Travel Intelligence – letter from India December 2000

Tamasha is a Hindi onomatopoeia. It’s perfect. It means a drama and there’s nothing the Indians like more than a good drama. When they are at their bellicose best you can pick the word out, scatter-gunning conversations like a shoot out at the Acchha  Corral. And when tamasha is all used up they use their Yiddish-on-Ganges rhyming slang version instead, drama-sharma. The Delhi daily round is just not the same without at least five tamasha, drama-sharmas.

And the tamasha of the month is the price hike at all of  India’s major monuments. On Friday 27 October 2000 it cost your average foreign tourist nothing to get into the Taj Mahal. Of course that was not quite the norm. A few months before it would have cost you or me 20 rupees, that’s about 30p on the current exchange rate. It was backpacker heaven to be able slope around the world’s ultimate love gesture for the same price as a cup of tea in a nasty neighbourhood back home. But the 27 October 2000 freebie was a sweetener.

I was there along with serried ranks of Indians taking in the sunset on Mumtaz’ marble magnificence. We were all having a lovely time. The foreign tourists were not quite so thrilled. They had not been warned that it was a busman’s holiday and that they were going to be sharing their magic moment with an ever-shifting, never-thinning crowd. Those staying over in Agra to make the dawn raid as well loped off back to their hotels, hoping for more luck and space at 5.30am the next day. They got space in spades. Those of us who went to catch the sunrise through the dust haze, picking out the swoops and swirls of Shah Jahan’s brilliant vision, got to pay $20 for the privilege.

That in itself was not too much of a problem. I had been warned about the price hike, though the poor French couple who shared a rickshaw with me had not. They did not have the money and the girl gave the full version of Franco-hysterics for the benefit of the small queue waiting to get in. The Indians particularly enjoyed it.    I am happy about the price hikes. They are a pan-India thing and the great monuments have been graded as either A or B, charges for A monuments being $20 and  $10 for B monuments. But I will only go on being happy if there is a definite improvement in the upkeep of the great Moghul and Hindu edifices that have become such a beloved part of my daily life. The increase from ten and 20 rupees per monument to $10 and $20 is roughly 500%. The plan must surely be to use this quite dramatic increase to find ways of discouraging casual lads from taking their ease upon the graceful stonework of the Moghul emperors. Uric acid deterioration is one of the factors eating away at India’s cultural heritage. And this is not just because of the boys taking a leak with a view. A huge number of bats and pigeons have become the plague of every monument, from Missy Mumtaz’ great tomb to the plump sensual curves of the monuments of the Lodhi rulers in the gardens where I run and think of an evening in Delhi. Or to be more exact bat shit and bird poop are eating away at every monument from the Taj to the Ajanta and Ellora Caves.

There is another factor of monument upkeep that has always annoyed Western tourists. While the Indians keep their own homes in a meticulous fashion they are amazingly casual when it comes to litter-bugging. They just don’t get it, but then their governments have not spent decades and zillions of rupees educating the population to ‘Keep India Tidy’. The gardens around most of the monuments are a positive study in modern middle class detritus. The Indian government should propose them to the Saatchi art collection as the definitive examples of over-pop. art.

I will continue to be happy handing over $10 and $20 if the Architectural Survey of India, the guardians of the listed monuments, use this money to clean up, to get rid of litter, to take measures to chase public pissers from the premises, and frighten bats and pigeons shitless.

What I have not quite worked out is what all the tamasha is about. After all it is Johnny tourist paying the big price and not the locals. I asked a friend what all the drama-sharma was about.

‘So embarrassing that we have to get foreigners to pay to clean up all our mess,’ he explained.

I don’t know what he is worried about. They cleaned up after us for two and a half centuries and what did they get—a half-decent railway system and an almost perverse addiction to brown manilla folders in very, very large piles.

Justine Hardy – New Delhi – December 2000