Cultural Amnesia of Hindus is More Alarming, not Sangeet Som
One remark is all it takes. The masks come off. Shredding and shedding their clothes, they all assemble in solid numbers displaying collective, self-righteous outrage in the public square. The wolves feeding off the carcass of secularism, and maniacally tearing away, gorging at anything that can remotely be called Hindu. Another fresh opportunity to fatten themselves on fake history.
Whatever be his reason, BJP MLA, Sangeet Som set the pigeon among the wolves by declaring that the Taj Mahal was “built by a traitor” and that it’s a “ blot on Indian culture.”
Enough for the cages to be opened and the heavy-panting Pavlovian garden variety species to emerge charging out. Some notable exhibits follow:
- Sangeet Som questions Taj Mahal’s ‘history’: The BJP leader is no stranger to controversy: Hindustan Times
- Yogi strikes at monuments built by Muslim rulers: Tehelka
- ‘Taj Built By Traitors,’ Says BJP’s Sangeet Som, Hate-Speech Giver: NDTV, disgustingly adjectivizing Sangeet Som.
- History lesson for Sangeet Som: Why Taj Mahal needs our loving care: Hindustan Times
For a fuller list, head here.
This isn’t the context to provide an architectural or aesthetic critique of the Taj Mahal but more accurately, a reflection about what it actually represents. V S Naipaul couches it best:
…the very grandeur of the Mogul buildings is oppressive. Europe has its monuments of sun-kings, its Louvres and its Versailles. But they are part of the development of a country’s spirit; they express the refining of a nation’s sensibility; they add to the common, growing stock. In India these endless mosques and rhetorical mausolea, these great palaces speak only of a personal plunder and for a country with an infinite capacity for being plundered. The Mogul owned everything in his dominions; and this is the message of the Mogul architecture. I know only one building in England with this quality of dead-end personal extravagance…the Blenheim. Imagine England as a country of Blenheims, continually built, destroyed and rebuilt over five hundred years, each a gift of the nation and seldom for services rendered…leaving at the end no vigorous nation…no principle beyond that of personal despotism. The Taj Mahal is exquisite…But in India it is a building wastefully without function; it is only a despot’s monument to a woman, not of India, who bore a child every year for fifteen years. It took twenty-two years to build; and the guide will tell you how many millions it cost. [V S Naipaul: The Indian Trilogy]
But then Sangeet Som is no Naipaul is all we can say, and in many way his statement obliquely represents the failure of the so-called “Hindu Right” to present a calm, dispassionate, focussed, and objective narrative in the first place.
To put it charitably, the Taj Mahal offers an illusion of romance. To the Indian spirit and ethos, romance, love and other tender emotions are living, throbbing springs of life and not something that requires a monument built for the dead. The Indian spirit builds a Brindavana complete with life-giving Tulasi, not an expensive graveyard using the blood, sweat and tears of thousands of nameless, faceless and unacknowledged slaves.
Some more notable exhibits before we proceed further .
Exhibit 1: Circa 1633 CE
It had been brought to the notice of His Majesty [Shah Jahan] that during the late reign many idol temples had been begun, but remained unfinished at Benares, the great stronghold of infidelism. The infidels were now desirous of completing them. His Majesty, the defender of the faith, gave orders that at Benares, and throughout all his dominions in every place, all temples that had been begun should be cast down. It was now reported from the province of Allahabad that 76 temples had been destroyed in the district of Benares. [Badshahnama: Abdul Hamid Lahori]
Exhibit 2: Circa 1635 CE
Shah Jahan’s soldiers captured some ladies of the royal Bundela family after Jujhar Singh and his sons failed to kill them in the time-honoured Rajput tradition. In the words of Jadunath Sarkar, Mothers and daughters of kings, they were robbed of their religion and forced to lead the infamous life of the Mughal harem. Shah Jahan himself made a triumphal entry into Orchha, the capital of the Bundelas, demolished the lofty and massive temple of Bir Singh Dev, and raised a mosque in its place. Two sons and one grandson of Jujhar Singh who were of tender age, were made Musalmans. Another son of Jujhar Singh, Udaybhan, and a minister, Shyam Dawa, had fled to Golconda where they were captured by Qutbul-Mulk and sent to Shah Jahan. According to Bãdshãhnãma again, Udaybhan and Shyam Dawa, who were of full age, were offered the alternative of Islam or death. They chose the latter and were sent to hell. [The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India: Sita Ram Goel]
Exhibit 3: Location-wise list of Hindu Temples Destroyed by Shahjahan
Udaypur (Madhya Pradesh): Two mosques built after destroying temples
Vidisha (Madhya Pradesh): Shãh Jahãni Masjid (1650–51) built after destroying a Hindu temple
Asirgarh (West Nimar district, Madhya Pradesh): Masjid built in the reign of Shãh Jahãn after pulling down a temple.
Nagaur (Rajasthan): Shãh Jahãnî Masjid at Surajpole after converting a temple into a mosque
Asla (Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh): Shãh Jahãnî Masjid built after demolishing a temple. [Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them: Volume 1: Edited by Sita Ram Goel]
More extensive and comprehensive exhibits of the aforementioned sort is available in Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them: Volume II. And this is apart from Shah Jahan’s reintroduction of the extortionist pilgrimage tax on Hindus, prohibition against Hindus rebuilding their destroyed or damaged temples, making apostasy a crime punishable by death, incentivising Hindus to convert to Islam, and his attempted persecution of the Sikh Guru Hargobind.
Unsurprisingly, Shah Jahan followed the same definitive trajectory of the Muslim despots who invaded and then imposed their tyranny from Delhi: rebelling against and/or overthrowing their respective biological fathers and/or benefactors. From Ala-ud-din Khilji who backstabbed his own uncle to Muhammad Bin Tughlaq who staged his father’s murder to Jahangir who unsuccessfully rebelled against Akbar to the selfsame Shah Jahan who followed his father Jahangir’s footsteps only to meet the same fate at the hands of his ultra-bigoted son, Aurangzeb who successfully put him under house arrest. This ungrateful phenomenon applies equally to various Nawabs, mini-Sultans, and the like.
Despite this unflattering record, all that the Taj Mahal-worshippers, the present-day history-denying distortionists can detect is the “sublime,” “poetic,” (insert your preferred adjective here) and eternal love story between Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal. It is one thing to admire the Taj Mahal for its architecture but an entirely different thing to qualify it with such epithets which not only suppresses the truth about this tyrant but heaps untold humiliation upon the memories of the abundant Hindu victims of his multifaceted tyranny.
It’s not the Taj Mahal but the mindset of these distortionists that’s the Eighth Wonder of the world. It’s almost as if these eminences have an incurable carnal lust for despots and imperial debauches like Shah Jahan. The crueller the despot, the greater the lust. Latest case in point: the newly-minted Redeemer of Aurangzeb’s Savagery: Audrey Truschke.
Of the female of this garden-weed species, of the “my body, my womb, my life” Feminist-Bible-thumpers, one only needs to ask this question: would any one among them be willing to take the place of Mumtaz Mahal? She who was betrothed at 13, married at 19 as the fourth wife following which Shah Jahan married more women, bringing the grand total to seven wives apart from the uncountable number of concubines and females he acquired as war booty. She whose incredibly fecund womb bore him fourteen children. She who died after delivering the fourteenth child.
And of the male of the same garden-weed species: would any one of you have the guts to propose to the female of your species softly crooning, “I will be your Shah Jahan, will you be my Mumtaz Mahal?”
The answer to that question will mostly come from a hospital bed.
The aforementioned love for Taj Mahal and the phony halo around the Shah Jahan-Mumtaz “immortal love story” also counts as one of the greatest successes of the Communist brainwashing of three entire generations of Indians — mostly Hindus. In an eerie, living, ongoing nightmare of inventing and peddling totalitarian history-writing, this success has been truly unparalleled. To the extent that these generations think that history is either a waste of time or that plunderers and tyrants like Mahmud Ghazni, Shah Jahan, Aurangzeb, et al are irrelevant today. Which is entirely consonant with a key Communist goal: that memory is a crime against history.
This rings truer when we contrast this mindless glorification of the Taj Mahal, the dargah at Ajmer and numerous similar Islamic monuments that are zealously protected with say, the Kailasanatha Temple at Ellora, the countless, grand temples, monuments, and sculptural and architectural marvels of Hindu creativity and accomplishment.
This contrast, nay, this disparity becomes starker when one notices two key factors:
- For instance, places like the Ajmer dargah are living sites — the visitor whether a Muslim or no, must show reverence. On the other hand, it is common to spot even Hindus wearing footwear at say, the Kailasanatha and numerous other temples in and around Hampi. These sites have been effectively de-sanctified in the Hindu cultural and civilisational consciousness and are now mere tourist spots.
- The wealthier (read: tourist revenue) among these Hindu sites are still poorly (at any rate, inadequately) maintained while nobody knows what happens to that revenue.
And so, we have it right there: the lopsided historical narrative of India literally on stone. Yet, Hindus as a civilisation are so far gone that vital signs like these staring them in the face hardly seems to bother them.
While we’re on this, it’s also interesting to talk to Government-appointed tourist guides at sites that were victims of Islamic vandalism. Here’s a sample of what you will hear: “here’s where the Rajput women committed Jauhar.” Ask the guide “why?” He’ll merely say “to save their honour.” Ask further, “from whom?” Silence.
It’s this and not Sangeet Som that anybody who cares for this country’s heritage should be really worried about.
