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Discuss this article (0 Comments)Sight for sore eyes
by This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it on Sunday, 19 April 2009
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Damian Reilly visits India’s most famous landmark, the Taj Mahal.
On the way to the seaside, excited children from the city will eagerly scan the horizon to be the first in the car to spot the ocean. Far inland, in the back of the steaming bus, the boneshaker, in which we’ve been sitting for the past six hours on the pitted road from Delhi, my travelling companions and I do something similar as we bounce into Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. Where is she?
I couldn’t want to see her more: something very beautiful. Because, over the course of the last 24 hours, I have seen terrible things. There are sights in India, unavoidable, that the traveller will never forget. Turn away, shut your eyes tightly, too late. No one does poverty like India does it.
In Delhi I saw a man in the crowd whose face, from nostrils down, was being eaten by leprosy. Two hours into our journey, when the bus wheezed to a stop to allow our aged driver to recover from a vicious attack of cramp in his left leg, and I took the opportunity to get off for a few moments, an emaciated man whose legs and arms were so horribly twisted and splayed that he resembled a human spider, somehow made his way towards me to ask for money.
And in Agra, on a similar bus break, a man and a boy, perhaps father and son, deformed, malnourished and clothed in rags, approached our group with grim dexterity and practice, transporting themselves like animals, quadropedal on hands and feet, again to beg. The coddled Western sensibility struggles for appropriate response — how do you engage with this? And there is so much of it.
Indeed, how does India engage with it? There are 1.3 billion people in this country. Today, the economy is said to be in fine fettle, foreign investment increases by the day, and the middle class is growing. But there is nowhere on earth where so few have so much, and so many have so little. India may be getting richer, but it doesn’t take long here to get the impression that all the money in the world wouldn’t solve these problems, not for a hundred years or more. Because they are to do with endemic disorganisation and massive overpopulation. Of course, it would help.
From my raised seat on the bus, I first glimpse the proud onion dome of the Taj on the horizon over a smallish slum of hovels and huts, itself tucked behind a dirty wall against which a man is nonchalantly relieving himself.
An hour later, after decamping from this bus to an electric one — nothing that causes pollution is allowed within half a mile of the Taj Mahal — and passing with some difficulty through overzealous security checks at the entrance, I am gazing at it from the famous spot where Diana, Princess of Wales, so famously batted her eyelashes for the world’s assembled media (some stunt, that, by the way, upstaging this masterpiece, this modern wonder of the world).
The Taj Mahal, full frontal, is an incredible sight. So much so, that at first it seems unreal: a painted backdrop like the ones in old movies. At its apex, on thermals, birds float carelessly. And it just sits there, so big, pearl coloured, so very assured in its symmetry. Make no mistake; the architects of the Taj Mahal understood fully how symmetry delights the human eye.
Perhaps it sounds trite, but beauty radiates from the Taj. From a distance, the translucent white marble is somehow made all the more distinct in the muddy Indian afternoon light, set off, too, by the lush green lawns.
The curvature, the design of the thing, is calming. The brightly clothed crowds, mostly Indians, are hushed as they mill and take photographs on the paths that circumnavigate the famous man-made ponds that lead to the mausoleum.
Up close, the beauty is not dimmed. In construction, over a thousand elephants were used to transport building materials from all over India. Inset in the marble, itself transported from Rajasthan, are jasper from Punjab, jade and crystal from China. The turquoise was brought from Tibet, the lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, the sapphire from Sri Lanka, and the carnelian from Arabia. There are 28 types of precious and semi-precious stones inlaid in the marble, upon which, too, are stunning designs of Arabic calligraphy.
Twenty thousand men took twenty years to build the Taj, at a cost of 32 million rupees — the equivalent of trillions of dollars today.
But you can’t put a price on love. And that is what the Taj Mahal is; a romantic gesture. Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan had it built, completed in 1648, in memory of his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. She lies inside, at the direct centre of the mausoleum, in a marvellously ornate marble tomb. So does he, beside his wife.
The legend has it that his placement here, at the behest of his evil son Aurangzeb, who deposed him, was a deliberate and spiteful act to break the famous symmetry of the Taj, the symmetry that was so important to Shah Jahan.
We, our group, had planned to meet beneath the archway that faces the Taj at 7pm. Indian light, in the hour before sunset, becomes so rich that almost everything it falls upon, no matter how mundane, becomes beautiful. In that light, it is near impossible to take your eyes off the Taj Mahal.
We left, quiet, all contemplating the majesty and ambition of what we had spent the afternoon witnessing. Outside, on the street, the begging began again immediately.
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