Beginning today, those entering the Taj Mahal’s complex with a smartphone or device will be able to use free-of-cost WiFi. Couples who swoon over the marvelous monument of love and request obliging guides or other love-struck tourists to take lovey-dovey pictures of themselves keeping the “teardrop on the cheek of time” — as Rabindranath Tagore described the Taj — behind them, can now share them with friends on social media at lightning speed.
Akhilesh Yadav may or not have been moved by love for the approximately 60 lakh tourists — domestic and foreign —who visit the Taj annually to provide Wi-Fi at the vast mausoleum which the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (1592-1666) built for his third and favourite wife Arjumand Bano, more popularly known as Mumtaz Mahal (1593-1631), as a mark of unparalleled marital devotion.
Take Yourself Back in Time
So the next time you visit the Taj whose white marble moved traveller Eleonor Roosevelt to say that it “symbolises the purity of love”, take yourself back in time — as we all do when we visit places steeped in history: In 1658 Shah Jahan was imprisoned in the Agra Fort by his rebellious and notoriously puritanical son Aurangzeb, and it was from a mirror-empanelled room of the fortress’ tower that the dethroned emperor supposedly spent the remaining eight years of his life gazing at the shimmering marble of the Taj across the Yamuna, seeking solace in the poignant beauty of the mausoleum he had built for his supposedly one true love.
Unlike generations of tourists — those who captured the Taj in cameras whose rolls produced black and white images in the 50s, through the age of colour film and now to our fancy mobile phone cameras that transmit photos via high-speed internet connection — the dying prisoner could only seek comfort in sorrow by seeing the reflection of the Taj on the rhombic mirror-work of the room. Of course, this story of Shah Jahan’s abiding and intense mohabbat for Mumtaz has been spun by generations of beguiling guides.
What Inspired Such Beauty?
Today, the majestic beauty of the domed mausoleum seems to furnish irrefutable proof of Shah Jahan’s noble devotion and abiding love for his wife who bore him 14 children, seven of whom died in infancy. What else but great love could have inspired such great beauty? The Taj Mahal was Shah Jahan’s first great architectural project and gift to posterity. But the Red Fort that he built in Delhi — then Shahjahanabad, his capital — was more extensive and costly, though none surpassed the Taj’s splendour.
What the guides at the Taj choose not to say and we do not mention in our captions for photos of the resplendent monument of love that sit on our Facebook pages are contemporary accounts of Mughal India that portray Shah Jahan as arrogant, petty and ruthless, a man given to gratuitous cruelty and obsessed with power and its emblems. In 1621, Shah Jahan had his elder brother Khusrau murdered. Five years before this, Sir Thomas Roe, the first English ambassador to the Mughal court, described Shah Jahan, then a young prince, as “ravenous and tyrannical”, comparing him with Lucifer.
Other contemporary European accounts also cast serious doubts on Shah Jahan’s reputation as a devoted husband, after Mumtaz had long passed away. The chronicles of the Italian traveler Niccolao Manucci are replete with scandalous tales of his sexual dalliances with the wives of his court officials and other men. Seventeenth-century French traveler and other European writers of the time, reporting on contemporary rumours, have suggested that Shah Jahan had an incestuous relationship with his eldest daughter Jahanara for several years after Mumtaz’s death. Mumtaz, incidentally, died in Burhanpur in Madhya Pradesh soon after giving birth to her 14th child, a daughter. It took 16 years before her remains were exhumed and interred again deep under the marbled base of the Taj.
Myth of Shah Jahan’s Marital Devotion
While some 20th century writers such as Aldous Huxley have dismissed the greatness of the Taj, saying that it was not a supremely beautiful monument, Bengali novelist Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, through the heroine in Shesh Prashna (The Final Question), points to the myth of Shah Jahan’s marital devotion.
Perhaps a more rational explanation for the entire Taj complex’s grandeur, as some historians have suggested, was Shah Jahan’s allegorical depiction of the celestial paradise or a figurative Islamic representation of the throne of god. Some of these historians, primarily Wayne E Begley, claim that the Koranic verses inscribed on top of Mumtaz’s cenotaph reveal perhaps the most striking evidence for the allegorical interpretation mentioned above. The genius of the Taj’s designers was in their concealed symbolism. Shah Jahan was a complex character, but what is quite certain is that his vanity pushed him to project himself subtly as the absolute ruler who was the august representative of divine authority.
When you turn on your mobile phone WiFi the next time you visit the Taj and aim to take a photo of the majestic monument, do spare some moments to reflect that Shah Jahan was obsessed with his royal greatness and destiny. He conceived of himself as the embodiment of the Perfect Man and the Taj a symbol of his vainglorious yet profound attempt to immortalise himself. But perhaps Shah Jahan’s vanity is not very different from our self-love in the age of social media.
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