India – Incredible and Intoxicating: A Week in The Golden Triangle
I don’t know if the phrase Stockholm Syndrome carries any weight in India but it describes my relationship with the country succinctly and accurately.
It’s a part of the world that introduces you to norms entirely warped from an occidental orientation (such as the curious cruelty of the caste system) and surreptitiously swipes closely held luxuries upon entry, personal space being the most glaring example. And I can’t wait to go back.
Not even the English language escapes distortion although there is precious little of it around. ‘Road’ no longer refers to lane adorned tarmac used by relatively homogeneous motor vehicles. Instead a ‘road’ is a disheveled morass of fumes, both toxic and verbal, as cars, rickshaws, cows and Range Rovers compete for every inch. ‘Heat’ also sheds its Irish meaning, no longer heralding a day seduced by sun and Scrumdiddly’s. Heat in India is double pronged, marrying intense sun rays with obscene humidity. Ice cream can’t help you and neither can beer. Anyone that would contest as much is
welcome to spend their working day in a sauna armed with a Choc Ice and a Carlsberg. It is a sweltering, intense experience. Indeed, the more attentive reader will notice that none of the pictures in this piece feature yours truly. There is good reason for this given my t-shirts were so drenched in sweat each day that had they been periodically wrung into a bucket they would have gone some way to arresting India’s looming water crisis.
My second stint in India was spent volunteering as an English teacher in a New Delhi slum. Life in a slum, or at least my tenuous grasp of it, was at once bewildering and beguiling and was sufficiently nuanced to warrant its own piece, available here. However, it’s my time outside of the slum that merits most discussion below.
The stunning Mughal architecture which dots the country is one of India’s strongest appeals. Each serve as a reminder as to the spectacular wealth that India boasted before Lord Clive and the British East India Company’s corporate imperialism ransacked the entire sub-continent. To think that an empire responsible for the Taj Mahal and Humayun’s Tomb would suffer a famine as destructive as the Bengal Famine of 1770 is harrowing and testament to the shameful mass deportation of wealth by the Company. India is yet to recover from such rampant empire building.
10 million people didn’t survive the Bengal Famine but small consolation comes with the preservation of much of India’s most stunning architecture. Subjecting yourself to the omnishambles that is Indian transport may make many balk but those journeys are invariably richly rewarded.
The most popular way of sampling these spectacles is to travel the Golden Triangle, linking New Delhi, Jaipur and Agra, home to the Taj Mahal.
New Delhi assuredly deserves most attention on this route. Rome enjoys near universal acclaim as a mecca for tourists besotted by ancient history but New Delhi is comfortably its equal in the realm of creaking hallmarks of antiquity. The city boasts a staggering amount of stunning tombs, forts and temples and diligently tells India’s history from the 12th Century Delhi Sultanate to its present position as the world’s largest democracy. Photography is banned at the most sedulously (almost inconceivably) ornate of all of these, the Hindu Akshardham Temple, but is positively encouraged at the Lotus Temple, Red Fort, Old Delhi, Gandhi Memorial and all manner of other wonders crammed into this 30m person metropolis.
Stop 2 is Jaipur and its magnificent Pink City which remains the home of the Jaipur Royal Family. The king was just 20 years old when we visited although, as my female fellow travelers were quick to clarify, he is not on Tinder. If you can survive that disappointment, the Pink City is a delight although dainty by comparison to New Delhi. Jaipur is also famous for gems, apparently sufficient justification for our guide to herd us into a tacky jewelers staffed by dusty elderly men with even dustier ‘precious stones’.
The irony of being assured that a $200 ruby ring would bring me financial success was lost amidst the anarchy and I physically squirmed when a palm reader declared me a ‘free spirit’ and explained that an emerald ring would reinforce my eccentricity. They did make a decent cup of chai-tea however, and manged to keep a straight face when insisting that ‘certificates’ to verify the precious stones were available. I asked if they could also legitimate some snake-oil that I picked up on my travels, but their bemused faces would suggest not. I left, precious stone-less, for Agra.
I had always assumed Agra to exist merely as a conduit to visiting the Taj Mahal. Rarely have I been as naive. With a population larger than Dublin and having served as India’s capital until it shifted to New Delhi in 1638, it has a far more intricate story to tell. However, it’s not 17th century political prowess that draws millions of tourists there each year. It’s the Taj Mahal.
The Taj is one of the ‘7 Modern Wonders of the World’ and is the mausoleum of Mumtaz Mahal, the favourite wife of Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, whose tomb the Taj also houses. It was completed in 1653 and certainly isn’t camera shy. Thankfully, the profusion of pictures available doesn’t blunt how stunning it is in person. It is spell-binding. The exterior is laden with calligraphy and carvings, each archway is encrusted with quotes from the Qu’ran in black marble and it’s far more intricate and assiduously adorned than photographs can hope to capture. The world is bedecked by tourist traps that fall hopelessly short of the reputation that precedes them (I am yet to fully process how abysmal Fisherman’s Wharf in San Fran is) but the Taj Mahal is a legitimate and assured ‘Wow’ moment. The world of sport has given us Muhummad Ali floating like a butterfly while acolytes of music and literature will readily point to Mozart’s Requiem and Shakespeare’s Macbeth as the apogee of human excellence. I contest that the Taj Mahal is architecture’s ambassador in this pantheon of panache.
However, this wasn’t enough for our guide. While the Taj is embellished with beautiful marble and motifs, our tour was instead garnished by nonsense of the highest order. Did Shah Jahan really cut the hands off everyone that worked on it to ensure they couldn’t build something as grand again? No, he did not. Did he plan the construction of a ‘Black Taj Mahal’ across the Yamuna River of identical size and splendour? Again, no, although our guide assured us that both claims were true. Myths masquerading as gospel, I didn’t ask if he worked part-time in a Jaipur jewelers.
To assume that this myth pushing was deceitful rather than jovial is perhaps unfair. As stunning as anything I’ve mentioned here is, I will not return to India to see the Taj Mahal again or to wander the Pink City. I will return for the people. Everywhere I went in India, be it as a teacher, a tourist or terrified tuc-tuc passenger, people were endlessly courteous to me, genuinely curious about me and sincerely occupied with making my time in India as a enjoyable as they could. I don’t think our guide’s tales were an attempt to wrangle extra rupees from us. I think he just wanted us to be agog at this remarkable country one more time.
