The first time…
… that you enter the gate that reveals the most photographed building in the world, you are already processing mentally all of the hundreds of images and postcards that you’ve ever seen of The Taj Mahal. It’s a picture that every child of school age sees in geography class. It’s in the window of practically every travel agency. You probably don’t know how many times you’ve seen it, it’s so pervasive visually, almost beyond being a cliche. And that’s not even including the most (in)famous picture of Princess Diana sitting on the bench by herself with the Taj a looming presence in the background. The Princess was no fool: she chose the ultimate symbol of love, the precious stone inlaid-marble mausoleum of Shah Jehan and his wife, created by more than 20,000 artisans over a 21-year period to signal the end of her marriage. For The Taj is a shrine, not just to love but perhaps even moreso to separation and certainly to grief. And this was the picture that announced to a world media braying for blood, that Charles and Diana were a couple no longer. Even without the formal statement, the symbolism was inherently obvious.
It is against this background that you measure the expectation and anticipation. You think you know the Taj already, that it’s so familiar it will be like seeing an old family home that you used to live in. But once you step through that enormous doorway, edging closer in the heat and midst of a press of humanity, and the view is suddenly right there, that it’s a completely different story. For The Taj Mahal is that rare object that is not somehow diminshed through being over-photographed and over-exposed. The Taj is the one of the very few things that transcends anyone’s attempt to photograph it. In a strange way, it shows you why a photograph is not - and can never be - real. It is a lesson in postmodernism, a reminder how a photograph is a construction in which the trace of the real may or may not be present.
On seeing it for the first time, The Taj Mahal moves most people to tears. Its beauty is so extravagant, it’s as if someone has hit you with a taser in your third eye. My guide (“I am Number#1 Taj guide!”) told me that when they were teenagers in the seventies, he and his friends used to go and sit around the base of the Taj every Saturday night, meet girls there, smoke clove cigarettes and talk until the sun came up. “We used to watch ‘Yellow Taj’ (sunset), ‘Blue Taj’ (midnight and moonrise) and then, ‘Pink Taj’ (dawn). The Taj is never the same. It changes 24 hours a day. ” Exhaling smoke a little too forcefully, his forehead creased slightly and he then added, “But you can’t do that anymore, not since the terror began. Then they put security on it so we couldn’t meet there anymore.” And with that he sighed and stubbed out his cigarette on the ground, before picking up the butt. “That era is over. The age of innocence is lost forever.”
He may be right and a certain kind of freedom may indeed be gone but the Taj grows more poignant nonetheless as the years pass. Bearing witness to the world’s largest (and possibly craziest!) democracy, it is a teeming oasis of contradictions and culture-melding scenarios. I have been back to it numerous times and it grows, if this is even possible, more astonishing each time.
