“I was not born to poesy My words are nothing to the crowd And yet I want to shout aloud These tangled thoughts of you and me
The fashions now have passed me by I think in childish, silly rhyme I’m not a creature of my time — (This self-assessment is a lie)” From Even Fairies Fornicate by Bachchoo Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal as a monument to his wife. It has become the most famous mausoleum in the world, treated as the architectural icon of love and loss. In Britain very few people know who Mumtaz was. The image of the Taj in the British mind will be associated with another princess and her story.
Princess Diana died in a car crash when she and her playboy friend Dodi, fuelled by cocaine and champagne, urged their French driver to violate the speed limit as they drove along the banks of the Seine in Paris. The earlier photograph of her sitting alone on the bench with the Taj in the background framing her lone figure remains as a memorial to her tragic life, her doomed marriage to Prince Charles, their rift and her drift into affairs with a Pakistani doctor and, allegedly others, ending in her accidental death.
Dodi Al Fayed’s father, the former owner of Harrods department store, has from that time eccentrically insisted that the accident was in fact an assassination by the British secret services under instructions from the Duke of Edinburgh. He commissioned a garish statue of Dodi and Diana, placed in a stairway of Harrods with a caption claiming that the lovers were murdered by the British establishment. So, two monuments in Diana’s memory, one to good taste, the other to abysmal paranoia.
Her son Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, and his wife Kate probably don’t share the conspiracy murder theory as they endorsed the tragic legend by sitting on the same bench together on their visit to the Taj this year and being photographed there as a tribute to Diana.
The photograph may show up the blemishes in the Duchess’ makeup, but conceals the detail of any negative nuance in the framing monument. A close-up of its marble walls, however would reveal the most recent threat to the monument, the infestation of insect faeces embedded in the marble which is turning it green. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) is, of course, cleaning off the faeces where they are on the surface, but the infestation goes deeper. Manoj Bhatnagar of the ASI’s chemical department says that his teams are applying mudpacks of Fuller’s earth, a type of lime-rich clay, and then washing them off 24 hours later.
Mr Bhatnagar claims this is a cleansing technique copied from a cosmetic treatment used by Indian women through the ages to restore a natural glow to their features and bodies. I wonder, without casting any aspersions on her grace and beauty, if the Duchess of Cambridge knows about this method of glowing.
Apart from mudpacks, the solution to the bug-faeces problem is obvious. There are 52 drains pouring rubbish into the Yamuna River that flows past the Taj. The gunk from these drains is, according to environmental activist D.K. Joshi, killing the fish in the river who maintain the ecobalance by eating and eliminating the insects that are causing the damage. Cleaning up the river and stopping the drains, thus reviving the fish density, would sort out the particular problem. It is reported that Akhilesh Yadav, Uttar Pradesh’s chief minister, has ordered immediate action to save the Taj. Watch this space.
When the Narendra Modi government was installed, I recall the Prime Minister making a passionate and very welcome statement about cleaning up the Ganga. He even assigned a whole ministry to the task, under a personage with a reputation for the rabid advocacy of Hindutva and so, presumably, a devotion to the river as a revered goddess. I expect the project is going well, but will check with my environmentalist friends who keep an eye on these things and make assessments of the ratio between achievement and propaganda.
Some years ago I visited the Red Fort in Delhi in the company of a distinguished international writer and his Pakistani- born wife. At the time the first BJP government was in power. The Mughal pavilions and the waterways in this national monument were falling apart and had been crudely patched with cement. Having expected to be marvelling at well-maintained historical beauty, we were shocked. The lady, a student of Mughal history, who had stories to tell about the self-same pavilions, had tears in her eyes. She said we should leave.
I am told the damage was temporary and the historical site has been restored, at least in part, to its original splendour. Not so the other historical sites I visited recently in Delhi. In other world capitals, in Amsterdam, for example, one can visit Rembrandt’s house in which the structure, the rooms and the paintings are kept in perfect condition. In Sussex, the British National Trust maintains “Bateman’s”, the house that Rudyard Kipling lived in, with his study, the artefacts he and his father brought back from India and his hand-written manuscripts in perfect condition. So also Keats’ house or that in which Shakespeare’s wife lived.
Contrast that with the fate of poor Ghalib. To get to his tomb one passes through the slum of Delhi’s Nizammudin named after the shrine of Sufi saint Nizammudin Auliya. To get to that revered shrine one has to pass through several corridors with dingy stalls selling cheap jewellery, pirated CDs and goat curry. In the yard there lies the neglected grave of Amir Khusrau, another of the country’s great poets.
On making enquiries I have been told that there is resistance from the local population and from the Muslim trusts controlling these historical sites to cleaning them up. A little determination from the Modi government, dedicated to cleaning up Mother Ganga, should be applied to these monuments too.