Re-reading the Taj

For one of the most visited destinations in the world, the reading of the famous Taj Mahal remains pitifully limited. It is dominated by a white marble edifice seen primarily from its quadrangular garden. A linear fountain interrupted by a platform bisects the visual composition and the building appears perfectly symmetrical framed by four minars against the northern sky. For most visitors, this image of the Mughal mausoleum, devoid of any larger physical and intellectual backdrop, dominates its contemporary presence.

In September 2010, the Yamuna River touched the base of the Taj Mahal’s 300-metre long, river-facing terrace for the first time in more than two decades. Heavy rains in north India had raised the river’s water level creating a momentous event in recent history of the celebrated monument fronting a near-dry riverbed. The event generated much public optimism and also, more importantly, hope for the Taj Mahal’s long-term future. Several studies have now concluded that the strength of the wooden shafts holding together its foundation depends on being constantly moistened by the river’s water. The event also forced people to re-read the Taj Mahal, revisit its idea as a riverfront monument and re-contemplate its experience as larger than the white marble-clad building.

It may not be obvious today, but the Taj Mahal was conceived as an inextricable part of a larger urban landscape, a microcosm of broader formal, aesthetic and symbolic relationships to the natural landscape, the city and other monuments. Over the past centuries, this landscape has taken many guises, some remaining conveniently shrouded to visitors, attesting to the skewed meanings and receptions lurking behind the idea of the Taj Mahal today.

The Urban Artifact

In 1631, with the decision to memorialize his deceased queen Arjumand Banu Begam (Mumtaz Mahal), Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal Emperor, would – like his predecessors – embellish the city of Agra with another monumental gesture. The flourishing capital with over half a million people along the banks of the Yamuna River was planned by Shah Jahan’s great, great grandfather Babur, the founder of the Mughal Dynasty, in 1526 based on Persian precedents with public gardens lining the river. As Ebba Koch notes in her book, The Complete Taj Mahal and the Riverfront Gardens of Agra, over four generations the city had grown around the Emperor’s red sandstone palace on the western bank, with the entire riverfront lined with opulent villas, mansions and mausoleums. These buildings were themselves set within public or private gardens overlooking the water together creating a five-kilometer-long public promenade as the dominant open space of the city. This was the physical and aesthetic urban context within which the Taj Mahal would be built.

As a riverfront infill, the design of the Taj Mahal was different from that of the other buildings along the river, which were generously set back from the water’s edge and centralized within verdant landscapes. The Taj was built close to the bank, with an 8.7 meter-high and 300-metre-long river-facing terrace with steps or ghats at its base, leading to the water. The plinth contained a linear sequence of seven interconnected chambers entered via stairs from twin cylindrical turrets at the ends; these rooms served as resting places for the visiting royal retinues, with windows and provisions for night lighting. The Emperor would boat down the river from the landing below the Shah Burj (royal quarters), park at the ghats, climb to the top of the red sandstone terrace and then approach the white marble edifice. This was the regal entrance to the Taj Mahal, its urban and most public face.

With Shah Jahan’s shift of the Mughal capital from Agra to Shahajahanabad in 1648, the riverfront setting of the Taj, released from royal patronage was gradually occupied by commoners who began using the water for sacred rituals and festivities. Gradually, with several villas sold by their owners and converted into funerary sites, the entire riverfront itself began to garner a funerary character, and by the early 19th century, during the British stronghold, began to show significant deterioration as seen from several documents of that period. By the early 20th century, the waters of the Yamuna had been both significantly reduced by dams built for irrigation, and polluted by industrial and sewage waste. The riverfront was now used as a latrine and garbage dump, many of the villas and mansions had been reduced to ruins, while silt covered the ghats that once connected the Taj’s plinth to the water. 

Within three centuries, with the degradation of its riverfront setting, few read the Taj Mahal’s larger urban presence; fewer still recognized that its front had become its backyard.

The Campus

The Taj Mahal was constructed as a large 22.4-hectare campus of multiple open spaces and red sandstone buildings with the white mausoleum as the focus. Ordered on a north-south axis was a repeated arrangement of a rectangle and a square, the former, half the size of the latter, and placed with its longer side towards the river, together creating four precincts each enclosed by high walls and gateways. Closest to the water was the mausoleum framed symmetrically by two buildings: a mosque on the west and a twin assembly hall to the east. Just south was the Char Bagh Garden, planned along two intersecting pathways dividing the 300x300-metre square into equal quadrants. Next came the jilaukhana, the transitional forecourt between the funerary and commercial realms of  the complex, where royal guests were received.

Closest to the city was the caravanserai, a two-storey commercial complex also planned on the Char Bagh theme, its intersecting streets forming the principal open space of a bazaar with individual rooms within an arcaded verandah of multi-cusped arches supported on slender columns. By the 1640s, with the caravanserai boasting a diversity of local and foreign trades and with merchants building their houses just outside this imperial campus, the area surrounding the Taj had, in fact, become an identifiable district, locally known as Mumtazabad, the queen’s polis. With the bazaars contributing financially to the mausoleum’s maintenance, the Taj Mahal had from the beginning infused its spiritual dimensions with the market’s commercial ones into a symbiotic ensemble.

Following the capital’s shift to Delhi, the market declined, and the caravanserai gradually transformed into what is now known as Taj Gunj. Over four centuries and several generations, it had been incrementally possessed by the local merchants and physically altered to meet their growing demands. By the early 20th century, nothing saves the four gated walls, once framing the central market square, remained identifiable; the four open-to-sky quads of the serai had been filled in with a haphazard development of labyrinthine walls and lanes and the bazaar’s arcades had been added on to, reducing the street space to tenuous lanes. Today, despite its continuing commercial activity, with nothing to visually unify the four outermost gateways, there is little to reveal the caravanserai’s original form as one steps out of the southern gate of the jilaukhana.

The Symbol

With the Queen’s sarcophagus transferred to the site in 1632, the Taj Mahal acquired a special importance as a royal funerary monument even before the completion of its base plinth. There is, however, a legend of a twin black Taj Mahal that Shah Jahan had supposedly envisioned across the river on the current site of the Mehtab Bagh. It was mentioned by the French traveler Jean-Baptiste Tavenier who visited Agra circa 1665, a year before the emperor’s death. It is hard to believe that Shah Jahan did not contemplate his own death and burial, but the lack of evidence of any construction activity and the absence of any records including those of Shah Jahan’s official historian Mohammed Amin Quaswani, leaves the matter shrouded in mystery. Meanwhile, Shah Jahan lies buried in the Taj, besides his beloved Mumtaz Mahal. But with his sarcophagus being the only element violating the Taj’s otherwise perfect symmetry, it is less convincing as an imperial intention and more as an eventual decision taken during his final days in imprisonment.

The Taj Mahal then is symbolic at many levels. As the largest mausoleum ever built for a Mughal queen, it embodies Shah Jahan’s indisputable love for Mumtaz Mahal. Its semiotics express both the Emperor’s larger cultural prerogatives as well as the summation of an Islamic architectural tradition appropriated for the Indian ethos. As an embodiment of monumental opulence and superb craftsmanship, it represents the former splendor of Agra, the glorious Mughal capital of the Caliphate. And as the seemingly ‘compromised’ resting place of its imperial builder, it testifies to the pathos of his final days and by extension to the vicissitudes of its own history.

The Paradise Between Two Worlds

As an urban artifact along the promenade, the Taj Mahal was a monument of and for the city, an amenity to the people of Agra and a public statement to visitors from near and far. The riverfront’s degradation is thus, by extension, a degradation of the Taj itself. But while its restoration seems intrinsic to the larger idea of the Taj’s preservation, the significant water shrinkage and contamination and the extent of ruin and decay in many of the historic mansions pose significant challenges to its implementation.

As a larger complex sustaining its caravanserai, the Taj Mahal was a monument of the people. It had been constructed and appropriated as such, and its enigmatic presence was always meant to be part of the plebian experience of Agra. In this sense the Gunj, however ‘inauthentic’, can be read as an extension, mutation, even maturation of Taj’s ‘commonplace’ dimension; an energized world that is different from the desolate riverfront, blurring resistance and conformity and invigorating the monument as a critical counter-image. As an intrinsic part of Taj’s experience however, the need for hygienic conditions within this informal habitat remains the dominant pretext for intervention. This of course is a task easier said than done, and one demanding a cautious surgical approach that prioritizes the Gunj’s quotidian necessities over any formal and aesthetic gestures. But preservationists remain bent on vacating the illegal settlement even as its residents argue for the Taj as their rightful legacy claiming their ancestors as its builders and subjects of the Emperor.

If the restored riverfront can become a new socio-economic engine for the Taj Mahal’s experience, why shouldn’t a strategic nurturing of the Gunj – its skilled labor force, stone-inlay crafts and micro-commerce – play an essential role in the monument’s recurrent upkeep, reviving its historic relationship with it? Arguably, the Taj Mahal today seems more meaningful this way: as a nexus between a potentially restored riverfront and the plebian realities of the Gunj; a paradisiacal realm embracing the disparate social aspirations of two concomitant worlds both of which want a stake in it.

Meanwhile, the Taj Mahal has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1983, even though its white marble tarnishing from smog and acid rain has made it as much an icon of love as of environmental damage depending on who is looking. Numerous steps have been initiated in response. 

Around 300 coal-based industries in the region have switched to natural gas. No transport is allowed within 500 meters (1/3 mile) of the white monument. Recent air monitoring continuously measures the air quality, along with a national government plan to help clean Agra’s air pollution.

As a coveted destination for thousands of visitors – historians, scholars, tourists alike – the Taj Mahal today continues to remind us of the dilemmas as well as the cautions against doctrinaire and linear attitudes to contemporary understandings of heritage conservation. It also reveals how the identities of places eventually emerge as much from their histories as the changing meanings and perceptions society imparts to them. The intention of this essay therefore is not so much to glorify the Taj Mahal’s past, but to provoke deeper reflections on its present and thereby expand the dialogues surrounding its future into broader and more holistic territories.

This essay is an abridged version of a larger original article published in ‘The Emerging Asian City: Concomitant Urbanities & Urbanisms’ (Routledge, London 2012), edited by Vinayak Bharne.

Photos: Vinayak Bharne / Drawings: Vinayak Bharne & Tongxin Mao