Taj Mahal 'doesn't need a theme park'
Michael Kerr reflects on plans for a Ferris wheel and cable cars at the Taj Mahal mausoleum in India.
By Michael Kerr
Published
05 Aug 2009
Nearly three million people a year are drawn to visit the Taj Mahal
Edwin Arnold, who was both a poet and an editor of The Daily Telegraph, said that the Taj Mahal was "not a piece of architecture…but the proud passions of an emperor’s love wrought in living stones”. The description has rarely been bettered, and the building itself is unimprovable. Everyone agrees on that.
New Delhi, India: My kind of town Everyone except the Agra Development Authority. As we reported earlier, the authority believes it can enhance “the visitor experience” at the Taj Mahal by surrounding the great mausoleum with “ropewalks, a suspension bridge, cable cars and a Ferris wheel”.
It’ll never happen. Or won’t it? Not so long ago, we were saying that a proposal for a glass walkway projecting from the lip of the Grand Canyon would never be given the go-ahead. But now it’s there, 4,000ft above the Colorado River, a cantilever bridge built, as the website tellingly puts it, to “withstand an excess of 71 million pounds in weight”. It comes, of course, with a café, serving burgers, chicken and barbecued pork – all in the interests of “improving the visitor experience”.
Similar schemes have been mooted, rejected or realised at tourist sights all around the world. Ruins that were already evocative have been tidied up to make them more fitting for camera and for advertising campaign. As the British Arabist Robert Irwin put it, of the Madinat al-Zahra, an Arabian Nights fantasy on the outskirts of Cordoba, "some of the walls are still standing (and such is the progress of archaeology that more walls seem to be still standing each time one visits the place)".
‘Tourist trap’ threat to Taj Mahal, our headline said this morning. The Taj Mahal, has, of course, long been a tourist trap, one of those sights that we can take in only as part of a swarm of camera-clicking visitors. Nearly three million people a year are drawn to visit it. Somehow, 360 years on, it is still surviving the swarm. The threat to it now has less to do with improvement than with greed, a greed that infantilises rather than enhances experience.
OP Jain, the mild-mannered spokesman of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, has commented that “the people who come to see the Taj are not the kind of people who like to go by ropeway or see it in front of a Ferris wheel”.
That reminded me of a visit I made some years ago to a game lodge in Tsavo West National Park in Kenya. The man behind the inquiries desk told me confidently that I could expect to see a leopard in a tree very close to where he sat pretty well every evening between six and nine. Not just any old tree, but one particular tree – the one to which the staff climbed by ladder at three in the afternoon with a juicy joint of meat to lash to a high fork. It was my first time on safari. I was hoping to see big game, but I also expected to have to work at it a little, to squint and strain for a glimpse of the shyer inhabitants of the bush. And here I was being presented with a big cat drawn by Disney. This wasn’t a leopard that went hunting; it was one that set its watch.
No one goes to Agra for the diversions of an amusement park. People go to see the Taj Mahal. That’s an experience that needs no enhancing.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/asia/india/5976407/Taj-Mahal-doesnt-need-a-theme-park-India.html