The Taj Mahal Struggles to Keep its Luster

If you’re lucky enough to get a room with a view, you’ll see it right away. A shimmering monument of white, it floats above the shabby city of Agra. From afar, the Taj Mahal is as beautiful as the poets promisea glowing tribute to obsessive adoration and a symbol of India around the world. But up close the picture begins to crumble. Acid rain and condensation from the former Mughal capital’s coke-fueled factories and, environmentalists say, a nearby oil refinery are eating away the marble and turning what remains the color of unloved teeth. The famous canals and watercourses stink. Garbage abounds. And attempts at preservation have proved ineffectual, clumsy and lacking in either funds or purpose. Common is the visitor who remarks how India’s most famous building captures the nation’s essence in more ways than one.

The trouble begins even before you enter. As authorities have banned fossil-fuel vehicles in the area, visitors must rent battery-driven cars or carts drawn by horses or camels. Despite fixed rates, overcharging is the norm. The drivers are rude, the hiring and negotiating shambolic. Flies swarm the animals and the dung they liberally scatter across the potholed roads. When you reach the entrance to the mausoleum that Emperor Shah Jahan built for his second wife, Queen Mumtaz Mahal, hawkers touting miniature Taj Mahals, bottled water and postcards, add to the chaos. You may shake them off, but you won’t escape being stung at the ticket counter. Foreigners are expected to pay $20 rather than the 40 fee for Indians. Slouching by the gates, bored-looking policemen and Archaeological Survey of India officials occasionally rouse themselves to fling boorish accusations at anyone looking like an out-of-towner. They harass and demand identification from one Indian dressed in Western clothes. Another man, insisting he is from the southern state of Kerala, gives up and pays extra.

After buying tickets, there’s a second queue, longer and sometimes more costly. Security guards on watch for terrorists frisk bags and bodies at two separate checkpoints, confiscating anything from a long list of banned items, including tripods, mobile phones and video cameras. And if the guards don’t get your equipment, the thieves might: pick-pockets work the lines, hoping to snatch some of the dazzling array of photographic technology on display. (Travelers’ tip: stick black masking tape over the brand name on your camera.)

Finally, you’re in. There’s no denying the first sight is awesome. The gardens, the ornamental fountains, the minarets, the enormous marble arches. You won’t feel cheated. It is big enough. It is white enough. It stands against a clear skyline. The symmetry is perfect. As your senses recover, however, the brilliance fades. Plastic bottles litter the lawns, the canals are dirty, guides offering tours for an inflated price are maddeningly insistent. The colored engravings are chipped and, in places, have fallen off. The graves in the basement are off-limits, the entrance blocked with untidy wire mesh. The inner sanctum smells of bats and pigeon droppings. Enormous beehives hang from the arches; black smoke stains mark where others have been burned off. The river behind the tomb is sluggish from sewage.

It’s not that India hasn’t tried to take care of the Taj Mahal. Several state environmental lawsuits have demanded action. Polluting foundries and factories have been closed down on Supreme Court orders. But the Archaeological Survey, the agency responsible for the building’s conservation, has neither the funds nor the know-how to carry out its duties. On June 21, however, for the first time in decades, a faint beacon of hope pierced the choking fumes: the Tata Group’s hotel chain took on the great landmark’s preservation. The company has previously converted former palaces into functioning hotels, and promises to bring in international experts from the Getty Foundation, the Smithsonian and UNESCO among others, to help restore damaged engravings and stones and revamp the lighting system. In a move that could spell an end to the bedlam around the entrance gates, Tata also plans a tourist center that will offer interpreters, computerized ticketing, banking, a fleet of shuttle buses, a cafE and washrooms. An army of 20,000 men took 22 years to build the Taj Mahal, eventually finishing in 1653. The hands of many of the workers were later mutilated to prevent them from duplicating their work elsewhere. Saving India’s great jewel may take a similarly monumental and ruthless effort.