The Taj Visit, or, the Real "Incredible India"

Some of you reading this may want to visit the Taj Mahal some day. That’s understandable. It seems to us to be the most beautiful manmade tourist site on earth. Pictures really don’t do it justice.

If you visit it, we have some advice, learned painfully.

Go early in the day, and don’t go on a Sunday, which is the day Indians have off, which makes the crowds horrendous, particularly late in the day. If you hire a guide, and most foreigners do, insist that you go early in the day, particularly at sunrise since it opens at 6 a.m., and that you go before the guide takes you to shopping establishments where he gets a kickback to look at expensive rugs which you have no intention of buying and couldn’t afford anyway. By going early on a non-Sunday, you avoid having to spend an hour in the security line to get in and you have more than 45 minutes to spend seeing the Taj Mahal and its grounds, which is what we had. We would recommend that you allot at least 3 hours and take your time visiting the site and enjoying the beauty from all angles, especially the beautiful, detailed inlaid carvings and the screens that are chiseled from stone.

There. We’ve vented now, and we do realize that we were lucky to get those 45 minutes, since most people never get to see the Taj Mahal in person, but we were quite frustrated after our mad dash, which was sponsored by Semester at Sea. We wrote a restrained letter of dissatisfaction to the program about it.

One other word of advice: Don’t go on a Friday either since that is the Moslem holy day of the week and the Taj is closed on Fridays.

The Taj Mahal is located in Agra, a city of about 1 million that is a 2-hour train ride south of New Delhi. An average of about 200,000 people a day visit the Taj, according to the Indian government, although I might question those numbers on any day except Sunday.

Now about the place itself (HISTORY ALERT! HISTORY ALERT! If history puts you to sleep, you could be in danger in the next few paragraphs.)

Indians have had countless religious wars over the centuries between many different invaders. The Mughals, who we know as the Mongols, invaded India and won a big battle in 1526. The most famous Mughal ruler in India was Akbar, who ruled from 1556 to 1605. He greatly expanded and consolidated Mughal rule. His grandson, Shah Jahan, who ruled from 1627 to 1658, built the Taj Mahal, to honor his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who bore him 14 children, the last of which killed her.

Akbar was also important because he started construction on Agra Fort, a massive red sandstone fort and palace that his grandson also expanded. We visited that fort prior to the Taj. Shah Jahan was imprisoned there the last eight years of his life by his third son, who killed his brothers and took over. From his residence in the fort, he could see the Taj Mahal, which is a short distance away. He was buried there with his wife -- I guess the third son wasn’t all bad.

Akbar also built the city of Fatehpur Sikri (pronounced fotta-purr-see-kree), which is about 25 kilometers outside Agra. It served as the capital of the Mughal Empire for about 14 years, then was abandoned because of water supply problems. We visited that, too, and it was very impressive. (We hope to set up slide shows of all these forts and the Taj on this blog after our return home.)

The Taj took from 15 to 22 years to build, depending on the source. Shah Jahan brought in designers and artisans from around the world to assure it reached the levels of beauty he wanted. More than 20,000 laborers and a thousand elephants worked on it. The artistry and inlaid marble work are exquisite. A mosque was built to one side of the Taj, and to keep the symmetry of the site an identical building was put on the other site, even though it had no purpose.

A small local note: All three sites we visited on this day had beautiful blooming dahlias on the grounds; we wonder if the tubers came from Swan Island Dahlias in Canby, the largest dahlia farm in the world? Or are the Swan Island Dahlias descended from the ones at the Taj Mahal?