigners from all sorts of nations, from the corners of the four sides of the world, have gathered, for trade and fulfillment of necessities, in such a country that the capital city of Agra has become all of India.

Abul Fazl, Akbar’s court chronicler, echoed the same view of the capital, ‘[i]t is filled with people from all countries and is the emporium of the traffic of the world’. Agra, then, was not just a Mughal city but a crossroads of many worlds. As Sharma notes, ‘[t]he local had quickly become a microcosm of the world’.

Further, Abu Talib Kalim Hamadani, one of the senior poets at Shah Jahan’s court, praised the city in glowing terms:

Nobody has seen such a city in the world

In which the seven climes repose.

People from every country reside in it,

They have never seen any harm here.

Additionally, the Mughals were famously fond of their gardens (read also Mughal Gardens, British Gardening and Netflix’s Gardener: On the ever growing thicket of history). As Catherine Asher notes, they had funerary, dynastic, and even religious significance. They were visual metaphors for sovereignty itself, signifying control over land and its people, not to mention water resources. It was under Shah Jahan, the Chahar Bagh or quadrilateral garden layout reached its canonical form, having perfect symmetry as paradise. Ebba Koch traces this evolution through imperial sites, from the Anguri Bagh in Agra Fort to Shahjahanabad, where even the palace itself was envisioned as a garden.

To contemporaries, Shah Jahan’s Agra appeared less a city than a vast garden. Muhammad Salih Kambo, one of the emperor’s historians, wrote that in Agra ‘the desire to stroll in the garden of Paradise is completely erased from the page of memory’.

Shah Jahan even renamed the city Akbarabad, in memory of his grandfather. Echoing this enthusiasm, his poet laureate, Haji Muhammad Jan Qudsi Mashhadi, extolled its charms:

My heart doesn’t rejoice in any other place—there is no better paradise than Akbarabad.

In this garden of pleasure and abode of joy, there is a bonanza of ghilman [youthful lads] and houris [enchanting women].

Don’t ask about the dusky beauties—look at their cute lips and don’t ask about their hearts!

Qudsi’s effusion was hardly unique. He employed the formulaic language of desire to populate Agra with idealised beloveds, both male and female.

Kalim, too, conjured the living pulse of the city: the attar (druggist), bazzaz (cloth-seller), saraf (money-changer), jauharfurush (jeweler), khayyat (tailor), zargar (goldsmith), shaikhzada (the shaikh’s son), and sipahzada (the soldier boy). Rooted in its Indian landscape, his verses also introduced distinctly local figures, the mahajan (merchant), tanboli (pan-seller), and dobi (washerman), alongside Shaikhs, Rajputs, and Pathans.

Kalim’s poetic eye moved effortlessly from the bustling bazaar to the Yamuna’s edge, exclaiming: “A city on two sides and the river in between; on the seashore [but] a sea without shore”. From there, he wandered into gardens alive with specifically Indian blossoms, champa, maulsri, and keora, fusing Mughal imagination with local flora.

The Taj Mahal, of course, found expression in this genre of topographical poetry. Qudsi hailed the monument as a sacred site:

Hail to the pure tomb of the Bilqis of our age,

for it has become the heavenly lady’s cradle.

A luminous spot like the garden of paradise,

perfumed like the ambergris-scented heaven.

In the Mughal poetic imagination then, Agra was not merely a city of empire. It was the very image of paradise on earth, where politics, poetry, commerce, and devotion intertwined beneath the scent of keora and the shimmer of marble.

In the European comparative imagination

European visitors were routinely awed by the city of Agra, often remarking that as the emporium of the world it rivalled, even surpassed, London or Isfahan.

In a letter to a friend, the French traveller François Bernier (also read From Early Modern Voyage to Modern Wanderlust: Lessons from the French Doctor François Bernier’s Travels to Mughal South Asia) described the city through a distinctly European frame of reference:

Agra has more the appearance of a country town, especially when viewed from an eminence. The prospect it presents is rural, varied, and agreeable; for the grandees have always made it a point to plant trees in their gardens and courts for the sake of shade, the mansions of Omrahs [high-ranking officials], Rajas [local rulers], and others are all interspersed with luxuriant and green foliage, in the midst of which the lofty appearances of old castles buried in forests. Such a landscape yields peculiar pleasure in a hot and parched country, where the eye seeks in verdure for refreshment and repose.

While Mughal poets imagined Agra as a reflection of paradise, Bernier saw it through the pastoral lens of Europe, a “rural prospect” rather than a celestial one. For him, the gardens evoked not transcendence but temperate beauty, soothing to the European eye in an unfamiliar climate.

Agra, in the European imagination, thus became both spectacle and study; a city to be measured, mapped, and marveled at, but never entirely understood.

The romance of yesteryears

Walking through Agra today, it is hard to imagine the layered cosmopolitanism beneath the tourist gaze fixed on the Taj. And yet, the pulse of the city—the crowded bazaars, the mingling of languages, the confluence of past and present—still gestures toward that older vision of Agra as a living emporium.

Nostalgia is its own kind of architecture. What I remembered of Agra was not just the monument, but the person I once was, who stood here before. Perhaps revisiting Agra was less about retracing a city and more about encountering a memory, suspended somewhere between marble and time.