The Indian Equator

by Ian Strathcarron

  “Why so? Where has everyone gone?” I ask him.

  “You see, the Taj is a world-renowned monument but the government has over-reacted. Here we used to have a famous tannery business and we made carpets for export all over the world. Also an iron-ore foundry. But the government has shut them all to protect the Taj. No industry of any kind is allowed within thirty miles of the Taj. Without growth from business the city is in decline.”

  “But the tourists, surely they help compensate for the lost industry?”

  “Not really,” he replies, “nowadays they are mostly groups on long day trips from Delhi.”

  This answered my next question about the city of Agra: although it is one of the most famous tourist cities in the world there are hardly any foreigners to be seen. I stayed in the Amar Hotel - an overpriced dump as bad luck would have it but we arrived late and tired off the Kanpur train - and apart from a small group of nonplussed Russians we were the only tourists unlucky enough to be there. Likewise, the surrounding streets were foreigner-free.

  That changes the minute one enters the Taj Mahal complex on the edge of town. Tourists there are there and a-plenty. In fact, the complex has the same population density as any other Indian city, apart from Agra, except the incumbents are not Indian. After spending two months in unusually close proximity to hundreds of thousands of Indians it is unnerving at first to be surrounded by massed throngs of northern and southern Europeans, Orientals all the way from Thailand to Korea, North and Latin Americans and brilliantly costumed Africans. Only Arabia seems unrepresented at this sight of Islamic munificence; maybe at some other time.

  The Taj itself is guarded by four forts, the North, South, East and West Gates. Anywhere else, in any other setting, any of them would be a major attraction in its own right. Most of the tour groups enter through the West or East Gates near where their coaches have to park, but the classic view of the Taj, the one in all the photographs, is best seen through the emptier South Gate. Few of the Delhi daytrip brigade arrive before 11 a.m. and the site opens at 6 a.m. for the sunrise photographs so overnighters - even those stuck at the Amar - can head for the South Gate early and be well rewarded for forgoing breakfast.

  As well as banishing industry from within thirty miles of the site the government has banned non-LPG auto-rickshaws from coming closer than 500 yards to any of the Gates. They haven’t left the tourists free to pollute either. From a long list of banned items are “Eatables such as paan, paan massala, pakoras and samosas, Smokeables such as bidis, cigarettes and match boxes, Music players such CDs, walkmen, etc, Weapons such as firearms, small arms and any knife kind, Accoutrements such as zips, pins and buckle belts, Photography such as videography, including mobile phone videography, flash capability and tripods.”

  Tourists are given slip-on overshoes for entry beyond the main plinth. The authorities have also made a reasonable attempt to banish the touts and hustlers who were giving a visit to the Taj such a bad name. Once through the Gates one is left alone to wonder in awe - if one wants to, most tourists are so busy snapping away that they never become still enough to experience the beauty shared between their inner selves and the building, settling instead for the rush of objective attractiveness seen through a lens.

  ***

  Well, Gillian and I, and even the more blasé Sita, who has been here twice before, are smitten by the perfection in shades of light and white marble that is the Taj Mahal - and more so than we expected to be. The concept of construction throws up visions of artisans starting in the center and adding layer upon layer of structure until the architect’s design is complete. The genius of the Taj is that the vision is of sculpture, reducing and reducing until the architect[69] shouts “Stop!” It seems as if only then, when the mausoleum was complete, did the minaret builders, the garden planters and watercourse engineers set to work.

  Mark Twain’s reaction was of a different kind. In the strangest chapter in Following the Equator, Chapter 59, he settles into a four-page rant against his least favorite people, travel guide writers. I first came across his antipathy towards them when we were together in Jerusalem, when he was working on The Innocents Abroad and I on Innocence and War; thirty years ago for him, one year ago for me. His beef at the genre can be summarized in one Chapter 59 sentence: “Often the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth,” of which theory more later.

  He started his broadside with:

  In Agra and its neighborhood we saw forts, mosques, and tombs, which were built in the great days of the Mohammedan emperors, and which are marvels of cost, magnitude, and richness of materials and ornamentation, creations of surpassing grandeur, wonders which do indeed make the like things in the rest of the world seem tame and inconsequential by comparison. I am not purposing to describe them. By good fortune I had not read too much about them, and therefore was able to get a natural and rational focus upon them, with the result that they thrilled, blessed, and exalted me. But if I had previously overheated my imagination by drinking too much pestilential literary hot Scotch, I should have suffered disappointment and sorrow.

  This seems at best contradictory. If his argument is that he cannot appreciate or describe what has been over-appreciated and over-described before, well perhaps, but it seems a bit of a woolly excuse for such a robust mind. But here he says he won’t describe them in spite of the fact that “by good fortune I had not read too much about them... with the result that they thrilled, blessed, and exalted me.”

  Then there’s a further contradiction when he writes about the Taj herself, surely the most important building he could have been referring to in his opening salvo above.

  I mean to speak of only one of these many world-renowned buildings, the Taj Mahal, the most celebrated construction in the earth. I had read a great deal too much about it. I saw it in the daytime, I saw it in the moonlight, I saw it near at hand, I saw it from a distance; and I knew all the time, that of its kind it was the wonder of the world, with no competitor now and no possible future competitor; and yet, it was not my Taj. My Taj had been built by excitable literary people; it was solidly lodged in my head, and I could not blast it out.

  He then goes on to quote extensively over several pages from several guide books extant at the time of his visit and by using italics for emphasis, castigates them for building up a false picture of the sites, not by exaggerating them but by telling the truth. His theory is illustrated by using the example of the word “gem”. He concedes that all guide writers’ individual use of the gem motif is true (“the Taj... where the architect leaves off and the jeweler begins” etc.) but by the cumulative use of the word gem the reader “beguiled by his heated imagination” builds up a picture of the Taj covered not in white marble, as miracle in itself, but in diamonds, “sparkling in the sun, a gem-encrusted Taj as tall as the Matterhorn”.

  Twain now expands his theory that an individual guide book with a true description of a site leads inevitably to cumulative guide books - even though individually accurate - stirring up hyperbole in the reader’ s imagination. For this he gives his own experience at the Niagara Falls, “which I had to visit fifteen times before I succeeded in getting my imaginary Falls gauged to the actuality and could begin to sanely and wholesomely wonder at them for what they were, not what I had expected them to be... not an Atlantic Ocean pouring down thence over cloud-vexed Himalayan heights... but a beruffled little wet apron hanging out to dry.”

  Several pages later, having burdened the reader with a not very well argued non-theory, he delivers his coup de grace - for this reader and writer anyway the best paragraphs in Following the Equator. It is as if somewhere between the conscious and subconscious he had presented to the guide book writers (of which, of course, he was also one) and the world an example of how it should be done. He chose his subject brilliantly: a comparison of the most familiar man-made miracle, the Taj Mahal, and the most unfamiliar natural
miracle, the ice-storm.

  I suppose that many, many years ago I gathered the idea that the Taj’ s place in the achievements of man was exactly the place of the ice-storm in the achievements of Nature; that the Taj represented man’ s supremest possibility in the creation of grace and beauty and exquisiteness and splendor, just as the ice-storm represents Nature’ s supremest possibility in the combination of those same qualities. I do not know how long ago that idea was bred in me, but I know that I cannot remember back to a time when the thought of either of these symbols of gracious and unapproachable perfection did not at once suggest the other. If I thought of the ice-storm, the Taj rose before me divinely beautiful; if I thought of the Taj, with its encrustings and inlayings of jewels, the vision of the ice-storm rose. And so, to me, all these years, the Taj has had no rival among the temples and palaces of men, none that even remotely approached it, it was man’s architectural ice-storm.

  Here in London the other night I was talking with some Scotch and English friends, and I mentioned the ice-storm, using it as a figure - a figure which failed, for none of them had heard of the ice-storm. One gentleman, who was very familiar with American literature, said he had never seen it mentioned in any book. That is strange. And I, myself, was not able to say that I had seen it mentioned in a book; and yet the autumn foliage, with all other American scenery, has received full and competent attention.

  The oversight is strange, for in America the ice-storm is an event. And it is not an event which one is careless about. When it comes, the news flies from room to room in the house, there are bangings on the doors, and shoutings, “The ice-storm! the ice-storm!” and even the laziest sleepers throw off the covers and join the rush for the windows.

  The ice-storm occurs in midwinter, and usually its enchantments are wrought in the silence and the darkness of the night. A fine drizzling rain falls hour after hour upon the naked twigs and branches of the trees, and as it falls it freezes. In time the trunk and every branch and twig are encased in hard pure ice; so that the tree looks like a skeleton tree made all of glass - glass that is crystal-clear. All along the underside of every branch and twig is a comb of little icicles - the frozen drip. Sometimes these pendants do not quite amount to icicles, but are round beads - frozen tears.

  The weather clears, toward dawn, and leaves a brisk pure atmosphere and a sky without a shred of cloud in it - and everything is still, there is not a breath of wind. The dawn breaks and spreads, the news of the storm goes about the house, and the little and the big, in wraps and blankets, flock to the window and press together there, and gaze intently out upon the great white ghost in the grounds, and nobody says a word, nobody stirs. All are waiting; they know what is coming, and they are waiting, waiting for the miracle. The minutes drift on and on and on, with not a sound but the ticking of the clock; at last the sun fires a sudden sheaf of rays into the ghostly tree and turns it into a white splendor of glittering diamonds. Everybody catches his breath, and feels a swelling in his throat and a moisture in his eyes - but waits again; for he knows what is coming; there is more yet. The sun climbs higher, and still higher, flooding the tree from its loftiest spread of branches to its lowest, turning it to a glory of white fire; then in a moment, without warning, comes the great miracle, the supreme miracle, the miracle without its fellow in the earth; a gust of wind sets every branch and twig to swaying, and in an instant turns the whole white tree into a spouting and spraying explosion of flashing gems of every conceivable color; and there it stands and sways this way and that, flash! flash! flash! a dancing and glancing world of rubies, emeralds, diamonds, sapphires, the most radiant spectacle, the most blinding spectacle, the divinest, the most exquisite, the most intoxicating vision of fire and color and intolerable and unimaginable splendor that ever any eye has rested upon in this world, or will ever rest upon outside of the gates of heaven.

  By, all my senses, all my faculties, I know that the ice storm is Nature’s supremest achievement in the domain of the superb and the beautiful; and by my reason, at least, I know that the Taj is man’s ice-storm.

  In the ice-storm every one of the myriad ice-beads pendant from twig and branch is an individual gem, and changes color with every motion caused by the wind; each tree carries a million, and a forest-front exhibits the splendors of the single tree multiplied by a thousand.

  It occurs to me now that I have never seen the ice-storm put upon canvas, and have not heard that any painter has tried to do it. I wonder why that is. Is it that paint cannot counterfeit the intense blaze of a sun-flooded jewel? There should be, and must be, a reason, and a good one, why the most enchanting sight that Nature has created has been neglected by the brush.

  ***

  The Twain party stayed in a mansion that is now the headquarters of the Archeological Survey of India. What the ASI has done to the place is typical of what the organization has done to lesser buildings supposed to be under its protection: ruined them. This, apparently is a building it actually owns too. Its regime is the worst of all worlds: a rulebook forbidding any changes to anything, including restorations and improvements, and referees open to... suggestion. One wonders what qualifications are needed, beyond nepotism, greed and bloody mindedness, to work for it.

  “Hello, I’m writing a book about Mark Twain’s visit to India in 1896.”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “No, well I do. He was here in Agra on 27 and 28 February.”

  “He maybe, I don’t know.”

  “And did you know he stayed here, in this very building, when it was used by the Resident, Colonel Loch?”

  “No, we wouldn’t have any records of that.”

  “Mark Twain lectured at the Metcalfe Hall.”

  “I never heard of that.”

  “Well, it burnt down. Kitchen fire. But you must have records of it. It was the town hall, the main public building until a hundred years ago.”

  “We wouldn’t know about that.”

  “So what do you know about, historically?”

  “No, we are for archaeology.”

  “And that’s not historical?”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  Sita gives me a nudge and rubs her finger and thumb: tea money. “When in Rome” and all that, but I’m not in the mood, feeling that the bribee should show a modicum of interest in what one might buy from him - and she has already found out nearly all the information anyway.

  Livy wrote:

  We are stopping in the most beautiful bungalow - it is a government house occupied by the Political Agent. He is a lovely, interesting man with the most charming house. I wish you could see us here!

  We have an immense bedroom more than 30 square feet and it must be about 30 feet high; it has a window onto a large pillared verandah - where, during the night, our servant spreads down his quilt on the stone floor and sleeps. Up high in one of the walls is a sky window which lets in an abundance of light and air. One side of the room has two doors into the dining room, and another side two doors into the entrance hall. By the side of the large window onto a piazza is the door into my dressing room - perhaps 10 x 12 - out of that a bathroom a good deal larger. On another side of the room - sleeping-room - opens a door to Sam’s bath and dressing-rooms.

  It is all most beautiful and delightful - good food, nice, interesting, homelike people, great comfort and great independence.

  All the doors in all Indian houses are curtained, so that you can leave the doors open, and so get the more air. In this house I find the best food I have found in India except at Belvedere in Calcutta.

  Around this house all the time a patrol marches so that one feels here much protected. You can leave all the doors open if you like without danger.

  I do so long for you all to see the pictures constantly before our eyes. These picturesque native servants come and go with their white dresses and white
turbans. There are four men to wait at dinner and one little boy of perhaps 10; he is the son of the butler. As you go along a hall or enter a room in these eastern houses there will rise up from the floor, where they are squatting, sometimes from 2 to 6 or 8 servants, sometimes they remind me of monkeys.

  Oh, dear. It is as bad as you are imagining. The gardens are destitute, unwatered, uncleaned, uncared for. The main entrance alone has been painted - and that a horrid shade of pink. The window frames are rotten. Tiles have fallen from the roof and not been replaced. The drive is covered in the usual litter. It’s some shop window for the headquarters of the people who are meant to be in charge of heritage and preservation.

  ***

  Tourists leaving the Taj Mahal immediately compare the squalor in the tiny medieval lanes around it to the sublimity they have just left behind. This is unfair; it is certain that in the Moghul days Shah Jahan and his court lived in grace and splendor, but the thousands of laborers who built the Taj, the Gates, gardens and watercourses lived in far worse conditions than the modern Indians crowded into the narrow streets, surviving on their cottage industries, just outside the Gates.

  More distressing is to see the squalor of the modern architecture that is India’s Sub-Continental Hideous. Agra was a Moghul capital and British garrison town and both previous civilizations built many other fabulous buildings here apart from the Taj. Alongside these - and unfortunately quite often on top of these - modern India has built its own new prestige buildings. It is valid to compare these and come to the only possible conclusion: modern Indian architecture is without any merit whatsoever. I’m not talking about the sight of the average new Indian dwelling which is always left unfinished with those twirly steel rods sticking up through the roof, the concrete left unpainted, the blocks unpointed and the builders’ rubble left lying in the street outside. No, even prestige buildings like upscale hotels or government offices or the burgeoning shopping malls are uniformly hideous, out of scale, immune to their surroundings and always left unfinished.