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After a lifetime spent reciting the eternal love story of the Taj Mahal, veteran tour guide Vishu Das says his faith is shattered.
“The story we have been telling all these years – what if it turns out to be a lie?” he asks, distraught as he looks at the monument from a nearby rooftop. His desperation leads to a radical suggestion: “Could we not just run a DNA test on the Taj Mahal?”
The moment ends with a bleak conclusion: “We are spreading a lie.”
This is a scene from Indian director Tushar Goel’s controversial film “The Taj Story,” released in October, which challenges the official history of one of the world’s most famous monuments to love.
In the scene, Das is advancing a theory widely debunked by historians: that the 17th-century Taj Mahal is not a Muslim mausoleum, but a Hindu palace, captured by Islamic rulers and “repurposed” for their own use.
“The Taj Story” is the latest in a slew of pseudo-historical films to emerge from India’s multibillion-dollar movie industry that critics say seek to demonize or erase the country’s roughly 200 million Muslims and create a history dominated by the Hindu majority.
Those critics say the project mirrors the ideology of the ruling Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), that has been accused of Islamophobia and stoking tensions between the different faiths that coexist in the world’s largest democracy.
Paresh Rawal, the actor who plays Das in “The Taj Story,” is a former BJP lawmaker, although Goel, the director, told CNN the movie was not financed or backed by any political party.
The film’s narrative goes against the long-held findings of the government’s archaeological department and has failed to convince many in India’s media and academia.
“The Taj Story” is a “collage of conspiracy theories,” wrote The Indian Express newspaper in a review, adding “it merely stirs the pot, blending fact and fiction to serve an agenda far removed from historical inquiry.”
Indian magazine The Week said it failed both as “compelling cinema and a propaganda piece.”
The movie opens with a two-minute disclaimer stating it is “a work of fiction” and that the makers “do not claim historical accuracy.”
At the box office, the response has been lukewarm, with the film raking in about $2 million from a budget of $1.3 million, Goel said. But for some, the narrative is resonating.
“The truth cannot be kept hidden any longer,” BJP lawmaker Ashwini Upadhyay told local news agency ANI. “If anyone tries to stop the movie, then more people will watch.”
“It is about knowing the truth,” Unnati, a cinemagoer who did not want to give her full name, told CNN as she left a screening in Mumbai. “We have been misguided all this time. We never knew our own history.”
CNN has contacted the BJP for response.
A symbol of love
Rising from the banks of the Yamuna River – sacred to India’s Hindus – the white marble Taj Mahal is the 17th-century embodiment of an emperor’s love for his wife.
Commissioned by Shah Jahan in memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal, the UNESCO World Heritage Site is India’s most visited monument, drawing over seven million people annually.
Within its gardens, couples seek inspiration from the love story it immortalizes. Beyond its walls, its image has become a universal symbol of India itself, gracing everything from travel posters to wedding invitations. For generations, it has represented a story of devotion, unparalleled artistry, and the country’s pluralistic past.
“The Taj Story” seeks to dismantle that narrative.
The 165-minute courtroom drama centers on Das, a tour guide played by veteran Bollywood actor Rawal. For 25 years, Das has regaled tourists with the legendary love story, but this public performance masks a deep-seated crisis: he is a man who can no longer believe the story he sells.
His growing doubts prompt him to file a public interest litigation challenging the monument’s official history, thrusting the film into its central debate: was the Taj Mahal built by Shah Jahan, or was it a “repurposed” Hindu palace, as a revisionist theory popular in some Hindu nationalist circles claims?
In the ensuing courtroom battle, the evidence-based arguments of historians and archaeologists are consistently drowned out by Das’s fiery speeches, which decry supposed “leftist agendas” and the “over-romanticising” of Mughal history.
“This film is about the historical facts of the Taj Mahal,” Goel told CNN. “Why hasn’t it been taught in our textbooks?”
He added the film is “not about Hindus or Muslims,” yet Muslim characters are cast as antagonists – from a rival tour guide who opposes Das’ campaign, to mobs that attack his children and vandalize his home.
It’s a sentiment actor Rawal agrees with. He told CNN that the film “doesn’t speak about any faith” and “speaks about facts.”
He added: “We are talking about the education board and why the historians have played dirty and all that we are talking about… It’s all facts in front of me… And I have verified with one or two historians, good and honest historians.”
Rewriting the past
The controversy surrounding “The Taj Story” comes alongside a broader attempt to redefine India’s past.
Since the BJP came to power in 2014, critics say, there has been a steady push to rewrite history through official channels, particularly targeting India’s Mughal period, when Muslim sultanates ruled over what became one of the world’s wealthiest empires, until the arrival of European colonialism led to its eventual decline and collapse.
Textbooks have been rewritten to downplay the history of India’s Islamic rulers, cities and streets with Mughal-era names renamed, and Muslim properties demolished by authorities for illegal encroachment on government land and as punishment for alleged rioting.
“The Taj Story” narrative also carries echoes of the controversy surrounding the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, a mosque that was demolished by Hindu hardliners in a 1992 attack over beliefs it was built on the site of a Hindu temple. The building’s destruction sparked some of the worst violence India has seen since independence and has been at the heart of a fiery and divisive debate about identity and history in the ensuing decades.
While supporters champion these changes as a restoration of India’s pre-Islamic heritage, critics condemn them as a deliberate erasure of the country’s pluralistic history.
It’s not the first time the Taj Mahal has become a flashpoint for political and historical disputes.
In 2017, it was conspicuously absent from a tourism booklet published by the Hindu-nationalist government of Uttar Pradesh, the state it is located in. The omission of India’s most famous landmark sparked backlash, which officials dismissed by claiming the booklet was never intended for public distribution.
Five years later, a politician with the ruling BJP filed a court petition demanding that 22 sealed rooms within the monument be opened to search for evidence of a Hindu temple. The legal challenge was based on the long-debunked “Tejo Mahalaya” theory – a fringe claim popularized by right-wing author P.N. Oak in the 1980s that the mausoleum was originally a Hindu temple. The Archaeological Survey of India has consistently rejected this theory, stating there is no evidence to support it.
While “The Taj Story” does not explicitly endorse the Tejo Mahalaya theory, its promotional poster, which sparked controversy, depicts the Hindu god Shiva emerging from the tomb.
Historian Swapna Liddle said the period during which the Taj Mahal was built is “very well recorded.”
She added: “The Mughals were a very bureaucratic state. They left behind a lot of documents, and we have all this. This kind of a project was a huge project.”
Bollywood as a mirror
For nearly a century, Bollywood has held a mirror to Indian society, the plotlines of the world’s most prolific movie industry reflecting the changing tides of a vast, developing nation.
Hindi cinema once reflected secular, democratic values championed by India’s founding fathers. But many critics say the industry has veered toward the right over the past decade – coinciding with the populist rule of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP.
“The Kashmir Files” of 2022 and “The Kerala Story” of 2023 are previous high-profile movie releases that were criticized for vilifying Muslims, perpetuating negative stereotypes, worsening religious tensions and distorting historical facts.
Meanwhile, films perceived as disrespecting Hindu traditions have faced severe consequences. The film “Annapoorani” (2023) was pulled from Netflix after right-wing groups protested its depiction of a Brahmin woman – a member of the priestly Hindu caste – cooking and eating meat. The historical epic “Padmaavat” (2018) triggered violent nationwide protests from Hindu groups who alleged it distorted history by suggesting a romantic link between a revered Hindu queen and an invading Muslim sultan.
These films, historians argue, are part of a broader campaign to redefine India’s national identity by elevating its Hindu heritage and vilifying its Muslim past.
Historian Liddle said that for many people, their “general idea of history” comes directly from popular culture.
She said that even though these are “fictionalized accounts,” they have an outsized “impact and influence” because audiences sincerely believe them to be “actual history.”
The Taj Mahal itself remains unchanged by the controversy.
As it has done for centuries, the marble gleams across the Yamuna River, a silent testament to symmetry and grace. But the story India tells about it is fracturing.
“We are seeing a spate of movies that seem to be very consciously projecting historical Muslim figures as villains,” Liddle said.
“This clearly aligns with a political agenda, and that is a kind of mischief that is very, very dangerous.”
