Anup Talab

This guide to Anup Talab in Fatehpur Sikri opens with Emperor Akbar filling this ornamental pool with coins in fifteen seventy-eight and giving them all away, then steps back to the sandstone platform built two years earlier as the most exclusive concert stage in the empire. It follows Tansen, the celebrated court musician among Akbar's nine jewels, who is said to have performed from that very platform, and it arrives at one particular request Akbar made of him: to sing a raga said to summon fire from the air. Picture the four stone causeways still leading out across the water toward that stage.