In a country where politics has turned toxic, leading virtually everything – from festival firecrackers to animal husbandry – to take on a “communal” religious coloring, perhaps it should not be surprising that even one of the world’s the most famous monuments has become a target. But that doesn’t make it any less tragic – or destructive.
The Taj Mahal is India’s most magnificent architectural wonder. Built nearly four centuries ago by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan as a mausoleum for his beloved wife, the marble monument was hailed by Rabindranath Tagore, India’s only Nobel Prize-winning writer, as “a teardrop on the cheek of Time.”
But the tears this time are for the Taj itself. Its gleaming white surface is yellowing, owing to air pollution from nearby factories and cottage industries. Repairs are needed so frequently that scaffolding often obscures its famous minarets. The town of Agra in the state of Uttar Pradesh, where the Taj is located, is crowded and grimy.
Unsurprisingly, tourism is down: the number of foreign visitors to the Taj Mahal fell by 35% from 2012 to 2015, and domestic tourism has also declined. Those who do still show up are bowled over by the Taj, but often appalled at what they see around it. This past summer, the American basketball player Kevin Durant sparked a row with his graphic descriptions of the monument’s surroundings.
But now the Taj is being rejected even by India’s own government. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which now rules Uttar Pradesh, has apparently decided that it wants as little to do with it as possible. The reason comes down to religious chauvinism.
Uttar Pradesh’s new chief minister, a saffron-robed Hindu monk named Yogi Adityanath, initiated the assault on the Taj by condemning the state government’s former practice of offering models of the Taj as gifts to visiting foreign dignitaries. Declaring that the monument does not “reflect Indian culture,” Adityanath announced that the government would hand out copies of the Hindu holy book, the Bhagavad Gita, instead.
Furthering this erasure, the Uttar Pradesh tourism department issued a brochure of the state’s main attractions, but left out the Taj Mahal, the state’s (and the country’s) main tourism destination. The government, preferring to promote Hindu religious tourism, such as the attractions of the holy city of Varanasi, has denied any cultural heritage funding to the Taj Mahal in the current fiscal year.
To outsiders, the BJP’s campaign against the Taj Mahal might seem bizarre. Why would anyone, let alone a country’s ruling party, want to undermine a universally admired – and revenue-generating – architectural marvel? And yet anyone familiar with the BJP knows that its attacks on the Taj are just one manifestation of the party’s politics of hatred toward anything connected to the history of Muslim rule in India.
To BJP true believers, the Muslims who ruled India for centuries were foreign invaders who despoiled a prosperous land, destroyed temples and palaces, enslaved and discriminated against Hindus, assaulted Hindu women, and converted millions to Islam. In this telling, this sordid saga of assault on Hindus culminated in the 1947 Partition of India by the British, which created Pakistan.
This is a highly simplistic interpretation of a complex history – one characterized far more by assimilation and co-existence than by religious conflict. But that doesn’t matter to the Hindu chauvinists who constitute the bulk of the BJP’s electoral base. They agree with the hardline Hindu chauvinist and BJP legislator Sangeet Som, who last month called the Taj Mahal “a blot on Indian culture” that had been “built by traitors” and “should have no place in Indian history.” If people like Shah Jahan – who supposedly wanted to “wipe out all Hindus from India” – were part of India’s history, Som said, “we will change this history.”
By stoking long-buried resentments and promoting hatred of Muslims, the BJP’s kulturkampf is dividing Indian society, fragmenting its political discourse, and undermining its soft power in the world
India’s Hindu extremists have long considered it humiliating that a monument built by a Muslim emperor could be Hindu-majority India’s most recognizable site. The difference now is that this is no longer a fringe group; its members are now in power in Uttar Pradesh, with enablers leading the government in Delhi.
Adityanath, for example, first gained attention for his incendiary anti-Muslim speeches – he spent 11 days in jail in 2007 for fomenting religious tension – and for leading a squad of volunteers who specialized in attacking Muslim targets. He earned notoriety by calling India’s most beloved film star – a Muslim – a terrorist. More recently, he urged the national government to impose a travel ban on Muslims, as US President Donald Trump has attempted to do.
Adityanath’s attacks on the Taj, however, have sparked national outrage powerful enough to force him to visit Agra to assure an anxious public that his government is committed to protecting the monument. “What is important,” he grudgingly conceded, “is that it was built by the blood and sweat of India’s farmers and laborers.”
This acknowledgement is only partly reassuring, as it enables another fringe position on the Taj: the late chauvinist historian P.N. Oak’s claim that the monument was originally a Shiva temple named “Tejo Mahalaya.” Some misguided Hindutva elements have already been caught trying to perform a Shiva puja (a rite to worship Lord Shiva) there. The RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), the parent body of the Hindu “family” of organizations that includes the BJP, has even called for Muslims to be prohibited from praying at the Taj.
For seven decades after independence, Indian identity rested on cultural pluralism. Now, the Hindu-chauvinist BJP is seeking to redefine India as a Hindu nation long subjugated by foreigners – not just British colonizers, but also Muslim conquerors. By stoking long-buried resentments and promoting hatred of Muslims, the BJP’s kulturkampf is dividing Indian society, fragmenting its political discourse, and undermining its soft power in the world.
If the BJP is to avoid doing further damage to the Indian nation, it must recognize that the past is not a blunt tool for scoring petty political points. One cannot avenge oneself upon history: history is its own revenge.
Shashi Tharoor, a former UN under-secretary-general and former Indian Minister of State for External Affairs and Minister of State for Human Resource Development, is currently Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs and an MP in the Indian National Congress.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2017.
www.project-syndicate.org
Yes, it is undeniably true that history factually speaks for itself. It is also undeniably true that a nation and its people should learn from its history and rectify past wrongs only as much as it can and to the extent really necessary for the peace and honour of its ‘soul’, without causing bloodshed or undue social and political tension. There is no real possible absolute answer or solution as undeniably the governing powers that can change and rectify the wrongs, injustice, shame and insults and dishonour of the past can either do so with drastic draconian measures or do it civilly and sensibly with a soft touch by way of reconciliation and mediation. For a rope once cut and mended by a knot can never be the same as the original. A virgin once raped cannot be a virgin again! Healing requires repentance and forgiveness going hand in hand. The essential question for the Indian sub-continent is understanding what people culture and civilisation they were before the British ‘united’ the disparate kingdoms and peoples into one, and what people culture and civilisation they can now claim or hope to be in the present after independence and the subsequent breakup into two (now three) nations divided perceivably between Muslims and Hindus. Allegorically speaking, can the British Isles return to its Gaelic roots and the Anglo-Saxons be banished altogether? What is Hinduism? What was its face before the invasion by the Aryans and the Greeks and the introduction of a pantheon of Gods and animal sacrifices and the caste system. Yes, the later Muslim invaders forced many to convert to Islam but did not the British make ‘coconuts’ out of its Indian subjects, all now speaking English and playing cricket and polo and drinking whiskey? That is what conquerors do! Did not the caste system encourage the lower castes, the untouchables to voluntarily convert to Islam as well? Who is the true Hindu! The indigenous dark skinned Dravidian or the Aryan fair-skinned North Indian? You want all Indian Muslims to revert to Hinduism, so that all Indians are Hindus, and those who do not want to be Hindu can cross the border, first get rid of the obnoxious degrading Hindu caste system!
Hindu extremists are the true face of India.
Yes, BJP like the stupid Americans that destroy Christopher Columbus’ statues…
we also need to teah our school children the 700 years of Al Queda, Boko Haram invasion of India.
I have not visited these places personally. Anyway, please do not tear down the Taj Mahal like the Babur mosque.
The author himself is on a crusade against the British, blaming British for India’s failure to industralize and develop. Two sides of the same coin. Indians are the same.
Shashi Tharror when speaking aloud in his better English about Cultural and religious pluralism alike beautifully set his arguments when discuss about British atrocities which CAN BE FORGIVEN BUT NOT BE FORGOTTEN (which dicussion, vidoes and statements are widelty liked as do I in person;, although I have noted and widely thought the ditto points in my mind about Brit atrocities well in advance than his statements and videos), should also come down with realities of explaning previlegeos given and provided in the name of minority to specific religions in India which in wider picture has a sect political agenda to dominate the world.
Oh! not only through 7 decades of Independent India but also at the time of independent-ing the India into 2 separate nations the political party in which Mr Tharoor himself being a party politician now post to his earlier diplomatic positions have done a hell lot of biased and vested policies for political good than national good despite the narratives of pluralism.
I would wait until Mr Tharroor would be intellectually free enough to bring new articles on how or how not; governance of 7 decades of Independent India and it’s (un) biased policy in the name of pluralism and multi religiousness was (no) less harming than the policies of the invading Mughal and their lineage’s tactics for reinforcing alien religion and power among India and methodical suppression of original religion of Greater India.
With due respect.
Subramanian
(in case Mr Tharoor has already edited articles on themes of atrocities and/or policies that Indian post-independent governments alike British and Mughals had been doing in order to weaken Indian originality and identity, please kindly email details for reading.
aummahasgr8@yahoo.com
whithout Uigur China is another dump and Tai, Vietnal, Malasia, singapore Japan would have been either just naked beach or grabage dump.
Oh are they blocking pillars of letting Alquaida dominate the world ! as well perhaps!? any logic !?!
GS Nair so you are also like to fabricate history. Sounds about right.
Looking at India through her monuments gives a picture of extreme diversity and not unity in any sense.
The northen "Temple cities" where the skyline is made up of thousands of "shikaras’ from as many Hindu and Jain temples are in stark contrast to the "City Temples" of South India where one single Temple can be so enormous it could easity include the Vatican and the Taj Mahal. With their 1 thousand pillared halls, and massive Gateways towering over 200 to 300 feet with over a thousand statues on some of them to the simple multi roofed Temples of Kerala or the over a thousand "cave Temples carved out of the hillside, including the crowning glory of the Kailasanatha Temple in Ellora, carved to stand independent. Larger and taller than the Parthenon, Hindu monuments alone do not fit one single model
The 1500 years Buddhism thrived in India created her own architecture. The Stupa has no intrinsic value except as a purely theological expression. Reaching enormous propotions in Sri Lanka, the "Dagoba’ rivals even the Pyramids.
The Jetavaramana Dagoba at 93 million bricks remains the world’s largest brick structure and is only shorter to the tallest Pyramid, the Pyramid of Kufu by a few dozen feet.
The Stupa went on to define East Asian architecture in the form of the Pagoda.
Jain Temples take carving to the level of lace as in the Temples at Mount Abu. Christian architecture includes Renaissance period Cathedrals in Goa and during the Colonial age Europe built a vast collection of European monuments.
One of Islam’s gloriest chapters is the Mughal Empire. From her Shalimar Gardens to her Palaces, fortresses and Mouseleums.
Some say the architectural plan of the Taj Mahal follows a Hindu blue print inspired by Mount Meru where four spires surround a central spire. One sees that in the Temple at Bodh Gaya and in Angkor Wat. The massive use of white marble was already done by Jain architects. The inclusion of gems into the pietra dura work ia also a Hindu/Buddhist/ Jain custom. One cannot deny the Persian influence of the Taj Mahal’s gardens.
From the ruins of Harappa to the city Lutyan built called New Delhi there is no one particular architectural style that is the face of India.