Behind the scum, a city of rare treasures

In the early 1940s, the Taj Mahal came close to being lost when an American air force cargo plane took off from the military airport and almost crashed into the famous dome, all because the refuelling had been done in kilogram equivalents of the American request in pounds.

The aircraft missed the dome by 100 feet, but what the pilot was able to avoid has since turned into a continuous battle "" the Mathura fuel refinery, acid rain, pollution, the humid breath of the thousands of visitors who come to see the Taj, the sweaty palms they place on the marble leading to acidic corrosion, the almost-dead Yamuna which could damage the mausoleum's wooden foundation...

Royina Grewal, described by friends as a "soft" environmental activist (because she isn't Vandana Shiva or Sunita Narain, they explain kindly) and best known for writing the scripts for son-et-lumieres in locations such as Gwalior and Port Blair, could have pulled off this book as a hagiographic account of a city and a monument, yet another in a long list of books that keep being published on the world's most photographed building (according to some accounts, though I wonder who's keeping count).

Instead, she delivers a gentle blow in the solar plexus as she wanders around the city, gathering information and writing it like reportage. Here is a travelogue that could also be a news report.

As a result the book is full of trivia. There is the usual travel trade lament as its keepers ask for more flights, better infrastructure and so on, in the hope of making still more money without, in turn, diverting any to the preservation or the maintenance of the city which guarantees them their livelihood.

It is not these but the jaunts into unexpected corners and places that leavens this book with a richness that unravels as Grewal "" without once editorialising despite the obvious temptation "" helps the reader understand a city and a culture that have remained hidden by such obvious tourist traps as its cheap footwear industry and the splendour of the Mughal monuments.

Babur's love of gardens is well known, and once there were gardens along Agra's outskirts, so many that the plantations along the Yamuna became known as Kabul, after Babur's homeland. Encroachments, the British conquest and development, post-partition squatters and a laconic administration have been witness to the desecration of one of the world's greatest cities.

Unfortunately, in the absence of an articulate Agra elite, there is no one to protest as, for instance, Babur's camp was replaced by an Armenian settlement, then a British jail, finally a commercial district and is, now, a Holiday Inn. A pity because, as Grewal finds out, having a maali at one time meant having an Agra connection.

Not only were they the best, their knowledge of flora "" trees, shrubs, local and imported flowers ("asters are best for people who want cut flowers", advises Dr Arvind Kumar Kushwaha of the Azad Nursery) was formidable.

Grewal makes the obligatory visit to leather workshops, but her travels take her to meet lawyers and activists and religious mahants, she finds Sufi roots and addresses the issue of cleaning up the Yamuna which here is more drain than river; there is the office of the Archaeological Survey of India where on the day she visits, a young man comes to show photographs of a wall that its occupant declares to be "definitely Mauryan".

Agra's history is immediately validated by at least 2,200 years, and yet the episode is treated with everyday disdain "" hardly surprising in a city that is littered with temples and churches, mosques, mausoleums and graveyards.

All these serve Grewal's purpose: to trace back the history of Agra and the Mughals through the present. There are historical references, quick snippets of often intimate snatches of Mughal history, gossip and scandal and learned discourses. As she moves between the present and the past, establishing links as she travels back and forth in a 500-year-old time frame, she links the wealthy empress Nur Jahan's business acumen and love of all things material and beautiful with Hari Wattal's knowledge and collection of carpets in the 21st century.

As she wanders around some more, she chances upon gynaecologists and jewellers, conservators and confectioners, embroiderers and marble artisans, historians and bureaucrats.

As she quotes both scholars and the historically illiterate, there is the odd sensation of chancing upon a diary that combines learning and fallacy in a travelogue where history and mythology merge. Perhaps that is the real story of Agra...