NYTimes on P.N.Oak's Hindu Taj Mahal

[Guest guest]

"In our office library I recently unearthed a small volume called

the ''The Taj Mahal Is a Temple Palace,'' by one P.N. Oak in 1974,

and billed as ''An Epoch-Making Discovery Which Has Proved All

Histories and Historians Wrong.'' He argues that the Taj was ''built

by a powerful Rajput king in pre-Muslim times,'' constructed ''of

the Hindus, for the Hindus and by the Hindus.''

NYTimes on P.N.Oak's Hindu Taj Mahal

 

A Glorious Survivor

http://travel2.nytimes.com/mem/travel/article-page.html?

res=9401E3D7123CF935A25756C0A9629C8B63

By AMY WALDMAN

 

Published: May 16, 2004

THE most famous narrative of the Taj Mahal, India's transcendent

tourist attraction, is the love story that prompted its

construction: the death of queen Mumtaz during the birth of her 14th

child; the grief of her emperor-husband, Shah Jahan; and his vow to

build the world's greatest monument to love.

 

But after more than 350 years, there are other narratives worth

exploring as well, including India's own complicated relationship

with the monument, and with the Islamic emperors who built it and

many of this country's architectural treasures.

 

 

There is the survivor's narrative of a monument that has been

plundered, nearly dismantled, and eroded by pollution. Read enough

of the history, and it seems a wonder it is standing at all.

 

Then there is the narrative of visiting it. The Taj has been so

hyped through time that seeing it seems destined to be an

anticlimax. But it isn't. The tomb's whiteness, its symmetry, its

curves, majestic scale and exquisite detail are unreal.

 

Unfortunately, visiting it is a little too real. The Taj is set in

Agra, an overcrowded city whose population has far surpassed its

support system. After three trips to the Taj with different guests,

I have come to dread the heat, the hawkers, the haphazardness of its

surroundings -- always vowing that this visit will be the last. Then

I see the ethereal dome framed in the gateway that ensures a

dramatic entrance and cannot wait to return.

 

The Taj is one of those rare creations that work from a distance and

up close, as a whole and in parts, and in totally different ways. It

has had its critics (''Marble, I perceive, covers a multitude of

sins,'' Aldous Huxley wrote), but they are few.

 

The tomb is set against river and sky, the hue of its marble

changing in the day's light. The perfect shape of the dome is

reflected in the long rectangular pool in front. The almost womanly

nature of the building's curves offsets the more severe formality of

its planes. The white marble contrasts beautifully with the red

sandstone of the mosque and its matching jawab, or answer -- the two

buildings that flank the tomb -- and the greenery of the gardens.

 

The interior bears a totally different kind of scrutiny, to perceive

the intricacy and color of the flowers that decorate the marble

surface and delicacy of the almost lacy marble screen that surrounds

the queen's tomb. Outside, the gardens -- the Moguls' signature --

today are significantly altered from the Mogul era, but they are

respectably maintained. You can, and should, walk the periphery of

the tomb, both to appreciate the building and its relationship to

the river and also the Indian families, lovers and tourists who come

en masse to see their country's great treasure.

 

The Taj Mahal has become the most identifiable symbol of India,

drawing 2.2 million tourists a year. People visit for the romance,

although it is not a particularly romantic experience. But in an age

obsessed with Islamic extremism, it is also worth viewing as a

manifestation of another side of Islamic civilization.

 

Those who talk about the lost glory of Islam and how the loss has

helped feed Muslim anger can find that glory in the Taj and its

marriage of architecture, design and engineering. It is one of the

world's most spectacular examples of Islamic art, albeit melded with

Persian, Indian and Central Asian influences. It represents the

culmination of an empire that, if not always benevolent, did provide

India with much of its modern-day structure and administrative

foundation.

 

Shah Jahan -- ''Emperor of the World'' -- was one of a series of

Mogul, or Muslim, emperors who ruled India from the 16th to 18th

centuries. Theirs was a civilization that contained both cruelty and

justice, excess and refinement. The emperors were great patrons of

the arts and artisans, students of science and architecture and

gardens.

 

The Taj is a wonder in the best sense, in that much of what makes it

work is invisible. The double layer dome. The calligraphers'

artfulness in gradually increasing the height of letters in the

Koranic scriptures on the exterior so that they look uniform. The

ingenious underground pipes that supplied water to the channels in

the charbagh, or foursquare garden.

 

But India is a majority Hindu nation, now controlled by Hindu

nationalists whose bête noire is the Muslim invaders who built the

Taj. As Hindu nationalists never fail to remind, the Moguls were

marauding conquerors who brutalized the bodies, psyches, and

monuments of Hindu India. But they also gave the country many of its

most beautiful buildings and gardens, which lie almost casually

studded throughout Delhi and Agra and nearby Fatepur Sikri, the

fabulous abandoned city built by Akbar.

 

Some ardent Hindu nationalists ignore this; others deny it

altogether. In our office library I recently unearthed a small

volume called the ''The Taj Mahal Is a Temple Palace,'' by one P.N.

Oak in 1974, and billed as ''An Epoch-Making Discovery Which Has

Proved All Histories and Historians Wrong.'' He argues that the Taj

was ''built by a powerful Rajput king in pre-Muslim times,''

constructed ''of the Hindus, for the Hindus and by the Hindus.''

 

Most historians, of course, disagree; it is clearly established that

the Taj was built by Shah Jahan, the son of Jahangir, the Mogul

emperor. Shah Jahan reputedly chose Arjumand Banu, renamed Mumtaz

Mahal -- ''chosen one of the palace'' -- as a wife at a noble

ladies' bazaar. Inflated through the ages into an almost impossibly

beautiful, virtuous and brave woman, despite a fairly scanty

historical record, Mumtaz Mahal accompanied him to war, and bore him

14 children, the last birth killing her at the age of 39. In death

she became her bereft husband's muse.

 

Like most great monuments, the Taj is a testament to the excesses of

its time. The Moguls were given to outrageous collections and

displays of wealth. So it was that 20,000 laborers (Kipling wrote of

the ''sorrow of the workmen who died in the building -- used up like

cattle'') spent 22 years to fulfill Shah Jahan's fancy, with jewels,

materials and craftsmen imported from China, Baghdad, Afghanistan

and elsewhere.

 

 

But its story is also about a struggle between tolerance and

extremism within Islam that continues to this day. Shah Jahan was

imprisoned by his son Aurangzeb, who succeeded him and reportedly

disapproved of his father's profligacy. Discarding the relative

tolerance of his forebears, Aurangzeb brought a Taliban-style rule,

trying to impose a literal Islam and persecuting and penalizing

Hindus and others.

 

Shah Jahan had sought perfect symmetry in the Taj, and placed the

tomb of Mumtaz (actually a marble cenotaph; her body is buried

below) squarely at the center, forming a perfect sightline out the

entrance. Aurangzeb spoiled that symmetry by placing his father's

tomb inside as well.

 

Some say that was because he felt guilty over how he had treated his

father and wanted to make amends. On my last trip, my guide said it

was because Aurangzeb deliberately sought to ruin the symmetry

because under Islam, symmetry should be reserved for God. ''He was a

fanatic Muslim,'' the guide, a Hindu Brahmin, said. Whether that

particular detail is true or not, Aurangzeb's fanaticism ultimately

led to the decline of the Mogul empire, prompting revolts among

different subject groups.

 

Aurangzeb did preserve the tomb at the Taj as a sacred space, and

for years, the Koran was continually read here by mullahs. That

custom ended as the Mogul empire declined, and the British empire

began to coalesce.

 

The British, along with the Jats, a caste of northern India, looted

the Taj of the lavish carpets, jewels, silver doors and tapestries

that once bedecked it. Lord William Bentinck, the first governor-

general of India, even planned to dismantle the Taj and sell off the

marble. And by the mid-19th century, according to D.N. Dube and

Shalini Saran in ''Taj Mahal,'' a small, readable guide published by

Roli Books International in 1985, the Taj had become a

colonial ''pleasure resort,'' with Englishmen and women dancing on

the terrace, and the mosque and its jawab rented out to

honeymooners.

 

Lord Curzon, who did more than any Englishman to preserve the Taj

and other monuments, noted that picnickers often came armed with

hammer and chisel, the better to extract fragments of agate and

carnelian from the flowers. He repaired the buildings, restored the

gardens, although with a British touch, and got the canals working

again.

 

It is easy to revile the British treatment of the Taj, but the

Indians haven't always done much better. As Agra grew, little effort

was made to spare the Taj the ravages of pollution, which began to

discolor the white marble. In the late 1990's, as the monument's

future began to seem deeply imperiled, the Supreme Court ordered the

shifting of some industries farther away.

 

Today, only electric-powered vehicles (or bicycle rickshaws) are

allowed near the Taj, and under a public-private partnership between

the government and the Taj Group of hotels, a major conservation

effort is under way. Moving slowly, thanks to unwieldy bureaucracy,

but steadily, a group of global experts has spent more than two

years researching and documenting the monument. Soon the real work

on the ground will begin. First the visitor facilities -- toilets,

drinking water and the like -- will be improved, and security made

less obtrusive. Then will come questions like how to improve the

visitor flow through the site and whether to restore the gardens to

their original state or preserve the lawns that were installed by

Lord Curzon.

 

A persistent conservation effort seems essential, given the

continuing threats to the monument. A scandal erupted after the

government of Uttar Pradesh, the state where the Taj sits, allowed

construction to start on a Taj Heritage Corridor, which included a

shopping mall between the Taj and Agra Fort, without securing the

permission of the central government. The project was scrapped amid

fears that it could damage the Taj, not to mention its ambience, and

the state's former chief minister, Mayawati, is being investigated

for corruption in connection with the project.

 

For now, the Taj endures, its elegance in contrast to the slums that

house nearly half of Agra's 1.5 million people.

 

In the words of the Indian publication Outlook Traveller, ''Whatever

mileage the city gets out of the country's most celebrated building,

it loses in the fact that you step out of it into filth.''

 

You can avoid some of the unpleasantness by taking an air-

conditioned bus tour, as my friend Christine and I did recently.

Most tours also stop at Akbar's tomb and Agra Fort, both definitely

worth seeing. A tour will spare you much harassment, but is

expensive, and subject to the whim of a guide; the one we had rushed

us through the riveting 16th-century Agra Fort, then forced us to

linger endlessly at a souvenir shop.

 

For more control of your time, you can take the train to Agra or

drive the 125 miles from Delhi. Either way, you will leave your car

or a taxi at the required distance, and hire a bicycle rickshaw or

motorized vehicle (or walk) to reach the monument. Most transport

will drop you at the eastern or western gate, where you will buy

tickets, but if you can, make your way to the southern gate -- it

allows for the most dramatic entrance, in which you move from a

medieval city quarter into a garden of paradise.

 

As a foreigner, you will pay $16 and be required to buy a ''day

pass'' to visit all the monuments -- Agra Fort, and others -- even

if you do not plan to visit them. Day pass is a misnomer: even if

you buy it, you must pay additional fees at the other monuments.

 

Getting into the Taj can leave you fairly ragged, between multiple

pat-downs by security guards, innumerable government-approved guides

wanting to sell their services, and having to check your electronic

devices, often with extortionists who demand to be paid. On your way

out, the hawkers will pounce.

 

The Taj, the Agra Fort and Fatepur Sikri are all in Uttar Pradesh,

one of India's poorest, most populous states. Unemployment is

extremely high, and you cannot blame residents for viewing the

monuments and the foreign tourists they draw as an economic

lifeline. Desperation sometimes manifests as aggression.

 

There may be no more brutal, surreal metaphor for that than what one

sees on the road between the Taj and Fatepur Sikri; it is lined with

men with dancing bears. As cars approach, the small bears are yanked

up on their hind legs in the hope of extracting a few rupees from

passing motorists.

 

But perhaps a certain arduousness in visiting the Taj only adds to

its effect. Somehow, after navigating the chaos, its beauty is even

more remarkable, perhaps more unexpected, when it first floats into

view, an image serene and perfect enough to tattoo inside an eyelid.

 

 

 

Correction: May 16, 2004, Sunday

 

An article on Page 9 of the Travel section today about the Taj Mahal

includes an outdated reference to the controlling role of Hindu

nationalists in India. On Thursday, after the section had gone to

press, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, whose nationalist party

had led the country since 1998, resigned after suffering an upset in

parliamentary elections.