How Safdarjung Tomb’s Mughal garden is being reimagined for a hotter, drier Delhi

How Safdarjung Tomb Mughal garden is being reimagined for a hotter, drier Delhi

In Delhi, monuments are often spoken of as though they were statues — solid, inert, and even complete. Safdarjung Tomb resists that idea. Long before one looks up at the sandstone-and-marble mausoleum, one feels the space around it: the axial paths pulling the eye forward, the water channels that promise movement but rarely deliver it, and the broad openness of the charbagh that still holds, despite everything, a certain calm.

Built in 1754 for Mirza Muqim Abul Mansur Khan-Safdarjung, the Mughal governor of Awadh, the complex is usually described as the last of Delhi’s great Mughal garden tombs. It is also one of the city’s fully realised experiments in climate design before imperial confidence, and ecological balance, began to fray.

Archival image | Photo Credit: V&A

The garden was never meant to be ornamental alone. Like all Mughal charbaghs, it was an engineered landscape, designed to cool, irrigate, choreograph air and movement, and offer relief from the North Indian summer. Water once coursed through channels and fountains; trees were planted to calibrate shade and humidity; pathways slowed the body, easing both heat and haste. Paradise, in the Mughal imagination, was practical.

Archival image from 1979

Over time, Safdarjung Tomb has been conserved repeatedly, largely with an architectural lens. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), which protects the site as a national monument, has carried out periodic repairs to the mausoleum, boundary walls, walkways, and garden features. These interventions stabilised stone and surface alike. Yet the garden’s deeper systems slipped out of alignment. Groundwater levels across Delhi fell. Historic wells dried. Water features became symbolic rather than operative. Planting patterns shifted, often guided by maintenance convenience rather than environmental logic. The charbagh endured, but it stopped working.