Taj Mahal

The Taj Mahal was built, as you may know, as an extravagant mausoleum for and monument to Mumtaz, beloved wife of Shah- Jahan, Mughal Emperor of India. Mumtaz died with their birth of their fourteenth child and Shah Jahan began his building a year after  her death.

See it at dawn as it rises from mist and dust and gradually comes into sharp relief beside the sluggish Yamuna river over there to its side. See this place later in the day as the crowds amass, cluttering the symmetry of the pools and paths as you approach. It glows, but go closer and look also at the detail inlaid, at the flowers made from semi precious stones pressed in to the white marble by the twenty thousand workers who took twenty two years to build it. And the most pressing thing about it might not be its numinous beauty, but the reason why it was built. The tombs lie side by side inside the centre, in an area plain by contrast in keeping with belief  - because this is what is appropriate in the heart of the mausoleum, however extraordinary the outside. An here, where the tombs lie, is the heart of it all, shadowy and cool and reverent.

If you cannot yourself, ask someone to read for you the inscriptions from the Qur'an that are inscribed throughout the complex. On the Great Gate it says

"Oh Soul, thou art at rest.
Return to the Lord at peace with Him and He at peace with you."

Think on. The Emperor himself wrote that

"Should guilty seek asylum here
Like one pardoned
He becomes free from sin."

He conceived it as a resting place, a place of cleansing and also, you might say, as a testament to a belief that what will survive of us is love. That he could, as the poet Rabindranath Tagore has it, "conquer time's heart/Through beauty."

And from Tagore's 'Shah-Jahan',

"Poet-Emperor,
This is your heart's picture,
Your new Megaduta,
Soaring with the marvellous, unprecedented melody and line
Towards the unseen plane
On which your loverless beloved
And the first glow of sunrise
And the last sigh of sunset
And the disembodied beauty of moonlit cameli-flower
And the gateway on the edge of language
That turns away man's wistful gaze again and again
Are all blended.
This beauty is your messenger:
Skirting time's sentries
To carry the wordless message:
'I have not forgotten you, my love, I have not forgotten you.' "

The flowers at the top and above show details in carving at the Taj Mahal. Both courtesy of Christian Haugen at Flickr under creative commons licence (thank you) and  taken at 7 a.m. Can you detect the pink glow on the stone at this time? That's why you go and visit it day and night - to see how it changes with the light. Thank you Christian for the other picture, giving us an idea - though perhaps we should not idealise who the Emperor was or what he did in his rule - of the scale of his vision and purpose.