‘WE MUST THINK ABOUT IT VERY HARD’: HOW TO WASH THE TAJ MAHAL’S DOMES
▶ Heritage bosses say grime on the famous structure can be cleaned, but it is risky, writes Samanth Subramanian
It is India’s most renowned monument, a visual wonder steeped in romance and visited by millions every year. But the task of cleaning the Taj Mahal has left national heritage officials with a problem: how do workers scale and scrub the building’s delicate dome?
The man in charge does not yet have an answer.
“There are a lot of calculations we need to make,” says Bhuvan Vikrama, the Taj Mahal’s superintendent in Agra. “We’re having to think very hard about it.”
Mr Vikrama works for the Archaeological Survey of India, which is responsible for the cleaning.
For centuries after the Taj Mahal’s completion in 1653, it required only a wash of rain to sweep away any dirt that may have coated the marble. But in the industrial age, the walls began to be coated in more persistent grime.
Workers started the current cleaning in the summer of 2015, in an attempt to restore its exteriors to their familiar, spotless-white brilliance. But airborne pollution from factories in and around Agra have left residue on the surface.
Right next to the Taj Mahal, the Yamuna has become one of India’s filthiest rivers. Its pollution has led to an explosion of a midge-like insect called Goeldichironomus.
The insects rise in clouds from the river and settle on the back wall of the Taj Mahal. Here, they excrete a substance full of chlorophyll, which leaves green stains on the shining marble.
The monument, built as a mausoleum by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal, attracts up to eight million visitors every year, government statistics show.
About 800,000 come from overseas just to see the Taj Mahal, its profile so seemingly perfect that poet Rabindranath Tagore described it as “a teardrop on the cheek of time”.
The cleaning project has been carried out while the monument is still open to visitors. Workers have had to be careful not to use chemicals that risk pitting or dissolving the marble.
Instead, as if the Taj Mahal were a customer at a beauty parlour, Mr Vikrama has given it a mud pack.
“We use Fuller’s earth in a paste and apply it on the marble,” he says. “When it dries, it tends to naturally extract the impurities from the surface. Then it’s taken off and the surface is washed down with water.”
The process is slow. The clay mineral needs time to dry and cleaners can work on only a small patch at a time. Between 30 and 40 workers have been treating small sections of the walls and the minarets with Fuller’s earth in the past 30 months, using scaffolding to access the upper reaches.
The same scaffolding cannot be used on the onion-shaped dome, which is 17 metres wide and reaches 35 metres from the ground. The dome weighs more than 12,000 tonnes, but it is still a delicate structure and vulnerable if any significant load is added.
“The usual metal scaffolding would be too heavy,” Mr Vikrama says. “We’re calculating the load of the scaffolding. Maybe if there’s a lighter version of modern scaffolding, that’s a possibility.”
An alternative might involve bamboo. In the 1940s, when minor repairs were carried out on the dome, a bamboo scaffold was erected.
Work on the dome will take up to a year to complete. “We have to be careful, but we’ll eventually get there,” Mr Vikrama says.
The stains are not damaging, but they are hard to miss. Prakash Srikumar noticed them when he travelled from Chennai to Agra with his family in December.
“It definitely ruins the beauty of the Taj Mahal,” Mr Srikumar told The National.
“From afar, when you’re walking towards it, it looks white and pristine. But you get up close, and you see all this grime and these green spots as well.”
The scaffolding and disruption are not the only worry for the building’s caretakers. Many believe the number of visitors is reaching unsustainable levels.
In December, not long after Mr Srikumar visited, a temporary ban was imposed on entering the main crypt of the Taj Mahal, which holds replicas of the graves of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal.
From April 1, when the crypt reopens, tourists will have to pay an additional 200 rupees (Dh11) to enter it, in addition to the 50-rupee admission ticket for the Taj Mahal.
The usual metal scaffolding would be too heavy. Maybe if there’s a lighter version of modern scaffolding, that would be a possibility BHUVAN VIKRAMA Superintendant of the Taj Mahal