The Tomb of Akbar the Great

This is the third entry about our trip to the Taj Mahal. These events take place on Saturday, June 26. We have flown to Dehli from Chennai and are on the outskirts of our destination, the city of Agra.

A while after the border crossing our driver Harpreet mentions that we are approaching the tomb of Akbar the Great, do we want to see it or drive on? Yes, we say. What we should have said was "Yes, we want to see it". Harpreet interepretted "yes" as "yes, drive on to Agra".
So he drove past the tomb. We squawked as we realized the misunderstanding. Oh, you want to see it? Yes, please. But by now we are past the tomb and Harpreet tells us in his laconic way that there is no u-turn.
At this point he has stopped the car half on the shoulder of a two-lane one-way road. We are about 150 yards past the gate to the tomb. In a bold move, Harpreet simply puts the car in reverse and begins backing us up a one-way street into oncoming traffic. He does this with complete calm, as though this was the normal proceedure for visiting the burial site of a Mughal emporer.
We exchange quick glances, like: is this really happening? But it is and his calm makes us think it might be ok until we hear the trucks bear down on us. Shawn and I look out the window onto the busy street with crazy whizzing traffic and see a man squatting down and defecating. We roll by him in reverse. As we chuckle and exchange japes I realize again that none of the rules I know apply and let go of the fear of the approaching trucks.
And soon enough we turn into the parking lot of the site where Akbar was laid down, and everything was fine.
Akbar was the third Mughal emporer. He consolidated rule in Northern and Central India in the late 1500's. A Muslim, he was originally intolerant of other religions. But after accepting a Hindu into his harem and a series of marriage alliances with Hindus he became a force for consolidation between the two groups. He is known and loved for his acceptance of all the various religions in his kingdom. Or at least that's what I read on the internet. Our driver isn't a guide anymore and we were pretty much on our own here.


The walled compound can be accessed by a series of gates like the one above. The gates are big deals themselves. This is red sandstone with marble inlays for the details. The decorations are very different from the Hindu style as you can likely spot. Islam prohibits anthropomorphic depictions, so most of the decoration is floral, geometric or calligraphic. Compare with the Hindu temples chock-a-block with people, gods and animals. We'll see this all again at the Taj.

Exiting the gate we see the main compound. Off to the right of this were a herd of ring horned deer gamboling in the limited shade of an expansive garden. At this point I had some camera troubles and was working to resolve them when we ran into another recurring theme: Indian tourists excited to see foreigners, especially Shawn.

We first saw the group above as the guy was taking snaps of the girls jumping up and down in front of the tomb. He was visibly excited to see Shawn and made a squawking bird-like laugh noise. Would we pose in photos together with them? Sure! A great swapping of photos ensued. He liked my camera, I checked out his D3000, we had a good time, clowned around and parted ways. This happened about 15 times this weekend everywhere we went. Usually it was the tourists, not the locals that were interested in us this way. Locals might ask where we were from or scam us for cash, but to other tourists we seemed to become part of the attraction. We were so busy being agog at the scene that we perhaps hadn't realized that we were part of it, not just observers. It was fun.

The domes are called chhatris. It means umbrella and they apparently are pretty popular in Muslim and Hindu architecture. It's cool to see them here on multiple levels like this.

When we got inside the main compound we wound our way through dark corridors to the basement tomb. Here was where they laid Akbar to rest. It was dark and clearly not intended for visitors: there was no decoration. But it wasn't anti-climatic becase of the gentleman you see here.

The hollow where the tomb was laid domed and had great acoustics. We know that because this dude did that Islamic keening wail. He'd sing the "Alllaaaaaah ah laaaaaa" song and it would reverberate through the building. Of course he had to compete with all the wisenheimers who would yell Echo and such in there, but when he got a moment of silence and did it it was pretty cool. Of course a gratuity was always welcome, as you see next to him there. What do you do for a living? I sit in the dark and sing to Allah in the tomb of an emporer who died 400 years ago for tourists. Ah, India, I don't know you at all but you are rich and strange.

Next, we arrive at the Taj, meet our guide and contend with a terrific challenge. Plus maybe some shopping.