The Great Emperors and the unacknowledged Artists.
The temples stand tall, the palaces are unblemished, the kings dominate history, and yet the artist is unknown.
For a huge part of history kings,Queens, Pharaoh or monarchs have adopted many strategies to gain absolute power and trust of the people, from introducing new gods to becoming gods/goddesses themselves. Every strategy has been played. Cleopatra considered her self a goddess to gain the respect and loyalty of the people. The Guptas introduced Hinduism to understand and govern the society better. The greed for superiority and ultimate power was not just seen in the stories ,literature, painting but also in the form of architecture. Cleopatra sat on a throne which was led by many steps which was very similar to the ziggurats of Mesopotamia. This gave the space a supreme feature as if Cleopatra was actually a goddess . Emperor Akbar sat really high in the Diwan-e- aam and the dewan-e- khaas, which made people look up while addressing him. When you look up while addressing someone you think of them as greater then you, even while addressing god, we look up. A space or a position of a throne can make people address the king or queen in a very different way and dictate how people feel about the space or the person.
The morning sun from the east, the slow breeze from the West, the filtered light in the mosque or the volume of the church, all dictate how you feel about the architecture. Architecture holds the power to make people feel in a specific way about someone or something. Like the light behind the cross, giving the sculpture a god-like feature, as if it is inevitable. The huge volume, makes you feel tiny, about how contempt we are as a being, the long alley filled with fine art shows how intricate the work and the details are, the cross in the end imitates our final destination ( to/with God).
Whenever you go visit a heritage site pay close attention on how the guide talks about the space. It’s always about “the great person” that build it not about the people who contributed to the establishment of the structure. The skilled, unskilled laborers , engineers, sculptors, painters or even the architect is not strongly mentioned or sometimes not mentioned at all. The rulers only fund the making of the structure he or she does not build it. Shahjahan never built the Taj Mahal, the architect ustad Ahmad Lahori did, the artist from Iran did, the workers from Rajasthan did. But when we think about the wonder of the world, we only think about the “two lovers”. Speaking of the Taj mahal, it took about 22 years to build it, which is not a very long time considering the 17th century but what really matters is the amount of money that was put into the making of the structure. Shah jahan almost emptied the shahi khazana (Royal treasure) which was basically the taxes paid by the people, not the Emperor’s personal money.The economic graph went so low that the common people ran out of food and water, while the king was busy mourning for his long gone wife. My question is, did we really need the ‘Taj Mahal’ so bad that we were ready to keep the life of the common people at stake, for an incident that they had nothing to do with them. Don’t take me wrong, the Taj is a masterpiece, no doubt, but shah jahan could’ve been a more responsible Emperor and not just a loving husband. It is not about forgetting the stories it is not about not remembering the kings or the queens but addressing the artists as well. It is about knowing the actual “builders” of the architecture.
Even though architecture was or/is built to favour the rulers, we need to remember the artists because they build the art and thus, they dictate how you feel about or inside of it. At the end of the day Ustad Ahmed Lahori did better at his job then the Emperor Shah Jahan .
