India’s Pride, Taj Mahal, one of the Seven Wonders of the World which signifies love and India’s rich history was built as a monument by Shah Jahan to his favourite wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died in childbirth, is now all set to get a baby feeding room.
This has turned out to be first ever Indian Heritage Monument to get breastfeeding room where conservative outlooks toward public breastfeeding mean nursing mothers are often shamed and told to cover up.
A top official at the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), Vasant Kumar Swarnkar, in Agra city home to the Taj Mahal – said that the baby feeding room is going to be set up by July in order to help the “millions of mothers who visit with their babies”.
A consistent visitor to the 17th century monument to everlasting love, Swarnkar said he got the idea when he saw a mother hiding under a stairway last week and struggling to breastfeed her baby in spite of her husband providing additional cover.
He then told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, “I could see it was so difficult for her (to feed her child) which is a basic motherhood right. So I thought we have to do something.”
In India, Public breastfeeding still brings a social shame where mothers are expected to be covered whole-body.
Previous year, mothers in the eastern city of Kolkata objected and protested outside a mall where the staffs told a woman to nurse her baby in a toilet and mocked her complaint.
The Taj Mahal attracts up to 8 million visitors every year. Swarnkar also said that he has ordered two other historical monuments that are situated in Agra to set up same feeding rooms.
The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) said that it is the first time facility that is being provided to from India’s more than 3,600 monuments.
Swarnkar said that, “My hope is that more and more monuments – not only in India but around the world – replicate this (plan) so that women can feed their babies comfortably.”
There was an incident in 2017 in which the director of London’s Victoria and Albert museum apologized to a mother because he asked her to cover up while breastfeeding her baby. Before that, two years earlier, one more person was expelled from Spain’s Corral del Carbon monument for the same reason.
Talking about the Taj Mahal, it was chosen as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the year 1983 for being “the jewel of Muslim art in India and one of the universally admired masterpieces of the world’s heritage”. It is observed by a lot of visitors as the best example of Mughal architecture as well as a symbol of India’s rich history.
