A long, rectangular pool in Agra, India, is probably the most photographed pool in the world. Millions of tourists scan its surface every year. This shiny oblong is so immensely popular because of what it reflects: Taj Mahal, the mausoleum a Mughal emperor saw fit to erect after the death of his wife in 1631. Nearly four centuries later, tourists with cameras crowd the far end of the pool to catch the symmetric reflection of the building, an image familiar from numerous books, postcards, brochures, and websites. To quote sociologist Dean MacCannell, we have accomplished “touristic certainty”. The “moral structure” of sightseeing compels us to participate in this collective ritual.
We are a diverse lot, coming from all over the world, but we behave almost identically, like pilgrims. We share our destination, our inevitable role as a visitor, the ideology of tourism, and its prime tool – the digital camera. At sunrise by the entrance, we have formed a queue, a thousand-legged single animal that has crawled through the gates and gardens, visited the dim interior of the mausoleum, toured the premises, and wandered back outside. Many of us are armed with guidebooks, ingenious publications capable of reducing whole countries to a convenient number of pages. The books feed our collective behavior by providing everyone with the same information. Yet, as books, they somehow remain personal items, extensions of the tourist’s individuality.
India has 22 National Languages and hundreds of other languages and dialects, with equally complex ethnic and religious composition. It is a dreamland for cultural studies based on identity politics. It takes a homogenizing force as powerful as the modern tourist industry to contain that overwhelming pluralism. Tourism being a form of consumption, consumers, homogenized themselves, need a structure to make sense of the chaos (“to accommodate the mess”, in Beckett’s phrase). The modern nation state provides an easy first step: most of us are there in Agra not to meditate on the intricacies of the Mughal Empire but to see the most famous emblem of Incredible India. So we tour the grounds, taking it all in, following in the footsteps of millions of others. It is wonderful. Still, such celebrated attractions always remind me of Oscar Wilde’s quip on Niagara Falls: “It would be more impressive if it ran the other way”.
Deviations from normal tourist behaviour are quickly defined as accidents. Afterwards, as the two of us take a moment to look around the square outside the inner gate, a man gestures to catch our attention. His mildly amused expression reveals that he has been observing us. “Taj is there,” he says, pointing.
So the tourist needs to keep looking the right way. Sometimes less spectacular targets qualify, as long as there is a target.
Incredible India: the advertising slogan is easy to appropriate for ironic usage. It can come in handy in everyday travel-related situations: while sitting in the deafening noise of a Delhi traffic jam, haggling over shirt prices, or watching women in saris walk straight to the ticket booth, past the long queue of obedient Westerners. When used for ironic effect like that, the phrase seems similar to what one often hears south of the Sahara: This is Africa. Both axioms, equally rich in connotations, are used by locals and tourists alike. Unless uttered with too biting sarcasm, both also convey a genuine sense of difference and exceptionality (like Only in America). Furthermore, they contain the heterogeneity of the (sub)continent by turning the “natural” plural into the neat singular. For nation states, this seems to be a survival strategy. In the case of Africa, the question is more complex than that, but when natives of sub-Saharan countries use the three-word sentence, it does sound like an expression of pan-African sentiment.
This takes us back to that white wonder of a monument, the tomb commissioned by one man to commemorate one woman. Looking at Taj Mahal now, I’m tempted to ignore part of the history and search for new meanings. Constructed almost entirely of white marble, and thus a monolith in at least one meaning of the word, the mausoleum seems a rather apt symbol for national unity – real or imagined. There it is on the guidebook covers. E pluribus unum.
Perhaps this is relevant in the context of our own heterogeneous School and its research unit(y). Is Plural our (comparatively modest) landmark, just waiting to be acknowledged as a sight to behold? Can the unit represent all of us? In other words, can Plural accommodate the mess?
Markku Salmela
P.S. MacCannell also points out that self-appointed intellectuals claiming to observe tourist rituals as neutral outsiders are an integral part of mass tourism.
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