Delhiwale: Tiles in a subway

Taak, a niche on the wall, is a disappearing element of Delhi’s architecture. A handful of city monuments boast tiles as an essential aspect of their primal elegance. In the distant past, during the process of glazing, a layer of pigmented ingredients—made of plant-ash flux or mineral-soda flux—would be applied to tiles of sand-and-silica or terracotta. On being baked in limited batches in small clay-fired kilns, they produced the colours they still emit today. This is for instance the case with the tiles on the 16th century-Sabz Burj, on Mathura Road. During a conservation project undertaken on the monument by Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC), its original tiles were left untouched, including those that had lost their glaze, but the missing portions were decked with new glazed tiles. These were handmade by craftspeople, especially trained by a team of Uzbekistan artisans, for this method of making tiles was lost in India. In fact, some of the world’s most sophisticated artistry of tiles is found in the palaces and tombs of Iran, embellished with mosaics of intricate patterns.