In 1815 Lord Hastings Ordered the Marble of an Agra Fort Bath Shipped to Calcutta, an Auction Under Lord William Bentinck Sold More of the Palace's Inlaid Marble, and the Ancient Monuments Act of 1904 Followed

On 24 February 1815 the Governor-General went through Agra Fort early in the morning and, by his own account, ordered the marble lining of a palace bath taken up and sent to Calcutta. Lord Hastings wrote this in a private journal that his daughter published in 1858. It is the earliest first-hand record of marble leaving the fort under British rule that this article uses, and it differs in one detail from the version Lord Curzon told in 1900.

The journal entry of 24 February 1815

Hastings found the Moti Masjid, the white marble mosque beside the palace, damaged by an earthquake. He directed blocks of marble salvaged from the ruins of other buildings to be used to repair it.

The bath chambers, lined and paved with marble inlaid in the same fashion as at the Taj, he called ruinous. The dome of one could not be mended at a cost he thought the government could bear. He asked the collector and the magistrate travelling with him whether the people of Agra would accept the marble being sent to Calcutta. They told him that fewer than ten people in the city knew the baths existed.

Hastings then directed that the marble of that chamber, and a marble fountain basin he found among lumber in the artillery yard, be “raised and shipped for Calcutta”. He thought they could serve there as ornaments to the city.

Later writers give the bath a different destination. William Sleeman, who reached Agra on 1 January 1836 and published his account in 1844, wrote that Hastings “broke up” one of the palace’s marble baths to send to George IV, then Prince Regent. Curzon told the Asiatic Society of Bengal on 7 February 1900 that the bath had been torn up as a gift for George IV but “had somehow never been despatched”. Havell’s 1904 handbook says it was sent home as a present to the Prince Regent. The journal entry names Calcutta and does not mention him.

What the auction sold

Sleeman’s next sentence says the rest of the marble of that suite of rooms was afterwards sold by auction, “on account of our Government”, by order of Lord William Bentinck. Syad Muhammad Latif’s history of Agra, published in 1896, says a large quantity of inlaid marble from the Diwan-i-Am and the buildings beside it was sold by auction in Bentinck’s time. Havell describes mosaic and marble fretwork from the same part of the palace as put up to auction by Bentinck.

None of the three gives a date for the sale or a price.

Not every loss at Agra Fort was the Company’s doing. Latif and Havell both say Suraj Mal, the Jat ruler of Bharatpur, carried the marble tanks and water channels of the Machhi Bhawan courtyard to his palace at Dig. The Victoria and Albert Museum’s catalogue dates his capture of Agra to 1761.

A Calcutta newspaper item of July 1831

The only price in the contemporary record comes from a newspaper. Fanny Parkes, who published her Indian diaries in 1850, copied into them an item from the Calcutta John Bull of 26 July 1831: “The Governor-general has sold the beautiful piece of architecture, called the Mootee Musjid, at Agra, for 125,000 rupees”. The paper said the building was being pulled down. It added that the Taj “has also been offered for sale”, that the price asked had not been reached, and that “Two lacs, however, have been offered for it.”

Parkes thought it shameful if true and asked, “Has he any right to molest the dead?” Her own pages on a stay at Agra in 1835 describe a lightning strike on the Moti Masjid in the Fort, so the building was still standing when she wrote them.

Sleeman also reported that the tomb of Itimad-ud-daula, its inlay “picked out and stolen” in part, was “about to be sold by auction” under a civil court decree to pay its private owner’s debt. The sources opened here do not say whether that sale went ahead.

The Taj story and its doubters

Sleeman drew a conclusion. Had the marble fetched the price expected, he wrote, “the whole of the palace, and even the Taj itself, would have been pulled down”. He put it as a probability.

By 1900 the probability had become a statement. Curzon told the Asiatic Society that “in the days of Lord William Bentinck the Taj was on the point of being destroyed for the value of its marbles”. Havell wrote in 1904 that the Taj “only escaped the same fate because the proceeds of this sale were unsatisfactory.”

Historians have not found an order. E. L. Woodward wrote in The Age of Reform in 1938 that “there appears to be no reliable evidence for the story that Bentinck wanted to pull down the Taj Mahal”, a passage Percival Spear cited in his 1949 paper “Bentinck and the Taj” in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Spear traced how the tale’s meaning shifted over time, from a sign of Bentinck’s meanness to a sign of British vandalism, and set out to test it against the record.

Live History India’s 2018 account of the debate says Spear, Woodward and John Rosselli, Bentinck’s biographer, denied that any proposal to dismantle the Taj existed, citing the lack of official documents. It also reports that Kavita Singh, an art historian at Jawaharlal Nehru University, argued in public lectures in 2017, using archives in India and Britain, that the story cannot be dismissed as fiction. That summary is the only account of her evidence available here.

The marble sale is not in dispute: accounts from 1844, 1896, 1900 and 1904 agree on it. A plan to demolish the Taj is. The contemporary evidence opened here is the newspaper item, which names no buyer and cites no order.

Delhi: occupation and clearance

For Delhi, the sources opened for this article describe occupation, removal and demolition after 1857 more than sale. Curzon told the Asiatic Society that after the rising it was “solemnly proposed to raze to the ground the Jumma Musjid at Delhi” and that the mosque was spared at the instance of Sir John Lawrence.

Carr Stephen’s survey of 1876 says an inlaid panel of Orpheus playing the violin was taken to England in 1857 by an officer of the Delhi Field Force and could then be seen at the South Kensington museum. H. C. Fanshawe wrote in 1902 that the Akbarabadi mosque, with all the buildings on the south and west sides of the palace, was removed after 1857, and that the Zinat-ul-Masajid was used for military purposes for many years, during which its founder’s tomb was taken away.

The Archaeological Survey’s report for 1903 to 1904 says the buildings of Shah Jahanabad “met with very severe treatment after the mutiny”. It records that the Hayat Bakhsh garden had been turned into a barrack-yard and that the Mahtab Bagh had been swept away for barracks. The Red Fort article gives the UNESCO and ICOMOS account of the same barracks, and the article on the British response to 1857 covers the reconquest of the city.

What the Taj itself lost, and when

Some of the Taj’s losses were older than British rule. Hastings recorded in 1815 that an outer fence of silver around the tombs had been carried away by the Marathas. Parkes wrote that the small door to the crypt had once been solid silver and was by then rough mango planks.

The Archaeological Survey’s report for 1903 to 1904 says the Taj was “one of the earliest of Indian monuments to be repaired at the hands of the British”, first taken in hand in 1810 under a Lieutenant Taylor. Curzon credited Lord Minto with appointing a committee for repairs at the Taj. Parkes wrote in 1835 that the Company paid for the garden staff and the repairs.

She also found the crypt tombs “beautifully inlaid, but sadly defaced in parts by plunderers”. At an earlier date, Curzon said in 1900, picnic parties in the Taj garden had taken hammers and chisels to the cenotaphs and chipped out fragments of agate and cornelian. He found Shah Jahan’s tomb in the lower vault still missing much of its inlay and ordered it restored. He gave no year for the picnics, and the sources opened for this article do not date the stripping to 1857. The dated record is Parkes in 1835 and Curzon in 1900.

The earlier article on the Taj covers its building and its legends.

Curzon’s survey and the Act of 18 March 1904

Curzon told the Legislative Council in Calcutta on 18 March 1904 that when he began to inquire into the matter five years earlier the Government of India had made three mistakes. It had accepted no obligation, set no standard for local governments and let conservation lag behind research. He revived the post of Director-General of Archaeology, in abeyance since 1889, and John Marshall was sent out to fill it. In 1898 to 1899 the central government had spent under £3,000 on archaeology, almost all of it on salaries, and the provincial governments about £4,000.

At Agra, he said, £40,000 to £50,000 had been spent on repairs since he arrived. The Taj was no longer approached through “dusty wastes and a squalid bazar”, and old plans had let the water channels and flower beds of its garden be restored. The Survey’s report for 1903 to 1904 adds that about 300 white marble flowers and 600 linear feet of marble band had been renewed on the garden battlements, each flower fixed with two small copper pins because a loosely set piece could be picked out with a penknife. A small museum of plans and photographs had opened in the south gateway.

In Delhi, the Survey’s report records the Naqqar Khana, the Rang Mahal and the Shah Burj as reclaimed from the military and waiting for repair.

The Ancient Monuments Preservation Act passed the same day, 18 March 1904, and Curzon called the Bill “the coping-stone of a policy”. The Survey’s report summarises it. The Act applies to monuments named in a gazette notice. For a private monument that is poorly kept, it lets the owner be asked to agree to proper maintenance, and a collector may acquire the building compulsorily if the owner refuses, except for buildings in use for worship. The government gets first right to buy when a protected monument or its site changes hands. The Act also allows the export of movable antiquities to be prohibited and excavation to be regulated.

What stands, and where the pieces are

UNESCO’s listing page says the Archaeological Survey of India manages the Taj Mahal complex, with legal protection under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act 1958 and its Rules of 1959. It says repairs and conservation have been carried out “right from the British period” without compromising the original qualities of the buildings.

A separate piece of the Agra Fort baths is in London. The V&A’s colonnade is part of the portico that fronted the hammam Shah Jahan built in the 1630s, originally twelve columns on three sides. The museum’s catalogue says marble blocks including these were unearthed after 1804, once the Company held the fort, and had apparently been buried earlier. Sir Alfred Lyall proposed in 1886 to send columns to London for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, to be given to the South Kensington Museum afterwards. Earlier scholarship dated the removal to 1821, but the catalogue says newer research in the Company’s records suggests the colonnade “had already been taken down before the British occupation of the fort”.

Other parts remain in India, at the Agra Circuit House since about 1899, in the Taj Museum since 1980 and at the Lucknow State Museum. The largest section is installed in the V&A East Storehouse after a conservation project that began in 2020.