When the great Taj turned into a barn

 

The legendary Jat king of the eighteenth century, Maharaja Surajmal once captured the great Taj Mahal in Agra. The Mughal kingdom was in disarray and the Jat ruler of Bharatpur in Rajasthan made challenging, humiliating forays into Mughal territories.

Jats are hereditary peasants. The great king of farming clans hadn’t much clue as to what to do with the wonder in marblework. But his farming knowledge helped him in this regard. He did something that assuaged his winner’s pride as well as kept the monument’s timeless beauty intact.

Even at the cusp of aesthetic inarticulateness, he didn’t strip the marble beauty of its honor; didn’t rape it like the clichéd ways of the medieval Islamic empire builders who ravaged beauty in stones with incalculable indigence of the soul.

With charismatic, ready, rustic wit, and naturalness of a mirthful clan having long affinities with jokes and puns, he turned the grand monument into a barn, put fodder in its grand ornate chambers and tied horses in regal arched passages.

But that was temporary; a temporary transmutation; a short eclipse like a cloud briefly covering the face of full moon on a clear night. He lost control of his glittering white barn after some time. So the wonder of mythical proportions was left almost untouched even after falling in the hands of a rival king. It just needed cleaning to get into order again as a beacon of love and beauty.

But to give the Jat ruler credit, he didn’t damage the wonder of the world like many medieval Islamic zealots, carrying archetypal punitive zeal against the kafirs, who attacked and destroyed many beautiful monuments, temples and libraries just for the sheer blind-faith born fun and revelry of intolerance and violence on those who followed a different faith. Carrying dexterous menace, they prided themselves as destroyers of statues, which they condemned as unholy, pretentious and perfunctory. And hence mutilated thousands of loveliest artworks in Buddhist monasteries and Hindu temples.