The Taj Mahal and Akbar's lost city

The Taj Mahal on Thursday,  May 19, 2011

Kalee Haywood, Shenetta Payne, Kate Zibluk and Sara E.McNeil at the Taj Mahal.

The Taj Mahal in Agra transcends description.

It is more graceful and intricate than any words can say.

And it’s one of history’s great love stories.   After the death of Mumtaz Mahal, third wife of Mughal emperor Shah Jhan died giving birth to their fourteenth child in 1630, the empreror mourned for two months and his hair turned from black to white. In his grief, he built the Taj. It took 22 years.

The white marble building is entirely handmade, with inlaid filagree throughout. Visitors are silent and reverent even if thousands visit each day.

We stayed overnight at the usual Indian hotel that featured sporadic electricity and internet service. The Taj is the center of the crowded, busy city of Agra, noted for its lack of services, and some Indians say, its corruption. After our visit to Agra fort the previous day, our dinner was interrupted by a dusty, sandy windstorm followed by a rare pre-monsoon cloudburst. The storm toppled a few trees around the Taj, but little damage occurred.

The Indian  government provides shuttle buses from the park entrance to the building, and it also permits the usual hucksters and hawkers to accost tourists with their efforts to sell them Taj Mahal snow globes and refrigerator magnates. We have become adept at ignoring them even after only three days.

A local boy helps Kate Zibluk find an unusual view of the Taj Mahal. When he was offered 10 rupees for his services, he said, "Not enough for what I do." I gave the young entrepreneur 50 rupees.

We reverently circled the building, taking pictures and considering Shah Jhan and Mumtal.

We then left for a tour of Fatehpur Sikri, the ghost city of Akbar the great. Akbar built a new capitol about 40 miles from Agra in the 1700s as a buffer against growing Rajastan to the west. But he found he could not sustain the city due to a lack of water, and he abandoned it to the elements only 12 years later. The outer walls still stand, and the courtyards, harems and barracks survived out in the dry scrub.

Kate Zibluk explores Emperor Akbar's private chambers at Fatehpur Sikri, the Mughal lost city.

Carl Lindquist and Sara E. McNeil take a break at the queen's private kitchen at the lost city.

An Indian soldier stands guard at the queen's study the way his ancestors did at the lost city.

We explored for a little over an hour, and then drove into Rajastan to its capitol, Jaipour, about 300 miles away. Around Fatehpour, the crowded squalor of Agra gives way to crop lands and farms. While many are still poor, the villages are neater and cleaner than the sad urban slums of Delhi and Agra.

Rajastan is mining country and the origin of the sandstone and marble of which the Mughal monuments are built. Even today, sandstone and marble cutters dominate the economy as well as farms and businesses. There is far less crowding and the roads less congested, but just as chaotic as the urban thoroughfares.

We arrived in Jaipour in the evening, and Sam, our tour guide and fixer surprised us by finding rooms at a small 19^th century hotel near the downtown. Being midweek, we were able to get our rooms upgraded to their best ones, decorated in British Raj style, with huge mahogany furniture, beds with large bedposts for mosquito netting, marble floors and other amenities.

And the internet connection works.

We are truly looking forward to our days in Jaipour.

Day 2: The Road to Agra and the Taj

Tour Guide Saurav (Sam) Somani, left, Carl Lindquist, Shenetta Payne, Kalee Haywood, Sara E. McNeil and Kate Zibluk leave the gateway of Emperor Akbar's tomb in Agra.

The five-hour drive from Delhi to Agra was itself an adventure.

The Delhi suburbs sprawl on for 40 miles as with New York or Chicago/ But American cities don’t have loose water buffalo and traffic going both ways in one lane.

The landscape of small stands and shops, some with electricity, some not, with dirty stands and stalls next to luxury auto dealerships, goes on and on, slowly giving way to  open fields.

But the crowds never really go away, not for 200 miles. The road in both, or all three or four directions, is full of trucks and three-wheeled cars and bicycles and motorcycles and pushcarts and rickshaws. There is no speed limit, but given the crowds, 40 miles an hour is equivalent to the German Autobahn, where they go more than 100 miles an hour.

A driver's-eye view of traffic in India. The truck in front of us was full of passengers near Agra.

They carry everything: wood, cement, eggs, recently harvested wheat, and people. A dozen or more people clamor onto the back of many trucks to get to work, or just out of town.

At intersections and rest stops, hawkers and beggars abound They knock on car windows with trinkets, cards, games, feathers…..anything. And if you take their picture, they expect 10 rupees, about 50 cents.

Sam, our guide, is friendly to them, but he advises us to ignore them, lest we be swamped with requests. Our Hindi lesson Monday included about five wsys to say no, but in general we ignored them.

A roadside merchant uses a monkey to do his marketing midway between Delhi and Agra.

A blind beggar sells jewelry at carside at Akbar's tomb.

A beggar girl stares at Kate Zibluk, who examines a jade necklace purchased from the girl's family.

Upon our entrance to Agra, we toured the tomb of Akbar, the grandfather of the builder of the Taj Mahal. The huge site was a quiet respite from the road. From there we checked into a luxurious-looking hotel, in which the electricity and the internet connection was sporadic.

A boy enjoys the shade at Akbar's tomb.

A Hindu woman uses a parasol to shade herself from the sun and 100-degree heat at Akbar's tomb.

Then we explored the Agra Fort, another Mogul monument, and at two miles in circumference, one of the biggest. The fort was a palace full of private quarters for harems and soldiers in its day. It was full of gardens and courtyards. It was the cite of riots in the 1857 Sepoy rebellion against the British. The Sepoys, were Muslim mercenaries, and when they found the British used pork grease to lubricate gun cartridges, they thought the practice defiled their religion. The practice set off a nationwide rebellion with many casualties on both sides.

But today, it is mostly filled with Indian tourists, proud of their own memories and the ability of their own people to build massive monuments, whether they were Moslem or Hindu. In the 100-plus degree heat, the tourists came in droves. We were among the few non-Asians there, and the Indians often asked us to sit in ith them as they took family pictures.

We were honoring their past along with them and they took pride that we bothered to do so as well. As a person of partially English descent, the irony wasn’t lost on me.

As we explored the fort, we could catch in the distance the Taj Mahal, and that awaited us in the morning.

Day 1

Sara E. McNeil, left, Shenetta Payne, Kalee Haywood  and Kate Zibluk don Muslim robes as they prepare to visit the Jama Masjid or Friday Mosque in Delhi, India, Tuesday, May 17, 2011.

                          

Chaos.

With 17 million people crammed into the space of a middle-sized American city, it's just impossible to manage. All you can do, is sort of keep it afloat. Sort of.

From the moment we stepped out of the Delhi Airport in the 96-degree heat at 1 a.m. Tuesday, the chaos was impossible to escape. Over a hundred taci drivers, rickshaw drivers, limo drivers and assorted others brayed and hawked for attention to take departing passengers to their destinations.

Even at that hour, the roads were full. Our voluble tour guide, Saurav (Sam) Somani,  explained that there are no rules to driving in Delhi, and "all you need are a horn, a a good brake and a sense of humor." He meant it. Little three-wheeled Tata taxis swirl on either side of the road, shared by everything from Rolls Royces, to oxcarts to loose cows and donkeys. They pass on the left. Or the right. There are few stoplights.

 A street scene outside the Jama Masjid, or 

Friday Mosque in Delhi, India in Delhi, India, 

Tuesday, May 17, 2011.

Somehow, we got to our small hotel in a safe neighborhood, guarded by a police checkpoint a few blocks away.

It's not that Delhi is particularly dangerous. It's just that the caste system keeps the untouchables with few options, and many become pickpockets and petty criminals.  The beggars and the impoverished slum dwellers, some who live in garbage dumps and pick food and reusable items from the litter, have few options.

 A sweeper cleans cleans the memorial to   Mahatma Gandhi, whose ashes were scattered on  that same spot in 1948.

                                               

     A Muslim Woman worships at the Jama Majid mosque.

A sweeper helps a tourist at Humayan's Tomb. Built in the ealry 1600s, the massive park is a model for the Taj Mahal.

                                               

                                                    

Above them are the low-level laborers, rickshaw drivers,  haulers, delivery people, and lavatory attendants. And there are entrepreneurs selling everything from food to clothes to electrical supplies on seemingly every street corner.

                                               

But there is quiet amid the din. And history. India has 5,000 years of civilization, and it served as a crossroad of the Silk Road that connected China to Europe. It has been influenced by Buddha, Alexander the Great,  Mohammed and Queen Victoria of Great Britain.

  A sweeper cleans the square near the old Red Fort,  a 17th Century Muslim palace, in Delhi.

                                     

The Moslem Moguls, rulers in the middle ages through the 19th century, left the most famous monuments, from the Taj Mahal, to the Qutab Minar, a tower more than 1,200 feet tall, built in the 1199, when European structures a quarter the height were considered towers.

We spent the day visiting monuments and looking at the city and its people. We then took a Hindi lesson and visited the city's entertainment district and then had dinner on embassy row, near the 1960s style U.S. embassy.

And tomorrow, Agra and the Taj Mahal.

                                               

 A worshipper cleanses himself at a public fountain at the mosque.

                                                            

A scene at the Jama Masjid Mosque.

The second act

India was never in my "top 10" list of places I might want to visit. It always seemed too crowded, too dusty, and too hot. When given the choice, I usually went some place cooler like like the UK, or less crowded, like the Canadian Arctic.

It started a year ago in my graduate seminar in visual communications. I worked with a Nepali student, Deepak Neupane, and told him I had always wanted to visit the Himalayas. He said I should go, and he meant it. So we visited Carl Lindquist, our director of international programs at Arkansas State and he liked the idea. Carl is an India scholar, and he had lived and married there. So we planned and India-Nepal trip. Eight months and a dozen permutations later, the Nepal trip faded. The two-country trip proved too expensive and lengthy. Our university chancellor made the final decision.

India remained. My wife, Sara E. McNeil had always wanted to go. She's the type of person who views  the Upanishads as recreational reading.

And I just wanted to go.

Somewhere.

I suppose you can say I am at a "career plateau." In the scheme of things, it's not a bad problem to have. After all, if your problems are existential, are they really problems? After several years of doing the requisite professor things -- publishing articles in journals and going to conferences and teaching classes and being involved in the profession yadda yadda yadda, I "topped out," with a promoted to full professor last year.

And left me ... I wasn't sure where. I could have continued to do more of the same things that got me to that final promotion, but what's the point? I looked into moving into administration, and I got some bites and even an on-campus visit for an associate deanship last year, but ultimately they filled the job internally at a far lower cost. 

My professional journalism career is at a dead end, too. I worked part time for a regional metro newspaper, but the economy killed that gig.  I was regional director and national vice president for a major professional organization, but after they chose someone else for president, they really didn't know what to do with me.  I sometimes fire off a column or a letter or rant in a local newspaper or professional blog, but I haven't found anything to sustain forward momentum.


Isaac Newton said that bodies in motion tend to stay in motion and that bodies that don't move tend to stay that way, too. I am not enjoying my my existential inertia. But I know I have no right to complain; I am in an enviable position. I can go through the motions, and they'd probably be pretty-good motions, until retirement and .....


... and  some professors do that, and it happens in other careers, too. Colleagues and friends tell me to gear down a bit, keep my nose clean, and sort of go into an early semi-retirement. With the way Social Security and my 401(k) look, that semi-retirement looks like a 20-year stretch. 


I am not ready for that.


So, here I am at Boston's Logan Airport, waiting for a flight to Paris, and then New Delhi. My daughter,Kate, 11, is beside me, playing a computer game and her mom is reading beside her. The students accompanying us, Shenetta Payne of Pine Bluff, Ark., and Kalee Haywood of Piggot Ark., are respectively reading and napping. And frequent flier Carl Lindquist is keeping track of our travel plans, double-checking itineraries.


We cross the Atlantic in an hour.


We're touring the Golden Triangle: New Delhi, Agra (home of the Taj Mahal) and Jaipour. We're visiting Mumbai and Bollywood. I hope to bring back a student tour next year and find a home for them to produce documentaries on the subcontinent.  I have meeting at  the Times of India, NDTV (India's CNN) and the renowned Whistling Woods Film School. 


I hope it works out, and as long as I have hope, I can move forward.