Marble and Jewelry and Art, Oh My!

After our first few days in Delhi, we took our learning to Agra and visited the Taj Mahal, the symbol of love from Shah Jahan to his favorite wife (side note: it must have been awkward to be one of the other wives, huh?). Today, the Taj Mahal is the symbol of all of India.

I won’t lie: I absorbed very little of what we learned on the tour. It was not our guide’s fault – he’s an ~*elite*~ guide who brought Sean Connery and the Italian president to the Taj, among others – but I was distracted with taking and posing for pictures.

Here’s what I did learn:

It took 22 years to build the Taj Mahal.
Everything is designed in perfect symmetry. To the left of the Taj, facing west, is a mosque. On the right, there’s an identical structure, but there’s nothing inside, and the building has never served a purpose.
Shah Jahan spent the last years of his life imprisoned by his son. When Shah Jahan died, his son interred him in the Taj Mahal next to his wife. The problem is that his wife is laid to rest in the center of the Taj. Placing Shah Jahan at his wife’s left ruins the perfect symmetry of the Taj.
Though there are tombs on the main level of the structure, the actual tombs are below and cannot be visited.
Nothing is painted on the Taj. The colors that appear to be painted are actually inlaid stones.
In the 90s, the government decreed that no factories could operate within 60 kilometers of Agra so they could better preserve the Taj. It sounds great until you remember that this put a lot of people out of work. The main industry in Agra today is tourism, perhaps out of necessity rather than choice.
The Taj Mahal was constructed with Indian marble and a special kind of glue. To this day, only the direct descendents of the Taj artisans know the secret formula for the glue that made the structure.
Jumping and dancing is not allowed at the Taj Mahal. I learned this after a few men with giant guns came at me after I spun around once for a video. I wasn’t aware a single spin was considered dancing, but I wasn’t about to argue.

The Taj Mahal was truly spectacular. 10/10, no notes.

From there, we visited three different artisan shops. The first was a marble shop, where the artisans are direct descendants of the artisans who worked on the Taj Mahal. Each family closely guards their craft and knows only their craft. For example, one family knows the secret art of carving into marble, while the other knows the secret process of shaping jewels and stones for the inlay process. Teams work together to create the inlaid marble, never knowing the full process behind their partner’s craft.

We watched artisans carving marble and shaping stones using the same tools of their ancestors. The process is slow and painstaking; a small piece of inlaid marble could take weeks to construct. The tour guide pointed to a tabletop on display and told us that the inlay process took 6 workers 2 years to complete. It could be yours for only $28,000!

After watching the process, seeing the difficulty, and hearing how rightfully expensive the pieces were, it was sobering to learn that a “good” wage for a marble artisan is only 2000 rupees a day – about $20. These businesses receive government subsidies in an effort to keep these artforms alive, but I can’t help but wonder who benefits from these subsidies and who is pocketing the $28k for a single dinner table.

We then visited the workshop of Mr. Shams, a famous practitioner of zardozi, a 3D hand embroidery process that weaves in jewels. I retained little about the process, but I can say that the pieces were absolutely gorgeous!