Rewriting History
A controversy in India provides a lesson for us all
Close your eyes and think of a famous building in India.
Are you thinking of the Taj Mahal? Most likely, yes. The architectural wonder is practically synonymous with India in the minds of many foreigners and is the crown jewel in the tourist hub that is India’s “Golden Triangle”—Delhi, Jaipur, and Agra. It rises above the banks of the Yamuna River, its white marble domes glistening in the sun. Around it are seventeen hectares of gardens, the kind of luxury one dreams of in the most idealistic visions of the Orient.[1]
The Taj Mahal is not only emblematic of India. It is also seen as a symbol of love, for it is a mausoleum built by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan for his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal. Constructed between 1632-1648 AD/CE, it holds the remains of both the emperor and his wife to this day, their genuine affection for one another attested by the historians of the period and now proclaimed to the million of visitors who come every year.[2] The Mughals were a Muslim dynasty descended from the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan, and as such, the Taj Mahal is covered with inscriptions from the Quran and bears a strong resemblance to Persian architecture.
But the modern nation-state of India is a majority Hindu land. Indeed, the word Hindu is derived from the Indus River, the same root from which we get the name India. Foreigners gave the name Hindu to the religious practices they encountered on the Indian subcontinent, but what came to be known as Hinduism contains great variety in terms of which deities receive chief veneration, which sacred texts are most cherished, and specific rituals and traditions. As the government of India became more centralized, these practices served to bind together a diverse range of people groups who had different ethnic backgrounds and spoke different languages.
So, when the modern state of India was established in the mid-20th century, the question of religion was key. Few historic kingdoms had managed to hold together the entire subcontinent (what is now India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) as a single political entity. Many of the early Indian nationalists envisioned a state that would be held together byf a common Hindu identity, but there was a major problem: the Indian subcontinent also contained Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians, and Jains, the latter a kind of extreme sect of Hinduism. Of these, the proportion of Muslims was by far the largest, and it was the Muslim Mughal dynasty that ruled up until the time when India was formerly incorporated into the British Empire. The existence of these Muslims on the subcontinent was a direct challenge to the idea that India could be a Hindu state.
Part of the problem was “solved” early on with the violent partition of two large Muslim majority regions, which would go on to become the nations of Pakistan and Bangladesh. But there were plenty of Muslims still living within the borders of India, most of them in the northern half of the country. Tensions between Muslims and Hindus have been a regular feature of Indian history since that time, though for every act of violence, there were plenty of Indians of both faiths simply attempting to live their lives next door to one another.
Then in the 1990s, a political party called the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP – Indian People’s Party) was able to gain the premiership of India for the first time. In 2014, Narendra Modi of the BJP became Prime Minister and remains so until this day. The BJP is a Hindu nationalist party, and during Modi’s premiership, Muslims living in India have been increasingly viewed as not part of the Indian project. This will not be surprising to anyone who remembers the 2002 Gujarat riots, in which violence flared between Hindus and Muslims when BJP officials blamed Muslims for a train crash that killed Hindu pilgrims. Modi was Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time and received heavy criticism for his words and actions.[3]
Why review this history? I promise it has to do with the Taj Mahal. For you see, since the beginning of this century, several BJP politicians have been bringing court cases based upon a sensational claim: the Taj Mahal is not a Muslim site at all but was reconfigured from a pre-existing Hindu temple.
The exact claims can vary, but generally it is said that the Taj Mahal itself was originally a Hindu structure, that Shah Jahan stole the land for the Taj Mahal from Hindu rulers, or both. Just last year, cases were being brought before India’s Supreme Court, one petitioning for some secret rooms on the site to be opened so that the true history can be revealed (What they expected to find in those rooms is anyone’s guess.),[4] and another claiming that the true history of the Taj Mahal is contained in a long-lost Persian document.[5] Both cases were dismissed for lack of evidence or jurisdiction, but what these petitioners want is to literally rewrite India’s history books. They claim the Mughals were not noble rulers who built beautiful, novel architectural wonders that have influenced India ever since, but usurping foreigners who pillaged India’s wonderful Hindu heritage for their own gain.
Why would anyone believe these things? After all, there are plenty of historic records documenting the Taj Mahal’s construction. No new evidence has emerged to call the common account into question. The theories being put forth by BJP politicians and others are conspiracy theories purporting to hold secret knowledge of a nefarious plot to subjugate Hindus. For Hindu nationalists who have never wanted Muslims living among them, it is a story all too easy to believe, even as the thought that India’s most famous and beloved landmark was built by a Muslim for a Muslim purpose galls them.
I bring this story to your attention because it illustrates a point I am constantly trying to make: that human beings believe what they want to believe. The idea that all your problems and failures to get ahead in life are actually due to the nefarious machinations of an elite group can be incredibly appealing, as can the idea that your enemies would not shy away from any form of evil, as can the idea that you alone have been clever enough to figure this all out. And when you bond together with others who share your beliefs, you enjoy fellowship with them. Your whole identity is reshaped. You are no longer an average person with average problems, but an enlightened individual who has solved the earth’s riddles and, if the elite group is simply brought down, will inherit all that you were originally due.
It is far less appealing to believe that your enemies are in fact less than geniuses themselves, that three people can keep a secret only if two of them are dead, and while they might be rotten in many ways, your enemies are not actually cartoon villains. It is less appealing to think that the nation from which you take your identity was built not only by people just like you, but a wide range of persons who made diverse contributions, along with a fair amount of happenstance and the unpredictability of the human story that raises one person up and brings down another.
Conspiracy theories like the one about the Taj Mahal are, at their heart, efforts to control history: to make it fit into neat and tidy boxes. But human beings are not neat and tidy. We have good moments and bad moments. The worst rulers sometimes do positive things, and the best rulers sometimes do negative things. We are, at every moment, subject to change and decay, chance and circumstance. We do not know when the next plague, or epic weather event, or war will throw off our efforts at progress. We do not have half as much ability to change our lot in life as we would like to imagine, and yet we could accomplish far more if we had a better attitude about it. We do not know when we might get sick or die. We struggle to know whom we can fully trust.
It is therefore a risky endeavor to place one’s ultimate hope and identity in anything of this earth. It is a dangerous thing to squeeze history through a narrow rubric, hoping it will fit. For the truth—the real, verifiable truth—will bend for no man or woman, and it will out in the end, even if it takes many years.
Until we can accept the truth about human nature and value that truth above our own personal narratives, we will be no different than a person who foolishly petitions the Supreme Court to agree that a building everyone knows is 400 years old is actually 800 years old. The fact that we wish things to be so does not make them so. It is the height of character to value the truth above all things.
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[1] https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/252/
[2] https://www.tajmahal.gov.in/views-of-maj-mahal.aspx#:~:text=Taj%20Visitors,than%200.8%20million%20from%20overseas.
[3]https://web.archive.org/web/20080319202511/http://www.hindu.com/2002/03/07/stories/2002030702791300.htm
[4] https://www.outlookindia.com/national/taj-mahal-controversy-court-quashes-plea-to-open-22-rooms-says-leave-it-to-historians--news-196376
[5] https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/let-the-history-of-taj-mahal-continue-as-it-is-sc/article66225517.ece