A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal (31 page)

As exemplified by the comments of Bernier and Salih, the influences on, and origins of, the inlay work have been the subject of a somewhat sterile and chauvinistic controversy over the years. Some have claimed that the technique derives solely from the Italian hard stone inlay work known as
pietra dura
, which was practised particularly in Florence under the Medici, and that travellers brought this to India. Others have pointed out that, long before Europeans arrived, the Indians had developed the technique of stone inlaying known as
panchi kura
, meaning ‘driven-in work’, which was used both for calligraphy and decoration. While the latter is certainly true, semiprecious stones that are of an even greater hardness than the inlays previously used in India were not employed before the arrival of the Europeans. Therefore, just as European painting had an effect on Moghul painting, it seems quite likely that either the Europeans or the objects they brought with them to the imperial court as gifts influenced Shah Jahan and his craftsmen to extend
panchi kura
to incorporate the jewels so beloved by the emperor.

Such a debate is much less important than the stupendous beauty of the inlay, which led a court poet to write:

They set stone flowers in the marble
That by their colour, if not their perfume
Surpass real flowers
.

In the nineteenth century a Russian female visitor enthused that some of the flowers
‘look so perfectly natural, the artist has copied nature so marvellously well, that your hand involuntarily reaches to assure yourself that they are not actually real. Branches of white jasmine made of mother of pearl wind around a red pomegranate flower of cornelian … while delicate oleanders peep out from under rich green foliage … every leaf, every petal is a separate emerald, pearl or topaz.’
*

Over forty different types of gems are used in the Taj Mahal. Shah Jahan had them transported from throughout Asia. Caravans brought jade along the silk route from Kashgar in China; beautiful, deep-blue, gold-flecked lapis lazuli was mined in the high mountains of northeastern Afghanistan; yaks carried turquoises on the first stage of their journey from upper Tibet; coral came from Arabia and the Red Sea; yellow amber from upper Burma; deep-green malachite from Russia and rubies across the sea from Sri Lanka. Lahsunia, the cat’s-eye stone, is said to have been brought from as far as the Nile Valley in Egypt. The choice of a particular stone for an application or location was not only influenced by its colour or transparency but also by its astrological associations. Sapphires, for example, were considered to have inauspicious connotations for many purposes and were therefore rarely employed.

When the gems reached Agra,
‘wonder working … magic making’
artisans polished them and cut them to size with a small bow saw. These saws had up to five copper strings set at various distances apart to allow slices of stone of different thicknesses to be made. Stone-cutters, probably using patterns prepared by artists to guide them, chiselled grooves into the white marble, into which they inserted the inlays and fixed them in place with a putty made of oil, lead oxide and wax. Lapidaries have counted up to sixty slices of stone, each cut and matched with precision to form a single flower of only an inch in size. Elsewhere craftsmen showed great skill in using the variations of colour within a single stone to suggest the shade variation within a single petal. They did not confine the art of
panchi kura
to the main buildings. Instead they used it extensively throughout the complex, thus adding to the unity of the whole. They reserved their finest work for Mumtaz Mahal’s cenotaph at the heart of the mausoleum, and for the mausoleum itself, but even decorated the crenellations of the sandstone battlements topping the complex’s walls with white marble inlay in a flower pattern to which they added a black marble centre.

A series of carved dado panels runs around the bottom of the walls on both the outside and inside of the mausoleum. The panels depict sprays of flowers such as tulips and irises, which rise in relief from the white marble.
*
Each panel has an inner frame of black marble and then a broad frame of stone inlay in stylized flower patterns. When the sun falls through the screens into the interior, it throws the flowers into even deeper relief, highlighting the three-dimensional effect. To make the relief carvings, known in India as
manabbat kari
, artists laid out the design onto the white marble with henna. Carvers then used a series of ever finer chisels to remove successive layers of surrounding marble, thus allowing the flowers and plants to emerge in all their beauty.

The final kind of decoration, the incised painting found mainly on the mosque and the guesthouse, has by its very nature proved less durable than the carving and the inlay. However, the beauty of its plant and geometric designs is still clear on both their walls and ceilings. The method of producing the incised painting was simple and can be seen in folk art in many places in India. First, workers painted a red earth wash over the white plaster. Next they drew the designs onto the wall. Finally they scraped away the red overlay delicately from within the drawings to reveal the white plaster once more and to make the flowers and geometric patterns apparently stand out from the red background.

The Taj complex, so exquisitely ornamented with jewelled, carved and painted plants and flowers crafted by the hand of man, would not have been considered complete without a correspondingly lovely natural setting – a garden of Paradise.

*
As we circled the mausoleum one hot afternoon, the Taj’s curator pointed out one striking, if relatively small, lack of uniformity amid the careful hierarchy of shape and detail. On the chamfered northwest corner of the mausoleum one of the half-columns carved into the marble at the side of the dado differs entirely from the others uniformly the same all around the building. Unlike them, it is not faceted and does not have the same capital. To us and to him it seemed a deliberate fault introduced by the builders. They had perhaps done so to render the Taj imperfect, since in Islam it is blasphemous to attempt to repeat the perfection of God’s handiwork. This is also the reason for the
abrash
, the deliberate discontinuity in the colour or weave of the finest Persian carpets.

*
The Alhambra in Granada, in southern Spain, is a well-known example.

*
The visitor was Madame Blavatsky (1831–1891), an unconventional woman who in 1875 founded theosophy, perhaps the first ‘new age’ teaching. Theosophy was in some ways similar to Akbar’s new religion. It saw truth in all religions and incorporated Hindu and Buddhist elements into a philosophy emphasizing the individual’s need to understand their own karma and for direct, intuitive communion with the divine in mystic trances.

*
The tulip is native to central Asia. The word ‘tulip’ derives from the Persian word
dulband
, meaning ‘turban’ or ‘turban-shaped’. In modern Iran the flower is a symbol of martyrdom and it is portrayed on the tombs of those killed in the Iran–Iraq War. At the very time when the carvers were portraying tulips on the Taj Mahal, tulip mania was sweeping Europe. It reached its height in Holland in early 1637, when a Dutch merchant paid 6,650 guilders (twenty-five times the annual wages of a carpenter) for a few dozen bulbs, not for planting but as an investment. A few days later the bubble burst, with prices falling to less than a tenth of what he had paid.

11

‘This Paradise-like Garden’

T
he English word ‘paradise’, which first appeared in a Middle English text of 1175, is a simple transliteration of the old Persian word
pairidaeza
, meaning a walled garden. But the linking of gardens to an eternal idyll is much older and is common to both Christianity and Islam, with their shared roots in the Old Testament and the arid Middle East. Paradise is closely associated with the Garden of Eden lost by Adam and Eve. In his epic poem
Paradise Lost
, written at the end of Shah Jahan’s life, John Milton described how, in the Garden of Eden:

Rose a fresh fountain, and with many a rill
Watered the garden; thence united fell
Down the steep glade …
And now, divided into four main streams,
Runs diverse …

Water has always been the stuff of life to desert dwellers. Oases in the Arabian Desert were perhaps the forerunners of the garden and the bright, verdant green of their vegetation became a sacred colour to the Arabs and subsequently the colour of Islam. When the Prophet Muhammad proclaimed Islam, the Koran stated that the Islamic eternal dwelling or paradise was a series of terraces, each containing ever more splendid gardens irrigated by four water courses representing the rivers of life. Part of the description from the Koran reads:

With o’erbranching trees in each:
In each two fountains flowing:
In each two kinds of every fruit:
On couches with linings of brocade shall they recline.
And the fruit of the two gardens shall be within easy reach:
Therein shall be the damsels with retiring glances,
Whom nor man nor djinn hath touched before them:
Like jacinths and pearls:
Shall the reward of good be aught but good?
And beside these shall be two other gardens:
Of a dark green:
With gushing fountains in each:
In each fruits and the palm and the pomegranate
.

When the Arabs invaded Persia, bringing with them the Koran, they encountered another thriving garden tradition stretching back over a thousand years. Xenophon wrote of how the great Persian ruler Cyrus had in the sixth century
BC
planted a garden with his own hands. One of Cyrus’s successors, Xerxes, was so transfixed by the beauty of a plane tree that he adorned its branches with gold amulets. The melding of Arabic and Persian cultures with their common love of horticulture produced gardens that their creators designed to be an earthly counterpart to the heavenly paradise.