Moonlight Sonata

BEHIND the Taj, on the bank of the Yamuna, there is another lunar cycle and another life. Under fading stars and an inky sky that’s still to rub out the sleepiness out of its dark eyes, the Agra of routine lives comes alive. Mukesh Gupta has already taken his post, ready to accompany the straying early Taj enthusiast. He calls himself the Sunrise and Sunset Guide. He comes at dawn, shows tourists the best spots to photograph the marble monument at sunrise, and then retires for the day. He returns in the evening, for a sunset routine.

Gupta takes you through a side gate to the back of the monument, where it’s a silvery silhouette before a misty Yamuna. ‘‘You know,’’ he tells you, making his way on the slushy slippery banks with practised ease, ‘‘the best place to see the Taj is from behind or across the river. Then you can’t see its red sandstone boundary. Only the white Taj shines in the moonlight looking as if it were suspended in the air.’’

This is what he has been doing for 35 years, he says, ever since he gave up his salesman’s job to become a resident devotee at every romantic’s ultimate shrine.

THE Dauji temple at the Dasehra Ghat slowly hums out its morning mantras. A couple hesitatingly take a dip in the cold river water. ‘‘The boatman will be here too soon,’’ says Gupta. Almost on cue he appears. Manoj the boatman is almost unconcerned that he has such an exotic workplace. Singing Hindi film songs full-throatedly he begins another day of rowing people from shore to shore, making his way below the flying cormorants, those symbols of insatiable hunger.

The hopping birds on the banks now have company. A community of squatters who have the dubious honour of turning the riverbank into their open-air, Taj-facing loos.

A man walks his camel across the sand with his two sons. ‘‘Not this early at least,’’ he protests, clearly not happy at being photographed at this private hour before he begins his day’s work. A puddle throws up the reflection of the camel. Another shows the Mehtab Bagh or the Moonlight Garden across the Yamuna.

Once upon a time a pool in the garden was said to reflect the Taj on full moon nights. But that was a long time ago. Today, the Bagh looks on silently at life in the shadow of the tomb. It looks on as day breaks again at the Taj.

‘The Taj is so feminine, so delicate’

This week, Agra hosted the winners of the Aga Khan Architecture Award. They told Devyani Onial why the Taj was still the template for Islamic architecture

This year the Aga Khan Award for Architecture — with a triennial prize fund of $500,000, it’s the world’s most valuable such award — chose seven projects, of which almost all were contemporary constructions in the Muslim world. Some were chosen as symbols of modernity, some for their social impact.

The Taj represents few of these qualities — it’s a symbol from the past, with little utility value. Nevertheless, its appeal is absolute. Why? And where does it stand in the pantheon of Islamic architecture, medieval and modern? The Sunday Express tried finding answers at a seminar hosted by the Aga Khan Foundation on November 29, 2004. Fittingly, the seminar took place in Agra, in the very week when the Taj threw off its veil on moonlight nights.

The seminarists spoke in different voices on Islamic architecture in the modern world. If they were near unanimous, it was in their choice of the Taj as an enduring aesthetic symbol. Here is what they said, about the object of their pilgrimage and how it informed their work.

CRAIG DYKERS

Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt

HE is one of the architects who designed Egypt’s most recent and perhaps most modern structure — a library that is a tilting disc, at the ancient city of Alexandria. An advocate of both continuity and moving on, Craig Dykers makes a full stop at the Taj. ‘‘You have to have one exception and that’s the Taj. The picture of the Taj has always been with me, but when you move close you step out of the postcard,’’ says Dykers.

His Oslo-based firm’s creation, the Bibliotheca in Egypt has provoked much discussion as a contemporary take at the site of one of the ancient world’s greatest libraries. ‘‘It’s important to be humble but also to be strong. You have to take a step back into history but you also have to have a vision for the future.’’

But a contemporary intervention, such as I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid at the entrance of the Louvre, is unthinkable for him in the context of the Taj. ‘‘This tomb is about death but also life.’’ For him ‘‘it’s the most feminine and delicate’’ of Islamic monuments, yet exudes power and strength.

It also has little utility value, unlike, say, the Bibliotheca at Alexandria. ‘‘The most useless things are usually the most beautiful. The Taj has no mechanical function but it has the function of the mind,’’ signs off Dykers, with the sort of logic that would seem reasonable only to an architect.

CESAR PELLI

Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur

NOT many look at Kuala Lumpur’s soaring Petronas Towers and think of the Qutub Minar. Cesar Pelli does. ‘‘It’s the same geometry,’’ says the architect of the 452-metre high Petronas complex — the world’s tallest buildings and the most visible symbol of Malaysia’s sky-touching aspirations. ‘‘Islam forbids depiction of images of humans, so we concentrated on geometry. It shaped the design,’’ says the Argentine-born and US-based Pelli.

But for Pelli, the Taj Mahal is the monument against which all others will be judged. When he finally saw it this week his belief was reinforced. ‘‘Its primary use is not as a template. It establishes an element of quality. It tells architects that within the Islamic tradition you can do a masterpiece like the Taj. It reassures us that it is possible.’’

There are less dramatic but equally important secondary lessons — how the stones are used, and decorations are engraved on stone walls. For Pelli, the elegance of the Taj lies in its subtlety. ‘‘The curve of the dome is so subtle. Architects today would have said, ‘Let’s make it fatter so no one misses the point’. But the Taj’s dome shows incredible restraint,’’ says Pelli, who counts Istanbul’s Blue Mosque as perhaps a comparable masterpiece of Islamic architecture.

DIEBEDO FRANCIS KERE

Primary School, Gando, Burkina Faso

THE school that Diebedo Francis Kere built in his native Gando, in the tiny west African country of Burkina Faso, has neither the scale nor the splendour of a great building. But already the echo effect of his little school is being felt in the surrounding villages.

Kere, the first in his village to receive higher education — he studied architecture at Berlin, where he now teaches — is happy to have made a difference, however small. He has, in fact, always felt more comfortable with smaller buildings and mosques.

THE Taj, of course is different: ‘‘Nothing compares with it. It shows us that love is possible.’’ Studying in Berlin, Kere had seen photographs of the Taj at Indian restaurants. But not one had prepared him for the real thing. ‘‘Its symmetry is perfect,’’ he says, almost gushes, ‘‘when I saw it, I didn’t take photographs. I thought my camera was not up to it.’’

For Kere, the garden at the Taj is a perfect setting, one he says he has not seen anywhere else.