Word: thakur
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...Nalini Thakur marches through the front door of a town house in New Delhi, crosses a courtyard where a woman is snoring on a rope bed, and arrives at a brick tomb that has survived for 450 years. Hidden away in this unlikely domestic setting, it's a splendid archeological curiosity?one of the first tombs to fuse Persian and Mughal styles in a way that prefigured the design of the Taj Mahal a century later. But as Thakur steps inside, she is assaulted by a stench that reveals the mausoleum's current function: it has become a toilet. "Heritage...
...Delhi, counts 70,000 historic monuments across the country, and R.P. Pereira in the New Delhi office of UNESCO?whose World Heritage Committee meets this week in Durban, South Africa, to review global conservation efforts?calls India "the world's biggest heritage site." But even conservationists like Thakur admit that it's impossible, even immoral, for a developing nation with a quarter of the world's poorest inhabitants to spend the fortune needed to preserve that history. The country's main heritage body, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), is so constrained financially that it limits its care to just...
...Sikh Golden Temple at Amritsar is not even on the list of protected monuments. Traffic swarms around its walls, staining and rotting them with acrid fumes, while a Sikh group from England has covered many of the original murals with what conservationist Gurmeet Rai, a former student of Thakur, describes as "avocado-green bathroom tiles and plastic stickers" and has regilded the famous dome using cement, which she says is trapping moisture in the walls...
...into shrines to their own gods. A day's drive away, Nalanda University, the wellspring from which ideas of Nirvana and reincarnation washed across the world from the 5th to 12th centuries, is nowadays a forgotten pile of bricks and weeds. Faced with this overwhelming array of neglected treasures, Thakur concedes: "Sometimes it's all so depressing, I don't even want to think about...
...elders, and spent her early teenage years in the violent world of the Dacoits - the storied bandits who roam the desolate plains of northern India. Devi exploded into the national consciousness in 1981, as the 21-year-old leader of a Dacoit gang that massacred 21 men of the Thakur landowning caste in the village of Bhemai. The massacre was a brutal revenge attack - Devi had been held prisoner and repeatedly gang-raped by upper-caste men of the village earlier the same year. And while it established her notoriety as one of India?s most-wanted bandits...