Sunil Sethi: Agra: The agony and the ecstasy

AL FRESCO

Agra: There is a small but superb new book out devoted entirely to one of the great buildings in Agra. No, not the Taj. It is called A Jewel of Mughal India: The Mausoleum of Itimad-ud-Daulah.

Photographed in exquisitely painstaking detail by Jean-Louis Nou, the well-known French photographer who died in 1992, it has been researched and written by Amina Okada, an arts scholar of Mughal India who is curator of the Indian collection at the Musee Guimet in Paris.

Many people regard the Itimad-ud-Daulah as a source of inspiration for the Taj, which is a later building and Okada's book explains why. It was begun at the end of Jahangir's reign and completed in 1628, a commission by his all-powerful consort Nur Jahan, to house the remains of her father Mirza Ghiyas Beg and mother Asmat Begum. Ghiyas Beg, a noble but impecunious refugee who fled from Persia, rose to become prime minister at the Mughal court. He was conferred upon the title of Itimad-ud-Daulah, "Pillar of the State", from which the mausoleum takes its name. His daughter, being Empress, naturally played an important role in his ascendancy.

There were many then, as there are now, who hated the "foreign-born" queen's guts but it was a more wilful and absolutist age. There was little they could do about her, the Emperor having declared: "Until I married her, I had no idea what marriage really meant." (She was his eighteenth wife.)

Being Persian, Nur Jahan introduced new elements of design in architecture, garden layout and decorative detail that have been unparalleled since. I had not visited the Itimad-ud-Daulah in many years and inspired in part by Nou and Okada's wonderful book took a weekend off to visit Agra.

That is where the ecstasy ended and the agony began. Visiting after a period of some years, my memories of Agra were of an unhurried, provincial town, dirty and plagued by tourist-touts certainly, but not the monstrously ugly, nasty, chaotic place it has become. The city's decline has to be seen to be believed.

There is one entrance to the city centre, a narrow, winding street with an old-fashioned railway crossing. Apart from being tourist destination number one in north India, Agra is a key trade post on the main railway link from Delhi to Kolkata so the gate is frequently closed. The congestion of tourist buses, lorries, autorickshaws and every form of transport from cars to bullock carts on either side of the crossing, stretches for about half a kilometre.

It can take another 45 minutes to get to the Taj Mahal. Mercifully the road to the monument's outer gates has been widened but it is neither any cleaner nor orderly. About a hundred shops, from souvenir stalls to dirty dhabas, lines of autorickshaws, touts, self-appointed guides and instant photographers, form a sort of cordon sanitare. If accompanied by foreign friends (as I was) the collective physical assault can only be resisted by a stout lathi.

Inside, although there were thousands of tourists, I found the gardens desiccated and not a single water channel or fountain in working order. From the embankment, a resident pointed out the foundations of the notorious riverfront shopping plaza the Mayawati government had planned. Despite her doomed pretensions of becoming a modern-day Nur Jahan, these are yet to be removed.

Next day, a visit to the Itimad-ud-Daulah had to be planned and timed like a military operation. Ghiyas Beg's tomb is only a few kilometres across the river but the traffic congestion on the two bridges, plus long jams at the other end due to an incomplete flyover, can take up the better part of the day. The squalor on the streets is unspeakable.

Mountains of uncleared garbage, excavated but uncompleted roadworks, crumbling slums and shantytowns line the path to Nur Jahan's masterpiece. What happened to the hundreds of crores set aside for the Agra Development Authority? What became of the dozens of initiatives to clean up the city, the river and its precious monuments?

Luckily, "the jewel of Mughal India" is well preserved. The cross-town journey not being for the faint-hearted, the Itimad-ud-Daulah does not attract as many visitors as the Taj or the Fort. Having spent a couple of hours in the beautiful building set in its idealised "paradise" garden, I wandered over to the river's edge.

Looking down from exquisite inlaid and painted pavilions was a shock. The waters of the Jumna are a filthy sewer. My sincere advice to those planning a trip to Agra would be to stay at home and buy the book.