Tejo Mahalay: Jahan's Ruse

"Shame is like everything else, live with it long enough and it becomes part of the furniture" - Rushdie.

 

Preamble: - Shah Jahan did not construct the Taj Mahal. The Mughal appropriated the Hindu Temple-Palace from a Rajput resident - renovated it to conceal its Vedic-inspired origins, and laid claim to constructing it. Period.

The syndicated discourse says the reign of the Mughals in India was free, fair and even romantic. For instance, it says the Taj Mahal was born out of a sad story of love and that Shah Jahan, a distraught widower and the 17th-century emperor at the time, took ‘22 years’ to ‘construct’ the ‘mausoleum’ in memory of one of his dead wives - Mumtaz.

Two points in the above paragraph are accurate. Jahan indeed commanded India and that he was a Mughal. Some cultures describe him as a romantic sort - perhaps because of the polygamist he was, maintained a harem of women and had an incestuous relationship with his own daughter, which he infamously justified by saying a gardener has every right to taste the fruit he has planted.

Every other point is a fallacy, save that Mumtaz died in 1631. Firstly, the complex can hardly be described as a mausoleum when it was found to have more than twenty residential apartments sustained by a seven-storey deep multi-tiered Well - still drawing water from the Yamuna next door. Secondly, forced conversions and the sad practice of 'suttee' that emerged during their reign underscored the brutality of the Mughals rather than their inclination to romance - and more pertinent is that the instinct of the Mughals to 'usurp' saw the destruction of a plethora of Hindu temples. Some of the larger ones were converted (or reverted, as they say) into Islamic structures. The Ram Janambhoomi of Ayodhya and The Krishna Temple of Mathura are notable examples.

The point is Shah Jahan did not 'construct' the Taj Mahal - simply because the Tejo Mahalay (its original name), a Vedic-architectured Hindu Temple-Palace, was already in existence several centuries before his time.

The Mughal shamelessly appropriated the Temple-Palace from the Maharaja of Jaipur via an executive order he issued - 'renovated' it to conceal its Vedic-inspired origins and then laid claim to its 'construction'. This position is proven not only by the very executive order that survived but by his own court chronicle, the Badshahnama, that explicitly explains the reason for the appropriation - not to mention references and travelogues put out by historians over a century capped with a scientific examination by carbon-dating.

This new science humbled two religion-inspired claims. The authenticity of the Shroud of Turin and the actual age of the Tejo Mahalay.

Christians are told that the shroud that bore the original image of Jesus is not a 2000-year-old fabric but a medieval fake. Reports from three organizations humbled the Archbishop of Turin, the keeper of the shroud, but to his credit, the man did not challenge the official findings. The ruse originated from a talented French artist of the 15th century. Christians are tickled by the revelation leaving the diehards - some of whom adorn blessed prints of the fabric in their homes - embarrassed.

On the other hand, to the chagrin of the fundamentalist, Jahan’s Ruse is deadly serious, if not outright comical. It is serious because an 'official' revelation of the 17th-century scandal will result in a violent religious upheaval. It is hilarious because the Mughal usurper and his conspirators would never have envisioned that the advancement of science would eventually unravel the ruse and render his legacy in India a laughingstock.

Science does not discern reactions to its revelations, but the official academia does, out of fear of violence, particularly religion-inspired.

The perceived sophistry of academia is pitiful when basic common sense can trump the official story. At the outset, it asserts that the edifice is entirely Islamic in design, but when it points out that the Lotus-capped dome, four corner pillars and the octagonal life-sustaining well are typically Vedic, it responds by saying that Hindu artisans influenced the design - thus, failing the argument by suggesting that artisans who were Hindu (who Jahan, in an apparent attempt to hide the truth, had hands and tongues separated from their anatomy after their work was done) were indeed more influential in the design of the mausoleum than the architects who were Muslim.

As it stands, even in politically-correct India, Jahan's only claim to fame is that he is benchmarked as a stupendous 'sex machine' given that he was a serial polygamist with a sizable harem of young women to boot and little consolation to the usurped theatre of Vedic culture is that the unmistakable and distinct Vedic architecture of the Tejo Mahalay emanates with pride to this day, despite the usurper's attempts to 'erase' it - and that the usurper himself was later imprisoned until death by his seemingly pious but equally brutal son, Aurangzeb, who's the propagation of his father's myth in turning this ideological fiction into 'reality' is another story.

Postscript: The black & white slides are a rarity as they were 'found' in an album in India. The photographs were first exhibited on the website of Stephen Knapp - a remarkable teacher - and clearly show the complex's unmistakable and distinct Vedic architecture. On the rear of each photograph is stamped "Copyright Archaeology Survey of India" and inscribed with self-explanatory captions (seen at the link). Those who have visited the complex would note that some photographs show areas where the public view is restricted.

The colour slides that follow are from V. S. Godbole, who explained, inter-alia, the complicity of the British in propagating the myth and P. N. Oak's role in exposing the relevant part of The Badshahnama (on page 403) that confirmed the appropriation of the Temple-Palace from the resident Maharaja.

Some pertinent angles in Godbole's images are the 11 Inverted Water Pots (not Islamic Domes as claimed), a typical Hindu placement and numerical and the little staging elephants that support the Vedic-styled towers (not Islamic Minarets as claimed). It is said that hacking out even one of those little carved-out baby elephants would compromise the towers' structure, underscoring not only the timeless engineering of Vedic architecture but the challenging task of erasing the ingrained Vedic signatures dotting the complex.

In his book, Taj Mahal: The True Story, Oak points out several design and architectural inconsistencies that support his position that the complex is a Vedic-architectured Temple-Palace rather than a mausoleum and proffered several others, namely that (1) Professor Marvin Miller of New York took samples from the riverside doorway of the complex and carbon-dating tests revealed that the timber pre-dated Jahan's era by at least 300 years. (2) European traveller Johan Albert Mandelslo, who visited Agra in 1638 (seven years after Mumtaz's death) describes the life of the city in his memoirs but makes no reference to the complex, claimed to be erected between 1631 and 1653 and (3) the travelogue of Peter Mundy, an English visitor to Agra within a year of Mumtaz's death, suggest that the Temple-Palace was a noteworthy building that existed well before Jahan's era.

Fearing religion-inspired backlash while leaning towards political expediency with the Muslim bloc, Indira Gandhi withdrew Oak's book and threatened the first edition's publisher with dire consequences.

The devil is not in the spectrum of references upon which Oak defends his position but contained in the central theme of 'appropriation' to which the invaders subscribed. The Anatolian culture was similarly invaded, but because its history had a wider footprint, it was less susceptible to outright usurpation, unlike its Vedic variety, which was close to the world at the time.

Several rooms within the Temple Palace remain sealed and inaccessible to the public. Oak asserts they contain a headless statue of Lord Shiva (then known as Tejo Mahalay) and other paraphernalia commonly used in Hindu rituals.

Historians on the side of the truth, who face a consortium of pandering peers and politicians blinded by fear and self-interest, suggest that the only way to validate or discredit Oak's research is simply to open and examine the sealed rooms.

The moral of the story: - The thorn Radical History simply can't remove from its side is History.

Words, Videography - Tommy Peters    (on YouTube)

Sources: Stephen Knapp, V.S. Godbole, P.N. Oak, B.L. Kerk, Rishwant Singh.

((The post is dedicated to Nina Jason. The video was made on a Mac with Picasa3, and Prem Joshua's Cosmo-Bali-Tan is the baritone that glues the elements. Advanced appreciation is rendered for materials used without the express permission of copyright owners - March 7, 2010)