Secondsaturn's Blog

One Night @ Mumbai, 2nd February 2010

I never go to weddings and that too just fly one evening down to Mumbai after office to attend a wedding reception is something that I never could imagine that I would do. But I did. I did this for a couple whose only child was getting married. It is possible that they will never see another function in their life as the newly married son leaves home permanently to become an NRI. Besides I knew that they would be happy to see me. These days of the afternoon of my life, I take these things seriously. Slowly one by one people who love me are becoming memories. This makes me more conscious and aware of the few remaining around me. This couple whose son’s wedding I went to attend was one of them.

I left office a bit early to catch the early evening Go Air Flight. In a rush I forgot to drink water and when I pushed around long queues at the security I realized that my throat was parched with thirst. I looked around for a glass at the security enclosure and found to my dismay that there was a snout out of which water gushed and you had to position your head, shoulders, torso, tongue and jaws to catch the water that ejected out like in a fountain to wet your face and smear your spectacles and embarrassingly moist your sweater. At the age of 50, I ended up unsuccessfully looking like a school girl wet all over her face because there is no luxury of drinking out of glass even though the school may have a water dispenser. In desperation to look for alternatives I headed for a Café Day counter to buy water when I suddenly stopped in my tracks and said “well, this is a ploy for me to buy bottled water.” I became adamant and walked up to the help desk to lodge my complaint. The girl was helpful, please maam, she said why you don’t write in the feedback form. I refused. I know these ploys very well, something similar to why court cases get so long to conclude; once you have delayed the moment, you have succeeded in distracting the person as well. No, I said, call the manager. The manager took about half an hour to come with three paper glasses.

Meanwhile I started to speak to the police, the cleaners and the other staff at the food counters. Each one said that they could not drink water from that fountain and as a result many had symptoms of dehydration. All of them including the policemen said that they were not allowed to complaint on the drinking water issue because they feared suspension. The cleaning staff said that one word of resentment and out they went of jobs and who would risk a parched throat at the cost of children and the elderly in the family? My heart sank. Is this our democracy, the world’s largest, on which I have an unwavering faith? This is not done, simply not done. Just for the profits of a few MNC chains, an entire population in the one of the world’s hottest cities is to be deprived of water? Besides, the height of the snout is such that water perpetually remains out of reach for children. The whole saga reminded me of Tagore’s poetry called Samanya Khoti, a Small Damage in which the queen ordered some huts of the poor to be burnt down because she wanted some fire to keep her body warm. The King exiled her by saying when private interests demand such a public sacrifice there is no question that she can in any way be tolerated. But the Indian democracy, the assimilative, unifying, universalizing and all absorbing grand civilization, has stooped so low at the altar of Mammon that thousands of people are to die of thirst to quench the profits of a few MNC brands? And should there be any protest the people are to lose their jobs? The manager at the airport tried to tell me that they were saving glasses to save trees? Is that the great environmental lie that is being told around? This is absolute nonsense and what is worse is just like once superstition helped sustain the dominance of religion, today science is being ferreted around to help establish the dominance of capital. No wonder, science is as disgusting as superstition when put to similar uses.

Anyway as I was boarding the plane, the TV showed two women in Ghaziabad fighting over the parenthood of the child. One woman was the surrogate mother of the child, while the other one the married wife of the biological father. Two men standing behind me were animatedly arguing about what motherhood should be? No, not whether it is a social structure or a biological fact but whether the woman who the man has socially married or the woman with who he had sex with reserves the right to motherhood? Interesting, the same mistress and wife argument seems to be preoccupying the minds of men while women debate about society and body. Monogamy has only sharpened the divide among women and their respective rights, men are least constrained by it.

I reached Mumbai without further fights or delays and felt an immediate elation at the quiet, mind-your-own-business and your business is my business attitude of the auto rickshaw drivers. One of them helped me to reach the Hotel Atithi, just on the outer walls of the airport. The desk handed me a form to be filled up in which I had columns like religion and caste. I jumped out of my skin !!!. I, the free citizen of India, having to write my religion and caste? I, for who the world’s longest Constitution has been written down? I a free citizen for who the world’s largest democracy grants equal dignity to all adults irrespective of religion, caste, class, creed? How dare the hotel abrogate the sanctity of my Constitution? No, the manager said, it is the state government that insists on such details.
Was not Jyotiba Phule from Maharashtra, was this not the home of Tukaram, Ramdas? Was this not the land that gave India so many martyrs to the Freedom Movement? But unfortunately, Maharashtra has decided to disown every body and make a hero out of Nathuram Godse, the man who killed the Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi. Do I think of Godse as the mythical Oedipus, who killed his father so that he could have control over his mother, perhaps the nation in this case? What is this strange psychology? Is attachment for mother also a subconscious expression of something else, like getting at a better and a stronger male, the father in this case? Sometimes a man’s chivalry is directed at other males rather than protecting the women. Just thoughts…I was wondering that when I came to Mumbai in 1969, as a child to visit my just married aunt I used to see hippies on the road. The American youth becomes a hippy when he is angry with the father and all that he stands for. The Asian youth become a religious fanatic, probably because religious fanaticism hurts the well established secular discourse of the state.

The taxi driver turned out to be an eager guide as well. He showed me all the new spots of interests; like the place where Hemant Karkare was shot at, the path the terrorists took, and the home of the Jews that was under siege. He was in fact so eager to show me the tree near which Karkare was shot down, that he nearly jumped the road divider. Strange he never even mentioned the Taj Hotel even while we drove past it several times. I think that like the terrorists he too believes that the people who visit the Taj ought to die. The class divide runs very deep even if the Marxists are no longer in fashion.
The taxi driver was an elderly Muslim from Pratapgarh, Uttar Pradesh called Abdul Rashid. I asked him how long he was in Mumbai to which he said that he had lost count. Seeing his eagerness at giving me a bonus ride (since I was paying him a fixed sum) all around the Shiv Sena monuments like Bala Saheb’s home, Raj Thackeray’s flat, MNS office and the Shiv Sena building I asked him whether he believed in the MNS. Abdul Rashid did not reply and instead grew philosophical and said that there was no reason to believe that we can every carry anything after we die. Why fight over trivial affairs when we are going to come alone to this world and depart alone? He sounded so much like Aurangzeb’s dying words and it was only then I noticed that he was tall and lanky and wore a skull cap which he said he had croched. He also said that as a past time he often wove skull caps. I asked him whether he knew calligraphy, the other talent of Aurangzeb, he said no that he did not know the letters.

Emboldened by my interests in the Muslims, Abdul Rashid showed me Haji Ali across the sea, standing patiently waiting for the devotee. In a sharp contrast to that the Siddhi Vinayak Temple stood in an arrogant defiance, as is trying hard to make a point. Devotees thronged in thousands, the long queue having reached Dadar. Rashid seemed very proud of the long queue that showed the devotion of Mumbaikars, something to brag about to a Delhiite like me. In Delhi, he was certain, that I will encounter no such intensity in devotion. He did not seem to mind that Haji Ali was empty.

Abdul Rashid took me to an alley approaching Colaba that was full of hotels especially to cater to tourists from the Gulf or on their way to the Gulf. There was a large building called the Hajj centre, serving the pilgrims to Mecca. Abdul Rashid has never been to Mecca, it is near home, he said, he can go at any time. Near home, I asked, utterly surprised at the suggested proximity between Mumbai and Mecca. Yes, Rashid said, it is the same sea, only this side and the other side. I never think of spaces like this, I always think them as separated by land mass, water bodies or by mountains. Rashid spoke of them as joining different locations. A significant difference in perception between him and I. I think of the world as discrete and divided, while to him it is all a unity with apparent diversity. I wondered whether it was for people like Rashid or intellectuals like me that we survive as a democracy.
Though Abdul Rashid was eager to show me the Muslim “deras”, he seemed to be very relieved to get on to the 5 km long flyover that rose straight from Mahalaxmi to the Flora Fountain completely ignoring spaces such as the Bhendi Bazaar, Gaffoor Market and Mohammad Ali Road, the names that are famous for the Bombay Blast of 1993. He mentioned several times that once we are on the flyover we will leave everything down below into the invisibility of our memory, we will not even catch a glimpse of these spaces. He was eager to erase all these notorious spaces in Mumbai; he was so enthused about Karkare and the 26/11 terrorists, perhaps because they were from Pakistan; but the blast embarrassed him, it were his own men and he too weak to do anything about such men.

The other narrative of Mumbai that Rashid felt that I should know was the saga of Pramod Mahajan. I saw everything, Pramod Mahajan’s flat, Rahul’s residence, Pravin’s residence, the hospital where Pramod Mahajan breathed his last, the crematorium in which his last rites were performed and the jail in which Pravin is locked up. Abdul Rashid thought that there could be no criminal like Pravin Mahajan, one who kills one’s own blood and makes a married woman take off her sindur. The motif of Sindur is India, Hindu or Muslim, it is of no consequences. Though Muslims except the ones in West Bengal do not wear sindur, the notion of the magic powder is spread deep into the soil of India. As they say in Kashmir, Islam in India is a Hindu sect. It is unfortunate that the Hindus have never seen it in this way. Whatever it is, I was convinced that the Muslims in Mumbai felt happier with the BJP than the Congress. The BJP could protect the north Indians from the MNS being the bigger Hindutva brother. The issue of the Hindi versus Marathi is getting to be more important.

I was surprised because Abdul Rashid no longer showed me any film star’s homes, or any studio, or any theatre halls. He showed me offices and restaurants, the Times of India office and the Jehangir Art Gallery, but stayed clear of cinema. Aapko dekhna hai? He asked disappointed. By now he had gathered a good impression of me because I wanted to go by the Worli Sea Link on my way back from the wedding and he was impressed because I had a large heart to spend Rs 50 as the toll tax. I got defensive; I merely said that taxi drivers were famous for showing film stars’ homes. Yes, he said, that used to be the case, now no longer. This was because the film wallahs no longer were important. I immediately understood; the drama of real life, the Karkare- terrorist shoot out, the point blank cold blooded murder of Pravin Mahajan or the tandav of the MNS were far more exciting. Real life events and not the make belief world of the cinema were now making up Mumbai; cinema was on a backfoot.
The disconnect of cinema and Mumbai was like the giant flyover that like a roller coaster took traffic off the crowds at Bhendi Bazar or the Sea Link that completely bypassed Mumbai, leaving it only as a side view in the horizon, cinema represented this grand impulse to leave the city behind as a space occupied by real people. The gloss of the flyover was a way to gloss over life. Mumbai was leaving itself behind. No wonder then some people wanted Bombay to become Mumbai, a way to claim or reclaim the city of reality and as Shobha De said make some sense of the growing culture of Bombay in which Mumbai had little space. Abdul Rashid’s deliberate ignoring of film stars was a way of isolating a culture that refused to acknowledge the presence of Mumbai in Bombay. These were of the people in clubs and malls ignoring the crowds in trains and who now needed to be ignored in return.

We reach Colaba and Abdul Rashid does not know the exact venue. So we stand asking people and Rashid gets down the cab to ask very old persons in the locality. The venue is a club and Rashid feels that the elderly should know it. But this club for the defense service persons and though Rashid assumes that very old taxi drivers would know of the location, I had no heart to tell him that familiarity with spaces is a matter of social class and not geography. My neighbour in my Delhi suburb residence is born and brought up in the city but has never been to Hauz Khas or Panchsheel; her modest social and economic background has made no grounds for her to ever access or visit these areas. Spaces in a city are divided by class and community and just as I have never visited Chitpur Road in Kolkata and my neighbour has no clue about Hauz Khas, drivers in Colaba had no reason to know of Navy Nagar.
Anyway we reach the destination and Abdul Rashid is again impressed with me. What fine people, what refined decoration, he commented. I went inside the reception ground but found myself standing at the end of a serpentine queue, a shorter version of the long ones of Siddhi Vinayak. Mumbaikars do not seem to mind the queue and wait for their turn. No one, even with slowly depleting food on the bouffet stacks ever thought of breaking the discipline and the routine. I remembered what a student leader in Jharkhand told me about Deccan India’s superior civilization. More reservations and more OBCs, the leader had opined, made India south of the Vindhyas more civilized. I agreed. Friends from Delhi eventually rescued me, have food first and then return to the queue, they suggested. I relented and found that opportunist strategies do better than bland obedience, at least when one is hungry.
On my way back to the hotel Abdul Rashid brought me by the new Sea Link. The empty stretch of the bridge provoked speeding and accidents. He brought up the topic of Noor Haveliwallah who in a state of drunken inebriation, hit, crashed and mangled taxis and killed a police on duty. The taxi unions and the police association were up in arms sending the court and the legislative assembly thinking of draconian laws to check drunken driving. Noor was an NRI, a woman, a non-Maharashtrian, Muslim, unmarried, outgoing and partying and a non-celebrity and had destroyed property of taxi drivers and killed a policeman. Neither Salman Khan’s crushing of the pavement dwellers, nor had the terrorist killing of policemen invoked such strong reactions on the Mumbai streets as Noor Haveliwallah had provoked. The attributes of her origin had made her a perfect candidate to be burnt at stake. She, a woman had upset not the street dwellers but a class of wannabe middle class aspirant, the taxi wallahs and had killed a policeman being a woman, one who should vis-à-vis the incumbent of the state remain invisible and inconsequential. Instead, she has assumed enough social and economic powers to maraud and kill. I could see Abdul Rashid express the lower class anger against the upper class and what best can it be if it is a young and unmarried woman and hence untouched by patriarchy, uncontrolled because she has partied, autonomous because she is on her own and free because she was enjoying with her own friends and Muslim, India’s most hated minority?

Anyway I returned to the hotel, barely being able to stay awake at hours past midnight. I crashed in my bed only to wake up at the alarm going off. I bathed and spoke to Madhusree. The hotel, as usual with its impeccable hospitality got me the complementary morning tea, good Assam, as it would suit my taste. The hotel had me dropped off at the airport where I again stood behind a long and a patient queue. I was traveling by Go Air whose boarding pass contains a tea or coffee at the Café Day. I proceeded towards the coffee counter but there was a serpentine queue again. I turned back and headed straight for Landmark; I was not to stand once again behind a queue even if it was for free coffee.

I had collected the morning Times of India edition at the hotel. I boarded the plane and read through it. Noor Haveliwallah was made to walk barefoot all over the place, a way to abrogate her social class and her existential being. The police association was collecting money to support the family of the deceased victim among them. One wonders what they did for the families of the colleagues who died on 26/11. Well. There was mention in the newspaper about insurance companies paying up for the damages, but not the solution but the punishment made Mumbai go agog. I don’t think that Mumbaikars want her to hang, but pay up astronomical sums for damages; what is a woman’s life worth so that one would want to take it? But her wealth, that should go. Women and wealth do not go together; women should not have wealth because that makes her independent and powerful, so the wealth should go. The barefoot image of Noor was a prelude to stripping her, dignity, wealth, social status and above all freedom. Her pathetic demeanour reminded me of Marie Antoniette and her execution by a power hungry and vengeful mob, albeit of the French Revolution demanding equality, liberty and fraternity.

The newspapers had other news, how the government is seeking to modify the CRZ rules so that capitalists and not the fisherman are benefited, how students forced to take the technical courses committed suicide, how SRK says that he will take the Shiv Sena on and Udhbhav Thakeray’s bogey of insiders and outsiders, the suicide of a cop at a mock drill, driven to desperation by his own ilk rather than rammed into by Noor Haveliwallah, how the liquor baron dies unable to bear the news of death of his daughter, and the SC ruling that Muslim cops who have two wives should be sacked. These pieces builds up the Universe of Mumbai – of conflict, contests, assertions, aspirations, despair and dominance tucked away behind the neat and long queues of Mumbaikars patiently waiting for their turn at everything. A Gujarati co passenger borrowed my newspaper apologetically saying that his edition was safely lying at home at the assigned time but because he had to leave early for the early flight he could not bring it with him. Soon the plane touches ground at Delhi and I am back after spending one night at Mumbai.

Madhusree and I feel a sense of ownership towards the Surajkund Crafts Fair because it has been five years now that we have made a colony around the ground as our home. What is even more pertinent is that each morning without fail, our pet bitch goes there for her shit. She has also made friends with some stray dogs in the grounds who are now regular partakers of Pedigree dog food. Our pet, called Georgina is a freak for freshly cooked hot meals and does not touch any form of processed and packaged food. But the canine species who inhabit the fair ground called Tuktuki, Rini, Jojo, Bhuto, Coco and so on gorge on the food we give them to keep them in good humour so that they accept Georgina’s footfall there every morning. These dogs and bitches are very helpful as they chase unfriendly dogs away and do not let the monkeys bother us. Besides the canines and the crowd of monkeys, there are others too in the ground like Rani, the camel, Ramesh the bull, numerous peacocks, a blue-winged pair of robin, some long tailed drangoes, patridges, hoopoes, white eagles and the best among them a small nuclear family of the nilgai, the bull, the cow and their calf. Sometimes, when a fire rushes through the Asola forest during the dry months of an early summer, more of such families of the blue bull and a few sambhar deer come for shelter in the Surajkund fair ground.

Besides these animals, also found in the ground are the peepal, banyan and babul trees. There are ketaki shrubs and some juliflora procipus, the dreaded shrub that sucks water out of the ground drying ponds, springs and marshes. There are fungi and mosses, especially when after the winter mist leaves the ground they proliferate into becoming a green velvety carpet on the earth. Then there are grasses, some are short and stalky and some grow tall. They create trouble for Georgina by entangling themselves around her ankles, feet and ears.

Some of us are regular visitors of this ground. These regulars seldom talk to each other or exchange pleasantries but we know one another as familiar faces. There are the yoga freaks, the laughter club wallahs, the elderly women who exercise in sarees with amazing dedication and regularity; there are some joggers, some walkers and some deep breathers. The men are mostly old and retired and who have little need to return home because there is little use for them there; there are the potbellied housewives who are bending backwards, forwards and on the sides to regain some agility that once was theirs but now forsaken them with hours of grueling housework; and there are the young men, who jog, run, jump not so much for fitness but to be qualified in the Haryana or Delhi police examinations. And there is also another very important set of visitors who come to Surajkund but remain mostly hidden behind the bushes and shrubs, and include men, women, boys and girls who come to defecate in the open because the toilets in the villages have no water. However, the star among us is an elderly couple and a young athletic boy who come to feed the animals in Surajkund. They look like the Pied Piper with the canine, bovine, apian and avian species faithfully following them around. When they come, Surajkund looks like the Tapovan of some Vedic heritage.

During the two and a half months of the fair, fifteen days for the fair and two months before that for the preparations, Surajkund is closed for us and along with that our lives get badly disrupted. In the fortnight of the fair, our roads are jammed, sometimes with cars and buses but also because people unfamiliar with the treacherous winds and bends of the road unsuccessfully negotiate the traffic. It is not always easy to drive along such winding and narrow roads with sharp bends and blind curves. Such cars sometimes slow down and at other times bang against trees and culverts and often ram into two wheelers and on coming traffic. The long and short of it is that our roads are congested and I can hardly reach office on time and take longer hours behind the wheel to reach back home in the evening. Georgina gets a bit upset at this. We have prolonged power cuts because the electricity is diverted for the numerous rides at the fair ground. All the surrounding grounds are taken over for parking and we have to go very early in the morning with Georgina because the parking contractors catch us and make us pay for using what we generally consider is ours. The morning visitors disappear and with them one does not know where the dogs and the monkeys and the peacock disappear too. Sometimes I spot Jojo running to greet us, or the robin couple trying to dig into a pool of mobile oil left behind by a leaking automobile. One morning I saw the mother cow with her calf of the nilgai trembling at the sight of a mammoth earth remover that had come to dig the earth out to create another parking space. The peacocks seem to have vanished and there seems to be no trace of Tuktuki or Bhuto. The other day I saw a heap of green and as I moved close I saw the entire row of ketakis lying uprooted and chopped off lying in the sun as garbage and slowly and painfully dying. Those who had the cover of the shrubs to save their honour while they defecate now have to do so in the full gaze of the people as the shrubs and trees have been mercilessly uprooted as a facelift for the fair ground.

As I walk the road to catch a sight of the crowds thronging into the fair ground dressed in glitter and gloss, I see a familiar face of Rani, the camel. She looks on pathetically at us as I call out her name. She is with a young urchin who is enticing the visitors to ride Rani and I learn that her owner has rented her out to this dry skinned unkempt adolescent from the street that is making some money out of her.
Madhusree and I decided to visit the fair only as a matter of formality. The fair is very much the same, more of an entertainment than education. One has to look at the crafts of the various parts of India to see how uniform the country really is. One who holds on to the idea that India is a unity in diversity has only to take a look at its crafts to see how such a vast expanse of diversity collapses into a unity of colour, design, shapes and skill. Most of the stalls have stuff that is sold at astronomical prices because of the high rents of the fair ground. What passes off as the handicrafts of the master craftsmen are surprisingly poorer and yet more expensive version of Dilli Haat or even of Sarjoni Nagar. Many of the wares are found by the highways to Jaipur or Agra and with the unauthorized hawkers in the streets around Swabhumi of Kolkata. There seems to be very little innovations in the garments, sarees or even the jewellery or furniture. Madhubani paintings are the same as ever and the durries, footwear, jute bags and stone carvings are unchanging and repetitive. But some had innovated like a craftsperson used walnut wood and ceramic pottery to create boxes or some had used jute to make some interesting footwear; one innovative craftsman had used very tiny beads and threads to make coasters and there was one who experimented with interesting colours for his pottery. I would have gone for more of paper machier, but unfortunately not many crafts persons were engaged in this craft. I was also disappointed with the terracotta craftsmen and wondered why the excellent artisans had not come from Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand.

Surajkund draws crowds and the sight of innocent crowds which in turn attracts terrorists and suicide bombers and hence in the name of protecting civilians, the fair ground runs thick with police persons. The police is everywhere, you can find them breathing down your neck when you bend down to look at some wares, you bang into them on your way to the toilets and you have to skirt them around when you have to move across the path to move into another arena. The women police are quieter sitting down in a corner but the men are moving around, jostling and brushing with the crowd, especially the women among them. I caught the glimpse of a policeman deliberately making a respectable woman dressed in a somber suit of black tweed very uncomfortable.

Surajkund has traditional folk musicians playing their music in every nook and corner, under trees and inside chaupals. But the visitors are forever missing their companions, or leaving behind their purses, or having buses to catch and hence all one gets to hear over the microphone are announcements in Haryanvi Hindi of how visitors have to collect their belongings and companions and get on to their buses that are now ready to depart. The noise pollution overwhelms Surajkund and once you leave the fair ground with your ears taut with the cacophony of announcements than with the pleasing strains of the folk music.

Madhusree and I found the food court to be like any other chaat corner of any market in Delhi. Cold samosa, soggy papris, stale golgappas, badly mixed bhel and insipid fruit juices that were supposed to be free of any preservatives were served here. On our way out, Madhusree spotted Giani’s stall and the Belgian chocolate half way between a frozen mousse and icecream was delicious. I was relieved to learn that Giani was a Sikh from Fatehpur in Haryana and not an Italian as a young friend seemed to believe.

But the stars of Surajkund were the musicians and the dancers. There were drummers from tribal Orissa, folk musicians of Karnataka, the seamen of Tamil Nadu, the desert dancers of Rajasthan, the dancer from Afghan hills, the Konkani fisherfolk, the Gujarati nomads and the snake charmers from the east all were performing and the women, young and old from among the visitors entered the arena and danced to their hearts’ content. The conservative Bengalis from among the crafts persons were initially shocked at the wanton enjoyment of the women folk of Haryana but soon enough they forgot their reservations and looked on appreciatively from their stalls.

As I watch the snake charmers and the bauls, or the Egyptian belle dance away with her many plaited hair, the Kerala masked men, the fisher women from Goa and the Gonds from the hills of Chhattisgarh, I realize that how similar the folk forms of dances are across the various parts of India and Eurasia. It is not merely the crafts but dance and music too seem to weave vast expanses of geography into a unity of culture and history. I also realized how and why Michael Jackson was so unique, because he started a brand of break dance that was centred on the naval and the body parts shot out into the air in defiance of the centre. In the folk dance forms that I was witnessing, flying movements of limbs and hips converged strongly and collapsed into the centre. America is outward, Eurasia is inward, a crucial difference in ways of seeing and being in the world.

Madhusree and I returned from the fair ground feeling cold as the breeze was rising with the sun going down. We had bought a walnut box with ceramic drawers to keep our nail cutter and dental floss in them. We also bought a candle stand which we immediately installed and put a burning candle in it. We made ourselves tea for the evening counting the days for the fair to get over and for everyone of us to return to the normal daily routine.

I have been to the Taj Mahal many times. I usually never miss a chance to visit this tomb. Along with Sikandra and Fatehpur Sikri, the Taj Mahal never ceases to wonder me. I have seen the mausoleum in the slanting orange rays of the setting Autumn sun, I have seen it in the misty and dewy mornings of North Indian winter. I have seen rains lashing against its minarets from a grey sky above, I have seen dark clouds conjoin into a speeding sand storm around its pillars, and I have seen it in the soft sunshine under a clear blue sky in spring. But never before yesterday did I see the Taj Mahal in the sharp simmering noon of peak summer. The guide told us right at the time when we were mounting the tonga that he would charge us double the usual price. We protested vehemently because we were expecting an off season discount. But the guide reasoned out and said after looking at the sky, “have you seen the scenery above”, where beams of the unrelenting sun was raining merciless solar heat on our skulls. We quickly agreed to him on the condition that he would explain things selectively and conclude our tour in half an hour flat. We had among us persons for whom this was the first sight of the Taj and the guide had to really do a job compressing the tour of the tomb so that the bare essentials could be chafed out from those details that suit a more congenial weather.
The Taj never fails to rejuvenate me through its suddenness of appearance. The monument is invisible from the outer gates but as one moves in through the gates into the inner spaces, one can slowly see the Taj bit by bit until it suddenly shocks you by opening up in its full splendour. The guide tells us that the pillars of the Taj tilt slightly outwards and this is because its architect felt that should there be an earthquake the pillars must not fall on the structure but could crash out on the other side thus saving the main edifice. The pillars are regular cylinders but appear conical to the naked eye because of their height. The letters of the Koran appear all around the arch progressively increase in size so that when seen from the ground they appear all of the same size. The quadrilaterals appear hexagonal because of the geometric patterns, and in some places pillars seem to be moving away from one another once again because of the geometrical patterns. Seen from inside the archways of the mosque or the hostel on either side of the Taj, the entire Taj Mahal seems to be floating away. Indeed when one sits on the side of the river, especially if the dry bed is inundated after a heavy monsoon, then one gets the feeling of being on the deck of a ship and the Taj seems to be afloat. There is a distinct sense of floatation in the Taj, which could be due to the several optical illusions around the monument. In a summer afternoon as the one I visited it, the Taj shimmers against the light sky and its reflection quivers in the waters of its canals to give the distinct feeling of the Taj mingling into the cosmos and its elements.
The guide had meanwhile prepared a list of characteristics that are essential to the understanding of the monument. The white marble from Makrana, the inlay work, the stone embossing and the filigree seemed to be common place and mundane. I realized that these were only incidental to the monument and not intrinsic to its mysteries. The crux of the Taj is its dimension. The utter symmetry of the architecture, the sameness of effect everywhere, and the acutely measured proportions makes the Taj suddenly disappear from sight if one looks very intently. This is why the Taj cannot be replicated; its dimensions are its wonderment; the feeling of floating away and its sense of becoming invisible. The Taj is unique not because of its visuality but because of its invisibility. I asked the guide whether he has ever seen the Taj on a full moon night, he did not. But he imagined that the Taj would be turned into a glowing monument and he would be able to see all the stones glowing at once especially because now he had to use the slight light of the mobile phones to show the tourists how the stones in the inlay work glowed at night. This could have been the case, if the Taj received light from a lower height. But the moon is overhead and because of its symmetry the entire structure disappears in its own shadow leaving only the white dome and the top portions of the pillars look as if they had been suspended from Heaven !!!
On either side of the Taj are symmetrical buildings, a mosque and the hostel. These images so mirror each other that from any direction the Taj looks the same. These monuments are essential to the symmetry of the Taj. The Taj was built in 22 years and everywhere the number finds its presence. There are 22 steps into the mausoleum; there are 22 resting points for the visitors and so on. Inside the mausoleum, due to the symmetry there is cross ventilation in which breeze flows in from all eight directions !!
The guide racked his brain and sped towards an enclosure in which lay drawing of the spire on the floor of the platform. He pointed out at the trident on the spire holding the thin slice of the new moon, symbols of Shaivite Hinduism and Islam held together. This is interesting because Akbar actively promoted the Vaishnavite Hinduism by officially celebrating Holi and Janmasthami but Shah Jahan seemed to have some inclination towards Shaivism, a branch of Hinduism that was clearly on the backfoot under the wide sweep of the Bhakti movement in northern India. The Deccan however was seeing a revival of sorts in Shaivism and this indicates the influence of the Deccan was no less on Shah Jahan than on Aurangzeb. Also hidden in its arches are lotuses that also give an illusion of being a trident, perhaps an attempt at favouring Shaivism over Vaishnavism, something that could well have been also a covert Deccan versus Gangetic Plain tussle.
I have never vibrated with the fact that the Taj is a story of love. Love cannot be so calculated and so rational, it cannot be so planned, so acutely designed, so conscious and so ostentatious. Love, to my mind is the stairway from Jodha Bai palace in Fatehpur Sikri that goes down into the temple so that the queen riding on the elephant need not have “touched” anything to spoil her purity as she went in and out of the temple; love is the 150 samples of earrings that adorn the border of her kitchen because for a long time Akbar only saw her covered head with only her dangling earrings being all that was visible to the Emperor. Akbar never took a navy out in the high seas because they were plied by the Portuguese and his Goan wife could have well been a Portuguese, yet another matrimonial alliance that we hardly notice. These were instances of great love. The Taj is too imposing, too awe inspiring, too mysterious, too intriguing to be love. The Taj is defiance, man’s defiance of Death, man’s refusal to accept the inevitable, King’s arrogance towards God so that death is forgotten, but the dead emerge into this massive monument to become the greatest wonder of the world. Taj rises to become the Divine, for only in its Divinity, Death can be forgotten and hence perhaps also conquered.
The Mongols, the forefathers of the Mughals have a penchant for loving their women and going far to fulfill that love for her. I saw the film called Mongol, a biography of Chengiz Khan in his youth and it appeared that the entire being of Chengiz Khan was founded upon the love for his principle queen. That same blood seem to flow into Akbar’s love for Jodha, Jahangir’s love for Noorjehan and finally Shah Jahan’s love for Mumtaz Mahal. This is not macho and many cultures are embarrassed by it. Jesus was supposed to have never married and Muhammad, a much married man is usually imagined as single. Rama is only slightly criticized for abandoning Sita while she was expecting his children and Buddha is a hero because he left behind his young wife and infant child in pursuit of a higher purpose. Hence, the Taj is an embarrassment for its celebration of uncompromising love of an otherwise uncompromising Emperor. The Mughals did not seem to talk much about it; the locals seemed to be eager to forget it and indeed a large section of the Indians today appear not to notice it. Nowhere is the desire to brush the Taj under the carpet so clear as in the city of Agra, where it is almost impossible to locate the Taj. The locals do not seem to know about it, the sign boards seem only to misguide the tourist. The Taj is promoted largely by Western tourists, inspired by the thesis of Victorian love and the romance of monogamy.
But the defiance of the Taj against the Divine, its assumption of Divinity, its desire to become so perfect so as to mingle indistinguishably into the ether, its weightlessness despite its girth, its floatation despite being grounded makes one wonder that the Taj is man’s ultimate desire to become God. This is also why; the Taj Mahal is such an embarrassment for the clerics and religious fundamentalists. But in such defiance of man and also his desire to become Divine lies the roots of the grand school of German Idealism, a system of philosophy that none other than Dara Shuko, Shah Jahan’s son is reputed to have inspired. Today German Idealism is much maligned but in the times of modernity, German Idealism’s discovery of the individual agent as the locus of history and the source of its laws was an assertion of human powers of inventions, discovery, secularism, equality and liberty. The Taj is perhaps the first assertion of that sentiment.
It is said that Agra was lost in obscurity before the Mughals came in here. Perhaps yes but possibly not. Agra was crowded, vibrant and had a life of its own, perhaps not under the Empire but definitely with a powerful civil society of merchants, guild owners, freight forwarders and money lenders. It was the seat of outsourcing for shoes and gears for the military would be manufactured from here. The location of the Taj and the Agra fort, and also of Sikandra and Fatehpur Sikri are in the outskirts of the city and not in the city proper. In fact, looked at closely, the city and the Mughal areas are distinct and clearly separated. Agra is merely associated with the Mughals because of the proximity; it is more of the Mughals trying to appropriate the glory of Agra than the other way round. No wonder then Agra by not putting up sign boards to indicate the historical monuments is also in defiance of the Taj, or the fort or even of Sikandra, where the great Akbar lay in a tomb resembling the mother’s womb in which his grave is planted like a foetus waiting to be reborn and reclaim over and over again. On the archway of Sikandra, written in Persian are the words from the Gita, that the soul leaves the body just as we leave our old clothes behind. Dara Shukoh eventually translated the full text of the Gita, on which Hegel wrote his commentary that constituted his philosophy of art and the prolegomena of Phenomenology

Another Visit

What the dead speak, what Death speaks

It is always a pleasure to visit the Taj Mahal, its grandeur that lies in the sheer scale of the building, the largeness that exhausts the span of the eye so that when you see the Taj you see nothing else in the field of vision. Made over a period of 22 years in the middle of the 17th century, the project was a famine relief work, a la the MNREGA. Created in the memory of his beloved wife, Shah Jahan raised the scale of architectural creativity to perhaps any possible peak of human imagination. The invisibility and not the visibility of the monument seems to be its unique selling point; the details are designed to simply vanish into a transcendental whole. This is a Kantian concept of perfect aesthetics as the unity of faculty to the point of non-feeling. The Taj becomes this point of the nirvana; it seems to be always present. Imaged after his imagination of Heaven, the Taj is high frequency.

There is excitement about the Taj, tourists visiting galore this monument that recreates the image of Heaven most believably upon earth. Compare that to Sikandra, grand and silent, awaiting your worship, just like its occupant, Emperor Akbar in his eternal sleep. This is the tomb of the king, a tome to his memory for having been a great king. This is also the only mausoleum in which you can descend to the actual grave and not the dummy grave that we usually find in other tombs. Just about any and everyone can walk into the grave. This is a mausoleum which does not have an elaborate rampart. One enters through a doorway and then through a narrow passage sloping down into the tomb. The grave area is totally bare without a single etch of either the Quran or any decoration. It is designed like a mother’s womb, the passage being the vagina for here the dead Emperor is laid to rest again as an embryo waiting to be reborn. Akbar was a firm believer of rebirth, and in death he promises to be born again. This is a peopled grave; this is also a people’s grave. A khadim stands lighting incense sticks, some visitors go and bend over the grave touching their foreheads to the stone just as they would do for any Hindu deity. Akbar stood for the Hindus, giving the natives dignity of being the real owners of the land and that changed the morale of India, not a King over subjects, but a guardian for children rightfully born into entitlement of the land. That explains Sikandra, its sprawl into that of all-encompassing outstretched hands, gardens those house deer and peacocks, monkeys and parrots. Atop the mausoleum is a five storeyed construction of hanging balconies with canopies, these being insignia of the raj chhatri, literally the umbrella of the king. Akbar is an Emperor, born as one, dead as one, forever one. Sikandra is that song in stone that immortalizes a king who thought of protecting a land, preserving its past and promising its future. It is the grave of an Emperor who impersonated the country and its people, its history and destiny, its dharma in all possible dimensions of economy, polity, society, culture and religion.

My personal favourite is the Humayun’s tomb; simple and solid, grand because it is so simple. Yet it is not the tomb of a king; it is a tomb of a king who wanted to be a good man, it is the mausoleum of a sage like human, saintly and scholarly. This is the most unguarded tomb of all, one can just keep on one’s shoes and trample about the graves. This mausoleum has the greatest number of graves; in fact it is stuffed with graves. There are graves within the central hall, in the corner rooms, under the main portico and in the open on the plinth and on the base platform. The mausoleum is populated with the dead and yet it is very dead itself. It looks like a room left behind in death by a great scholar, the trees drooping heavy with its dark and shiny green canopy of branches and leaves look as if they are pouring over books in deep concentration. Unlike the Taj which is live, unlike the Sikandra which wants to be alive again, the Humayun tomb is life as it once used to be, as it was once lived, with its garden and the trees looking like impressions on cushions and back rests of chairs upon which the scholar used to once be; he no longer is but the impression of once where he sat is clearly marked out.