After the Mughals arrived in India, a great cultural growth occurred in many different forms of art, such as music, visual art, architecture, and literature. India was already a country with many different cultural aspects, but the Mughals, of Turkish-Mongolian descent, expanded the realm of art even further. This Mughal art and architecture was considered an Indo-Islamic-Persian style, which combined different aspects of Islamic and Persian art with indigenous Indian art. This style thrived during the Mughal Empire from approximately 1526-1857 A.D. The monarchs of the Mughal dynasty encouraged art in areas such as literature and painting and created many great buildings and gardens that are still a great display of beauty today. The presence of the Mughals in India added to Indians’ cultural life through the beautiful and rich forms of art such as architecture, painting, literature, and music that they introduced to the subcontinent.
First, the Mughals made many great contributions in architecture. The mausoleums, mosques, palaces, and cities that the Mughals created were very rich and intricate. In the words of A.L Basham, “The Mughal period was one of great splendour, and has left its mark on India in the form of many lovely buildings, wherein Islamic and Hindu motifs often blended in perfect unity.” The most noticeable contribution that the Mughals made in art was architecture, because they left so many great mausoleums, mosques, and palaces. Perhaps the most famous piece of architecture even in the world today is the Taj Mahal, which is a mausoleum that was built by the Mughal monarch Shah Jahan to entomb his third wife’s remains after she died in childbirth. Construction on this beautiful structure began in around 1632 and was completed in the year 1653. This structure was built mainly of marble, and it includes many tranquil gardens and canals. It is an Islamic structure, but it still was a “symbol of