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Tug-of-war over the Taj
Mahal
By Debasish Roy Chowdhury
HUA HIN, Thailand - The monument to love
is torn between nation and religion. To the
chagrin of a nation that sees the magical marble
mausoleum as its most eloquent symbol, a Muslim
body has declared that the Taj Mahal is its
property - a move that could set off another bout
of ugly communal politics polarizing Hindus and
Muslims India.
According to the Uttar
Pradesh Sunni Wakf Board (UPSWB), Mughal emperor
Shah Jahan's 17th-century monument to his wife
Mumtaz Mahal is now Sunni Wakf property as Islamic
scholars and Persian experts studying the tomes
have found that this was what the emperor had
willed.
The UPSWB also cites the
observations made by the Supreme Court in an
earlier case that all mosques and mausoleums are
Wakf property. Indian law defines "Wakf" as a
permanent dedication by a Muslim of any movable or
immovable property for any purpose recognized by
Muslim law as pious, religious or charitable. The
UPSWB contends that no matter how beautiful the
Taj is, it's basically a graveyard of Shah Jahan,
Mumtaz Mahal and some lesser courtiers. And all
graveyards, by law, have to be Wakf property.
Besides, the Taj complex also houses a mosque,
making it a legitimate Wakf property, it says.
"From today, the Archaeological Survey of
India [ASI] ceases to have absolute right of
possession over the monument," declared board
chairman Hafiz Usman on Wednesday. "Henceforth, we
will have the right to manage all religious
rituals carried out inside the Taj Mahal premises.
However, the federal or the state government can
take care of its maintenance."
This brings
the Taj, declared a nationally protected monument
in 1920 and listed as a World Heritage Site by the
United Nations in 1983, under the administration
of two mutually hostile organizations. From now
on, though the ASI will continue to look after the
mausoleum, the board will determine how it's run
and maintained. An angry ASI is preparing to
appeal against the Wakf board's decision in
Allahabad High Court, the highest court of law in
the state of Uttar Pradesh, where the Taj is
located.
The Wakf board will appoint a
muttawali (caretaker) for the monument.
Under Wakf rules, the caretaker gets 7% of the
revenue from the building, which is to be spent on
its maintenance, and a say in how the rest of the
money is spent. The ASI earns a handsome Rs150
million (US$3.3 million) a year by way of Taj gate
receipts. The board contends that Shah Jahan was
its first muttawali. Most see the pecuniary
gain as the prime mover behind the cash-strapped
Wakf board's decision to stake a claim to the Taj.
Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal emperor, and
his queen Mumtaz were virtually inseparable. Since
he couldn't bear to be parted from her, she would
travel with him wherever he went. Accompanying him
on a military campaign, she died at 39 giving
birth to their 14th child. Legend has it that
Mumtaz's dying wish was a monument to their
undying love. The young emperor, then only the
fourth year into his reign, was inconsolable.
Contemporary chronicles say the royal court
mourned for two years, Shah Jahan became a
recluse, turned away from the business of
governance and became obsessed with building the
memorial to his wife.
Magnificent
monument
Shah Jahan was bent on making Taj
the most magnificent monument on earth. It took 22
years and 20,000 laborers to build. The white
marble was quarried in the northern state of
Rajasthan and transported by a fleet of 1,000
elephants to Agra. The semi-precious stones used
for the inlay came from all over the world: red
carnelian from Baghdad, jade and crystal from
China, malachite from Russia, agates from the
Yemen, corals from Arabia, turquoise from Tibet,
lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and Sri Lanka,
chrysolite from Egypt, and onyx and amethyst from
Persia. The master mason is said to have come from
Baghdad. After the completion of the project, Shah
Jahan is believed to have ordered his right hand
to be cut off so that he could never repeat this
masterpiece. In 1657, Shah Jahan fell ill, his son
Aurangzeb threw him into prison and seized power.
The deposed emperor spent his last days staring at
the Taj from his little cell. He was buried next
to his wife at Taj Mahal.
The Taj row
comes at a time when the Hindu nationalist
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), ousted from power by
a coalition led by the Congress Party last year,
still gropes for an issue to energize its
demoralized cadre. Realizing that it may never
make it to power on its own with its Hindu
rhetoric in a society as complex as India's, and
to muster the numbers, it will always have to turn
to smaller parties whose politics might be in
conflict with its own, the BJP has of late been
trying an image makeover of sorts. Its president
and leader of the opposition, L K Advani, recently
showered praises on Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the
founder of Pakistan, the Muslim country whose very
existence the BJP had for long held as anathema to
its Hinduist ideology. The brush with secularism
means the BJP can't also kick-start its dying
temple movement, in which it brought down an old
mosque in Ayodhya, promising to set up a Hindu
shrine in its place. The Taj issue, in that sense,
is a more convenient horse to whip as it can touch
a nationalistic chord without being overtly Hindu.
That the BJP has already spotted gold in
the Wakf board's declaration was evident by the
rapid response of its top leaders. "The Taj Mahal
is a world heritage and symbol of secularism. If
it is made a Waqf property, it will lose its
identity," said BJP leader Lalji Tandon. The Sunni
board finds it difficult to maintain its existing
properties with its meager funds, he said, posing
how then could it maintain something like the Taj.
Roared former BJP state president Vinay Katiyar:
"The Sunni board is unnecessarily communalizing
the issue. There is no evidence to show it is a
Sunni property. I am going to campaign against
it."
A shift of strategy is already
evident in BJP ranks. The party and its
ideological parent, the Rashtirya Swyamsevak Sangh
(RSS) has for long held that the Taj Mahal was
actually built on temples and thus should be
brought down, the way they razed the Babri Masjid
(mosque)in Ayodhya to the ground, claiming that it
was the birthplace of Hindu Lord Rama. The same
Katiyar recently declared that Shah Jahan buried
his queen in an ancient Hindu temple palace of
Lord Shiva after removing the deity. This palace,
Katiyar and his ilk claim, was usurped by Shah
Jahan and then transformed into his wife's
memorial. "It actually belongs to us [Hindus] and
we will do everything possible to reclaim it,"
Katiyar declared a few months back. By charging
the Sunni board of playing communal politics, the
BJP is now subtly changing tack.
Though
many hold that Shah Jahan built the monument from
scratch, there's also a popular school of thought
that the emperor modified an earlier palace owned
by Hindu King Jai Singh. In any case, the Taj is a
beautiful blend of Indian Hindu and Persian Muslim
architectures. Shah Jahan himself declared that he
did indeed acquire Jai Singh's premises for the
burial, compensating him with four palaces. Some
contend that he took the Rajput (a Hindu warrior
clan) king's garden by the Yamuna river near
Delhi, others say it was a palace. There are some
architectural aberrations that lend credence to
the thesis that the Taj was a superstructure on an
existing palace. The mosque, for example, is about
15 degrees off Mecca, very unusual for a Mughal
construction. A third, and extreme, opinion -
mostly propagated by Hindu extremists - is that
the monument is a superstructure on temples. "Shah
Jahan built the Taj Mahal on top of a total 8,921
Hindu temples. Of these, 4,936 were Shiva temples
and a lot of Kali temples were found as well ...
The top priority of the RSS right now is to raze
the Taj Mahal and restore those temples," read an
RSS press release some time back. The latest row
thus provides Hindu nationalists like Katiyar the
perfect excuse to kick up a row on their pet hate,
this time with a dash of secular appeal.
Hindu
extremists, after all, have never disguised their
aversion to India's proudest possession, which is
also a testimony to the grandeur of the Muslim
period in India. A few years ago, when the BJP was
in power, thousands of the BJP's youth members,
assembled at Agra to mark the party's 50th
anniversary, went berserk at the monument of love.
They teased women, urinated publicly, plucked
flowers and rinsed their mouths in fountains as
the helpless police looked on. By the time they
were through with it, the Taj and its surroundings
looked like a garbage heap.
The travails
of the Taj just don't seem to end. It was only
last year that the government opened its doors to
the public for night-time viewing for the first
time in 20 years. Though the Sikh insurgency ended
in the mid-1990s, Indian authorities remained
reluctant to let visitors back to the Taj after
sunset. In recent years, a state government tried
to build a shopping mall blocking its view, and
was pulled down. During the height of tensions
between India and Pakistan in 2001, officials drew
up plans to camouflage the Taj to disguise it from
possible Pakistani air attacks. There were also
fears that a militant Kashmiri separatist group,
Laskhar-e-Toiba, was planning to try and blow it
up. The only good thing that has happened to the
Taj Mahal of late has been the initiative to put
it in a new list of the seven wonders of the
world, a campaign taken up in earnest by former
Miss World and Bollywood beauty Aishwarya Rai
("the Taj is more beautiful than me"). Going by
the Taj's tormented history, that was too good to
last.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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