The Taj Mahal is considered to be one of the ‘seven wonders of the world’. I’ve been lucky to visit it once, way back in 1985, when I was a young college student visiting India.

After going around it and inside, I eventually just sat on a bench in front of it, staring at it for hours, marvelling at the building’s imposing beauty and impact.

Mainstream history correctly records that this majestic white marble mausoleum (in Agra, India) was completed on the instructions of Mughal Emperor, Shah Jahan in 1653.

And yet, very few know that by the end of the Mughal era in the mid-19th century, the Taj Mahal was crumbling and in danger of collapsing. It had also been robbed over and over again by thieves and plunderers, who took away a number of precious jewels and stones that were used to beautify it.

By the mid-1800s, the Taj was nothing like the ‘wonder of the world’ it is today (or was during Mughal rule).

The Taj Mahal was first restored by a Britisher in 1902 ­— Lord Curzon, the British Viceroy of India. When he first saw the mausoleum, he wrote that it had been continuously ravaged by robbers and forces of nature and was in a bad shape. He immediately ordered its restoration, and, by 1905, the Taj got a new lease of life.

Though Curzon can be praised for saving the Taj from turning into dust, another British official, William Bentinck, who rose to become a governor in India in 1828, actually joined the locals in plundering it.

He imported machinery and tools to rip out the precious white marble from the once majestic building and send it to Britain. In fact, according to Dr Mubarak Ali’s book, In Search of History, the plan also included completely demolishing the building.

However, what is even more interesting is the fact that in spite of ample and irrefutable evidence available about when the building was constructed and who ordered its construction, there appeared many Indian and some British historians in the late 19th century who claimed that the Taj was not built during the Mughal reign of Shah Jahan!

Mubarak Ali laments in his book that it was the British who first initiated this trend because they could not swallow the fact that a ‘backward people’ (of India) were capable of achieving such architectural brilliance and beauty.

Major Sleeman, a British Major, remarked in 1844 that the Taj was actually designed by a Frenchman, Austin de Bordeaux. British Colonialists such as Sleeman insisted (without providing any reliable proof), that the design of the mausoleum was the work of European architects.

Things in this regard got even more outlandish when certain reactionary Hindu ‘historians’ began to claim that the building actually pre-dated Shah Jahan and was built before Muslim rule began in India.

Such claims failed to hold in front of the overwhelming evidence available that places Shah Jahan as the man who ordered its construction in the 17th century.

Though the tour guides during my visit to the mausoleum in 1985 all named Shah Jahan and his large army of workers to be the sole creators of the Taj, even in 1985 I was made aware of certain Indian historians who were trying to prove otherwise.

Even in recent times one can come across books such as Taj Mahal: The True Story (by P.N. Oak) that was published in 1989 and claims that the Taj Mahal was built as a Vedic temple in 1155 and/or before Muslim rule in India; and that Shah Jahan had only acquired it from one Jai Singh. Oak claims that the supposed temple was built by Raja Paramdari Dev in the 12th century.

Oak attempts to provide multiple proofs to back his claim, but none of them have managed to prove their authenticity in the face of rigorous historical and scholarly scrutiny by those opposing this theory.

It must be added that Oak has gone on to also try to prove that Christianity and Islam are both derivatives of Hinduism, or that the Catholic Vatican the Westminster Abbey (along with the Taj) were all once Hindu temples to Shiva!

Many noted Indian historians have called Oak a ‘mythhistorian’ — someone who peddles myths as history — while others have described him to be a ‘pseudo-historian’, or someone like Eric von Deniken, the Swiss author who in many of his books has claimed that most of the great and antique historical monuments on Earth were actually built by aliens who visited earth in ancient times! Enough said.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, August 24th, 2014