The Taj Mahal and Red Fort: Tourism in an emergent capitalist society (Lorie in India, Blog #4)

Everyone knows that India is disturbing because of the extremes of poverty and wealth, with an emphasis on the former. Street children, dirty and clothed in rags, walk between cars, barely avoiding being hit. Cripples sit on the ground and beg. Some city people live and sleep in falling down buildings, their facades open to the street. Dogs and goats eat piles of garbage on the sidewalk. In the countryside, people live in huts, although rural poverty always seems to me to have a softer face. We expected and see all these forms of poverty, which is shocking but expected.

At the same time, there is a clearly growing middle class. We see it in the hundreds of students in school uniforms visiting the museums, the thousands of families in the monuments. There seems to be increasing hope for the future.

But there is another side to a madly capitalist society attempting to “develop” as fast as possible which is disconcerting to me and Crystal. I think it has to do with some kind of convergence of capitalism itself and of culture. This convergence reaches a kind of extreme in India, and provides a constant distraction when one is a tourist.

Rewind to the Raj- the time of British colonialism in India. To a colonial power, a country being colonized is just a commodity. Its people, resources, animals, are all potential commodities to bring wealth to the mother country. It takes many years and many liberation movements to recover from being treated as a commodity in one’s own country, and India, like so many countries, struggles with this.

But now we are in a new historical phase. We, as white people, look like a commodity to Indians and other world peoples who are struggling to reach the middle class. This group of people includes those in the service industries, such as car drivers, tour guides, and more. These people see us as an opportunity which they want to push as hard as they can to gain some advantage. It is not enough that we pay them to drive us to a monument, they want to take us to their brother’s rug shop, or to a handicraft store where they get a commission. We expected hawkers to sell things on the street, or people to beg. This is disturbing but to be expected. But more middle class agents, such as drivers and guides, are “on the take” to a degree which distorts the relationships with us upon which our trip depends.

For example, our Taj Mahal guide took us to a marble carving “factory” where we were told that the family had been making marble inlaid with semi-precious stones for nine generations, and were in fact descendents of the Aryan (Persian) people who settled in this area many centuries ago and built the Taj Mahal. We knew they were trying to sell us marble tables. We visited the family shop and watched them at work. I did not think that the hand grinders and small pieces of marble they were using would account for the big pieces they were selling in their shop. And, in fact, we were later told by another driver that these shops in Agra are put-up jobs, that the marble is made in another town and the workers are acting as if they make the products here, because this is where the tourists are. To me this is disturbing because it also implicates our guide, a nice young man with whom we spent the day and whom we enjoyed getting to know. Since he lied to us about the marble, to get a commission if we had bought some, we cannot help but wonder what is true and not true about all the things he told us about Indian life. After two days of being guided or driven by a series of people who all had a hidden agenda, and contradicted each others’ information about India, we began to avoid contact with people. But this is sad, since that contact is what generally makes travel so interesting.

In contradiction to this experience with drivers and guides is the other side of India- the fact that in these two days we saw incredible things. The Taj Mahal is more majestic than one can imagine from the pictures we have all seen. Most impressive are the detailed inlaid stones and carvings which cover it and can only be seen up close, and the extraordinary 4-way symmetry of this building/sculpture from every angle, inside and out. Also amazing is how it changes color from brilliant white to rose, and more, depending on the sun. Equally amazing are the beautiful Indian families who experience this with us, and want authentically to be photographed together and to talk a bit, without making any demands.