Agra was a Mughal capital before it was a tourist stop
On the Yamuna about 230 kilometres southeast of Delhi, Agra’s golden age arrived with early sixteenth-century Mughals. Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir and others made it the subcontinent’s foremost city and imperial seat. Shah Jahan even nicknamed it Akbarabad for his grandfather.
The city really has two stories. An older settlement on the Yamuna's east bank, lost in legends of Krishna and the Mahabharata, was rebuilt in 1504–1505 by Sultan Sikandar Lodi of Delhi, who had a commission survey both banks from Delhi to Etawah before choosing the site and making it his seat of government. It grew into a leading centre of Islamic learning, full of officials, merchants, scholars and artists. Akbar then founded the modern city on the west bank in 1558.
Little survives of anything older. A seventeenth-century chronicler called Agra a mere village before Sikandar Lodi, and its fort had served a king of Mathura as a jail; raids by Mahmud of Ghazni had wrecked the place. The name is disputed: the favourite explanation is Hindi agar, a salt pan, after brackish soils once used to make salt, while a Sanskrit reading takes agra, front, as the first of the groves where Krishna played.
Under Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan, Agra was the Mughal capital and the foremost city of the subcontinent, a hub of learning, arts, trade and faith. Shah Jahan called it Akbarabad after his grandfather and built the Taj Mahal between 1632 and 1648 in memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal. A red sandstone pavilion Sikandar Lodi raised in 1495 later became the tomb of Akbar's empress Mariam-uz-Zamani. As Mughal power ebbed in the late eighteenth century, the Marathas and then the East India Company took the city.
Today about 1.6 million people live there, making it the fourth-largest city in Uttar Pradesh. Footwear, leather and other factories sit beside a huge tourist trade built on the Taj Mahal and Agra Fort, both UNESCO sites, and the city anchors the Golden Triangle circuit with Delhi and Jaipur.
Source: Agra
