The queen the inscriptions name
Henry Cousens, in his 1916 survey of the Ibrahim Rauza, read the mausoleum's own inscriptions as naming its true subject: "it was primarily erected as the mausoleum and memorial of his queen Tāj Sultāna, but the king, dying before her, was first interred within it" (p.71). Tradition placed her grave first among the row of tombs in the sepulchral chamber, ahead of Ibrahim's own mother: "There is nothing to indicate whose the individual tombs are in the sepulchral chamber ... Tradition gives the following order from east to west: (1) Tāj Sultāna; (2) Hāji Badī' Sāhiba, Ibrāhīm's mother; (3) Ibrāhīm Jagat Gīr, himself; (4) Zuhrah Sultāna, his daughter; (5) Darvesh Pādshāh, his son; and (6) Sultān Sulaimān, another son" (p.71).
Two separate inscriptions around the mausoleum's south door give the dates. The outside band's chronogram gives her own death date: "Around the south door, on the outside band ... In the above the words in italics, or rather, the Persian equivalent words Tāj Sultān ahl-i-jannat, form the chronogram which gives us the date A. H. 1043 (A. D. 1633) as the date of the death of Tāj Sultāna, the wife of Ibrāhīm II., who died some seven years after the king" (p.75). A separate triangular inscription between the two south-door bands gives the king's own death date: "Between the above two bands of inscription is a triangular inscription in the top of the arch which reads ... he said:—The place with the guide. Year 1037. [A. D. 1627-28.] This inscription records the date of the king's death" (p.75). Cousens read the whole inscriptional programme as settled in one direction: "It is clear from those given above that the building was erected to the glory and memory of Tāj Sultāna" (p.75) — a queen commemorated, on his 1916 reading, rather than a queen who commissioned.
Patron, not only the memorialized
Later inscriptional scholarship reverses the direction of Cousens's reading. Where he found a monument built for a queen, more recent analysis of the same inscriptions finds one built by her: "the Persian inscriptions on the mausoleum's walls reveal that the complex was built by his wife Taj Sultana either originally for herself or for her husband" [wiki-ibrahim-rauza]. She was "the second wife of Ibrahim Adil Shah II" [wiki-ibrahim-rauza], and the son she bore him took the Bijapur throne: "Taj Sultana's son, Muhammad, eventually reached the throne at the age of fourteen, after a fierce rivalry with his half-brother" [wiki-ibrahim-rauza].
Malik Sandal, whom Cousens names as the mausoleum's architect — "the architect of this magnificent pile — the creator of all this fretted loveliness — was Malik Sandal" (p.75) — "continued to manage the project even after her death" [wiki-ibrahim-rauza].
