#which may be intentional on the artists part to evoke her soldiering days but may just be close to how she wore it

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Continental Army Pvt. Deborah Sampson Gannett in her wedding dress, 1785.

(aka I can't stop collecting gender non-conforming 18th century New Englanders, and got really excited when I realized a gown I'd saved as reference on Pinterest was, in fact, her wedding dress).

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The Decay of the Angel:

Yukio Mishima and Paul Schrader on the Body, Death, Suicide, Sexuality and the Nature of Evil

Being a reworking of three previous blog posts into one essay.

On a hot day after Christmas, in a second-hand bookshop in Newcastle, New South Wales, I came across The Decay of the Angel by Yukio Mishima. It was one of those books that resonates immediately at some visceral level without even having to open the cover: the book as fetish object. On beginning to read in the shady basement where I was staying, one of the first impressions the book made on me was that the title, in English, seemed to be a mistranslation. The decay referred to pertains to a dimension dreamed by a rich old man, Shigekuni Honda, one of the novel’s main characters. The name of this dimension has been more often translated into English (from many and various Asian Buddhist texts) as the ‘God Realms.’ So the ‘angel’ who loses her wings would belong to a pantheon of gods and goddesses rather than a host like the seraphim.

A closer translation into English might have resonated with Wagner’s Götterdämerung (Twilight of the Gods), that I suspect may have been in Mishima’s mind when he wrote it. One strand of narrative traces Honda’s reconciliation to a less simplistic Buddhist world view than that with which he begins in the book. Could Mishima also be alluding to Nietzsche’s death of god? The allusion to decadence is still there. Despite the questionable title, The Decay of the Angel has been rendered in beautiful translated prose that evokes the sea, the ships, the industrial harbour of Yokohama, Honda’s dreams, and his obsession with a sixteen-year-old boy, whom he takes for a reincarnation of others he has followed in his life, all of whom have died young. Both Honda and the boy Tōru seek to destroy each other in a web of evil that ultimately threatens to destroy them both.

It was after completing the writing of this book, which Mishima considered to be his masterpiece, the last of his Sea of Fertility tetralogy, that he committed seppuku, planned as a grand theatrical staging of a ritual suicide at a headquarters garrison of the Japanese Self Defence Force, or the army by any other name. Mishima is considered by many to be a proto-fascist but the truth seems to be far more complex. Paul Schrader’s film, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, takes on the complexities of Mishima’s entire life as art; another resonance with Nietzsche’s idea of life as a constant act of creation: an expression of the will to power.

In an interview about his Mishima film, Schrader says, ‘I do believe that the life is his final work and I believe that Mishima saw it that way, too. He saw all his output as a whole, from the tacky semi-nude photographs to the Chinese poetry to the Dostoyevskian novels to his private army – it was all Mishima.’ (Schrader on Schrader, Faber and Faber.)

The film has never been distributed in Japan. Schrader says, ‘Mishima has become a non-subject. People read about him but there is no official viewpoint, so that if you’re at a dinner party and his name comes up there’s just silence. Now, that atmosphere of cultural discomfort is amplified by the fact that one of the precepts of the Japanese psyche is that outsiders really can’t understand them… So if (the Japanese) don’t understand Mishima, how can a foreigner possibly hope to?’

It’s true that when reading writers of other cultures, or writing about them, or making films about them, inevitably the maker creates his or her imaginary versions of that culture that those who are born into it may not share at all and resent the intrusion on the shared cultural construction of those born in place.

Schrader – as does Mishima’s biographer John Norton – sees Mishima’s suicide as the ultimate theatrical expression of a man who wanted to reconcile art and political action in real life. The film builds toward this climax in a collage of ‘present-time,’ flashback, and novel-dramatization, each with its particular filmic ‘look’ that draws on Costa Gavras, the black and white of the Golden Age of Japanese cinema, and the present day theatricality of the set designer Eiko Ishioka. 

Purity, the Emperor and Suicide

A red rising sun opens the film and the image is underscored by Wagnerian echoes in the extraordinary music composed by Philip Glass. The music quickly transforms into a military snare tapping a march, as Mishima vests himself in the dress uniform of his private militia, the Shield Society. The film begins on the day when Mishima sets out with four cadets from the Shield Society, ostensibly to instigate a military coup but with the intention of committing seppuku because he knows that the coup will inevitably fail.

The end of the mission is foreshadowed in the film’s dramatization of Mishima’s novel The Runaway Horses. A group of military cadets plot a coup. Their leader, Isao, says to his followers: ‘The Emperor’s face is not pleased. Japan is losing its soul. In a single stroke, we’ll assassinate the leaders of capitalism. Burn the Bank of Japan… At dawn we’ll commit seppuku.’ To his military superior he says of the plot: ‘Japan will be purified. We’ll only use swords. Our best weapon is purity.’

In a telling interrogation, the police detective, who has arrested the young plot leader, says: ‘You’re still too young and pure. You will learn to tone down your feelings.’ Isao answers: ‘If purity is toned down it is no longer purity.’ And the detective: ‘Total purity is not possible in this world.’ And Isao’s reply: ‘Yes, it is… if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.’

As a young man though, it appears that Mishima’s resolve of purity and oneness with the spirit of Bushido was undermined. Schrader’s film depicts Mishima in his late teens where he claims that his dream is to be a soldier and fight for the Emperor and Japan. The young Mishima is mortified when he exaggerates his physical weakness at his army medical and is discharged as unfit for service. In the film’s voiceover, the adult Mishima character says, ‘I always said I wanted to die on the battlefield. But my words were lies, I never really wanted to die.’

Schrader uses this moment as a turning point where the character of Mishima resolves to perfect his body, the better to embody the spirit of the Samurai. And this worship of the perfect body resonates with Mishima’s sense of his sexuality.

The Body and Sexuality

Schrader was stopped from using Forbidden Colours – Mishima’s most overtly gay novel – by Mishima’s widow who wished to play down her husband’s sexuality. Schrader got around this by basing some scenes on Mishima’s semi-autobiographical novel, Confessions of a Mask. He introduces the writer’s sexual orientation as he deals with the writer’s childhood. In the movie’s first chapter, entitled Beauty, at the age of twelve, Mishima is taken to the theatre by his grandmother and through an open door, he sees three Kabuki actors, all of them men, one of whom is playing the part of a woman, the others in effeminate make-up. Schrader’s shots of the boy and the actors creates a palpable sexual tension. At school, the boy is ridiculed by his classmates for being a poet. When the boy Mishima sees a picture of St Sebastian pierced by arrows it arouses him to masturbate.

During the black and white flashback sections of the film, Mishima is dancing with another man in a gay bar. He’s upset when his dance partner jokes that Mishima is too flabby. Mishima takes up bodybuilding to improve his physique.

In voiceover, Mishima says, ‘My life is in many ways like that of an actor. I always wear a mask. I play a role. When he looks in the mirror the homosexual, like the actor, sees what he fears most, the decay of the body.’

In the second chapter of the film, entitled Art, Schrader develops the character’s sexuality using a dramatization of Mishima’s novel Kyoko’s House. The actor in the story takes up bodybuilding as he fantasizes having the physique of a matador so that his body will be as beautiful as his face.

There follows a long voiceover soliloquy as Mishima, lauded in Japan, respected abroad, goes on a journey across the world.

‘As the ship approached Hawaii I felt as if I emerged from a cave and shook hands with the sun. I’d always suffered under a monstrous sensitivity, what I lacked was health, a healthy body, a physical presence. Words had separated me from my body. The sun released me. Greece cured my self-hatred and awoke a will to health. I saw that beauty and ethics were one and the same, creating a beautiful work of art and becoming beautiful oneself are identical. I attained physical health after becoming an adult. Such people are different from those born healthy, we feel we have the right to be insensitive to trivial concerns. The loss of self through sex gives us little satisfaction. I was married in 1958, my daughter was born in 1959 and my son in 1961.’

In the dramatization of Kyoko’s House the bodybuilding actor gets into an argument with a visual artist. The actor says, ‘The human body is the work of art. It doesn’t need artists.’ But the artist replies: ‘Okay, let’s say you’re right. What good does your sweating and grunting do. Even the most beautiful body is destroyed by age. Where is beauty then? Only art makes human beauty endure. You must devise an artist’s scheme to preserve it. You must commit suicide at the height of your beauty.’

The actor signs a sadomasochistic pact with an older woman libertine who cuts and burns the actor’s beautiful body before they commit suicide together.

Evil as Aesthetic in De Sade, Genet and Mishima

In The Decay of the Angel, the old man, Shigekuni Honda steals a glance at the young Tōru ‘and felt that he was seeing in that glance his own life… The evil suffusing that life had been self-awareness. A self-awareness that knew nothing of love, that slaughtered without raising a hand, that relished death as it composed noble condolences, that invited the world to destruction while seeking the last possible moment for itself… his own inclinations all through his long life had been to make the world over into emptiness, to lead men to nothing – complete destruction and finality.’

Honda wants to cultivate Tōru’s evil potential. The evil in The Decay of the Angel is all on the level of personal betrayal. The aesthetic is similar to that of Jean Genet who gives himself over to sordid betrayal and punishment. He makes Evil into Good, or more than that: into holiness and sanctity; hence Sartre’s essay Saint Genet.

In Literature and Evil, Georges Bataille points out that in Sartre’s essay on Jean Genet: ‘It seems to me that the whole question of Good and Evil revolves around one main theme – what Sade called irregularity. Sade realised that irregularity was the basis of sexual excitement. The law (the rule) is a good one, it is Good itself (Good, the means by which the being ensures its existence), but a value, Evil, depends on the possibility of breaking the rule. Infraction is frightening – like death: and yet it is attractive, as though the being only wanted to survive out of weakness, as though exuberance inspired that contempt for death which is necessary once the rule has been broken.’

Just as Honda wants ‘to lead men to nothing – complete destruction and finality’, Sade in Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome imagined as many ways as possible to destroy human beings singularly and collectively. Bataille says: ‘In the solitude of prison Sade was the first man to give a rational expression to those uncontrollable desires, on the basis of which consciousness has based the social structure and the very image of man… Indeed this book is the only one in which the mind of man is shown as it really is. The language of Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome is that of a universe which degrades gradually and systematically, which tortures and destroys the totality of the beings which it presents… Nobody, unless he is totally deaf to it, can finish Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome without feeling sick.’

Sade spent time in jail because he acted out to some extent the frenzies to which he was driven. He did cut a female beggar, Rose Keller, with a penknife and pour wax into her wounds. He did organise orgies at the castle of Lacoste though not to the extent of acting out the fantasies he wrote of in Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome, but for sure, women and men were badly hurt. In comparison with characters in the writings of Genet and Sade, the evil of Honda, or of Georges Bataille’s characters, is a little tamer. Honda, as we see, holds back at ‘the last possible moment.’

And Honda’s female friend, Keiko, tells Honda’s protégé, Tōru: ‘You’re a mean, cunning little country boy of the sort we see sprawled all over the place. You want to get your hands on your father’s money, and so you arrange to have him declared incompetent… your sort of evil is a legal sort of evil. All puffed up by illusions born of abstract concepts, you strut about as the master of destiny even though you have none of the qualifications. You think you have seen the ends of the earth. But you have not once had an invitation beyond the horizon… You’re a clever boy, no more.’

Whereas Sade and Genet pushed their criminality in waking life to extremes beyond ‘decency,’ they pulled back at the last moment from death, and left that ultimate ‘expression of freedom’, if it can be called that, to their literature. Mishima did not go so far in his literature as Sade or Genet, or even Bataille, in their portrayals of sexuality. And Mishima is the better writer for it.

Finally, Mishima didn’t pull back – as Honda and Tōru do – in his life or his death. He was determined to unify his actions and his art. It’s Mishima’s obsession with the body and beauty and its connection to his sexuality and ideas of purity that creates the complex psychology that foreshadows his death by suicide and how he made that theatrical performance of seppuku the union of action and art.

In Schrader’s film, in voiceover Mishima says: ‘The average age for men in the bronze age was eighteen, in the Roman era, twenty-two. Heaven must have been beautiful then. Today it must look dreadful. When a man reaches forty he has no chance to die beautifully. No matter how he tries, he will die of decay. He must compel himself to live.’

But Mishima already was losing the desire to live. Again, in voiceover, the adult Mishima says: ‘A writer is a voyeur par excellence. I came to detest this position. I sought not only to be the seer but also the seen. Men wear masks to make themselves beautiful. But unlike a woman’s, a man’s determination to become beautiful is always a desire for death.’

Politics

In the third Chapter of Schrader’s film, entitled Action, Mishima, as writer, has reached the height of his fame, and has perfected his body to the point of narcissistic infatuation. He poses for photographs as a samurai, as St Sebastian, as the successful artist beside Greek sculptures. He founds a private militia, complete with uniforms designed by himself and the tailor to General Charles De Gaulle. He names his militia the Shield Society, a spiritual army to protect the Emperor and the pure spirit of Japan. He is aware of the ridiculousness of his position. In a speech to gathered dignitaries of the theatre world of Japan and the West he states: ‘Some people have called us toy soldiers. But our goal is to restore the noble tradition of the Way of the Samurai. I have always supported the tradition of elegant beauty in Japanese literature. I cannot stop striving to unite these two great traditions.’

When Mishima is invited to speak on campus at a university protest occupation in the sixties, there is something absurd in his facing the vociferous students. They accuse him of being illogical in his purist stance. He says: ‘Having got to this position out of sheer pride, I’m not going to become logical now. We all want to improve Japan. We’ve all played the same cards, but I have the Joker. I have the Emperor.’

In voiceover, he says of the moment where he faced the students: ‘For a moment I felt I was entering the realm where art and action converge, for a moment I was alive.’

Seppuku

Chapter Four of Schrader’s movie is entitled The harmony of pen and sword. Mishima says in voiceover: ‘The harmony of pen and sword. This samurai motto used to be a way of life. Now it’s forgotten. Can art and action still be united? Today this harmony can only occur in a brief flash. A single moment.’

He dedicates more of his life to the Shield Society.

‘Running in the early mist with the members of the Shield Society I felt something emerging as slowly as my sweat. The ultimate verification of my existence… Our members were allowed to train in the facilities of the regular army. I flew in a combat fighter. These privileges were granted to us because of the symbolic significance of our society. Even in its present weakened condition the army represented the ancient code of the Samurai. It was here, on the stage of Japanese tradition, I would conduct my action. Having come to my solution I never wavered. Who knows what others will make of this? There would be no more rehearsals.

‘Body and spirit had never blended. Never in physical action had I discovered the chilling satisfaction of words. Never in words had I experienced the hot darkness of action. Somewhere there must be a higher principle that reconciles art and action. That principle it occurred to me was death. The vast upper atmosphere where there is no oxygen is surrounded with death. To survive in this atmosphere, man, like an actor, must wear a mask. Flying at 45,000 feet, the silver phallus of the fuselage floated in sunlight, my mind was at ease, my thought process lively, no movement, no sound, no memories. The closed cockpit and outer space were like the spirit and body of the same being. Here I saw the outcome of my final action. In this stillness was a beauty beyond words, no more body or spirit, pen or sword, male or female. Then I saw a giant circle coiled around the earth, a ring that resolved all contradictions, a ring vaster than death, more fragrant than any scent I have ever known. Here was the moment I’d always been seeking…’

The final act of the film and of Mishima’s life in politics and art took place on November 25th 1970. Allowed into the barracks of the Japanese Self-Defense Force with his four cadets, and welcomed into the commander’s office, Mishima took the general hostage and demanded that the soldiers of the garrison be commanded to assemble in front of the building in order to hear his speech. The general acceded to his demands. Mishima stepped out onto the balcony and addressed the soldiers. He exhorted them to rise up in the spirit of Bushido and to install the Emperor as the rightful ruler, and to protect the pure spirit of Japan from Western military and economic occupiers. Ridiculed as much by the soldiers as he had been by the university students, Mishima realized that the soldiers had hardly heard a word of his cry for resistance.

Mishima stepped off the balcony from where he had delivered his final address. In the office of the commander of the barracks, he knelt to disembowel himself. He botched the ritual. One of his cadets was supposed to behead him with a sword. The chosen one made a mess of it and another cadet had to take over while the first cadet committed suicide. Tastefully, Schrader doesn’t show the acts of self-butchery. The film closes with a poetic vision of the rising sun and the poetic lines of transcendence  that describe the final moments of Mishima’s character Isao from The Runaway Horses…

What is it in Mishima and in Schrader’s biographical account of his life that holds such a fascination for me?

On an aesthetic level, Schrader is a Western artist who is trying to understand an artist of the East who is a fanatic in his pursuit of perfection. This essay (in the French sense of essayer) became an obsession for me: another way of understanding my attraction to the idea of a pure and unattainable perfection whether in literature or spirituality.

Mishima, as symbol, embodies for me all those weaknesses of systems that strive for such purity of spirit; that are inevitably an expression of the egotism of wanting to be a master – of oneself or of others; combined with the whole traditional set-up of sensei and disciples, that finds its ultimate expression in the blindness or delusion of an inner group convinced of its rightness and purity: the fanaticism of seeking purity in the spirit or in art that inevitably collapses into messy and tragic farce.

Schrader’s film plays this out on screen: Mishima played it out in his life and art. It’s not that Mishima didn’t produced great works of literature. He did. But the extremes that literature permits us to explore belong to art, to cinema, to writing…

De Sade belonged in jail. Genet was happy to end up in jail. Mishima was happy to die as he did. Their literature permits us to go to imaginative extremes, to liberate ourselves of concepts that stop us being internally free; to face up to the dark side of the psyche, to the fascination with the scatological.

Bataille kept his excesses to the literary and the consensual for which it’s possible to have far more respect. Baudelaire, too, to some degree. As a writer who regards commitment to literature and the political to be crucial to life, I can’t help but mention Samuel Beckett. Beckett didn’t shirk his responsibilities to the political world: he risked his life in the French Resistance against the Nazis. At the same time, he had a total commitment to literature.

How much saner, or for me more enviable, is Beckett’s approach than that of Mishima, or De Sade, or Genet? ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

Bataille says that ‘Nobody, unless he is totally deaf to it, can finish Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome without feeling sick.’ There were moments in writing this essay where I felt something similar in confronting Mishima’s outlook and embracing Schrader’s interpretation of his life. No doubt, the subject touches something terrifying in the darkness of my own psyche.

At a physical level, Mishima’s choice to die at forty-five when at the peak of one’s power is ridiculous: there is so much more living to do. It’s easier to understand Hemingway’s decision at the age of sixty-two. With mind and body passing sixty, there is a sense of fearing death less than facing mental and physical deterioration and incapacity.

In 2016, I lost my brother to early onset Alzheimer’s Disease. Even without such a tragic and heartbreaking illness, at the moment, I’m aware that my physical and mental capacities must inevitably diminish. Having witnessed in another, so close to me by blood, and more, the ravages of such a debilitating illness, the engagement with Yukio Mishima’s writing and Paul Schrader’s film of his life, makes this essay a direct confrontation of my own fears of old age, sickness and death. No matter how much the idea of death as less frightening than physical and mental deterioration, I take solace in Nietzsche’s understanding of our constant becoming as an irrepressible expression of the creative will, aware that there is a part of me, no matter how deep the moments of desperation, that still insists on its expression in life.

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Agra

Time-Travelling In Agra As the Mughal capital, Agra was a robust city even before the Taj was built. EPIC JOURNEYSUTTAR PRADESHROHINI CHOWDHURY | POSTED ON: NOVEMBER 1, 2014 The sight of the sun setting over the Yamuna behind the Taj Mahal has mesmerised visitors to Agra for centuries. Photo: Adrian Pope/Photographer's Choice/Getty Images The first time I visited Agra, it was with my grandfather. I remember moonlit gardens, and tall fountains that fell into sparkling silver streams. I remember the dark dungeons of Akbar’s fort. Most of all, I remember the ghostly crypt beneath the Taj Mahal, where lay two solemn graves that sent shivers up my spine. The graves, my grandfather explained, were those of a queen, Arjumand Banu Begum, and her grief-stricken husband, the Emperor Shah Jahan, who had once ruled all of India. The story of Shah Jahan and the mausoleum here built in memory of his beloved wife has fired the imaginations of writers and poets through the ages, as it fired mine, even as a child. As I grew older, my fascination with the Taj Mahal turned into an abiding interest in Mughal history. The more I read about the Mughals, the more captivated I became with them—the larger-than-life emperors, warriors, poets, architects, painters, and their incredible achievements. Agra beckoned again and again. Over the years, I have visited Agra several times—with friends, with my children, and most recently, with a sheaf of notes copied from the journal of Peter Mundy, a young officer with the East India Company, the hand-written original of which I had discovered one grey morning in the British Library in London as I researched pre-British India. Mundy had arrived in India in 1628, the first year of Shah Jahan’s reign, and kept a detailed record of all that he saw and experienced. I expected to find descriptions of Agra, but imagine my excitement when I found in Mundy’s writings an eyewitness account of the building of the Taj Mahal. It is perhaps the only such account that exists. Mundy writes that the Emperor spared no expense building the Taj, so “gold and silver [were] esteemed as common Metall, and Marble but as ordinarie stones”. Construction commenced in 1632, soon after the queen died in childbirth. Legend has it that it took the work of 20,000 artisans to create this symphony in marble. Around the tomb was “set a raile of gold”. This palisade, of solid gold and studded with precious jewels, which Mundy saw in 1632, was then valued at six lakh rupees. It was removed in 1642, and replaced by a marble lattice screen, which is what we see today.  Emperor Shah Jahan, credited with building the iconic monument, was considered one of the greatest Mughals. His reign was immortalised in a visual record called Padshahnama that he commissioned. Photo: Fine Art Images/Dinodia Mundy also writes of the Emperor’s intention to “remove all the Cittie” to the vicinity of the Taj Mahal, building streets, shops and houses close to it. The new suburb and market, to be called Taj Ganj, was to provide revenue for the upkeep of the mausoleum. Merchants, shopkeepers and artisans had already begun to move into the area in Mundy’s time, and in 1643, the shops and sarais there yielded one lakh rupees in the form of rent. Shah Jahan assigned this amount for the maintenance of the Taj Mahal. Taj Ganj still thrives, no longer a suburb, but in the heart of the city through which hundreds of thousands of tourists who come to see the Taj Mahal must pass. As I leave the Taj behind me, the rain begins to pelt down. I take refuge in a small teashop, selling cigarettes, packets of chips, and a strong, murky brown brew that claims to be ginger tea. I risk the tea, and am grateful for its warmth and sugary kick. I look out upon the crowded streets of Taj Ganj, the tourists, the shops selling crude replicas of the Taj. Shah Jahan probably wouldn’t have been surprised by the bustle, for the Agra of his time was also a busy, crowded city, “populous by reason of the greate Mogolls keeping of his court here”, Mundy wrote. “Every day there was about the dharbare [darbar], such a number of Eliphants, horses, coaches, Soldiers, peons” and other people that it was difficult to pass through them. But what was Agra like before the Taj, I wondered. It’s had many avatars. In the 11th century, it was one of the many fortresses sacked by Mahmud of Ghazni on a raid into India. During the last quarter of the 15th century, the fortress was converted into a city by a Rajput king. In 1506, it became the capital of Sikandar Lodi, ruler of the Delhi Sultanate. Agra remained the capital of the Lodis until the fall of the Sultanate in 1526, when the Sultan, Ibrahim Lodi, was defeated at the Battle of Panipat by Babur, a prince from Central Asia, who established the Mughal empire in India. Though Babur chose Delhi as the capital of his fledgling empire, he spent considerable time in Agra, where he laid out the first of many fine gardens he would go on to build in India. In a letter to his dearest friend Khwaja Kilan, a homesick Babur consoled himself with the beauty he had created in his flower-filled gardens in Agra. “The palas trees which I have had planted, seem to absorb the glow from the dawns and the dusks, and attain the soft hues of Makarana marble,” he wrote. “King­fishers sail carefree over the chinar groves and the marble terraces cradle the velvety lawns. The fountains sing and weep like the sitars…” Not much remains of Babur’s original gardens. Though the Aram Bagh, Dehra Bagh, and Zahar Bagh, all attributed to Babur, still grace the riverfront in Agra, their original layout has been altered considerably. Be that as it may, the gardens still evoke the memory of Babur. As I gaze upon their regal symmetry and serene grace, my heart goes out to the young emperor, conqueror of Hindustan not so much by choice as by necessity, who tried—with considerable success—to recreate the ordered beauty of his homeland in the hot, disorderly land he had had to make his own.  There are 48 pillars in the many-arched Diwan-i-Aam of Agra fort. On its eastern side is the Takth-i-Murassa or the throne room inlaid with precious stones where Shah Jahan sat when he met his subjects. Photo: Blaine Harrington/Age Fotostock/Dinodia Agra truly came into its own during the reign of Babur’s grandson Akbar. One of his first acts upon becoming emperor in 1556 was to move his capital from Delhi to Agra. Agra—or Akbarabad, as the new capital was known—became the heart of the powerful Mughal Empire, and an important commercial centre. In the words of Abul Faz’l, Akbar’s vizier and court chronicler, the city was “filled with people from all countries” and became “the emporium of the traffic of the world”. Appropriate to the strength and majesty of his empire, Akbar built a massive fort in Agra, overlooking the Yamuna. From here, he ruled an empire that extended, at the time of his death, from Kashmir in the north to the Deccan in the south, from Baluchistan and Afghanistan in the west to Bengal in the east. Despite the centuries that have passed, Akbar’s fort still dominates the landscape. Its walls, of red sandstone, rise 70 feet above the banks of the river. I enter through the Lahore Gate, which takes me through several public areas, including gardens and a marketplace which once served the royal ladies, but today serves the tourist trade with its glittering array of cheap trinkets and flashy souvenirs. Of the 500 or so palaces built during Akbar’s time, only a few remain—of the rest, some were demolished by Akbar’s successors to make way for their own, and others by the British to put up barracks.  Geometrical mosaics cover the roof of Akbar’s tomb in Sikandra. Akbar was a great patron of the arts, and his tomb reflects influences not just of the Mughals but also of the artists from Bengal, Gujarat, Rajasthan, and other parts of India who worked on it. Photo: Kimberley Coole/Lonely Planet Images/Getty Images Akbar also planned his own tomb, and began to build it in Sikandra, a small, crowded village on the outskirts of Agra, several years before his death. It was completed in 1613, eight years after his death, by his son Jahangir. An imposing, three-storeyed structure, it is richly adorned with marble inlay and intricate mosaics of coloured stone. It stands amidst vast manicured gardens where herds of deer graze languidly, and langurs run riot amongst the trees. Contemporary accounts tell us that gold, silver, and precious stones were used to decorate the interior, and costly carpets covered the floor. Peter Mundy paid a visit to the tomb, but was not permitted to enter the chamber where Akbar lay buried, “by reason the Kinge [Shah Jahan] keepes the key of the doore which is alsoe sealed with his signett”. The jewels and costly ornamentation have disappeared but Akbar’s mausoleum retains its stately air. No matter the mood or mode in which I visit Agra, I am always struck by the almost surreal manner in which the brash and crass co-exist with the gracious. On the city’s narrow streets, diesel fumes and the aggressive blaring of a thousand motor horns assault the senses until I turn the corner and, stepping through an archway, am transported into a world of serene gardens and quiet fountains, trees rustling in the morning breeze, and birdsong. It wasn’t much different in Jahangir’s day. The city was built without any regular plan, but hidden amongst its higgledy-piggledy alleys lay the magnificent garden palaces of the nobles of the Mughal court. Along the right bank of the river, which is today occupied by modern buildings, stood the palaces of important court officials. Akbar’s fort continued to be the royal residence, where Jahangir and his queens lived in state. Agra was situated at the junction of several trade routes, and Francis Pelsaert, a young employee with the Dutch East India Company, who arrived in Agra in 1621, and who, like Mundy after him, kept a meticulous account of his time in India, recorded the “indescribable quantities of merchandise”, that passed through the city in the course of trade across the land. These included “immense quantities of grain, such as wheat or rice, sugar, and butter… salt, opium, asafoetida, ‘painted’ cloth called chits [chintz], red salu from Burhanpur, ormesines from Lahore, horses, and large quantities of cotton, which is grown largely between Surat and Burhanpur.”  Marble inlay work lives on in Agra even today, primarily in the form of souvenirs sold to visitors to the Taj Mahal. Photo: Super Stock/Dinodia Today, the markets in Agra are still crowded, but not with the vast varieties of goods that Pelsaert describes. Readymade garments, leather footwear and tourism are the city’s main industries. Visitors also seek its petha, the crystallised pumpkin sweet that is such a favourite in northern India, and its dalmoth, a savoury namkeen that usually accompanies tea. I make my purchases from one of the several busy, brightly lit shops in the crowded market. I am almost ready to say goodbye to the city—except that I cannot leave till I have paid a visit to the tomb of Itimad-ud-Daulah, Nur Jahan’s father. Nur Jahan was a formidable woman. As her husband, the Emperor Jahangir, declined in health and power thanks to his dissolute lifestyle and dependence on opium, she took over the reins of the Empire. She was also a great builder. She constructed inns and sarais for the comfort of travellers, and laid out many gardens in and around the city, which can still be seen. Her crowning achievement as a builder though, is the tomb that she had built for her father, Itimad-ud-Daulah, upon his death in 1622.  Shah Jahan and Noor Jahan’s tombs in the Taj Mahal are covered with calligraphy, which was deeply prized by the Mughals as the primary means of preserving the Quran. Photo: Aldo Pavan/Lonely Planet Images/Getty Images The small tomb stands in a large garden on the left bank of the Yamuna, and as I walk up to it, its jewel-like perfection takes my breath away. The perfectly symmetrical building is made entirely of white marble. Its walls are inlaid with semi-precious stones in intricate patterns of trees, fruits and flowers. Pelsaert, who witnessed the building of the tomb, declared that it had already cost ₹350,000, “and will cost a 1,000,000 more before it is finished”. The tomb represents a transition in Mughal architecture—from the imposing, majestic red sandstone monument of Akbar and his predecessors, to the graceful, poetic white marble beauty of the Taj Mahal. For many visitors to Agra, the delicate beauty of Itimad-ud-Daulah’s tomb surpasses the fairy wonder of the Taj Mahal. I stand beside the river and gaze out upon its dark waters, made even darker by the rain-laden monsoon sky. A pair of painted storks, a lone egret, some herons, and an adjutant stork stand morosely upon a sandbank. On the far bank of the Yamuna rises the massive bulk of Akbar’s Fort. To my right, out of sight, where the river curves, is the Taj Mahal. I bid goodbye to this city of romance and history. I will be back soon, I promise, to wander down its narrow lanes, to find perhaps a quiet, leafy garden I have not yet seen, and there to lose myself in the grace and glory of a past that has gone forever, but which holds me firmly captive still. The city takes note of my promise, and answers in the shrieking calls of a flock of parakeets flashing brilliant green across the sky. Appeared in the November 2014 issue as “Time-Travelling In Agra”.