Mughal 'paradise' gets tortuous
makeover By Raja Murthy
Agar Firdaus bar rue Zamin ast, Hamin
asto, Hamin asto, Hamin ast! If there is a
paradise on earth, this is it, this is it, this is
it! - 13th century poet Amir Khusrau's famous
couplet describing India, inscribed on the walls
of the 17th century Red Fort.
DELHI - The
earthly "paradise" that is the Red Fort in Delhi
is getting a stuttering makeover even as it
continues drawing thousands of visitors as one of
Asia's most popular historical monuments.
The Archaeology Survey of India (ASI) is
face-lifting the Red Fort to preserve the site's
tumultuous legacy. The fort not only represents
painstaking craftsmanship and creativity, but also
a decadent lifestyle that weakened and destroyed
one of the most
powerful empires in
history - the Mughals.
A bit of
Mughal-style wealth would come in handy right now,
say the restorers. "The Red Fort is far too
important a monument to be left neglected," ASI
conservation officer Milind Angaikar told Asia
Times Online. "But our biggest challenge is
shortage of funds. Being declared a World Heritage
monument [in 2007] has not increased the budget."
No such financial constraints hampered
Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan (1592-1666) whose
architectural credits include the Taj Majal. He
took nearly 10 years to complete building the Red
Fort in 1648. There was nothing like it in
existence. An English general described it as the
greatest palace in the world of that time, if not
all time.
Merging Indian, Persian and
European art, the fort holds marble and red stone
structures of low height set amid wide rectangular
lawns, gardens, trees, fountains, music played
five times a day, waterways and lights. This
palace of palaces was ruled by Mughals, ransacked
by Persians and Afghans, colonized by British and
retrieved by India.
The largest and most
significant of the seven forts or seven old cities
of Delhi, the Red Fort, or Lal Qila in
Hindi, still carries much significance in modern
India. The flag of a free India fluttered here on
August 15, 1947. Indian prime ministers have
addressed the nation every Independence Day since
from the Red Fort ramparts near the Lahore Gate
entrance.
The Red Fort gets hours of my
time often when I am in Delhi. There is a sense of
deja vu, a feeling of wonder at the happiness,
sorrows, triumphs, tragedies, intrigues, struggles
these skeletons of the past might have seen, the
stories the red sandstone walls could tell of the
people who lived and died within.
They
were a curious breed, those emperors of the Mughal
dynasty (1526-1857). The founder, Zahiruddin
Muhammad Babar, was descendant of the Mongolian
psychopathic mass murderer Ghenghiz Khan from
Central Asia. The word "Mughal" comes from
"Mongol".
Shah Jahan, the fifth of the
Mughal emperors and builder of the Red Fort, died
a prisoner of his son Aurangzeb (1618-1707).
Aurangzeb, whose coronation in the Red Fort came
after he'd murdered his brothers, became an
intolerant extremist, an one-man ancestor of the
Taliban who was ignorant to the fact that one
respects one's own religion by respecting others'.
His intolerance for non-Muslims destroyed regional
alliances his forefathers had built. He was the
last of the powerful Mughals who ruled from the
Red Fort.
He sowed the seeds for the end
of the Mughals, even as the Red Fort was epicenter
to one of the largest empires in the world, the
second-largest in Asia after the Qing Dynasty
domains in China. At its peak, Mughal lands
stretched across 4.6 million square kilometers,
nearly all of South Asia except for a part of
present-day Kerala in south western India.
In the next hundred years, the Red Fort
became a temple for the empire's luxuries and
pleasures of the flesh. But attachment to
excessive physical comforts can creates mental
discomfort, and the following generations of
Mughal princes grew up progressively weak and
incompetent.
Their final fall came in the
Red Fort within 150 years. In 1857, the English
colonials captured Bahadur Shah Jafar the second,
the 17th and last of Mughals and a figurehead in
India's First War of Independence, which saw him
led him out in chains and shipped to exile in
Burma (now called Myanmar).
The last known
descendant of the Mughals, in the lineage of
Babur, Akbar "the Great" and Shah Jahan, was in
2009 discovered living in dire poverty in a
Kolkata slum. She was running a small tea stall,
and later given a job as a maid servant running
errands for the government-owned firm Coal India.
The wealth this maid servant's Mughal
forefathers hoarded in the Red Fort hints at the
riches the sub-continent once owned. The loot
Persian raider Nadir Shah carried out of Delhi in
1739 needed 1,000 elephants and 800 horses to
carry it. His booty included the golden Peacock
Throne encrusted with sapphires, emeralds, rubies
and the famous Kohinoor diamond now part of the
globally stolen property comprising the British
queen's Crown Jewels.
"All this was like a
jungle, full of weeds, when I came here," said
gardener Dinanath, watering the lawns in front of
the palace where two of the most powerful emperors
in the world lived. Dinanath, working here for
over 35 years, is part of a team of 105 gardeners
trying to recreate a semblance of what was once
called Hayat Bakhsh Bagh or "Life-Bestowing
Garden".
The garden had its own "Stream of
Paradise" or "Nahri-i - Bisht", an
elaborate waterworks running throughout the royal
living quarters. Water lifted from the River
Yamuna flowed out of copper and clay pipes in
lavishly appointed bathrooms called the "Hamman"
to offer a choice of hot, cold and steam baths. In
a late February afternoon a few hundred years
later, a child delightedly scampered up and down a
small wooden board bridging the now bone-dry,
dusty "Stream of Paradise".
"In about two
or three months, there will an improved sound and
light show with computerized laser beams and
projections," said Pradeep Kumar, manager of the
nightly Sound and Light show manager since the
mid-1980s. The Red Fort itself was built for light
effects. The important edifices, including court
halls and the emperor's living quarters, are laid
out to face the setting and rising sun in an
east-west line.
The Rang Mahal or "Palace
of colors", for instance, must have been a
spectacular sight as the sun rays reflected off
small mirrors embedded on ceiling and walls. The
late winter sun at about 5.30 pm glowed exactly on
the marble pedestal in the Diwan-i-Khaas where the
bejeweled golden Peacock Throne once stood,
probably turning it into a shimmering glow of
rainbow colors.
Even the waterways
contributed to the light effects. The water ran
through garden tanks with niches for candles or
oil lamps - so the flickering light plays on the
water and turns it into rippling gold at night.
Yet all the sensory delights of this
"paradise" proved a gilded trap that across
centuries choked the life out of the Mughals. One
of the major reasons the tide turned against them
was people revolting against excessive taxation
imposed to pay for Mughal luxuries, compared to
which European kings of the era could be said to
have been living in budget accommodation.
A now poverty-stricken Red Fort depends on
revenue from visiting tourists, but at the same
time these visitors threaten its existence.
"Increasing footfall on the marble floors creates
reverberations that are damaging the structures,"
says conservation official Angaikar. "Some of the
sections that are closed may never be opened
again."
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online
(Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about sales, syndication and
republishing.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
