Birbal's Khichdi

Few in Agra should have grudged a six-month-long birthday bash for the Taj Mahal that has turned, in one way or another, into everyone's rozi-roti. But no one seems happy. Not the shopkeepers sullenly watching the tour guides shepherd foreign flocks past their shelves of Taj kitsch. "Ever since these celebration plans started, it's become even harder for our boys to get tourists to stop at our shops." Not the historians: "The Taj was founded in 1632, was officially completed in 1643, even the last inscription is 1647. So how can we call it the 350th anniversary?" Nor the conservationists: "If only they had come up with one grand idea befitting a monument of this scale instead of this mish-mash of dance and music and poor planning." Not the men in the tourism office: "What's the point of holding the celebrations in the peak season when there are already thousands of people coming to see the Taj anyway." Not the CRPF men posted at the gate, whose unusual job of screening Indians from foreign nationals, many of them hopefully disguised in kurtas and saris, has just got trickier with hordes of news photographers now focusing on the piquant scenes that ensue: "You can't enter with a Rs 20 ticket, go get the Rs 750 one." "But I am an Indian!" "No you are not!"

The trouble is, the ASI man posted inside the Taj says as he counts the stacks of green five-dollar bills (about Rs 250) that is the organisation's share of the ticket money (the remaining Rs 500 goes to the Agra Development Board), "we have a Birbal ka khichdi here—too many authorities wanting to milk the Taj dry".

The khichdi is very much in evidence as the official celebrations for the Taj's 350th anniversary opens on September 27, after five months of inter-departmental skirmishes and chaotic planning. It was, like all sarkari ventures, an ambitious plan—at least when it started some time in June this year. So ambitious that it was eventually extended from a single night's festival on a full moon night into six months to accommodate the warring factions: the UP tourism board, and the central ministries of tourism and culture, each of whom allotted themselves two full moon nights for the festivities: Lata Mangeshkar, Ravi Shankar, Sufi concerts, the works, all performing against the backdrop of the Taj. But there was a small oversight that no one, surprisingly not even the coordination committee set up several months ago, anticipated: any performance near the Taj has to be cleared by the Supreme Court of India. There followed, of course, the usual last-minute solutions and scramble: the festival will now open at Agra Fort instead of the grounds across the Yamuna near Mehtab Bagh. "We had to scale it down," admits UP tourism secretary Zohra Chatterjee. "There was no point getting Lata Mangeshkar and Ravi Shankar for the opening as we were planning because the new venue can only accommodate 500 people, unlike the earlier location where 10,000 guests can be seated."

Shah Jahan would have winced. The builder of the Taj, according to art historian Ebba Koch, was a man of meticulous planning. For two hours every day, during the 17 years it took to build the Taj, the Mughal emperor met with his team of architects. He made improvements and, if his official historian is to believed, even designed "the majority of buildings". The Taj Mahal planned and laid out by Shah Jahan was a sprawling complex, according to Koch, whose forthcoming book, Taj Mahal, documents the immense amount of planning that went into building the monument and its environs. "It consisted of a large, walled-in rectangular enclosure which contained the tomb and its flanking buildings on the riverfront terrace; the garden, the forecourt and its flanking courtyards with tombs of lesser wives of Shah Jahan; and a bazaar and caravanserai complex now built over by the Taj Ganj". Money, of course, didn't matter: it cost Rs 40 million at a time when gold was selling at Rs 15 a tola.

In a way, says Koch, "Shah Jahan was building the Taj for us. The emperor was inconsolable, of course, when his favourite wife Arjumand Banu Begum died, but this was also a monument to himself as a ruler. He made a special effort with a carefully planned architectural theory, for the days and generations to come." Even now, agrees conservationist Amita Beg, with over two million visitors a year and with no major repairs since it was built, "it is structurally in mint condition, so brilliantly constructed that even the underground chambers built to accommodate visitors are still amazingly dry". It was, incidentally, its solid construction that probably saved the Taj for posterity—the cash-strapped British viceroy Lord Bentinck auctioned away the tomb for its marble. But the Mathura bania who bought the Taj found it almost impossible to break down the mausoleum and cart away the marble.

Festivals were very much part of the original plan. Although Shah Jahan decreed that no festivals be held on Arjumand's death anniversary, Beg points out that the monument was designed for festivities, "continuous urs" with even a rigid hierarchy of seating: only the aristocrats got to go up to the platform, while camel drivers and other such workers squatted on the garden grounds.

The emperor was far-sighted enough to plan for the maintenance of his masterpiece for the generations to come: he set aside the revenue of 30 villages, besides the earnings from its fruit orchards and bazaars for the monument's upkeep, including salaries for the hereditary malis and guards or qadims for whom he built special residential quarters. A former Taj caretaker, G.A. Qamar, recalls the qadims still ruling over the monument, extracting money from the stray tourist who wandered into the tomb. "They harassed visitors and acted as very unreliable guides." There were no guides then, says Qamar, who joined the ASI as a caretaker in 1957 and worked inside the Taj for 22 years. "Anyone wanting to see the Taj had to collect a permit from the collectorate, and it was usually the rickshawpullers who got these permits and sold them to tourists." Except for the occasional dignitary, like Nehru who came with daughter Indira, the Taj was a neglected monument then, with locals loitering on the open lawns from sunrise to midnight.

By the 1960s, Qamar recalls, the monument's fame had spread across the country, bringing visitors in such hordes that Agra was transformed into an unlikely tourist hub with its attendant hotels, restaurants, shops, guides and, of course, photographers. Just how crucial the Taj had become for Agra's economy, Qamar says, became clear when the Taj closed for a month in 1971. "The Bangladesh war was coming, and it was feared the Taj would be an easy target because of its clear visibility even in the dark. So it was covered up for a month in black sheets." It was a month, Qamar says, when Agra "came close to starving".

The covers came off the Taj and Agra recovered. But now, as Beg points out, the situation seems to have reversed: the mausoleum, protected by high walls and multiple authorities, still attracts millions of visitors but it is the city that is dying around it. When Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal, Agra was a bustling city—'the emporium of the traffic of the world', as he called it. Now with the Supreme Court ruling on moving the shops and factories out of a 50-km reach of the Taj, the city is dying, along with its bazaars and its artisans. Qamar agrees: "Ever since the Taj started closing by 7 pm, nobody wants to stay the night in Agra anymore. They come by the busloads, see the Taj—and if they have time, the Agra fort perhaps—and then leave."

For Qamar, the best birthday present the country can give the Taj Mahal is to revive Agra to its old glory. What the mausoleum built for eternity doesn't deserve is a tomb of a city.