Stranger in the Palace of Love

Today I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions.—Frantz Fanon¹

Both cenotaph and tomb, the Taj Mahal operates as both a monument to love and a monument to death. But its history as a romantic site is of more recent provenance than its history as a monument to temporality.² Its formalist geometry and symmetry as well as its gleaming marble cladding create a stunning visual effect, the contradictory appearance of both solidity and lightness, a hulking volume with the detailing of a precious gemstone. They also placed the 17^th-century Taj within a standard of beauty that emerged in the 18^th century that falsely associated whiteness with the beauty of an earlier classical period.³ Built in the early modern period, the Taj was constructed at a moment in which the world-making practices of the medieval and classical worlds were giving way to a new mode of building and a new way of thinking. Hannah Arendt used the term “world-making” in the mid-20^th century to refer to the project of philosophy as a social project.⁴ More recently, scholars like Ariella Aïsha Azoulay have deployed the term to reframe an understanding of precolonial creative practices as living social practices and not as commodity-oriented “art.”⁵ This difference between “art” and “worldmaking” is echoed—albeit in an essentialist way—on the first page of one of the early 20^th-century guidebooks that the curator of Banerjee’s exhibition at the SU Art Museum, Romita Ray, placed across from the sculpture, almost as a conversation partner (fig. 1):

“India is the only part of the British Empire where art is still a living reality, a portion of the people’s spiritual possessions. We, in our ignorance and affectation of superiority, make efforts to improve it with Western ideas; but, so far, have only succeeded in doing it incalculable harm. It would be wiser if we would first attempt to understand it.”⁶

The modern architectural profession emerged within both the colonial project that transformed living social practices into an economy of things and the early modern revolution in European thinking that historians would later call “the Enlightenment.” At the conceptual center of the modern architectural discipline’s new understanding of building was the individual, usually a man, usually white, inscribed arms akimbo within the sacred geometries of the circle and the square.

At the center of Rina Banerjee’s Take me, take me, take me … to the Palace of Love (2003) is an antique globe, a model of the world European empires sought to dominate (fig. 2). It is a model based in scientific reason, but organized according to the new, conceptual order of Westphalian nation-states with clearly defined borders and territories. Hovering precariously above the globe is a heavy antique Anglo-Indian chair (fig. 3). Red orbs cascade over this hybrid throne, filling its seat and spilling over it like luscious jewels or drops of blood. Over all of this, pink plastic sheets, stretched across a metal frame, mimic the spectral form of the Taj Mahal. In its mimicry of the original, Banjeree’s sculpture allows us to peer through the building’s romantic image and glimpse something else.

The Taj Mahal that we see today is the product of not only an early modern construction project, but its modern defacement and renovation (fig. 4). Throughout the 19^th century, almost immediately after British troops conquered Agra from the Marathas in 1803, they set about systematically looting and even auctioning off many important palaces and monuments in the city, including a rumored attempt to dismantle and sell off the Taj Mahal.⁷ Today, we understand these actions as part of the larger colonial project of extracting resources from and impoverishing one of the richest regions in the early modern world. At the end of this century of plunder, George Curzon, who served as Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905, oversaw the renovation of the Taj Mahal. The representative of Queen Victoria as empress of Britain’s South and some of its Southeast Asian colonies, Curzon was invested in using historical markers and new monuments to establish a colonial narrative about the British empire’s permanence in India during the early 20^th century.⁸ Curzon took historical liberties in his renovation of the Taj Mahal and introduced several ahistorical motifs (including replacing the chandeliers looted by the Jats with Egyptian lamps) and redesigning the gardens to conform to English landscape standards, removing many of the fruit trees that had grown to maturity and began to overshadow the tomb itself. Curzon’s renovations staged the tomb as an object within a manicured lawn and secured its place as a romantic site. Writing to his friend, St. John Brodrick, Curzon openly described his own romantic inclinations:

“The Taj is incomparable, designed like a palace and finished like a jewel—a snow-white emanation starting from a bed of cypresses and backed by a turquoise sky, pure, perfect and unutterably lovely. One feels the same sensation as in gazing at a beautiful woman, one who has that mixture of loveliness and sadness which is essential to the highest beauty.”⁹

Curzon’s comments illuminate the ways that desire, or more specifically the inability of powerful white men and women to control their desires, drove empire and its ideologies. This act of hubris extended not only to the lands, resources, and peoples they exerted power over but to the concepts of time and space that they sought to subjugate to the progressive clock- and calendar-time of modernity and the bordered geography of nation-states.¹⁰ Just as world-making practices that produced sites like the Taj Mahal could be reduced to object-making processes that reduced life to things, within this new spatio-temporal conception, an idea like “love” could be reshaped with new romantic meanings that centered on the individual.

But the Taj Mahal glimmers with sacred verses and not the unrequited yearnings of romantic poetry. Over the four doors of the tomb are inscribed suras that foretell the terrible events that will occur on the Day of Judgement: the folding up, the cleaving asunder, the rendering asunder of our world. They end on the east door with Al-Baiyina, “the Clear Evidence,” a reminder that those who are righteous and do good works shall dwell forever in Gardens of Paradise beneath which rivers flow.¹¹ These are not the melancholic sentiments of “loveliness and sadness” that Curzon hallucinated. Rather, these are sentiments that connect the reader to times, places, and lives beyond the individual. They challenge us to conceive of a world that emerges out of a different kind of love, one that is not in bondage to the individual or a pathological attachment to a lost object of desire, but that obligates us to act selflessly on each other’s behalf and to transcend the poverty of the self. It is the love that Fanon calls us to study in Black Skin, White Masks: a love liberated from the coloniality of power and what he called “the metaphysis of race,” a love deeply rooted in collective practice.

The objects in Take me, take me, take me…to the Palace of Love come from different parts of the colonized world, a third world that still fabricates the luxury objects and daily conveniences of the first world. They were plucked out of circulation by Banerjee and placed in this new context where they tell a story about a shared experience of surviving the brutality of empire. Embraced by an ephemeral shelter of pink plastic and metal scaffolding, their ontological values are no longer determined by a marketplace of commodities. It is in these queer shadows that Banerjee gives them the opportunity to conjure new worlds beyond the world in flames colonialism has bequeathed us.