Jali Screen

About Jali Screen

Cross the marble threshold of the Tomb of Salim Chishti at Fatehpur Sikri, constructed in 1580–1581 under the Mughal emperor Akbar to honor the Chishti Sufi saint whose blessing was credited with the birth of Akbar's son and heir, and the perimeter veranda dissolves into pierced white marble. Thirty-six screens, each cut from a single block of Makrana marble, surround the central cenotaph chamber. The pattern is a network of intersecting hexagons and stars rendered as openings in the stone; the marble itself is the negative space. Light enters the chamber as a moving constellation of small geometric spots that travels across the floor and the cenotaph during the day. Air passes through the same openings, and the chamber stays cooler than the courtyard outside by several degrees in summer. (The veranda and its jali screens were added during Jahangir's reign around 1605–1607, completing the white-marble cladding of an originally red-sandstone tomb.) The jali screen is the pierced stone or marble lattice of South Asian Indo-Islamic and pre-Islamic Indian architecture — a load-bearing or non-load-bearing wall element whose perforations are the design. Pre-Islamic Indian temple architecture used pierced stone screens (*gavākṣa*, *jaalipattara*) from at least the Gupta period (fourth–sixth century CE), and the Delhi Sultanate (1192–1526) incorporated the technique into its mosque architecture (Qutb Minar complex jali, twelfth–fourteenth century). The form reaches its high classical phase in the Mughal era (1526–1857), with the major exemplars at Humayun's Tomb in Delhi (1565–1572), the Tomb of Salim Chishti at Fatehpur Sikri (1580–1581, with the marble cladding and jali veranda c. 1605–1607), the Sidi Saiyyed Mosque in Ahmedabad (1572–1573, including the worldwide-known "Tree of Life" jali), Itimad-ud-Daulah's Tomb in Agra (1622–1628), Akbar's Tomb at Sikandra (1605–1613), and the Taj Mahal at Agra (1632–1653, with the marble jali screen around the cenotaph of Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan). Smaller jali traditions continue in Rajput palace architecture (the Hawa Mahal at Jaipur, 1799) and across Indo-Islamic monumental construction to the early colonial period.

Mathematical Properties

Mughal jali patterns combine two formal vocabularies: geometric and arabesque. The geometric vocabulary draws on the broader Islamic geometric tradition — eight-, ten-, twelve-, and sixteen-pointed star patterns, hexagonal and octagonal tessellations, and various interlocking-polygon arrangements. The arabesque vocabulary is curvilinear-vegetal, deriving from the broader Islamic surface-decoration tradition and from Indian pre-Islamic *kalpavriksha* and vine-and-tendril figuration.

In geometric jali, the pattern is a planar tessellation rendered as openings in a stone or marble slab. The Salim Chishti tomb screens are members of the *p6m* or *p4m* wallpaper symmetry groups depending on the specific panel — hexagonal and square-symmetric layouts predominate. The pierced areas typically account for between thirty and fifty percent of the panel's area, a ratio that emerges from the structural-versus-optical trade-off: more openings give more light and air but less structural integrity; fewer openings give a heavier wall with less ventilation. Engineers studying surviving Mughal jali have noted that the panels approach a structural-optimum opening ratio for the marble used.

In arabesque jali, the pattern is not strictly periodic. The Sidi Saiyyed Mosque "Tree of Life" jali, carved across twin single-stone panels, is a unique non-repeating figural composition with bilateral symmetry around a vertical axis — two trees of life facing each other, their branches and tendrils interweaving in a layout that does not tile. The geometry is more akin to a single complex curvilinear figure than to a periodic pattern. Many Mughal arabesque jali are similarly one-of-a-kind compositions rather than members of a wallpaper group.

Most Mughal jali combine geometric and arabesque elements within a single panel. The Itimad-ud-Daulah perimeter screens (Agra, 1622–1628) frame geometric hexagonal lattice within arabesque-bordered cartouches. The Taj Mahal cenotaph screens (Agra, 1632–1653) combine octagonal lattice with floral arabesque inlay (*pietra dura*). The synthesis is characteristically Mughal.

The pattern is generated by compass-and-rule construction in the Islamic-geometric tradition for the geometric portion (see the *girih tile* and *Islamic geometric patterns* hub pages for the standard construction methods), and by freehand or template-based drawing for the arabesque portion. The complete design is transferred onto the marble or stone slab as a chalk or charcoal outline, the openings are cut by drilling and chiseling, and the surface is dressed and polished to its final finish. Cutting time for a major panel is months.

Architectural Use

Jali functions across several specific architectural roles in Mughal and pre-Mughal Indian architecture:

**Tomb chamber screening.** The central cenotaph or sarcophagus chamber of major Mughal tombs is screened by jali — light enters through the openings, but the cenotaph is partly visually withdrawn from the visitor. The Tomb of Salim Chishti at Fatehpur Sikri (1580–1581 with marble jali veranda c. 1605–1607) is the high example, with thirty-six jali screens of single-block marble surrounding the central chamber. Humayun's Tomb in Delhi (1565–1572) carries large-scale stone jali in the side bays. The Taj Mahal at Agra (1632–1653) screens the cenotaphs of Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan with a low marble octagonal jali screen carved with floral *pietra dura* inlay — Ebba Koch's *The Complete Taj Mahal* (2006) discusses this screen in detail.

**Mosque jali.** The Sidi Saiyyed Mosque at Ahmedabad (1572–1573) is the great jali-mosque, with ten jali windows including the famous "Tree of Life" twin jali on the western wall (carved across two adjacent single-stone panels by the workshop of Sidi Saiyyed, a Habshi nobleman of the late Gujarat Sultanate). The Jama Masjid at Fatehpur Sikri (completed 1571) carries jali in its perimeter walls. Many Sultanate-period mosques in Delhi, Bidar, and the Deccan use jali for clerestory light.

**Zenana and purdah screening.** The women's quarters (*zenana*) of Mughal palaces (the Red Fort at Delhi, the Agra Fort, the Lahore Fort) and Rajput palaces (the Amber Fort, the City Palace at Jaipur) are screened by jali. The Hawa Mahal at Jaipur (1799, Maharaja Sawai Pratap Singh) is the most extreme example — a five-story palace facade with 953 small jali windows purpose-built so that the royal women could watch street processions without being seen.

**Jharokha-i-darshan.** The Mughal court ritual of *jharokha-i-darshan* (the emperor showing himself at a window to the assembled court each morning) involved a balcony at the imperial fort wall. The emperor was visible through the balcony opening; behind him, jali screens shielded the *zenana* women who were attending the morning ritual unseen. The Agra Fort and the Lahore Fort preserve these balconies.

**Tomb verandas.** Veranda jali at saints' tombs (the Tomb of Salim Chishti; Itimad-ud-Daulah's Tomb at Agra, 1622–1628; the Tomb of Akbar at Sikandra, 1605–1613) screens the perimeter walk around the central chamber, creating an intermediate light zone between the bright courtyard and the dim cenotaph interior.

**Garden-pavilion screens.** The garden pavilions of Mughal *charbagh* (four-part garden) layouts often carry jali — the Shalimar Bagh at Lahore (1641–1642) and the gardens at Kashmir preserve examples.

The pre-Mughal Sultanate examples (Qutb complex jali, Delhi, twelfth–fourteenth century; Adil Shahi Bidar and Bijapur jali, fifteenth–seventeenth century in the Deccan) are stylistically distinct from the Mughal classical phase but use the same architectural logic. The pre-Islamic Hindu temple antecedents are at the level of technique and the *gavākṣa* type of pierced screen — the iconographic content differs.

Construction Method

Mughal jali is built in five steps: the stone is selected and cut to slab; the pattern is designed and transferred to the slab; the openings are drilled and chiseled; the surface is dressed; the slab is mortared into place in the wall opening.

Step one — stone selection and slab cutting. The most prized material is **Makrana marble**, quarried in Rajasthan and used for the white-marble jali of the Taj Mahal, the Salim Chishti tomb veranda, the Itimad-ud-Daulah screens, and many other major Mughal commissions. Red sandstone from Bharatpur, Karauli, and Fatehpur Sikri is used for earlier and less prestigious jali (Humayun's Tomb side bays, the Qutb complex jali, the Jama Masjid at Fatehpur Sikri). Gujarati sandstone is used for regional Gujarat work (Sidi Saiyyed). The slab is cut to the wall opening's dimensions plus a margin for mounting. A major jali slab can be three meters tall and two wide, cut from a single block; the Sidi Saiyyed Tree-of-Life jali is famously a twin single-stone composition across two adjacent panels.

Step two — pattern design and transfer. The master architect or the workshop chief draws the pattern at full scale on paper, parchment, or directly on the slab in chalk and charcoal. Geometric patterns are constructed by compass-and-rule in the Islamic-geometric tradition; arabesque patterns are drawn freehand or from workshop reference drawings. The Mughal court workshops (the *karkhānahs*) under Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan maintained drawing collections; some survive in Indian and international museum collections.

Step three — drilling and chiseling. The openings are blocked out by drilling a series of small holes around the perimeter of each opening, then connecting the holes with a fine chisel to break out the central core. The chisel and rasp are used to refine the opening's edge to its final profile. For an interlocking-star geometric pattern, hundreds or thousands of small openings are cut, each precisely aligned to the geometric grid. For an arabesque pattern, the curvilinear openings are cut by following the chalked outline. The work is slow and unforgiving — a slip can crack a marble slab and waste months of carving. A major jali panel takes a senior carver and his team several months to complete; the thirty-six panels of the Salim Chishti veranda represent years of cumulative workshop time.

Step four — surface dressing. The front and back faces of the panel are dressed to a fine flat finish. The marble is polished to a slight sheen; sandstone is left with a tooled surface that catches the light. The edges of the openings are rounded slightly to soften the visual edge and to reduce stress concentrations that could crack the stone.

Step five — installation. The finished panel is mortared into the wall opening with lime mortar (the standard Mughal building mortar), often with a small overlap onto the surrounding masonry to lock the panel in place. Large panels may be set into iron clamps for additional security.

The craft transmission combines the Indian-temple stone-carving tradition (which the Mughal workshops absorbed and reorganized under Persian-derived architectural direction) with the Islamic geometric pattern tradition. Master carvers (*sangtarāsh*) and master architects (*muhandis*, *miʿmār*) worked together under the imperial *kārkhānah* system. Ustad Ahmad Lahori is named as principal architect of the Taj Mahal; many other masters worked anonymously. The training was hereditary in many cases — sons followed fathers into the stone-carving workshops — and continued from the Mughal era into the colonial period and into the present, with the same workshops in Agra, Fatehpur Sikri, Ahmedabad, and elsewhere supplying both conservation work and contemporary commissions.

Spiritual Meaning

The jali screen carries spiritual weight in several overlapping registers, and the Mughal architectural tradition deploys it consciously across them.

In the **Sufi-shrine register**, the tomb-chamber jali screens of the great Chishti saints' tombs (Salim Chishti at Fatehpur Sikri, Khwaja Muinuddin Chishti at Ajmer, Nizamuddin Auliya at Delhi) carry the symbolism of the screen between the living devotee and the saint's *baraka* (divine grace, blessing-power). The pilgrim approaches the cenotaph through the jali. Light comes through; the saint is partly seen, partly veiled. This is reading-friendly to the broader Sufi vocabulary of *parda* (Persian for "veil" — the same root that gives the Indian *purdah*), in which the divine is veiled and yet partially perceived through creation. The jali makes this metaphysical condition architectural: the divine grace passes through the screen as light and air pass through the openings, partial and modulated.

In the **Islamic-theological register**, the jali shares the broader Islamic geometric tradition's aniconism — the move toward geometric and vegetal (arabesque) rather than figural decoration in religious settings, grounded in the doctrine of *tawḥīd* (divine unity beyond all image). The jali makes a screen of pure geometric pattern (or vegetal arabesque) and uses it to filter light into the sacred space. Oleg Grabar's *The Formation of Islamic Art* (Yale 1973, revised 1987) sets out the theological background of aniconism in the Islamic tradition; Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom's *Art and Architecture of Islam 1250–1800* (Yale 1994) discusses its specifically Mughal expressions.

In the **Indian pre-Islamic register**, the antecedent technique of pierced stone screening carries the Hindu-temple symbolism of the *prākāra* (the sacred enclosure that separates the temple sanctum from the outer world) and the *gavākṣa* (the kudu-window through which the divine sees out and the devotee sees in). The Mughal jali absorbs this layer without erasing it — at the Sidi Saiyyed "Tree of Life" jali, the *kalpavriksha* (Hindu wishing-tree) and the Islamic tree-of-paradise read together. The Indo-Islamic synthesis is the spiritual condition itself, not a problem to be resolved.

In the **household-religious register**, the screening of the *zenana* and the practice of *purdah* are religious-social practices with theological framing in both Islamic and Hindu traditions of the period. The jali architecturally enables these practices. Modern reading of this function tends toward two distortions: an orientalist exoticization that frames purdah as romantic mystery, or a modern-feminist reading that frames it as straightforwardly oppressive. The honest historical account is more textured. Elite Mughal and Rajput women experienced purdah variously — some women of high status preferred the *zenana* as a space of dignity, education, political influence (Nur Jahan, empress of Jahangir, exercised significant political and cultural authority from within the imperial household; Jahanara Begum, daughter of Shah Jahan, was a major literary and architectural patron operating within the same conventions), and freedom from the demands of public male presence. Other women experienced it as restrictive. The architectural enabler — the jali screen — was the same in both cases. Naming this honestly is more useful than either softening or polemicizing.

What the jali does *not* carry, in the documented tradition, is any framing as hidden or initiate-only knowledge. The patterns are Islamic-geometric and Indian-architectural conventions transmitted publicly through craft guilds. The Sidi Saiyyed workshop is named in the dedication; the imperial workshops of Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan are extensively documented (Ebba Koch's *Mughal Architecture* gives the names of master architects including Ustad Ahmad Lahori, principal architect of the Taj Mahal). The form is public craft, religiously charged, deployed at scale by named patrons and named masters.

Significance

The jali screen is one of the most architecturally serious answers to a problem the early-modern Indian climate poses to monumental building: how to admit light and air into an interior without admitting the full glare of the noonday sun, the dust of the dry season, or the unfiltered view from outside. The Mughal answer is a wall of pierced stone whose openings sum to a controlled fraction of the wall area — enough for ventilation and a soft diffused light, not enough for direct solar gain or unmodulated visual access.

The screen does this several jobs at once. Optically, it converts direct sunlight into a moving pattern of small light-spots and the rest as shadow, lowering the apparent brightness of the interior by an order of magnitude while preserving the daily and seasonal rhythm of natural illumination. Thermally, it admits cross-ventilation through the openings while blocking radiative heat from the wall mass — interior temperatures in Mughal jali-screened chambers are reliably several degrees below exterior temperatures in the May–June heat. Acoustically, the pierced stone scatters sound rather than reflecting it, dampening the echo that bare stone walls would produce. Architecturally, the screen substitutes for a solid wall while preserving the structural function of the wall — the jali at the Salim Chishti tomb and the marble jali around the central cenotaph chamber of the Taj Mahal are load-bearing in addition to being decorative.

The screen also served a specific social function in the courtly architecture of the Mughal and Rajput period: the screening of the *zenana* (women's quarters) and the *purdah* household-separation system. The architectural literature is clear on this, and the function is honestly described in the surviving Mughal texts and in modern art-historical analysis (Catherine Asher, *Architecture of Mughal India*, Cambridge 1992; Ebba Koch, *Mughal Architecture*, Prestel 1991 and *The Complete Taj Mahal*, Thames & Hudson 2006; Navina Najat Haidar, *Jali: Lattice of Divine Light in Mughal Architecture*, Mapin 2023). The jali allowed women in elite Mughal and Rajput households to observe court proceedings, public ceremonies, and street life from interior or balcony spaces without being seen from outside. In particular contexts — the *jharokha-i-darshan* at Mughal palace forts, the *zenana* balconies of Rajput palaces like the Hawa Mahal at Jaipur (1799, the "Palace of Winds," purpose-built with 953 small jali windows for the royal women) — the form is institutionally tied to a household-separation practice with theological, social, and class dimensions. The honest account names this and does not soften it into universal-design language: purdah was a specific historical practice, often constraining for the women it governed, sometimes preferred by women of high status as a marker of dignity, and the jali screen is one of its principal architectural expressions. The screen's other functions (light, air, beauty) are real and continue today in non-purdah contexts; the household-separation function was its specific social purpose in much of its classical use.

The Indo-Islamic synthesis the jali represents is worth marking. The technique of pierced stone screening predates the Islamic arrival in India by a millennium — Gupta-period (fourth–sixth century) Hindu temples used *gavākṣa* (kudu-window) and pierced lattice elements, and the form was developed extensively in Chalukyan, Hoysala, and later medieval temple architecture (the Modhera Sun Temple in Gujarat, eleventh century; the Hoysaleshwara Temple at Halebid, twelfth century). When the Delhi Sultanate (1192–1526) and later the Mughals (1526–1857) brought Persian-derived Islamic architectural ideas into a context where Indian stoneworking was already at world-class sophistication, the result was a synthesis: Persian-and-Central-Asian pattern vocabulary (geometric stars, arabesque vegetal curves) executed in Indian-temple-tradition stone-carving technique. The Sidi Saiyyed Mosque's "Tree of Life" jali (Ahmedabad, 1572–1573) is the most famous expression of this synthesis — a vegetal-figural design with iconographic resonance in both Hindu (*kalpavriksha*, the wishing-tree) and Islamic (the tree of life in the garden of paradise) traditions, executed across twin single-stone panels on the western wall. The Sultanate-Sufi-Hindu cultural ecology of Gujarat produced something that does not reduce to either parent tradition.

The jali screen is therefore a Mughal-era achievement that draws on a deeper Indian craft tradition. It is the dominant *non-Maghrebi, non-Persian* form of Islamic geometric pattern architecture — a distinct regional flowering that should be understood on its own terms, not assimilated to the Alhambra or the Topkapı.

Connections

Within Islamic geometric architecture: the jali shares pattern vocabulary with **Islamic geometric patterns** broadly, the **eight-fold star**, **ten-fold star**, **twelve-fold star** layouts, and the **sebka latticework** of the Maghreb. The connection is at the pattern level; the medium (pierced stone or marble) and the workshop tradition (Indian-temple stone-carving) are distinct.

The **arabesque** vegetal-curvilinear tradition appears throughout Mughal jali work, often interwoven with the geometric. The Sidi Saiyyed "Tree of Life" jali is the canonical arabesque-jali synthesis. Itimad-ud-Daulah's Tomb (1622–1628) carries especially fine arabesque jali work in its perimeter screens.

Pre-Islamic Indian antecedents: **Gupta-period** stone screens (fourth–sixth century CE), **Chalukyan and Hoysala** temple screens (sixth–thirteenth century, especially in present-day Karnataka), and the *gavākṣa* (kudu-window) tradition continuing through the Pallava, Pala, and other regional schools. The Hindu temple stoneworking tradition is the technical foundation on which Mughal jali built.

Cross-tradition: the closest non-Indian parallels are the carved-stone *mashrabiyya* of medieval Cairo (Mamluk and Ottoman, fourteenth–eighteenth century), the wooden lattice screens of Yemen and the Hijaz, and the Andalusi *celosía* (a wooden lattice screen used in Spanish-Islamic and Mudéjar architecture). Each is a regional answer to the same problem (light, air, privacy in hot-climate monumental architecture); each developed in dialogue with local craft traditions. The Cairene mashrabiyya is the closest functional cousin; the Mughal jali is more often in marble and more often in larger continuous screens than the Cairene wood-turned form.

The contemporary parallel is the **brise-soleil** (sun-breaker) of mid-twentieth-century modernist architecture — Le Corbusier's screen walls at the High Court at Chandigarh (1950s, in former Mughal territory and explicitly informed by jali tradition) and the deep concrete grilles of much late-twentieth-century South Asian modernism. The jali tradition is in continuous architectural conversation from the Mughals through Chandigarh to contemporary work by Studio Mumbai, Bijoy Jain, and other regional practices.

Further Reading

• Catherine Asher, *Architecture of Mughal India* (Cambridge University Press 1992) — the standard architectural survey. Ebba Koch, *Mughal Architecture: An Outline of Its History and Development (1526–1858)* (Prestel 1991, revised 2014) and *The Complete Taj Mahal* (Thames & Hudson 2006) — for the Taj jali in particular and for the broader Mughal context. Navina Najat Haidar, *Jali: Lattice of Divine Light in Mughal Architecture* (Mapin Publishing 2023, ISBN 9789385360749, with essays by Ebba Koch) — the most recent monograph specifically on jali, with extensive plates and a detailed treatment of the zenana and purdah architectural-social function. Milo Cleveland Beach et al., eds., *Masters of Indian Painting* (Artibus Asiae 2011) — for the broader Mughal artistic context. Giles Tillotson, *Jaipur Nama: Tales from the Pink City* (Penguin 2006) — for the Hawa Mahal and the Rajput jali tradition. Subhash Parihar, *Mughal Monuments of the Punjab and Haryana* (Inter-India Publications 1985) — for regional Mughal monuments outside the Delhi-Agra core. The Aga Khan Trust for Culture conservation reports on Humayun's Tomb (2007–2013) and on the Sundar Nursery / Nizamuddin Renewal Project document the conservation of historic jali. For pre-Islamic Indian antecedents, Susan Huntington, *The Art of Ancient India* (Weatherhill 1985) covers Gupta and later temple screens.