Sikandra and Agra: Akbar's tomb and the Taj Mahal

We recently drove from Delhi to see the Taj Mahal. On the way, we stopped at Sikandra to visit the tomb of Akbar, the greatest of the Mughal emperors. Here's the trip in pictures.

The sunrise over industrial Faridabad was beautiful, but I'm not enough of a morning person to have taken a picture. Being more of an animals-later-in-the-day person, this was the first pic I took on our trip:

 

Our driver pulled over at a seemingly random spot along the highway, and this macaque leapt out of nowhere at our car, startling everyone. Of course we fell headlong into the tourist trap, taking pictures :) 

 

When we gave the monkey's owner Rs 20, he demanded Rs 100 each from the three of us. He got Rs 30 and that was that.

Below: Sikandra. This is the "buland darwaaza" (great gate) leading to the gardens of the tomb of Akbar, the greatest, ablest, and probably the most enlightened of the Mughal emperors. Early 17th century, local red sandstone with ornate marble inlay (including Koranic calligraphy in letters at least a foot high). I can't imagine how anyone can plan and execute a facade as ornate and detailed as this.

 

Below: A closer look at the main arch of the gate. It's the south gate of the complex. This is not painting or glazed tiles - it's stone inlay, set in stone.

 

 Below: Because iconography is strictly forbidden, Islamic art relies heavily on geometric and floral motifs, and calligraphy. Chevrons, eight-pointed stars, and octagonal designs are common, but I find the incorporation of this swastika to be an interesting Hindu / Indic touch:

The gate is equally ornate on the other side. I took this picture after walking through the gate, into the gardens. Garden tombs, by the way, seem to be an innovation from around the 15th-16th century. Not really sure about this, though. The gardens at Sikandra are laid in the typical Mughal "chaar baagh" design, which divides the layout into four equal quadrants and is aligned precisely to the four cardinal points.

One of the smaller residents of the gardens. He was excessively bold for an Indian squirrel - almost climbed on my shoe. According to legend, the Indian squirrel got his stripes by helping Ram build the bridge to Lanka and bring back Sita. Ram patted him to thank him, and his fingers left this mark.

Other denizens of the gardens included spotted deer and black buck. On a previous visit, I've seen monkeys, but there weren't any this time. Looking out on the gardens feels like stepping into an 18th century miniature painting (which, incidentally, would likely be painted using a squirrel-hair brush).

Below: The tomb itself looks like a mishmash of architectural styles, with Islamic arches and a profusion of chhatris. Beyond the main arch is an ornate foyer, then a dark passage leading into the chamber where Akbar rests.

 

Below: Vaulted foyer through which you enter the tomb, with floral designs and calligraphy embossed with gold leaf.

Below: Damaged panel under main arch.

Below: Door leading to Akbar's burial chamber.

Below: Recess in the foyer wall. I suppose this is a recent addition - the wall looks like plaster and the design is too stark.

Below: Carved stone screen off the main foyer of the tomb structure. I am not sure what the symbolic significance (if any) of skylights and screens is in Islamic architecture - given the interdiction to portray god, I wonder there's more to it than beauty / ventilation / lighting.

Below: Akbar's cenotaph in the foreground. In the background is the ramp that leads into the chamber.

Below: The single skylight that lights the chamber.

Sorry this picture lacks drama and romance:

My little camera couldn't capture the ornate lamp that hung over the cenotaph in that dark chamber, so I had to use a flash to show the detail. Must ... get ... DSLR ...

Below: Gold-plated lunch recess for the guard at Sikandra.

Below: Lamp in the foyer. My guess is bronze.

Below: Pottery "store" on the highway from Sikandra to Agra. I took this from the car window - it's on the edge of the road.

Got stuck in a horrendous traffic jam on the edge of Agra. This chai shop was right outside our car:

Back on the road in our tasseled Toyota Innova, with Sekhar at the wheel and Venkateswara on the dashboard:

Below: Cut paper delivery guy stuck in the traffic jam along with us. Maybe he's headed for a bindery?

 

Below: Paper recycling guy was also stuck in the same traffic.

Below: Another "buland darwaaza", also of red sandstone. This is the gateway to the Taj Mahal. Again, chaar baagh gardens on the other side. The forecourt has entrances from three cardinal directions. We are in front of the gate that faces the fourth direction (north) and leads to the Taj Mahal (like Akbar's tomb, the Taj faces south). This gate is perfectly aligned with the Taj - you can see the pale arch of the Taj through it.

Below: Walking through the gate - view of the Taj from under the arch. It was very sunny, around 1:30 or 2 pm.

Below: On the other side of the gate. The Taj is mindboggling in its perfection and symmetry. I cannot imagine how anyone could even conceive of something so huge, so detailed, so complicated (importing precious materials and experts from so many countries) in the 17th century, much less actually have it made. The whole structure is tiled with marble from Makrana, Rajasthan. The jade, onyx, coral, amethyst, lapis lazuli, mother-of-pearl and other semiprecious inlay materials came from Persia, China, Tibet, Afghanistan, Russia, and the Indian Ocean. Many of the artisans came from other countries too.

Below: I turned around and took this picture of the sandstone gate again. It's equally ornate on the outside and inside. Again, not painting or glazed tile but stone inlay.

Below: The gardens are perfect at many levels. First, each quadrant mirrors the other quadrants. Second, the motifs tiled into the quadrants are horizontally and vertically symmetrical in themselves. And the whole complex is perfectly symmetrical and aligned to the four directions, with the Taj facing south.

Below: Satellite view of the perfection. This is how the Taj complex looks in Google Earth - perfectly aligned to the four cardinal points. Mid-17th century!

In the above image, going from south to north, you can see the forecourt with its three entrances to the east, west and south. Tourists enter  from the east. On the northern side of the forecourt are the sandstone steps and the big sandstone gate. Further up, the gardens in front of the Taj, and then the monument itself with its four minarets, flanked by the mosque and its replica.

Below: The main cupola with its crescent finial.

It's very difficult to convey scale. I took the picture below from maybe 20 meters away.

Below: The sides of the Taj Mahal are about as ornate as the front, and the arches built on a similar scale - perhaps the exact same height as the front arch. This calligraphic stone inlay runs around the main arch on the Western face.

Although many people were taking pictures, photography is not permitted in the main chamber where the cenotaphs of Arjumand Bano (Mumtaz Mahal) and emperor Shahjehan are. So I have no pictures of that dimly daylit chamber whose walls are covered with even finer inlay than the outside. The cenotaphs are encircled by carved screens.

Below: Wall of one of the narrow passageways that filter daylight very gently into the building. At Sikandra, a sign by the car park said: हमारी विरासत, हमारा गौरव (our heritage, our pride). Clearly not for some idiots.

Below: The Yamuna river runs by just north of the Taj Mahal. This is the minaret in the northeast corner of the structure. We sat for a couple of hours, I think, in the marble-covered shadow of the Taj, with a cool breeze coming in from across the river. Despite the hundreds of tourists gaping, jabbering and taking pictures, it was relaxing to sit there.

Below: This red sandstone building is to the east of the Taj Mahal, and a replica of the mosque on the other side. It was possibly used as a rest house - can't find confirmation of this.

Below: East-facing arch of the Taj.

Below: Southeastern minaret in the late afternoon sun. Makrana marble tile.

Below: We stopped for coffee at a not-very-clean UP Tourism cafe.

And then the long drive back home. A tiring but fabulous day!

Consumer, cow, milkman, roses, tulsi: one ecosystem

When I was little, we got our milk delivered straight from the buffalo sheds a few miles away (this was still Bombay, not somewhere in the countryside). The milkman had a bunch of buffaloes (or tended someone else's), and brought milk in large aluminum buckets, like the one on the left, and measured out as much as my mom wanted, into a large saucepan from the kitchen.

There was no packaging at all, no waste, and the milk had to be 100% fresh or else you'd know at once (it's warm here so fresh milk doesn't keep long unless you pasteurize by boiling). Sometimes the milkman would bring me a rose from the bush that grew by the shed. And when we wanted fertilizer for our house plants, he'd bring a dung cake (dry, not stinky). We'd pound it into a very coarse powder and scatter it in the tulsi pots. One cowpat is quite a lot of fertilizer!

It was such a wonderful, simple and environment-friendly system, and the producers (buffalo and milkman) were a more direct part of the lives of us consumers, not separate. The milk man died, the sheds got moved out, and we now get our milk and fertilizer in plastic packets, and the roses come from commercial farms with a massive carbon footprint (refrigerated trucks or planes). We have no idea who feeds the buffaloes or tends the flowers, what their names are (our milkman was Udit Narayan), whether they look healthy and are paid well, and how fresh or pure the milk truly is.

Bhopal verdict - justice delayed AND denied

Skulls discarded after research at Hamidia Hospital. Medical experts believe the methyl isocyanate gas inhaled by people in Bhopal may have affected the brain. Photo: Raghu Rai.

Referring to the compensation to Bhopal gas victims, Dow Chemical's public affairs specialist Kathy Hunt said in public in 2002 that “$500 is plenty good for an Indian." The explanation for this may be that Hunt and Dow are racist. But what is wrong with us?

From The Times of India, June 8, 2010:

Appearing for CBI, then additional solicitor general Altaf Ahmed had argued before the SC that the accused knew about the potential danger of the lethal gas escaping and hence should be tried under the stringent provision.

"There was ample material produced by the prosecution in support of the chargesheet which indicated that all the accused shared common criminal knowledge about potential danger of escape of the lethal gas — MIC — both on account of the defective plant which was operated under their control and supervision at Bhopal and also on account of the operational shortcomings detected by the Varadarajan expert committee," Ahmed had said in court.

However, a bench comprising then Chief Justice A M Ahmedi and Justice S B Majmudar disagreed. "On our finding that the material pressed in service by the prosecution does not indicate even prima facie that the accused were guilty of an offence of culpable homicide and, therefore, Section 304-II was out of the picture, Section 304-A on this very finding can straightaway get attracted at least prima facie," the bench said. It then quashed the charge framed against the accused under Section 304-II.

Christmas lights in Mumbai

I took these pictures a couple of days after Christmas, in the vicinity of Sacred Heart Church in the Mumbai suburb of Santa Cruz. This church was built in the 1930s, I think in place of the Santa Cruz church from which the area got its name. The old church was destroyed long ago. Below is a picture of lights in the church driveway.

Below is a picture of the intersection of Church Avenue and Hasanabad Lane. A street with a Christian name and a church on it, and one with a Muslim name and a mosque on it. The neighborhood is home to plenty of Christians (nearly all Catholic), Muslims, Hindus, and no doubt other religious minorities.

Up to perhaps the mid-90s, the surrounding lanes were lined with cute little cottages that belonged mostly to Christians. The houses had names like "Carmel", "Villa Linda", "Aurora", "La Petite Fleur", "Violet" and "Homestead". Some still exist, but others are replaced with ugly buildings like the one at the intersection below. Many of these new buildings have names that reflect cultural poverty -- "Silver Symphony", "Silver Melody" and "Silver Harmony". One unpretentious villa (I think it was Violet) got torn down in the years I was away from the city, and in its place sprang up a little pink fortress called, equally incredibly, "Pinky Cottage". I have to wonder if such strange names are chosen by people who insist on using the English language despite having no feel for it. That is sad. Why not name your home something nice in Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Sanskrit, or whatever? Do the people who name them have no beautiful vocabulary they can call their own?

Below, a closer look at the star. It says "Love was born at Christmas, star 'n' angels gave the sign", and then hope, love, joy, peace, and "Wishing you a merry Christmas".

I don't know for sure what this little bit of road is called. I'm just calling it Convent Avenue. It's the lane right across from the Willingdon Catholic Gymkhana. Every year the entire lane is lit up, and for some reason it always reminds me of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet.

Below, the star on Convent Avenue.

I think from a distance this star looks like an LED dragonfly.

I took the picture below with a flash, so you can see the Christmas lights intertwined with tropical bougainvillea. India is north of the equator so technically it's "winter" in Mumbai, but that just means about 15 degrees Celsius (roughly 60 Fahrenheit), so I was in T-shirt and sandals.

I walked past the dragonfly/star, and took the picture below.

Below, a closer look at the star/dragonfly. It was a lot of LED bulbs strung around a wire frame. Probably nothing special to look at in the daytime, but quite pretty at night. I thought the sign dangling below struck a jarring visual note. FWIW, it says "The star guides you to the Christ, Prince of Peace".

Somebody's home on either Convent Av or St. Francis Road.

Below, a vinyl sign at the corner of Convent Av and St. Francis Road, put up by the Congress Party. Mumbai can always count on its politicians to uglify everything with their poor aesthetic sense. There was a bigger, uglier Christmas greeting put up by the BJP near Sacred Heart Church, but I didn't take a picture. If they want to make our neighborhood ugly, the least they can do is make us laugh - Baba Siddique should have worn a Santa suit for this picture. Next election I'm not voting for anyone unless they wear a Santa suit in their Christmas poster.

Below, a dilapidated cross outside a dilapidated cottage at the corner of Hasanabad Lane and St. Francis Road. My camera is straight, the cross is crooked.

Below, festive decorations outside a coffee shop in Santa Cruz East.

Happy 2010!