Layers

I wonder if you have heard of a palimpsest! Wikipedia defines it as, “… a manuscript page, either from a scroll or a book, from which the text has been either scraped or washed off so that the page can be reused, for another document.”

Archeologists who have found palimpsests seemed more interested in the underlying layers.

I first came across the term in Carl Sagan’s CONTACT. Metaphorically, a palimpsest means anything with hidden layers of meaning. And, as you “scrape off” of the top layers, other layers may reveal themselves.

When I posted this picture on my photo stream on Google+, I titled it “Jo Baat Tujh Mein Hain, Teri Tasveer Main Nahin” without thinking about it too much. I was borrowing the title of one of my all-time favorite Rafi songs to say that any picture of Taj Mahal hardly does justice to the charm of the monument itself. And I set it aside.

And then the layers started coming off:

1. That song is from a Hindi movie called Taj Mahal
2. It is set to Raga Jog which is rumored to date back to the music court of Akbar, the grandfather of Shah Jahan who built the Taj Mahal.
3. It is considered to be one of the most popular Ragas used in the Agra Gharana

I am a Madaraasi and I don’t even understand Hindi very well; and this sounds like pure Urdu poetry. But a good deal of the lyrics seem to apply to Taj the monument as much as they apply to the woman he is singing about.