Was India’s Taj Mahal a Hindu temple? Only if you believe the revisionist conspiracy theories
- Nearly 400 years after its construction, the Mughal-era landmark has become the latest target of historical revisionism in increasingly polarised India
- A member of PM Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist party challenged the site’s history – a case some legal experts say could go all the way to the Supreme Court
Decades of photographs, film appearances and tourism campaigns have cemented the celebrated structure’s hold on the public imagination.
Even when seen on a faded 1950s tourism poster in the corner of a Rajasthan tea shack – its marble-white dome and towering minarets turning to yellow in the scorching desert heat – the Taj Mahal still beckons to travellers from across the ages.
It is India writ large. Or, as historian Rana Safvi puts it: “The Taj Mahal is not a Hindu or a Muslim monument, it is an Indian monument, the one which represents India all over the world”.
But that universal appeal has been called into question in recent years, on the back of a historical revisionist’s decades-old claim that the Mughal-era mausoleum was built atop a Hindu temple.
