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Consisting of five columns (with separate pillars, capitals and bases), four lintels, and three double and two single brackets, it is the largest surviving section of a three-sided structure that originally comprised 12 columns (other sections of the colonnade remain in Agra and Lucknow). Shah Jahan’s historian Abdul Hamid Lahauri praised the beauty of the hammam and described it as decorated with <i>parchin-kari </i>(stone inlay) both inside and outside. \n\nBy the eighteenth century, the formerly powerful Mughal empire was in terminal decline. With the court no longer based in Agra, many of its palace buildings fell into ruin. In 1761, Agra was captured by the forces of Suraj Mal, the Jat ruler of Bharatpur, who removed material from buildings within the Red Fort to reuse in his own palaces. Father Francois Wendel, a French missionary based in the city, wrote ‘Agra… and its buildings which Suraj Mal had torn down without restraint, after he had become master, provided much for the edifices which in Dig, Bharatpur, Govardhan were begun or completed under his rule’… ‘Gates, stones, beam, lime, in a word, all that could be utilised for building, was taken off by the Jats’. Much of the inlaid marble used in the construction of the Suraj Bhavan in the palace at Deeg appears to be from Shah Jahan period buildings in Agra. \n\nDuring the final decades of the eighteenth century, Agra was retaken by the Mughals and the Marathas. After the East India Company took the fort in 1804, they unearthed large quantities of blocks of marble, including the fragments of the dismantled colonnade. They had apparently been buried there earlier, presumably to clear the site of rubble.  Previous scholarship has suggested that the colonnade was dismantled when the East India Company removed the marble pavement from one of the inner rooms of the dilapidated bathhouse in 1821, however, based on more recent research into the EIC records, it is now believed that they had already been taken down before the British occupation of the fort.\n\nIn 1886, Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall (Lieutenant Governor of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, and commissioner for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886) drew attention to the colonnade fragments and suggested that a selection of the columns be sent to London for display in the exhibition, on the condition that they would afterwards be given to the South Kensington Museum. The exhibition catalogue states that ‘Suraj Mal, the neighbouring Raja of Bharatpur... apparently buried’ the pillars and that a local stonemason named Nathuram Mistri ‘restored’ them prior to their dispatch to London.\n\nThe colonnade was subsequently displayed in the museum’s Eastern Galleries (also known as the Indian Section) on the west side of Exhibition Road. As existing photographs reveal, it moved location at least once within the building. When the Eastern Galleries closed in 1957 to make way for Imperial College, the colonnade was moved into storage. In the 1980s, one column was restored with thousands of cut coloured stones. The presence of different types of fillers in place of approximately 50% of the original inlay in the rest of the colonnade indicates several moments of restoration in its history, probably related to its reinstallation in various locations. Following a major conservation project launched in 2020, the colonnade has been conserved and installed in V&amp;A East Storehouse. \n\nOther components of the original colonnade remained in the Red Fort in Agra. Around 1899, two columns with capitals and two half-columns with half-capitals were integrated into the porch of the Circuit House (a government guest house) in Agra, and one column with base and capital and one corner headpiece (with two brackets) were sent to the Lucknow State Museum. Two columns with capitals have been displayed in the Taj Museum since 1980. Other parts, including a half capital and a corner headpiece (with two brackets), remain in storage in the Red Fort.\n","historicalContext":"","briefDescription":"Part of the colonnade fronting the bathhouse in the fort at Agra, white marble inlaid with coloured stones, Mughal, c. 1637","bibliographicReferences":[{"reference":{"text":"","id":""},"details":"","free":"Ebba Koch ‘The Lost Colonnade of Shah Jahan’s Bath in the Red Fort of Agra’, in The Burlington Magazine, volume cxxiv, June 1982, pp. 331-339, preprinted with a postscript in Ebba Koch, Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology. Collected Essays, OUP New Delhi, 2001, pp. 255-268.\r\n\r\nOfficial catalogue for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition (London: William Clowes, 1886), p.45. \r\n\r\nV&A registered files: \r\nRP/1886/4339 \r\nRP/1988/1421\r\nRF/2018/214\r\n\r\nFrançois Xavier Wendel, trans. Jean Deloche, James Walker, Wendel's Memoirs on the Origin, Growth and Present State of Jat Power in Hindustan (1768) (Pondicherry, 1991). \r\nFrancis Rawdon-Hastings, The Private Journal of the Marquess of Hastings (London, 1858), p.18-19.\r\nSyad Muhammad Latif Agra, Historical & Descriptive: With an Account of Akbar and His Court and of the Modern City of Agra (1896) p.87. \r\n"}],"production":"","productionType":{"text":"","id":""},"contentDescription":"","contentPlaces":[],"associatedPlaces":[],"contentPerson":[],"associatedPerson":[],"contentOrganisations":[],"associatedOrganisations":[],"contentPeople":[],"associatedPeople":[],"contentEvents":[],"associatedEvents":[],"contentOthers":[],"contentConcepts":[],"contentLiteraryRefs":[],"galleryLabels":[],"partNumbers":["IS.167:1-1886","IS.167:2-1886","IS.167:3-1886","IS.167:4-1886","IS.167:5-1886","IS.167:6-1886","IS.167:7-1886","IS.167:8-1886","IS.167:9-1886","IS.167:10-1886","IS.167:11-1886","IS.167:12-1886","IS.167:13-1886","IS.167:14-1886","IS.167:15-1886","IS.167:16-1886","IS.167:17-1886","IS.167:18-1886","IS.167:19-1886","IS.167:20-1886","IS.167:21-1886","IS.167:22-1886","IS.167:23-1886","IS.167:24-1886","IS.167:25/1-1886","IS.167:25/2-1886","IS.167:25/3-1886","IS.167:25/4-1886","IS.167:26-1886"],"accessionNumberNum":"167","accessionNumberPrefix":"IS","accessionYear":1886,"otherNumbers":[],"copyNumber":"","aspects":["WHOLE","Column [1]","Column [2]","Column [3]","Column [4]","Column [5]","Plinth","Column base [1]","Column base [2]","Column base [3]","Column base [4]","Capital [1]","Capital [2]","Capital [3]","Capital [4]","Capital [5]","Bracket [1]","Bracket [2]","Bracket [3]","Lintel [1]","Lintel [2]","Lintel [3]","Lintel [4]","Bracket [4]","Bracket [5]","Plinth fragment [1]","Plinth fragment [2]","Plinth fragment [3]","Plinth fragment [4]","Column base [5]"],"assets":["2025PD1677","2025PC8903"],"recordModificationDate":"2026-01-06","recordCreationDate":"2005-09-20","availableToBook":false}}