Resentment over Muslim emperor building
India’s most recognizable monument fuels campaign to push it to margins of
history
By Michael
Safi
 |
Some members of India’s ruling Hindu rightwing party claim the Taj Mahal
does not reflect Indian culture. Photograph: Pawan Sharma/AP
|
Times are tough for India’s monument to love.
Air pollution is turning its marble surface yellow. Restoration work is
obscuring its famous minarets. Tens of millions of tourists still flock to Agra
each year, but numbers are reportedly waning.
Critics of the Taj Mahal are also growing
increasingly bold. In past months, religious nationalists in the Hindu-majority
country have stepped up a campaign to push the four-century-old Mughal monument
to the margins of Indian history. One legislator recently kicked up a national
storm when he labelled the tomb “a blot”.
Resentment at the fact the country’s most
recognisable monument was built by a Muslim emperor has always existed on the
fringes of the Hindu right. But those fringes have never been so powerful.
Attacks on the monument, a lifeline for its
home state of Uttar Pradesh, have grown so loud that last week the state chief
minister – himself a critic of the Taj – was forced into “a day-long exercise
in damage control”, one newspaper said.
Yogi Adityanath paid an elaborate official
visit to Agra on Thursday to issue assurances that the Taj was a “unique gem”
that his government was committed to protect.
“We should not delve deeper into the details
of why, when and how the Taj Mahal was built,” Adityanath said. “What is
important is that it was built by the blood and sweat of India’s farmers and
labourers.”
At the heart of the controversy is a larger
fight over India’s past and present. Hindu nationalists, among their ranks the
prime minister, Narendra Modi, now wield unprecedented power across the
country.
Many, including Modi, believe the hundreds of
years in which north India was ruled by kings who practised Islam was a period
of “slavery” no different from the British Raj.
“So they have a certain attitude towards any
buildings that were built by Muslim rulers,” says Vishal Sharma, the secretary
of the Agra Tourist Welfare Chamber.
Before he was appointed chief minister of
Uttar Pradesh in February, Adityanath was best known for his fiery anti-Muslim
rhetoric. He spent 11 days in jail in 2007 for inciting religious tension, once
compared the film star Shah Rukh Khan to a terrorist, and has called for India
to replicate Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban.
Adityanath helped kick off the latest furore
in June, when he said he was glad visiting dignitaries were no longer gifted a
scale model of the monument, because it did not “reflect Indian culture”.
A tourism brochure recently published by his
government omitted any mention of the Taj, but listed Hindu pilgrimage
locations including the temple in eastern Uttar Pradesh where Adityanath serves
as head priest.
Sangeet Som, a member of the ruling Bharatiya
Janata party prone to inflammatory outbursts, went even further this month,
labelling the 17th-century monument a “blot” on Indian culture that had been
“built by traitors”.
“Taj Mahal should have no place in Indian
history,” he said, claiming Shah Jahan, the emperor who built the mausoleum for
his deceased wife, had “wanted to wipe out Hindus”.
“If these people are part of our history,
then it is very sad and we will change this history,” he added.
Fuelling the controversy are the writings of
a fringe historian, PN Oak, whose works were dismissed for decades but are
enjoying new prominence among Hindu hardliners.
Oak claimed that much of the world was once
ruled by an ancient Hindu empire, that the English language is a dialect of
Sanskrit, and that Westminster Abbey is, in reality, a temple to the deity
Shiva.
The Taj too, he argued, was originally a
Shiva temple built by the maharajah of Jaipur, and initially named the “Tejo
Mahalaya”.
Advertisement
His theory has been cited by several BJP
legislators this month to cast doubt on the provenance of the monument. A dozen
students were arrested at the Taj last week for offering prayers to Shiva on
its grounds.
Historians are frustrated by the debate. “It
is absolutely wrong and absurd,” says R Nath, a leading historian on the
architecture of the Mughal era.
The history of the Taj is among the best
chronicled of any Indian monument, recorded in detail at the time by three
court historians.
“We know exactly how the land was acquired,
how the foundations were laid and how it was built,” he says. “There is not a
single piece of evidence to support this theory that it was a Shiva temple.”
Another historian, Rana Safvi, has obtained a
rare copy of the actual property deed Shah Jahan used to obtain the land for
the monument. “The evidence is clear that it was the site of an eminent and
pleasant haveli [mansion],” she says.
She sees the Taj as the victim of a political
campaign to reframe Indian history as a fight between Hindus and Muslims.
“There is a lot of difference between colonists such as the British and rulers
like the Mughals, who lived in India, married in India, and died in India,” she
says.
“Except for brief periods under [the Mughal
emperor] Aurangzeb, we don’t see great periods of communal strife,” she says.
“They were the exceptions, not the norm.”
It was hoped that Adityanath’s about-face on
the monument and his official visit last Thursday would mark the end of this
latest storm. But the day after, the history wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh, a leading Hindu nationalist umbrella group, publicly called for Muslims
to be banned from praying at the Taj site.
Sharma, the Agra tourism chamber secretary,
is watching the continuing controversy with concern. “Whenever there’s unrest,
even just reports of unrest, it affects tourism. The Taj brings in lots of
foreign currency and even the domestic tourism is quite a lot,” he says.
“If they had to pick a side,” he adds, “Agra
people would choose the Taj Mahal over this government.”
