Indian Marble Madness!

Ryan:

Marble floors & staircases can be found in even the most run down hotels we have stayed at. The Indian state of Rajasthan apparently is well endowed with vast deposits and numerous varieties of marble. At ~$0.75/ft², marble flooring in India runs about 1/3 the price of the cheapest pergo flooring offered at a Home Depot back in the states.   

On one particular stretch of road from Kota to Udaipur, our bus drove through a ~20 mile stretch of back-to-back marble wholesalers.  Each wholesale yard contained literally hundreds of car-sized blocks of marble covered and aligned in formations that stretched to the boundaries of their property.

One of thousands of marble wholesalers between Kota and Udaipur

Through centuries of building forts, palaces, and places of worship, Rajasthanis in particular have become especially adept at extracting these deposits, as well as those of sandstones, lime stones, and granites (also plentiful in these areas).   


Near the border between Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh lies the city of Agra, former capital city of India during part of the Mughal Empire and home to the massive Taj Mahal.  The Taj Mahal was built by the Shah Jahan (5^th ruler of the Mhugal Empire and grandson of Akbar), as a mausoleum in honor of his wife Mumtaz who died giving birth to one of their children.

Many of the monumental buildings before and after it were constructed using locally available dark red sandstone.  Surrounding these monuments is a maze of dirty gray masonry buildings (3-5 stories tall) containing shops, residences and guest houses.  The white marble of the Taj Mahal (a special variety that comes from the Makrana region of Rajasthan) rises in surreal contrast against the dreary architectural backdrop of Agra - It is a massive building unmatched in height by anything else in sight (people look like ants against it), -Its symmetry defies the randomness of the surrounding township – And the white stones of its construction give it a light/faint cloud-like appearance that is augmented by its domes and spires (reminiscent of  a fairy tale castle).  In real life, it looks as it does in the postcards – like a painting against the sky – unreal.

The surreal fairy-tale like Taj Mahal - just like the postcards