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Journalism of Courage
Mughal mausoleums in India,such as Humayuns Tomb and the Taj Mahal to stretch Dostoyevskys We all fell out of Gogols Great Coat about pre-revolutionary Russian writers came out of the original in honour of Tamurlane,the Mughals illustrious and sanguinary ancestor,in Samarkand,Uzbekistan. That mausoleum,the Gur-e Amir,eventually became the Timurid dynastys family crypt,much like Humayuns Tomb came to be the Dormitory of the Mughals. Not much is left of the azure-domed Gur-e Amir,despite large-scale restoration. Humayuns Tomb would have suffered a similar fate had it not been for periodic doses of good fortune in an otherwise long history of neglect. The last was its recognition as a World Heritage Site in 1993,and the Archaeological Survey of Indias redoubled efforts thereafter to restore the glory of the Tajs precursor.
So the fact that a team of Uzbeks,an architect and three tile craftsmen,has been recreating the right shades of the original Mughal tiles could be sweet coincidence,reconnecting all the dots of an old narrative of cultural intercourse. Except,it isnt. The Uzbeks,with tile and ceramic craftsmanship closest to the Mughals,got the job after a protracted process of consultation with tile-producing countries to fill in for a skill long lost from India. The ASIs determination to take time and go for the authentic,so as to also avoid pulling out a single damaged tile from the structure,is laudable.
