‘They loved the beauty around them’: the exquisite taste that made the Mughals great

Ahead of a major V&A exhibition, artist Waqas Khan celebrates the majesty of the Mughal empire – from the towering Taj Mahal down to the labyrinthine detail of their miniatures

‘Look at these,” says Waqas Khan. “I call them Jali. They’re Islamic windows.” I look, as he urges, at the unglassed stone windows from Agra that are installed all around us in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s South Asia gallery. If you have ever visited it, you will have seen them, but not everyone looks as closely as Khan. “Look at the repetition,” he says. “You can see it in all these patterns.”

He means this as praise – and it’s easy to see the beauty of that apparently infinite repetition. The yellowish sandstone window grilles have a dazzling range of designs – floral, crystalline, triangular – in every window, interlocking and extrapolating and expanding with a complex regularity that looks as if it may go on for ever, far beyond these cooling lattices.

‘They loved the beauty around them’: the exquisite taste that made the Mughals great

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