Stacey Samuel leapt before the Taj. (Carolyn Slutsky)

Wobbly toy cobras in cheap bamboo baskets. Peacock feathers tied into fans. Snow globes swirling glitter around a two-inch Taj Mahal.

“I give you cheap. Just take a look,” insisted one of some two dozen vendors who thrust a bazaar’s worth of kitsch into the faces of student journalists this morning. We were making our way through the streets surrounding the majestic Taj, India’s most-visited tourist site.

“You want postcards?” said one determined man who trailed the pack with a ratty set of torn-from-a-book paper rectangles. “200 rupees? 100 rupees? OK? OK? OK?”

Not yet a full day into our stay in Agra, we found ourselves sucked into the swirling chaos of a place that stakes itself on profits made from those who live afar. Home to both the Taj Mahal and the majestic Agra Fort, Agra is abuzz with tourists – a situation that gives the place a more commercial veneer than the temples, mosques and churches we’ve visited thus far. Our tour guide estimated that the Taj complex receives 5,000 visitors a day.

“Folks, we’ve got to hurry. The sun is rising,” Prof. Sree Sreenivasan repeated to coffee-seeking stragglers as we boarded a bus marked “TOURIST” about a half-hour before light was to take hold. Outside the windows, men squatted by small fires and women swept leftover pink Holi dust from streets as we proceeded in receding darkness to see the Taj at the most striking time of morning.

Built by Moghul emperor Shah Jahan following his favorite wife’s death in 1631, the Taj Mahal houses the tombs of both wife and husband and took 22 years to complete. The Muslim ruler employed a slew of elephants and some 20,000 workers – both Muslim and Hindu – from all over India and the Middle East to work its stone and exquisite carvings. Many descendents of those first builders still work at the Taj and live in Taj Ganj, the neighborhood that borders the complex grounds.

We ended a long line of security checks and pat-downs near a small swarm of entrepreneurs who take the photographs that the Taj is known for – the gimmick angles that make a person appear to be holding the building’s base with his bare hands, or pinching its tip with her forefinger and thumb.

“OK, madam, jump,” one cameraman told student Amanda Millner-Fairbanks as she attempted a different pose, a leap off a bench captured to look as if she’d bounced all the way to the top of the famous dome. “Like this, like this,” he said, demonstrating, hopping like a frog.

The next hour and a half were spent traipsing the Taj grounds while wearing white shower cap-like booties on our shoes – an innovation introduced complex-wide last year for foreign tourists whose feet are unaccustomed to the Indian tradition of shedding footwear while trodding stone walkways. Wearing the booties means you can keep your shoes on but cover their dirt – making it possible to both keep feet clean and show respect for the tombs at the same time.

The cost for the booties is included, along with a bottled water, on the “foreigner ticket” – a cost of 750 rupees, or about $17. Admission for an Indian citizen is much less – 20 rupees, or less than 50 cents.

“When Indians from villages come here, they have 10 to 12 people in their families and cannot spend more than this,” our guide for the day, Akshay Jain, 27, explained. “They charge 750 rupees for foreigners because they can pay it. In Agra, the only source of revenue is the Taj.”

Until a little over a decade ago, Agra had a bustling leather industry, but it was banned in 1994 after it was discovered that acid rain from the pollution was ruining the Taj’s inlaid stones. Since then, the town has relied even more on the tourist draw to support the guides, guards, gardeners, travel agents, restauranteurs and autorickshaw drivers who make their livings off the crowds.

One of those dependents is Bishamber Singh, 44, a fourth-generation groundskeeper we met as he swept the garden pathways. Singh, a Hindu, has done the same work for nearly 30 years and said it’s his destiny as a member of the Banwari caste to continue. Were he not cleaning the Taj, he’d be cleaning somewhere else, he reasoned.

That the caste system influences present-day tourism operations may come as a surprise to those from outside India, but Singh said his work does have its benefits day in and day out – namely, the stunning view he encounters each day on the job.

For Singh, the best Taj sighting has less to do with the time of day or angle of sun, but when the complex remains sparkling after visits by the masses.

“That’s what makes me happy,” Singh said.

***

It is said in Hindi that each grain of rice is inscribed with the name of the person who will eat it. It must be the case, then, that the jasmine and basmati chawal waiting in our group’s final stops – Varanasi, Sarnath and Mumbai – lacks the names of Prof. Ari Goldman and his 17-year-old daughter, Emma.

Goldman, now known to students and Indians alike as “Ari-ji” (appropriate not only because it sounds like “Ari G.,” but because "ji" is a Hindi honorific), tonight announced that he and Emma will part ways with the group and remain in Agra while Emma recovers from a stomach bug.

Prof. Sreenivasan and students will continue on to Varanasi and fly to the United States on Tuesday. The Goldmans now plan to return home on Sunday, two days earlier than scheduled.

“In Jewish tradition we have a saying – daiyenu – ‘it would have been enough,’” Goldman told students over their last meal together before the group departed to catch an overnight train. It would have been enough for him, he said, to have had the first half of the semester together in New York. And it would have been enough to have simply gotten everyone to India safe and sound.

The fact that eight days passed with no sickness and a vast amount of learning is something he said he’s thankful for.

The group also bid a temporary farewell earlier in the afternoon to student reporters Shira Schoenberg and Greg Gilderman as the two departed in a car bound for Mumbai. Schoenberg, an Orthodox Jew, needed to travel early to prepare for Shabbat on Friday and to begin reporting in Mumbai’s Jewish community.

Gilderman hopes to recover from the stomach illness that seemed to make its rounds among group members as the rest toured today’s sites. Both will reunite with fellow students when the rest reach Mumbai on Saturday evening.

Despite depleted numbers and a few queasy stomachs, however, the Columbia assembly traveled on tonight, piling into the bus for a ride to the train station 40 kilometers away. There, hired porters stacked carts high with New York suitcases and led the way – extra bags balanced carefully on their heads – for the walk, lit by a full moon, to the next train.

| TrackBacks (0)