The Taj Mahal India - A Masterpiece Under Threat

The Taj Mahal India - Threat to the Future

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The Taj Mahal India has been the object of looters of many varieties for more than 100 years.

The British, along with the Jats, a caste of northern India, looted the Taj of the lavish carpets, jewels, silver doors and tapestries that once bedecked it.

In 1830, Lord William Bentinck, governor of India in the 1830s, planned to demolish the Taj Mahal and auction off the marble. The story goes that the demolition crew were ready to begin work but were only stopped because Bentinck was unable to make the scheme financially viable.

There is no evidence for this story, which may have arisen as the result of Bentinck’s penny-pinching attitudes. However, the Archaeological Survey of India, still believe and argue that a sale by the British East India Company was planned under Lord Bentinck, which failed as no satisfactory buyers could be found.

By the mid-19th century, the Taj had become a colonial "pleasure resort," with Englishmen and women dancing on the terrace, and the mosque and its jawab rented out to honeymooners. In 1857 during the time of the Indian rebellion the Taj Mahal was further defaced.

The British soldiers and government officials chiselled out precious stones and lapis lazuli from its walls. Picnickers came armed with hammers and chisel to extract fragments of agate and carnelian from the flowers By the close of the century parts of the Taj Mahal had fallen badly into disrepair.

The British viceroy Lord Curzon ordered a massive restoration project, completed in 1908. He also commissioned the large lamp in the interior chamber, which he had modelled on one hanging in a Cairo mosque, after the local craftsmen failed to provide an acceptable design. He repaired the buildings, restored the gardens, and got the canals working again. However the garden was remodelled with the more English looking lawns visible today.

By the 20th century better care was being taken of the Taj Mahal. In 1942 the government erected a scaffolding over it, in anticipation of an air attack by the German Luftwaffe and later by the Japanese Air Force. During the India-Pakistan wars of 1965 and 1971 the government erected scaffoldings again and the monument was covered in a tarpaulin, to mislead would-be bomber pilots.

Its most recent threats comes from environmental pollution on the banks of the Yamuna River including acid rain which occurs due to the Mathura oil refinery As Agra grew, little effort was made to protect the Taj from the the ravages of pollution, which began to discolor the white marble. In the late 1990's, as the monument's future began to seem deeply imperilled, the Supreme Court ordered the shifting of some industries farther away.

Today, only electric-powered vehicles (or bicycle rickshaws) are allowed near the Taj, and under a public-private partnership between the government and the Taj Group of hotels, a major conservation effort is under way.

Moving slowly, thanks to unwieldy bureaucracy, but steadily, a group of global experts has spent more than two years researching and documenting the monument. Soon the real work on the ground will begin. First the visitor facilities will be improved, and security made less obtrusive. Then questions of how to improve the visitor flow through the site will be addressed. There is a plan to restore the gardens to their original state, but it may be decided to preserve the lawns that were installed by Lord Curzon.

In 1983 the Taj Mahal was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Today it is a major tourist destination.

A persistent conservation effort seems essential, given the continuing threats to the monument. A scandal erupted after the State Government allowed construction to start in 2002 on a Taj Heritage Corridor, which included a shopping mall between the Taj and Agra Fort, without first securing the permission of the central government. The project was scrapped with fear that it could severely damage the Taj, and its ambience, The state's former chief minister, Mayawati, was at the centre of the scandal..

Recently the Taj Mahal was claimed to be Sunni Wakf property, on the grounds that it is the grave of a woman whose husband, Emperor Shah Jahan was a Sunni. The Indian government has dismissed claims by the Muslim trust to administer the property, saying their claims are baseless and the Taj Mahal India is a national property.