The second Mughal emperor died falling down a flight of stairs. Humayun had spent the afternoon of 24 January 1556 on the roof of his library at Purana Qila — a small octagonal pavilion called the Sher Mandal — observing Venus. The muezzin's call came as he was descending. Humayun knelt, touched his forehead in prayer, stood up too fast, caught his cloak under his foot, and fell. He died three days later. His son Akbar was thirteen.
Nine years later, his widow began work on what would become the first true Mughal monument in India.
Bega Begum's commission
The standard story is that Humayun's tomb was commissioned by Hamida Banu Begum, his senior wife and the mother of Akbar. Recent scholarship credits a different widow — Bega Begum, his first wife, also called Haji Begum after her pilgrimage to Mecca. She is the one named in the foundation inscriptions and the contemporary chronicles as the patron. Hamida Banu would have approved the project, but the day-to-day commissioning, the architect's hiring, the financing, was Bega Begum's work.
She chose a site by the Yamuna, near the dargah of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya — a deliberate placement, inviting saintly blessing on the dead emperor. Construction began in 1565. The architect, hired from Persia, was Mirak Mirza Ghiyas. The tomb opened in 1572.
What was new
Three things about the building had never been done before in India at this scale:
The charbagh. Mirak laid out the surrounding 30-acre garden in the classical Persian chahar-bagh form: a square divided into four equal quadrants by water channels, each quadrant further divided into four, the whole grid centred on the tomb. The number four carried Islamic Quranic resonance — four rivers of paradise — and the geometry made the building feel like the still centre of a cosmological diagram. Indian rulers had built tomb-gardens before, but never at this scale and never with this disciplined Persian grammar.
The double dome. The roof of the tomb has two shells. The outer dome — the soaring 42-metre marble swell visible for miles — is decorative. The inner dome, much lower, forms the ceiling of the cenotaph chamber inside. The gap between them keeps the inside cool and lets the outside look heroic. The technique came from Timurid Central Asia, but Humayun's tomb is the first major Indian building to use it.
The cenotaph plan. The tomb sits on a high arcaded plinth raised above the garden. Inside, the floor plan is a precise chahar-suq — a Persian "four-quartered" cross, with the main cenotaph chamber at the centre and eight smaller chambers radiating off it. Around it, the building presents identical faces on all four sides, each with a soaring central iwan (recessed arched gateway) and red sandstone walls inlaid with white and black marble.
How it became the Taj
Sixty years later, Shah Jahan — Humayun's great-great-grandson — commissioned a tomb for his wife Mumtaz Mahal at Agra. He sent his architects to study Humayun's Tomb first.
The Taj Mahal is, in nearly every important way, a refinement of the same building:
— Same chahar-bagh garden layout (with the tomb moved to the north end instead of the centre — the only major formal innovation).
— Same charsuq cross plan.
— Same double dome, with an even higher outer shell.
— Same four corner chhatris.
— Same play of red sandstone and white marble — though the Taj reverses the dominant colour.
— Same Quranic inscriptions in inlay-work along the iwans.
What changed was scale and material. The Taj is bigger, whiter, and uses inlay work (pietra dura with semiprecious stones) at a level Humayun's tomb only gestured at. But the diagram on Shah Jahan's architect's table was, fundamentally, the building Bega Begum had already paid for in Delhi.
Who else is buried there
The most underrated feature of the tomb is the company Humayun kept in death. The plinth chambers around the main cenotaph hold over 150 graves — Mughal princes, princesses, courtiers, and finally Bega Begum herself. The site became the dynastic necropolis of the empire. The last Mughal emperor to be exiled, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was caught hiding in this tomb complex by Captain Hodson in September 1857. He was arrested in the south-east corner of the garden, where the British troops found him with his sons.
The dynasty had begun, in its first major monument, with a widow burying her husband. It ended, three centuries later, with an old man hiding among the dead.
If you go: entry ₹35 Indians, ₹550 foreigners. The complex includes Isa Khan's earlier octagonal tomb-garden — twenty years older than the main tomb and worth thirty minutes on its own. Sher Mandal at Purana Qila, where Humayun fell, is 5 km north; we include both in our walk.