MAY-A-3

A TOURIST TRIP AS PILGRIMAGE TO AGRA
AND “THE TAJ”
MAY 2, 2001

TRAIN TO AGRA FROM DELHI, THEN BUS RIDE TO FATEHPUR SAKRI,
IN TORRID HEAT, TO EXPLORE THE ABANDONED CAPITAL OF SHAH AKBAR,
THEN MAKE THE ROUNDS OF HIGH PRESSURE CARPET SALESMEN
AND A FLYBY OF THE AGRA FORT
AS WE DEVOTE THE WHOLE OF THE AFTERNOON TO SUNSET
 AT THE TAJ MAHAL

 

Four o'clock in the morning was too early to have any of us up and about other than grudgingly, and a few of us needed repeated room calls to mobilize. A couple of us were still not awake as we were shuffled into the waiting taxis with little concern for baggage, since we would be returning to the same Jakuri Inn for the night after a day trip by train to Agra-a rather well exercised tourist day trip route. There are three UN World Heritage zones in Agra, the Mogul capital of India, built at the time when Akhbar ("The Great") was the Emperor. First is his planned, built, occupied, and then abandoned special Capital City Fatehpur Sikri. Then there is the second attraction-the Red Fort of Agra-site of the defeat of the subcontinent when the British Raj stormed it and made their Queen, Victoria, Emperiatrix. And third, of course, is the Taj Mahal, said by many to be the most famous and beautiful building or memorial, or token of undying love (choose one!) in the world. We would see them in that order, contrary to our acquired Agra guide's advice, since he suggested we might go first to the Taj, before the place became choked with visitors, and the sun came up to bring the ambient temperature above 45* C. Michael Eiffling was convinced, however, that he wanted to take pictures of the Taj at slanting light and sunset, and suggested we start with the old capital city at an hour's distance from Agra itself. This would mean that we would catch the maximum heat of the day's predicted high temperatures at each of the three sites, and would foreshorten our Fort Agra experience in order to maximize the time we would be at the Taj.

By now, even those who had not been to India (or, abroad) before are getting used to the amenities of our First Class cabin in the narrow gauge train; the straight pipe through the floor of the "WC" through which the narrow band of some of the best fertilized real estate in India can be seen retreating under the train was hardly even remarked over by those returning from a bathroom stop while traveling out to Agra.

Agra is now a busy industrial city, large by standards other than those of India, sine the several million inhabitants are a small fraction of those living in some of the larger cities, and the population of the unhoused street people in Calcutta or Bombay may be even larger than the population of Agra. The number one engine of the economy is, however, tourism, and there is a strict law to try to protect their number one asset from deterioration. There can be no smokestack-industrial or otherwise, within a 75 km radius of the Taj Mahal. This is a law designed to protect the marble monument from acid rain or deterioration from airborne pollutants and photochemical smog. That the very much more frequent and considerable more delicate tissue of the alveolar-capillary membrane is al over India stoking the fires of thousands of such point pollution sources right under these nostrils is of no major legal consequence, presumably, since none of these more delicate mortals is supposed to last forever. The Taj is an immortal tribute to love-even a faithful marital love-Mumtaz was his favorite and most productive wife until her death at a somewhat early age in the throes of yet another pregnancy's delivery.

So, off we go to see first the abandoned Mogul capital city, and then the long afternoon visit to climax our stay in Agra at the Taj, with a quick stop at the Fort Agra and much longer, unfortunately, stops at the high pressure shops of rug peddlers and jewelry or souvenir shops. Here comes the first stop---a place I had toured about 20 years ago, and never thought I would see again, although I fully expect to see the Taj at decade intervals-and annually for the next several years-who knows, some day while not traveling by myself.

FATEHPUR SIKRI
THE ABANDONED CAPITAL CITY OF AKHBAR "THE GREAT"
AND SEAT OF THE MOGHUL EMPIRE

When last I was here, I did not have the capability to tell you that SIKR is 21* 06.05 N, 77* 40.05 E which makes it 107 miles at 34* (i. e. northeast) of Delhi. It had taken us a couple of hours to get from Delhi to Agra by train, and now another hour and a half to go part way back toward the site of Fatehpur Sikri. AGRA is 27* 09.33 N and 78* 01.44 E, or 113* from Delhi at 33* which is where the Taj Mahal is located.

The city of Fatehpur Sikri is 9.7 square kilometers, and walled with two major gates. Most Moslem structures have a gate at the sunrise (Eastern) side, since the sun is in a position that it will always be on the Eastern edge, whereas the sacred Q'aba of Mecca is West of India and varies with your position on the globe. Many of us get accustomed to the Moslem prayer posture be to bow toward the East, showing that we are unaware that possibly the majority of the Moslems on earth (certainly, at least, the largest Moslem nation, Indonesia) must bow toward the West, a mistake we make as Westerners who do not frequent the great parts of the globe such as the Turkic Republics of the former USSR and the very Moslem Gulf states and Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan, states whose very founding is on the basis of their dominant Islamic religion. Akhbar (as one might suspect from his name, one of the first of the 99 names of Allah, "The Great", as in Allah Akhbar!" the quintessential Moslem credo) was Moslem. The Mogul originated from the Caucasus Mountains in the area of the Turkic Republics where they had swept down from the Asiastic steppes as Mongols from the north central plains where Mongolia is today. I had looked across from Kazakhstan into Mongolia, where the fierce warrior hard-riding horsemen of the terrible era of the Mongol hordes, Genghis Khan, and the like had come down and sacked such erudite capitals as Baghdad and Damascus and turned the rivers black with the ink of the priceless medieval manuscripts of the overthrown libraries and piled skulls in center cities everywhere along the way to let the populations know that they were not campaigning as Mister Nice Guy. These Mongols got religion, in much the same way our Western conqueror heroes who had done the same pillaging and conquest came East from the cradle of our "Western Civ"-Alexander, also the Great. At the marriage of Alexander's armies and the women they had subdued, Hellenic became Hellenistic, and the cross-fertilization led to new cultures, with a number of somewhat unorthodox religions from the hybrid. The same happened when the Mongol became Mogul, and came down from the Caucasus to spread the "Allah Akhbar" by the sword, and merchant trading by the camel caravan in refueling victualing stations that were the Turkish Caravanserai. The lineage of Akhbar and his forefathers and descendants carried on the same practice of marrying the daughters of the prominent princes in which they hoped to strike up allegiances-an easier process for the Moslem since they were allowed four wives and any number of concubines by the Koranic good book. So, Akhbar-just before he became so "Great" took three wives-hedging his bets for a later fourth. One was Moslem-of course-and the other two were to become Moslem for the purposes of being consort to the emperor, but one was a Hindu princess and the third was Christian. This is Hellenistic hybridity on horseback.

Poor Akhbar. He did what he could. As much as he tried, he kept impregnating them and the best they could do was to abort or to deliver a squalling baby girl-not just what anyone wanted. So he consulted a sage wiseman who lived out near a place Fatehpur Sikri (you can tell from the suffix that it was a Hindu town, which end in -Pur, as in Jaipur, etc, as opposed to a Moslem town, which ends in the suffix -Abad, as in Jalallabad). The Sufi (the name for a Moslem mystic saint) declared that he would have a son, in fact two of them, and that they would issue from his Hindu wife, and that this first borne heir would succeed him. And, so it came to pass.

Akhbar was so over-the-moon thrilled with this prophecy and its fulfillment, that he decided to build his capital of his whole Mogul Empire based here in Fatehpur Sikri, and designed and built at town as own of the earlier planned capital cities-later examples include Pierre L'Enfant's Washington DC, Australia's American-designed Canberra, Brazil's Brasilia, India's New Delhi, Malawi's replacement for Blantyre as Lilongwe, and a few other unpopular rather sterile government towns. To do so, they diverted a rather inadequate nearby river and built a lake as the water source for this new capital, and then set to work, sparing no expense from the emperor's rich purse and labor pool of conscripts and came up with the classic Mogul design and construction. Elaborate multiple floors of carved red granite sandstone and marble with no pictorial symbolism (they are Moslem-and thou shalt not make any graven images of Allah, man or their creations--- so highly stylized art was wrought. The entire area was cooled and circulated by canals of water. There was a temple built for his Hindu bride with a motif from the Hindu areas she had come from. A special Mosque was built opposite the Eastern main gate, and we could go in there only if we rented leg covers, since it would be unsanctified to bare our thighs in such holy place. We had already stripped off our shoes and had tried to walk around the courtyards, especially in one platform like that which is also seen in the Red Fort, where a musician or poet would sit on the raised central platform surrounded by the flowing cool waters and the emperor would listen to the music or poetry from an overhead balcony. To express his favor, he would throw gold coins down-an early from of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

There was also the court where the Emperor-the last court of appeal-would hear the arguments on serous cases. He was said to b a merciful leader, but there were and are lots of capital crimes in Islam. So, "elephant justice" was carried out. At the conclusion of the testimony, the accused's head was placed on a marble block and a trained elephant would come over and place its foot on the head of the accused. Whither from a silent signal from the emperor, or in default, the elephant's own judgment on the accused would decide the case. He either stepped over or on the accused, and in either case the recidivism rate was quite low.

When I was last in Sri Lank and had toured the Colombo Zoo, there was a trained Asian elephant act involving quite a few of the Zoo's keepers and trainers. The previous day, a disaster had struck, and so I was there on a very big turnout day. The keepers would lie down and have the elephants kneel over them three at a time. On the prior day, there must have been some silent "thumb's down" equivalent in elephant lingo, since all three were crushed the prior day. There was a great murmur of anticipation when I was present in the following performance in 1996, and when the three (new) trainers lay down, the elephants stepped gingerly over them and all three got up-I thought, rather more to the crowd's disappointment.

I said we "tried" to walk around in the red stone courtyards. It would be more accurate to say we hopped around, since the noonday sun was churning up some serious contact heat from the paving, and the air above it was seen to radiate with wobbly heat waves. A slender worn carpet had been strung over toward the entrance of the Mosque-exactly as I had seen it in the world's (then) largest Mosque in Lahore Pakistan (a gift from the United Arab Emirates Emir Sheik Zayed of Abu Dhabi for his gratitude to be able to come to Pakistan and go hunting with his hunting Sakir falcons-not to be outdone, Saudi King Faisal donated a very large modern mosque in the new capital of Jalalabad-see here is another planned capital of a new nation with a suffix which you already know tells you what religion is dominant in this subcontinent new nation!)

We hopped over to the Mosque dressed like native Fijians, holding our wrap around skirts to cover our thighs. It was not that anything more was covered than before, since, if anything, the wrap called attention to those who were "half naked" according to Islam, and the dance we had to do because of the continuous hotfoot and the unwrapping wrap around made it rather peculiar that anyone bothered at all-but it is a steady source of revenue, since few westerners would travel and sight-see on a day like today without wearing shorts, and the fees charged by the concession to pass out a flour sack square of cloth on a hot day would build a new mosque to rival Sheik Zayed's!

There were several devout Indian women, bulging very prominently. They had come on a serious pilgrimage. In the mosque is buried a special interment-the seer who predicted a son and heir for Akhbar. Each of these very pregnant women were here wrapping and knotting a silk colored scarf into the carved granite interstices of the marble and granite stone screens surrounding the tomb and dropping coins on the grave as well as flowers. Don't knock it-it worked at least once before!

Alas, the Emperor's New Town! It ran out of water! The capital was used 16 years after its completion, and the lake dried up. The engineers tried every which way to conjure up water, but apparently it was easier to bring forth sons. No water, no capital city! Tell that to the development boards of LasVegas or Arizona's golf courses! The town was abandoned and remains just as it was left---but it probably had less aggressive hawkers, hustlers and pickpockets surrounding the city walls before the tour buses rolled up with foreign currency bearing pasty white travelers.

COTTAGE INDUSTRIES-
UNDER A VERY HIGH PRESSURE SALES IMPERATIVE

I have heard the spiel, I have been there before, and I even know a few things about rugs. But, I will have to say, that this group was among totally dedicated professionals I have encountered----tell them anything, and work your way into their confidence by assuring them that this is just a learning experience in which all we are trying to do is teach you something about beauty, art and culture---then move in hard and fast for the closure, and sell them something, anything, but make it the top of the line or you will never get to marry my daughter!

Oriental rug salesmen-have I stood up under their assaults before? Yes, and I have also bought a few very good rugs, but I know when I am assessed as a fellow who is the silent treasurer behind a whole flock of fleeceable wannabes. If only we can make them want it badly enough, he will come through and spring them a loan. So, the master salesman instructed his team of henchmen to roll out with a dramatic flourish in a finely choreographed performance, each time ending in a dramatic slapping sound as the rug was hurled to a spectacular dazzling in front of ---what is this? Medical students? Surely they should have several extra thousands after they have contributed so many hundreds of thousands toward their education and had enough left over to bring the here! After assuring us repeatedly that we would have to buy nothing, and recognizing me as a veteran who was not going to buy another this time, they poured it on, in haughty offense, when it appeared we would be leaving their self-advertised educational session on Kashmiri rugs without leaving at least ten grand in US currency or credit behind, they had the cold hostility of someone taken advantage of when all they ha done was to turn on one of the finest thespian productions anyone could ever withstand. And, not even the senior citizen with them would spring for them and pull out his gold card so that they could have a fine silk Kashmiri for them to carry home to an intern's apartment to have the cat pee on when it was frustrated by their being gone three nights in a row!

I do not respond affirmatively to the highest pressures that super salesmen can exert. I did not come to buy a carpet, and it is not the single chance in my lifetime to do so, since I have proven that by collecting a whole batch of these already and having given a few away-notably an dowry heirloom to each son at each's wedding, and one Anatolian carpet that disappeared from my house with the moving van on the day I was not around as the furniture was packed out. But, I am not easily flattered, cajoled, and then insulted for someone else's profitable purposes, so I resent the heavy-handed sales techniques of isolation, ganging up, cutting out, substituting, bundling, special deals for very worthy individuals, taken from some hint about where they are from or what their name or any other hint that is dropped along the way-"What is that? You have a cat, too?" (Dollars to a doughnut the only cat he has seen is the one he kicked out of the alley when he was ducking out to carry the loot to the bank." The faithful henchmen and shills are to stand by silently supporting the mood created by the master, and even if when spoken too, they defer all to the controlling master who has got to score or fail in full public view of his underlings, which is why he increases in a fit of pique when his best act has not scored. Today, it is carpets, jewelry, inlaid marble, silks; tomorrow it is leather, perfume, carvings. If the only individuals they se of my species "Extranjero" are the gullible sheep led to the shears, I should also have an educational mission to perform---I ain't one of those!

AGRA FORT:
THE SHORT COURSE

Even though it was cool in their showroom-another psychologic refuge-I was eager to move on through the heat, which brought us next to a Chinese style lunch, on our way to a rather truncated stop at the Agra Fort I had once toured in sufficient detail that we could remain outside and just point to its one feature that is always good for a bit of pathos.

I had once stood inside the luxury accommodations (at the time) when the later descendent of Akhbar the Great, named Shah Jahan, could recline on his marble couch and watch the maidens cavorting in the pool with fountains before him-an early iteration of later videos. But, no matter how titillating this entertainment might have been for him, he was still obsessed by the haunting memory of his one true love, the lovely Mumtaz, who had died in childbirth and had left him unfulfilled from that day. What's to do? If you are the Shah-the emperor of one of the mightiest Asian collected fiefdoms-you plan a lasting memorial to your lost love, and that is what he did. With the finest designers in all of Moslem-mankind, and with 24,000 workmen around the clock, erecting Indian marble, and engraving it to accept perfectly fitted semi-precious stones as inlays, he had the Taj Mahal erected, as a centerpiece for the Moslem paradise vision of a garden.

He had quite a long time to admire this masterwork, since he was deposed by his son-another fine Islamic tradition, practiced "with extreme prejudice" by the Ottomans in having one of the princes of the harem kill off all others of the usually abundant offspring of the king, since a harem tends to produce whole clutches of heirs. So mamma's job is to be sure through the intrigue of the harem and court politics, to be sure her own offspring survive and to be sure the others do not---a politico-sociobiology!

Shah Jahan's son put his father in cold storage rather than doing him in-another little favor for which people of that era earned titles like "The Merciful"-and for well over a decade into the declining years of his life, Shah Jahan could stand on tiptoe in the window of his chamber as he was under house arrest, and stare across the dirty river at the most beautiful monument to love ever built-his Taj Mahal. Whatever he and Mumtaz had in the abstract, he now had her in the concrete-and it was as far away from him as it was from her. Both she and he were brought to lie side by side in the chamber of the Taj-the only asymmetric part of the building and the whole complex. Sigh!

THE TAJ MAHAL

What I remember distinctly about my last visit here is that there were a large number of Indians who were tourists, particularly from places I have never been in Southern India, with a very distinctive Dravidian look and dress about them, who were wandering about the Taj Mahal, but looking at me. They were eager to pose with me and take pictures with their own cameras to go home and say they had met these white men with blonde hair and green eyes at the Taj. It reminded me of the time I had gone to the Shogun's castle in Kyoto with Michael. We were son engulfed near the palace with the "nightingale floors" floors constructed to make chirping and squeaking sounds when anyone sneaked around on them, an alarm system for night time assassination attempts on the part of those, who, like the Moslem kings, had reason to suspect that this might happen to them since that is how they got to where they were. We had sneaked quietly along, Michael and I, listening to the floors squeak, when we were overwhelmed by a stamped of dark-haired dark eyed-identical looking clones-of Japanese teenage schoolgirls in uniform, all of whom pounce upon Michael to have their picture taken with this blonde blue-eyed devilishly handsome American boy. For the first several pictures, Michael grinned sheepishly, and I took a couple of pictures of them taking pictures with him, vying with each other to stand next to him; his smile became a bit wan as the number of rolls were expended. As I had said last year when Raghu Rai had followed me photographing me from every angle in every gesture no matter how routine or insignificant-this is what Cindy Crawford must feel like all day long!

Here they came! I had hardly arrived, when I, and many of our team, most particularly the blonde women, were besieged and asked not be photographed, and we could have mad e a living posing.

We got to the Taj by a new means, not present last time. In keeping with the "no smokestack within miles of the Taj" policy, one cannot drive up to it in an Indian bus, belching its usual quota of diesel and unburned carbon into the lungs of the pedestrians that are being passed by centimeters. We got out of the bus, and got into an electric cart to get close to the Taj and to await the gate guards to frisk us as though we were boarding Air India's 747. I was intrigued as I stood to see a pair of Zebu (called Brahmin cattle) hitched to a pulled lawn mower, who were being prodded to walk along, thereby mowing the grass along a garden path. Every little bit counts.

We waited for the requisite number of plastic (no glass allowed) water bottles-each of us carried a full one and a half liter water bottle in to the Taj, and none of us had any left as we returned-the guide was right, we had picked a very hot time of the day. We were allowed to carry a camera or two, but nothing sharp and no electronics-so I left the tape recorder behind. I pocketed two rolls of film and a panoramic disposable camera-with an idea already formed about what I wanted to shoot, since I remembered what I had seen before-the white Taj Mahal, and the pilgrims in their colorful saris parading along between it and the reflecting pools which, at the right time in late afternoon would mirror both. I got what I was after.

Taj Mahal means "Crown of the Palace". Shah Jahan's bride Mumtaz Mahal means, "Ornament of the Palace". We walked in through the metal detectors and went to my second favorite spot to photo the Taj through the arch of the garden gate. We learned that the Taj was a product of the 16th century craftsmen of India working with Indian marble and inlaying the semi-precious stones into marble so non-porous that the pollution, which had been unchecked after the arrival of India's later industrial revolution, has not affected it. Shah Jahan means "Emperor of the World" so it must have been a kick to contemplate the Taj from the window of his prisoner's cell for most of the last of his life.

The inlay of all the flower petals and other intricate designs was the tedious part, which took the most time, as well as the carving of the marble to make the stone screen work. The colors set into this very white marble are delicate since the inlays are small. Black is onyx; brown is Jasper; Blue is Lapis Lazuli; pink is Carnelian-the most expensive along with green is Malachite; there are turquoises from Kenya and mother of pearl and abalone-and, trust me, they still practice this same art from to day for special purchaser patrons, some of these commercial artists being the direct descendents of the men who worked all day and night on the Taj.

There is a mosque on one side of the Taj, clearly being the direction of the sacred Qaba at Mecca, which, as described earlier, is West of here. For purposes of balance and symmetry, a comparable building needed to be constructed on the Eastern side of the Taj, but it is an empty and functionless building named the "Answer" simply to balance off the Mosque on the West. So, one can tour the equivalent of the mosque without taking off one's shoes on the Eastern "Answer."

I walked around, seeing what I had wanted to see, reinforced by the memories of my last visit so I knew where I wanted to be when the sun slanted across the Taj and would give me reflections off the pools, about the time a large group of very colorful Indian women walked by. I was pressed into service before then, posing with Indian families, some of whom had not one English word, but now have a captive picture of a live American, who was beginning to show the same wan smile as Michael had at an age far younger and cuter than I.

The calligraphy from the Koran is spelled out in inlays scripted in Belgian onyx, the third hardest stone after diamond. Ah, Shah Jahan! At least your "lasting" monument was to love, rather than to the industrial output of the world's best war machine! Sigh!

We were heading out through the gates and going to take the same electric carts back to our bus, as we passed a line up of camels walking close enough to the Taj to give off toxic polluting fumes. We went off to get pop sickles-the fir5st I have had since childhood, but rather needed at this time, and then went off to see the artisans doing the carving of marble with the delicate scratching of the surface to be 3 millimeters deep to hold the inlays. Then we were escorted into a showroom, where the air conditioning and the offered cold drink ("No thanks") should be the clue that the hard sell was coming. They showed illumined marble tabletops and other good things all of which were in the thousands of dollars-just what a group of medical students should want to see for the second time today. But when the asked for smaller pieces, the salesmen knew they had got them hooked, and we went up another flight to a showroom of hundreds of dazzling marble goodies, with Carrie Starkie eager to get her husband a chess set, and each of the others remembering the spouse or boyfriend or girlfriend not on this trip who would need some form of consolation prize. I helped bargain for a few of them, and then put in a bid for myself. When I walked away after my last offer, they came down to my price, which I did not report to the others, since they all felt triumphant at getting a ten percent reduction down not a quarter, and I got two pieces for one half the starting prices.

As we went by taxi to the Railroad Station, we boarded the train and a fellow came over to me, with Hem eager to introduce him to me. This fellow is an Indian living in Los Angeles, and had reported to Hem that he recognized me. In what connection? He had heard me on a radio interview on the Out of Assa book and had seen me in George magazine! So, one more time in chorus----"It's a small world after all!"

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