On the Way to Burano

The trip from Venice to Burano takes a little under an hour and is a pleasant way to observe some of the lesser known islands of the Venetian Lagoon. These islands are treasure troves for the archaeologist. They have been the locus of important moments in Venetian history. For the visitor with a few days to spare and a copy of the Actv vaporetto timetable they can be engaging and rewarding destinations.

On the way to the vaporetto stop for Burano we passed the first spring crocuses dancing in the wind in the Giardini Papadopouli. Filaments of cloud spun across a cerulean sky. At the changeover stop at Fondamente Nuove a brisk breeze ruffled the waters of the Rio dei Gesuiti.

It seemed a perfect day to visit the island that Hemingway described as the feminine equivalent of Murano, to drift across the lagoon in the wake of Byron, Shelley, James Fenimore Cooper - the armies of tourists and visitors who had plied the route since the days of the Romans. Burano as Henry James said, is “a pretext … for a day on the lagoon”.

A self guided tour group from New York and a group of locals returning to Burano packed into the vessel. Inside the cabin, the air was thick with the fug of humanity overlaid with wafts of expensive perfume, stale cigarette smoke and wine. Obviously somewhere in Venice wine was being dished out in generous amounts early in the morning.

After the requisite amount of jostling those few individuals not belonging to either group were squashed in the middle. A young Venetian man, his English girlfriend and a scattering of other nationalities gazed across a sea of heads at the lagoon beyond windows that were firmly shut against the outside world.


The vaporetto chugged past San Michele, the cemetery island of Venice where the remains of only a privileged few find permanent rest. The less fortunate being consigned, after a suitable period of interment, to the charnel house.

Reflections on the reality of death in the lagoon were interrupted as Vignole floated green and lush far to starboard, a reminder that even Venetian vegetables grow on islands.


No one went ashore on Murano, but more Burano-bound passengers squeezed on board. There was standing room only. This was off-season. Where had the information that few people visited Burano come from?

As we departed Murano the ferry in front of ours turned south-east to wend its way through channels cut through the mud flats that have protected the island of St Erasmo for millennia.

Then someone opened a window. Wind gusted through the cabin. A man began yelling in heavily accented English. An American on the starboard side shouted back. The window was slammed shut.

The two men leapt to their feet, trading insults across the heads of startled passengers, cutting off the view of Isola San Giacomo in Palude on the port side and of Isola Lazzaretto Nuovo on the starboard.

Ancient Greek and Roman artefacts have been unearthed on these islands. But it is their history as ‘plague’ islands and later as military installations that links the two.

San Giacomo in Palude, or “paluo”, (St James in the Marsh) was originally a Cistercian convent. During the plague of 1456 lepers were moved from San Lazzaro to San Giacomo. At some stage the convent was transformed to a Franciscan monastery and remained so until Napoleon dismantled most of the religious institutions on the lagoon islands. He transformed the island into a garrison and it served a military purpose for various armies until 1964.

Lazzaretto Nuovo was Venice's second quarantine island. Around the turn of the first millennium the monks of Saint Giorgio Maggiore built the church of Saint Bartholomew on the island and it became known as Vigna Murada (the walled vineyard). In 1468 the island was renamed Lazzaretto Nuovo, to differentiate it from the first quarantine station which now became known as Lazzaretto Vecchio.

All incoming merchant vessels, their crew and cargo had to be processed here. Life for ships’ crews temporarily quarantined on the island was usually comfortable. However anyone from the merchant ships who exhibited signs of the plague was summarily removed to Lazzaretto Vecchio and certain death.

Periodically, plague victims were brought from Venice and left to die on Lazzaretto Nuovo. Some historians believe that at least eight thousand people died here from the plague.

Napoleon’s, and later the Austrians’, enthusiasm for military installations saw Lazzaretto Nuovo reborn as a gunpowder store and it remained in military hands until 1975.

Through all of these changes the herons and egrets have maintained their still and careful fishing in the marshes surrounding these islands.


However ancient and natural history were far from the minds of the passengers aboard this vaporetto on an early spring morning in 2010. A modern blood feud seemed to be evolving. Loyalties were being established.

Voices were raised in support of the protagonist, or against the antagonist. The air was thick with testosterone.

The New Yorkers adopted shock tactics and engaged their foe in Italian. There was a momentary silence as the opposing side absorbed this surprise blow.

Then someone flung out insults in dialect. Touché. The Americans, however, were prepared and responded in kind.

Translations were muttered for the benefit of the neutral centre who understood neither Italian nor dialect.

The welfare of ‘the children’ – sturdy young men and women accompanying their older, and presumably more responsible family members on tour or home to Burano – was at stake.

American ‘children’ apparently cannot tolerate closed windows, Buranelli ‘children’ wilt in the wind.

What a fine linguistic display it was!

San Francesco Deserto slipped by unnoticed by most
.
This island had been inhabited intermittently since at least the first century.

In 1220 Francis of Assissi, accompanied by Brother Elias, Francis’ friend and supporter during difficult times, hastened back from a peacemaking mission in the Middle East to avert a crisis in his congregation in Europe.

Like all travellers from the East he passed through the Venetian Lagoon. Over the following few years Francis grappled with the problems besetting his congregation before returning to the Middle East in 1223. Here he instituted the practice of erecting a nativity scene at Christmas time to illustrate to the faithful the extent of the poverty in which Christ was born.

Earlier in this same year Jacopo Michiel, a relative of the Doge of Venice donated the island to the Franciscan order.

However Francis’ desire for peace among men of all faiths and nationalities was not being celebrated by the passengers on the vaporetto.

Calls on both sides for the captain to intervene and control the opposing party were studiously ignored. No actual physical contact between the two parties had occurred. But there was much pacing and milling and waving of fists to accompany the shouting. The vessel remained well balanced as each side aligned port and starboard.

Isola di Crevan, of which all that is known is the dubious fact that its oysters are safer to eat than those from islands closer to Venice, slipped by as the vaporetto turned into the channel leading to the Burano stop.

At the disembarkation point each group determined to beat the other on shore. A bottleneck ensued. Old ladies sitting under the trees in the park beside the vaporetto stop rose, curious, ready to participate in whatever drama was coming ashore. The boatman yelled a few exasperated words. Whether it was his words or the shock of fresh air and a blue sky is not entirely clear, but the arguing stopped as suddenly as it began.

One group of the antagonists headed for the public housing units on Mazzorbo. They glanced back as they crossed the footbridge that connects the two islands at the opposition who had proven such worthy adversaries.

The Americans headed for the cafes.

Had this, after all, been just an opportunity for an international family squabble to be made public?

No one cared any more.

Women in black surged from the entrance to Fondamenta Pontinello inviting the disembarking passengers to come into their village, purchase lace and embroidery, tea and cake.

The sun was shining, the canal sparkled, the brightly painted houses glistened. The air was clean and sweet. A filigree of cloud flitted across the sky.

There was lace everywhere, draped from doorways, across display tables, in shop windows. Business was going to be brisk.

Observer

1 May 2010
Note:  The map, as all my maps are, is a 'mud map' and is for reference only.  Not to be used for boating in the lagoon!
References:
Website for Actv Servizio Navigazione Linee urbane
Canticle of the Sun, Francis of Assisi
Italian Hours, Henry James

Murano Glass

They have been making glass for over 700 years.  The industry has survived invasions, competition, wars, the invention of plastic, changing fashions, and previous economic collapse.  In spite of the broken windows in the abandoned foundries, the rotting boards on the docks that speak of hard times being endured on the island, it is difficult to believe that Murano will not once again undergo a revival of its craft

The shrine was made of glass: a glass mosaic Virgin and Child in the Byzantine style.  The floral offerings on the ledge below the icon were moulded glass in red, pink, yellow, orange, and blue.  The virgin bore her child like a medallion on her chest.  Her glance, alert, almost fearful was caught by something to her right.  Her gaze, intense yet distracted, rendered irrelevant the opulent ornamentation surrounding her.  What, the observer could only wonder, was she looking at?  On this damp grey day in early spring the shrine gleamed, refracting the light caught by the glass mosaics.

On Fondamente Cavour the shop windows glowed.  Glass in a myriad of colours and forms illuminated the town’s shopfronts.

It is glass that lures Venice’s visitors on the 40 minute vaporetto trip to the island of Murano.

Glassmaking probably began in Mesopotamia 4,500 years ago, but it was the Romans who industrialized it.  During that period glassmakers travelled throughout the empire freely exchanging ideas and techniques.

Twenty years after the death of Jesus Christ, the technique that revolutionized glass production, glassblowing, was developed in Jerusalem.  Glassmaking became a portable industry, producing lighter weight vessels than the available pottery and metal.  It was cheaper as well, for glass is easy to recycle.

Some historians believe the original glassworkers of Northern Italy were descendants of freed Syrian and Judean slaves who spread their craft through the Roman Empire.  Whoever these early craftsmen were, the tradition of glassmaking has deep roots in the area.  By the first century AD Northern Italy was exporting small coloured glass bowls.

In Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees Richard Cantrell extols the masculine virtues of the Muranese – their resilience, their fishing and duck hunting skills, their fecundity. 

With its rows of solid brick buildings along the seafront and the workmanlike steel bridge over Murano’s Grand Canal, there is something masculine about Murano, in spite of its delicate, dazzling products.

Yet Murano’s early history is not about glass.  Unlike the nearby island of Torcello, during the first millennium Murano produced no glass.  The Muranese were refugees from besieged Roman cities, hunters, fishermen, salt harvesters and boatmen.

The Via Annia, a Roman road followed the Adriatic coast as far as the glassmaking centre of Aquileia.  The road passed through the ancient settlement of Altinum, and here it came close to the shore of the Venetian lagoon, close to the inner lagoon islands, including Murano.

Refugees from Altinum escaped Attila the Hun’s invasion of Italy in 452 A.D. by fleeing to these sparsely populated islands.  Within a few decades twelve of the lagoon communities, including Murano, formed a cooperative council, the first step towards a Venetian Republic.

,

When the Lombards invaded Northern Italy in 568 A.D. refugees once again streamed onto the lagoon islands and the Muranese continued to work as fishermen, salt traders, hunters of the waterbirds that abounded in the shallow backwaters of the lagoon.  They also controlled the port on the nearby island of St Erasmo and generated income by servicing and trading with vessels that used the port.

The new millennium saw Murano’s fortunes on the rise.  Proof of this was the island’s acquisition of its own saintly relics in 1125.  The remains of St Donatus and some remains of the dragon he slew were brought from Arezzo and installed in the renamed Church of Santa Maria e San Donato.  In Byzantine Europe any city worth its salt had to have its own saint, and saintly relics.

Then in 1291 the Venetian Doge Tiepolo changed Murano forever when he closed down the glass furnaces in Venice and moved them to the island.

During the years that followed this move the Venetians tried to retain the lead in glass production in Europe by isolating the glassmakers and imposing strict secrecy laws on them.  They well knew the value of trade secrets. 

The move benefited both the Venetians and the Muranese.  Venice acquired the space left vacant by the departing glassmakers, and ensured that only Venetians would trade in Venetian, now Murano, glass. 

In return the Muranese were provided with their very own medieval-style state of the art industrial estate.  They were elevated socially and their daughters married into the families of rich Venetian merchants.  The craftsmen immediately began to expand their product range, revived ancient glassmaking techniques, invented new ones.  They kept the balance of trade with Europe on the plus side for the merchants. 

Today tourists visit Murano as part of the Venetian experience to tour the glass museum and those glass factories open for inspection. 

They are following a well trodden path.  In the Middle Ages Murano was a popular destination for visitors from Venice who went to enjoy the clean air and to walk in the gardens.  By the 15^th century Murano was famous all over Europe.  People came to watch the glassmaking process. 

Within two hundred years all Murano’s ‘secret’ manufacturing processes had been copied in other parts of Europe and it was no longer the remarkable destination it once had been.

In 1797 Napoleon invaded Venice, ending over a thousand years of republican government.  After Napoleon the Austrians took over as occupiers.  During the following decades travellers in the lagoon risked being pulled over by customs patrols.  Books, food or jewellery in their possession were often confiscated and heavy on-the-spot fines imposed.

By the mid-1800s few people risked visiting the islands, except for the young and adventurous.  Byron, Shelley and James Fennimore Cooper were numbered among those who braved the lagoon trip.

Murano suffered a further blow when the Austrians built a deep water shipping lane from Mestre to Lido and the Muranese lost their income from servicing shipping. 

Glassmaking did not die out entirely, however.  Although only five foundries survived, by the late 1800s Murano was back in commercial production.  The foundries turned out glass mosaic tiles as part of the restoration of Venice’s churches, in particular the mosaics in St Mark’s.

The resilience of the Muranese saw them ride the economic roller coaster of the 20^th century, the wars, the sudden shifts in fashion.  Vittorio Tosa Borella led the glass revival on Murano in the early part of the twentieth century.  He was followed by equally talented and farsighted artisans.  But the Second World War brought hard times for the industry and in the years after the war Muranese craftsmen worked hard to regain their popularity and their customer base.

By 2001 Murano was once again turning a profit.  One third of the 5,000 people on the island worked on their own as artisans or shopkeepers.  27 industrial glassworks processed 13,000 metric tons of raw glass a year. 

Such a run of good fortune could not last.  The world wide economic collapse in 2008 shattered the tourist industry.  The glass artists of Murano fought back.  For Christmas 2009 they put on their usual glittering, colourful public display – an antidote to the bleakness of the northern winter. 

On a damp grey day in early spring in 2010 small groups of tourists wandered past the brightly lit windows of the glass shops, or sipped coffee in the restaurants.  Few were buying.

By afternoon the rain was falling, rivulets of light flowed from the front of the shopfronts into the canal.  A sudden surge of children released from school filled the street.  The children skittered across the iron bridge.  Their mothers, impeded by prams and strollers, calling warnings as they struggled to keep up with their charges.  Soon they were gone, mothers and children, down the lanes and alleys. 

A Venice bound vaporetto pulled in.  The few tourists rushed from the café beside the stop, jostled to board it without getting wet. 

In the momentary silence that followed the departure of the vaporetto the icon glimmered through the rain, the virgin still alert to whatever danger lurked nearby.

Observer

Thursday, 15 April 2010
World by Itself: Tradition and Change in the Venetian Lagoon 

New?Delhi : Journey's End

The days in Delhi had been spent time-travelling – hopping from the era of the early Mughuls to the twentieth century then zipping back to pre-Islamic and early Islamic times. The increasing heat bearing down through the thickening humidity forced early morning trips to sites. Rajasthan beckoned. On that final day a dust storm swirled across the city while we travelled to the end days of yet another empire, to structures built over a village reputed to be the remains of the very first settlement in Delhi – the ancient settlement of Indraprashta.

We followed in the footsteps of kings and travelled up Rajpath to look at part of Lutyens’ Delhi.

Although many British architects were associated with the public buildings of New Delhi during the Raj, it is Lutyens whose name is remembered and who also evokes the most controversy.

Edwin Landseer Lutyens was born in London. His father of German immigrant descent was a minor painter of his time. His mother was the daughter of an Irish protestant policeman. Edwin Lutyens was a sickly child, the ninth son in a family of thirteen.

It seems apt that the government that gave the most opportunity to the English working and lower middle classes to acquire wealth and some status as expatriate workers in India should have commissioned a man whose childhood, if not exactly poverty stricken, was certainly not that of the privileged classes.

In 1911 King George V announced the British were moving India’s capital from Calcutta to a new site in Delhi. Lutyens, married to the daughter of a former Viceroy of India, was already a well known and respected architect in England.

In 1912 Lutyens served on a committee with Herbert Baker and Mr Lanchester to advise the Indian Government on the practicalities of building a new capital. Lutyens and Baker then drew up a plan over which they squabbled for years.

The government enclave was finally completed in 1929 and inaugurated in 1931 when the British Viceroy in India moved into his new vice regal residence on top of Raisina Hill. From here he could gaze across Vijay Chowk down Rajpath to India Gate.

Wide avenues may have been Lutyens’ idea of opening the city to the light, a reverse of the closed, often claustrophobic designs of earlier rulers of India. But on first arriving in front of the former vice regal residence, now known as Rashtrapi Bhavan and home to the President of India the view down the hill evokes images of despotic rulers and grandiose military processions. It takes a shift in perspective to view it for what it is.

An entire army could parade effortlessly down Rajpath. And that is exactly what it is used for. Each year on January 26, Republic Day, the Indian military parades its might before the celebrating citizenry.

Delhi residents are proud of the enclave. The Rashtrapi Bhavan has been described as “architecturally quite brilliant”. If you read nothing else about this part of Delhi, read Dalrymple’s description in City of Djinns.

He begins by saying:
“This was Rajpath – once the Kingsway – one of the great ceremonial ways of the world. It was planned as an Imperial Champs Elysees – complete with India Gate, ... But it was far wider, far greener, far more magnificent than anything comparable in Europe ...”

I will leave the rest for you to read yourself.

The maidan around India Gate at the foot of Rajpath is a venue for families to escape the claustrophobic clutter of the city and relax on cool afternoons.

Look at a map of Delhi. From the seeming chaos of the ancient lanes there emerges an elegant symmetry. The “wheel” of Connaught Place articulates with that of India gate. The two harnessed by wide roads to the oval of the President’s Estate.

Birla Mandir was completed in 1939, just eight years after the capital was moved to Delhi. During the building of both of these structures Gandhi was bringing the situation of India to the attention of the world, embarked on a journey with an inevitable ending.

Within twenty years of the Viceroy moving into his residence India was partitioned and the last occupying forces had departed.

Observer
Friday, 2 April 2010
http://longline8.blogspot.com/

Email: longline8@gmail.com


For a brief thought-provoking discussion about Lutyens and others involved in the design of public buildings in Delhi see
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?235665


Another worthwhile website:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/8_2_urbanities-architect.html

The following is a great blog from Delhi:
http://thedelhiwalla.blogspot.com/2009/04/capital-walk-raisina-hill-lutyens-delhi.html

Dalrymple on Lutyens:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2004/nov/13/architecture.india









                                                                                                                     

Complexity in Qutub

The earth in the complex is saturated with the voracious ambitions of millennia.  The light refracted through the dense humidity of this pre-election day in Delhi glances off the Iron Pillar, forces people to shelter in very small groups beneath the colonnades.  It is a day of premonition, of words carefully chosen. There is more than the weight of history draining the energy from the day.

Lal Kot, Qila Rai Pithora (Pithorogarh), Qutub Complex – these are more than a litany of names.  They are a summation of over twelve hundred years of the history of one place.

At least eight waves of occupation have been identified in this area.  There are records of people living here intermittently from 2,500 B.C. and proof that humans inhabited this site continuously from the Mauryan period in the 4^th century B.C. until the Mughals left in the 19^th century.  Their remains – the detritus of empires - litter the landscape.

The ghost of Anangpal of the Tomar Rajput dynasty is raised.  He founded Lal Kot in 736 A.D.  One of Anangpal’s ministers was a powerful Jain merchant by the name of Nattal Sahu.  Nattal Sahu built the Jain temples, the remains of some of which, together with the remains of Hindu temples, form the colonnade under which today’s visitors shelter from the early rising heat.

The six ton Iron Pillar is the first known example of wrought iron manufactured on earth.  It is at least sixteen hundred years old.  Originally erected on a site in Udaygiri near Bhopal in present day India, it was part of an installation along the Tropic of Cancer which combined astronomical observations with religious worship.

The date when it was removed from its mountain top and transported over 700 kilometres north to Delhi is disputed.  Some claim the second emperor of the Muslim Slave dynasty Iltutmish, who ruled from 1211 – 1236, ordered the pillar moved.  The explanation favoured by the guide at the complex is that Chandragupta II installed the pillar in the middle of the assortment of Jain and Hindu temples that were on the site in 1052.

One hundred and thirty years later the Chauhan King of Ajmer conquered Lal Kot and renamed it Qila Rai Pithora, but this was a short lived victory.  The face of empire in India was changing.

These changes grew from two events that together led to the present day Qutub Complex in Delhi. 

One of these events began in 1145.  1,900 metres above sea level, in Ghur, in what is today Afghanistan, the city of Firuzkah was founded as a summer capital of the Ghurids.  Four years later the Ghaznavids captured and crucified the brother of the ruler of Ghur and sent his head to the Sultan in Iran.  Legend has it that revenge was swift and intense.  The Ghurids massacred 60,000 Ghaznavids, took the survivors prisoner and mixed their blood with mud to build Ghurid towers.

Twenty years later two brothers ruled Ghur.  During their reign a 65 metre high mud brick minaret was built in Firuzkah.  Incidentally, less than fifty years later Firuzkah was destroyed by the Mongols.  Only the minaret survived.  It has stood in that high valley in Afghanistan for over eight hundred years and is known today as the minaret of Jam.

One of those ruling brothers, Mu’izz al-Din (known in India as Muhammad Ghori) was the man who changed the face of empire in India.

While the minaret was being built in Firuzkah, the second event was taking place.  The Mamluk dynasty was being established in Egypt.  Originally the Mamluks were the spoils of war, captured as children, sold on in slave markets, and raised as Muslims.  Brought up in the military, Mamluks over time attained prestige and political power, and ruled colonies on behalf of their powerful owners.  In the 12^th century no aspiring empire builder was without his Mamluk army.  The brothers from Ghur were no exception.

 

Qutub-ud-din Aibak (Aibak), was a favoured slave soldier of Muhammad Ghori.  Together they came out of the hills of Afghanistan and invaded northern India.  In 1192, only twelve years after the King of Ajmer renamed Lal Kot, the Afghans conquered the ancient fort.  The following year, in his role as Governor on behalf of Muhammad Ghori, Aibak began construction of India’s first mosque. 

First he destroyed the 27 Jain and Hindu Temples and defaced the images of the pagan gods carved in the few remaining pillars.  He used the material from the temples in his building project. 

The remains of these temples is the colonnade that once formed part of Aibak's Quwwat-ul-Islam Mosque. 

Aibak was not the first, nor would he be the last to proclaim the replacement of one religion, one culture, with another through destruction of and building over earlier buildings.

In 1199 Aibak began construction of the Qutub Minar, of which Dalrymple, in City of Djinns says,

The tower still stands above the walls of the old Hindu fortress a tapering cylinder rising 240 feet in four ever diminishing storeys like a fully extended telescope placed lens-down on a plateau in the Aravalli hills.  The tower is a statement of arrival... (p. 260)

Tower building seems to be a theme of empire building.  The Emperor Ashoka who lived from 304 B.C. – 232 BC was not averse to erecting the odd tower.  Some of the massive stone Pillars of Ashoka still stand, inscribed with edicts for the edification of Ashoka’s subjects.

Ghori was murdered in 1206 and Aibak took over as ruler of northern India.  At first he ruled from Lahore but eventually moved the capital to Delhi.  He became the first Muslim ruler of Delhi and established the Slave Dynasty which held power for most of the next century.

When Aibak died in 1210, his son-in-law, an ex-slave, Shams-ud-din-Ultutmish, completed the Qutub Minar.  Ultutmish named as his successor his daughter Raziyya.  She was murdered after three years in office.  She was the first female ruler of Delhi.

Although the Qutub Minar is not mud brick but red and buff sandstone, it bears a striking resemblance to the Minaret of Jam and is a link not only to the origins of Islam in India but to a now remote area of Afghanistan and a little known period in Afghani history.  It is also a timely reminder of the fugitive nature of right and the transience of might.

Observer

Tuesday, 9 March 2010

Longlines  http://longline8.blogspot.com/

Email:  Longline8@gmail.com

Ref: Dalrymple, William, City of Djinns: A year in Delhi

, Penguin, New Delhi, 2004.

Early Morning in Delhi – encounters with Vishnu and Lakshmi

The story that a Hindu saint told Mr Ghanshyam Das (G. D.) Birla that if he did not rebuild the Lakshmi Narayan Temple in Delhi he would lose his fortune probably has a basis in fact. Mr G. D. Birla had inherited the Marwari family’s money lending business, expanded, diversified and prospered.

He had become friends with Mohandas Gandhi in 1916 and financially supported Gandhi and advised him on the economic issues facing India. In 1926 Mr Birla was elected to the Central Legislative Assembly of British India. The 1930’s saw an increase in his friend’s radicalism – the salt march, Gandhi’s hunger strikes and riots between Hindus and Muslims.

At the same time Hitler was on the rise in Europe, and Europe and America’s emergence from the Great Depression was not following the optimistic arc predicted. There was political violence and famine throughout much of the world. In January 1933 the Pakistan Movement was officially launched. It was going to be a memorable decade.

Mohandas Gandhi agreed to inaugurate Mr Birla’s rebuilt temple on condition that it be open to people of all religions and castes, especially untouchables.

Mr Birla went on to build temples in many places in India, as well as hospitals, schools and institutes of higher education. The Birla family is today one of the industrial giants of India and continues to support and maintain the temple commonly known as Birla Mandir. For those interested in intricate and dramatic dynastic tales, a review of references to the family by The Times of India over the past ten years is entertaining reading.

The Birla Mandir is, appropriately, dedicated to Lord Vishnu the preserver and his consort Lakshmi the Goddess of prosperity and wealth.

The original temple was built in 1622 and renovated in 1793. The rebuilding between 1933 and 1939, ensured that almost all the gods of the Hindu Pantheon are now represented and, in a gesture of inclusiveness rare in those times, a Buddha shrine was included.

There is something refreshing about a Hindu temple – the combination of blatant commercialism with the crowds of poor whose tiny offerings of flowers and rice reflect the immense optimism of the human race; the open-armed welcome that these temples offer and the flamboyant, complex decoration; the gentility of an ancient religion and most importantly the inclusiveness that is true Hinduism. That this temple is open in the early hours while there is a hint of coolness in the air adds to its attraction.
Observer
19 February 2010
http://www.longline8.blogspot.com

longline8@gmail.com
p.s. Temple hours are 7a.m.-12 noon and 2pm - 9p.m, but always check first.

The Red Fort Delhi India

The Red Fort loomed huge through the haze of heat and dust that was Delhi. During the pre-election days in 2009 security was intense and very visible, yet the people in the street seemed unaffected by this inpending event. Perhaps this had something to do with the history of Delhi, a survivor of invasion after invasion. Its population has been repeatedly driven out, their temples defaced, torn down, built over.


The Mughals were late-comers in Indian history, but reminders of their reign are everywhere stamped on northern India, especially on Delhi, the city of the plain that has existed since prehistory.
History is a means of making events in the past explicable and, sometimes, acceptable. In 1638 Shah Jahan the Mughal Emperor moved his capital from Agra back to Delhi and began to build his new capital Shahjahanabad.  One of his wives, Mumtaz Mahal, had died seven years earlier and Shah Jahan had commissioned the construction of her tomb, the Taj Mahal in Agra. In spite of the tales of devotion of husband for this, his third wife, Shah Jahan stopped the construction of the Taj Mahal until Shahjahanabad, The Red Fort and the Jama Masjid were completed. The Taj Mahal in Agra was completed 23 years after the death of Mumtaz Mahal.
The new walled and defended capital city was completed in 1648 and the building of the Red Fort, a city within a city was commenced in the following year.
The cities that, until the economic crash of 2008, were springing up all over the Middle East were not modern phenomena, just historical repetition.

Completed in just nine years Lal Qila or Red Fort was twice the size of the fort at Agra.

The Red Fort became the centre of Mughal power. The emperor and his court resided within its walls along with the Mughal administration, a military garrison, arsenal, the treasury, craftsmen and shopkeepers.
Two main gates, one on the west and the other on the south, called Lahori and Delhi gates, lead into the fort. While the walls, gates and a few buildings in the fort are constructed of red sandstone, marble is the material used to build the palaces.
The fort has played a major part in the history of India since the days of Shah Jahan and deserves more than a brief visit. It was from the fort’s main gate, the Lahore gate, so named because from this gate the road lead to Lahore, that the Indian flag first flew on declaration of India’s independence in 1947.
From Lahore Gate the fort is entered through Chatta Chowk the covered bazaar that has been part of the fort since its inception.
In the Hall of Public Audience (the Diwan-i-Am) some of the most intricate stone inlay work outside of Italy is to be seen. The art of cutting and fitting polished semiprecious coloured stones together in a marble bed to give the effect of painting is still carried out in Rajasthan.  The floral inlay panels in the Hall of Private Audience (Diwan-i-Khass) are reminiscent of the less intricate work see on the pillars of the Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi.

From this hall Shah Jahan’s original Peacock Throne, valued in 1665 by the French Jeweller Tavernier at six and a half million pounds sterling, was removed by the invading Persian general Nadir Shah in1739. This removal was seen as a symbol of the true end of the Mughal Empire although it remained in power in name only for another one hundred and twenty years.
The story of the pillaging by the Persians segued into the convoluted and bloody history of the Koh-i-noor diamond and its continued illegal possession by the British who acquired it when Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in 1877.
The guide who, as a Muslim, had been that morning justifiably proud of the Jama Masjid, grew gloomier and gloomier as the trek through the fort continued, the heat and humidity increased and stories of betrayal, familial violence, destruction, thievery and abandonment compounded by incompetence and greed piled one on the other.
The Moti Masjid, the Pearl Mosque, built by Aurangazeb, Shah Jahan’s son, is a small walled building in one corner of the fort. When questioned about the mosque the guide indicated the high walls around the mosque. Aurangazeb, he said, was a religious fanatic who ruined India. He needed these high walls to protect himself from being assassinated while he prayed.
Aurangazeb, the guide hastened to add, was a genuinely religious man who acted solely from genuine religious belief.

Although made in a moment of high emotion, this statement was probably not far from the truth. Aurangazeb broke the tradition of Mughal rulers’ tolerance of Hindus and had the dubious distinction of being the first Muslim ruler to impose sharia law on his non-Muslim citizens, and reintroduce the jizya, a poll tax on non-muslims. This was a move not designed to make friends outside his own religious circle.
In 1857 the British sacked Delhi, took over the Red Fort, demolished ‘architectural treasures’ and built in their place a solid brick army barracks which stands today.
The Mughals did leave a repository of great architecture. Their fusion of Hindu, Persian and Islamic styles resulted in elegant and practical public buildings that continue to influence designers and architects around the world.
By mid- afternoon the air in Delhi, spiced with that smell of burning plastic that is endemic to the Asian olfactory experience, was thick with humidity. The recurring tales of invasion, repression, plunder and pillage only added to the oppressive atmosphere.
From The Red Fort to Gandhi’s memorial was a relief. As the heat and humidity stabilized in the late afternoon, the violence and turbulence of Indian history was put aside in the contemplation of the simple plinth that celebrates the life of a truly great leader.
Observer
12 February 2010
http://longline8.blogspot.com/
Email:  longline8@gmail.com

Hazy Daze in Delhi

This journey began in Delhi ten days before the 2009 elections, five months after the Mumbai bombings. 

The Jet Air flight from the Gulf to Delhi was full, crammed with workers returning home at the end of their overseas contract.  There were two incoming tourists on the flight.

Delhi was hot, humid and very secure, if the sandbag gun emplacements outside the airport were any indication. 

The list of places to see was long, the time was short.    Adiga’s words from The White Tiger were still fresh:

Let the driver tell you the truth.  And the truth is that Delhi is a crazy city. ... all the roads look the same, all of them go around and around grassy circles in which men are sleeping or eating or playing cards, and then four roads shoot off from that grassy circle, and then you go down one road, and you hit another grassy circle where more men are sleeping or playing cards, and then four more roads go off from it. (Adiga, p. 99)

Therefore the Indian Tourist Bureau’s ability to provide a knowledgeable guide and an experienced driver for a reasonable price seemed a good idea.

The trip to India was sudden and unplanned so a map was bought, and plans made over dawn coffee in the hotel.

Maps are wonderful things.  They impose the mirage of order on chaos, encourage the traveller to believe in the accessibility of cities.  Lay a map of Delhi on the table, pencil over it a grid with Connaught Place in the centre.  There, with a little jiggling of the grid, Delhi can be divided up into a few days sightseeing.  Simple really. 

The guide was a shepherd through the mazes of security screens thrown up around any structure more than a metre high.  On this, the first day, Mughal monuments predominated so the guide was an expert in this field.  He also provided protection from the beggars, thin on the ground in the heat and dust.  Desperate touts formed phalanxes of invaders at the sight of rare tourists.  But all, beggars and touts, were remarkably polite - insistent, but polite. 

The number of armed police and soldiers patrolling the streets and lanes demonstrated that a safe tour of Delhi had come at an enormous cost to the Government of India. 

What a city Delhi is, the outcome of over 3,000 years of habitation, a complex, ugly, noisy city, battened down against attack from within and without, a city of parks and gardens and horrific slums.

Yet Delhi is a democratic city with all the trappings of democracy and the problems and corruption of the developing world.  It is a vibrant city where even in those tense pre-election days the optimism among its people was palpable.

It was, however, not politics but historical monuments that were the reason for this stopover. 

The driver knew which grassy circle led to which road.  And the first road led to the Jama Masjid, Shah Jahan’s Friday mosque, because this was not a Friday, and the mosque was open for visiting before the thick blanket of humidity swaddled the city and turned the mosque courtyard into a sauna. 

The Jama Masjid is the largest mosque in India.  Entrance to the mosque is free, but a ‘photography fee’ is charged.  Women must wear the floral covering provided at the entrance – an article of clothing so ugly that even if Bollywood stars Aishwarya Rai or Bipasha Basu were wearing it there is no risk any man would be overcome with lustful thoughts at the sight of them.

Shah Jahan completed the Red Fort in 1648 and then turned to the construction of a mosque opposite the fort. 

This large red sandstone structure was built on a rise on the Delhi plain on a base raised a further ten metres from the ground.  It is said that it took 10,000 men six years (1650-1656) to build.  Getting mosques up in a hurry seems to have been a aspect of the Mughal reign.  Aurangazeb, Shah Jahan’s son and ursurper, built the Badshahi Mosque, the biggest in the world for 313 years, in Lahore, in the two years between 1671 and 1673. 

In spite of the fort-like appearance of its exterior the mosque is interesting both architecturally and historically and a good example of the Mughal style. 

The three main domes are of white marble with accents of black.  The minarets also display innovative combinations of sandstone and marble.  The cool, arcaded cloisters with intricate marble facing were occupied mostly by sleeping men and beggars careful not to harass the tourists.

Two bomb explosions within the mosque in April 2006 aimed, apparently, at the then liberal minded Imam do not seem to have resulted in any over-zealous security – or at least what would be called over-zealous in security-minded Delhi.   

This Imam was, in accordance with tradition for the Jama Masjid, a direct descendant of the Imam invited from Bukhara by Shah Jahan to inaugurate his mosque on 23 July 1656. 

In City of Djinns after a visit to the Jama Masjid for Eid prayers Dalrymple wrote:   

...Islam has always been an urban faith, ill at ease with the wilderness; its civilization has always flourished most successfully in the labyrinths of the ancient bazaar towns of the East.  Certainly there can be no doubt that Islam looks at its most impressive in a great urban cathedral mosque, ...(p. 251)

His reflections were perhaps inspired not only by the sight of “twenty or thirty thousand” Muslim men at prayer, but also by the mosque’s proximity to the crowded lanes that lead to Chandni Chowk.  This former Mughal boulevard lead to the Red Fort.  Now it is the hot, noisy, congested main street of Old Delhi, which still leads to the massive citadel of Shah Jahan.

Observer

2^nd February 2010

Email:  longline8@gmail.com

http://longline8.blogspot.com

References:

Adiga, Aravind, The White Tiger, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2008.

Dalrymple, William, City of Djinns: A year in Delhi, Penguin, New Delhi, 2004.