Amanat Khan

Abd-ul-Haq, given the title Amanat Khan by Shah Jahan, was the calligrapher who designed and wrote the Quranic inscriptions on the Taj Mahal. He is the only person permitted to sign that building, and his signature is on it.

He was a Persian who came to India with his brother, worked at Agra and Delhi, and after his brother's death withdrew from court.

He built a serai in what is now Tarn Taran district in Punjab, on the Lahore to Delhi road, and put his own calligraphy and glazed tilework on its gateways. He is buried there.

The serai is a large walled enclosure with two monumental gateways, deteriorating, in a village named after him.

The man who wrote the Taj Mahal is buried in a Punjab village and there is no signage on the road.

The inscriptions at the Taj Mahal are in thuluth, inlaid in black marble, and the letters increase in size with height so that they read as one size from the ground. That correction is the technical achievement he is known for.

He signed the inscription at the gateway. It is the only signature by any craftsman anywhere on the building, and nobody else who worked on it is named.

The serai at Sarai Amanat Khan is on the road between Amritsar and the border. Its gateways carry glazed tilework of the same period and the building is deteriorating without any conservation programme of consequence.

What we don't know

  • The extent of surviving tilework at the serai, which has been deteriorating for decades.
  • The serai has no published measured drawings and the extent of surviving tilework has never been recorded.

Where to check this

  1. Archaeological Survey of India listing for Sarai Amanat Khan. Archaeological Survey of India - alphabetical list of monuments, Punjab ↗

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • Scholarship on the calligraphy of the Taj Mahal.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 65 accounts in Before the Gurus, the chapter of this site covering the region before 1469, from the Indus cities to the Lodhis.