The mystery and real tragedy of the Taj Mahal

The Taj Mahal is an obvious mystery. Everyone sees it and no one really understands it. The image is an icon of love but love has many meanings and many faces.  Ignore Kali dancing behind it and see the faces reflected in the water and let us follow the faces as they tell the story of the Taj.

The first two faces are Shiva and Parvati. Shiva and  Parvati are husband and wife gods and Shiva, unlike the Aryan Gods brought by the Bhat Brahmins, openly celebrated his love for his beloved wife and soul mate. Shiva said he derived his power and sanity and balance from the love of Parvati. He called the power Parvati gave him  Shakti. Sex? Too simple. Love.  Shiva is Shiva because of the power of Love. All of his mythic stories speak of his transformation for the better through love. Love.  The power of transforming Love.

Now what does this have to do with the Taj Mahal? Simple and complex. The Taj is a symbol of love but the Taj was built for Shiva  before the Mughals invaded India. So the original symbol of the Taj was indeed love but it was the Love of Shiva and Parvati. But tourist books don’t say that! All right! Examine the facts for yourself.

Mahal is Indian and means ‘Palace’ so why would a Mughal tomb be called a palace? Taj comes from an older Jat ( the Hindu population of Agra) name for Shiva. Tejo  which means Shiva. They have always called the Taj  Mahal Tejo Mahalaya. The Palace of Shiva.

Shah Jahan’s wife’s name is Mumtaz ul Zamani. How is that remotely related to Taj Mahal =Palace? Even Shah Jahan and his Wahhabi bigoted son avoided using ‘Taj Mahal’ because it was profane Hindu jahiliyyah or pagan barbarity. Why avoid uttering words if those words are suppose to be a beloved’s name? His mother’s name? But if those words actually means Shiva’s Palace then indeed devote Muslims cannot utter them.

The Hindus devoted to Shiva have records of 12 famous  Jyotirlinga temples to Shiva including the ‘Crystal Temple’ in Agra and the famous Hindu treatise on architecture called ‘Viswakarma Vastushastra’ refers to the ‘Tej Linga’. Agra for the Jats was a key center for the worship of Shiva and they refer to FIVE Temples in Agra built to worship Shiva. Now there are ONLY FOUR. What happened to the famous fifth ‘Crystal Temple’ to Shiva?

There are other Hindu references to his missing Agra temple which was called Agreshwar Mahadev Naganatheshwar or Lord Great God of Agra or King of the Cobras ie Shiva.  Jats called Shiva in Agra Tejaji. Therefore the Taj  Mahal is Teji Mahal or Palace of Shiva the Lord of the Cobras. or Tej Mahal the palace of Great Abode of Tej. Shiva lived on a snow white mountain so a crystal temple to Shiva is logical. So the Taj was created to be a symbol of transforming Love: Shiva’s love for his Beloved.

The marble came from Jaipur.  Western Gem merchants   in Agra refer to the Tej Mahalaya as Hindu  taken by Shah Jahan or confiscated by Shah Jahan from the Rajah of Jaipur who was his hated Rajput inlaw and also the source of the famous white marble used to create the Taj. There is no other marble in India like it. It is unique. Only the quarries of the Rajah of Jaipur boasted such white marble. And the Rajah of Jaipur was the most famous Rajput inlaw of the Mughal Royal Family.

Shah Jahan’s own official biography, the Badshahnama, on page 403 Vol I refer to a grand mahal or palace  with a dome by a river in Agra which was  seized or confiscated from his hated Rajput inlaws in Jaipur, Maharajah Jaisingh of Jaipur (where the white marble came from).  Westerners  at that time referred to the Taj as Rajah Mansingh’s Palace  (scion of Jaisingh). So even Shah Jahan’s own bio says he confiscated the Mahal  from the Rajah of Jaipur for his own use. The Bio refers to the land by the river, the 7 stories, the 100 plus rooms, dome, and support buildings indicating this was an preexisting mahal or palace which might at one time have been used for sacred purposes. The Rajput rajahs were famous patrons of the Hindu gods. The autobiography of Babur also states that he when he conquered Agra he seized a crystal palace there which he used as his summer palace.

Legends say Akbar the Great engraved a fabled tablet emerald with the words: Love triumphs only when it is kind. Love is universal only when it is shared. Akbar inclined to Sufism which celebrated the Divine Love of Allah and some say he deeply loved his Rajput wife from Jaipur. Akbar returned the Taj to the previous owner who was his kindred of his beloved Hindu Rajput wife. It was a gracious gesture to make. Perhaps it was a gesture of Love.  But right after that fabled emerald appeared his drunken son declared war on Akbar and waged civil war. Supposedly, the angry, bitter, alienated son fell in love with a nautch girl, courtesan, or perhaps a lessor wife of Akbar, the Rajput lessor wife of Akbar and mother of his own half brother. That would have been legal if not biological incest. The scandal outraged the aged Akbar enough to almost kill his alienated son and supposedly murder the unfaithful Rajput lady. So the Royal Family of the Red Fort feuded and blood flowed. The Taj watched as a family imploded into violence and death.

Jahangir survived Akbar to rule, a notorious drunkard and drug addict haunted by lost love and love turned to hatred. Meanwhile, his devoted, long suffering wife actually tried to rule as India foundered under Mughal rule. He also came to perhaps see that emerald as a curse. Karma. What goes around comes around. The man who waged war on his father now found his own sons warring against him to depose and murder him.

In turn Shah Jahan, the son Jahangir most loathed,  came to power in a bloody palace coup. He then waged war for decades  until his own bloody sons tried to depose him. The son he most loathed, Aurangzeb, lived to depose Shah Jahn.  Aurangzeb later snarled ‘never trust sons’ as he murdered some of his own sons to prevent them deposing him.  Shah  Jahan and his long suffering wife are faces below Shiva and Parvati. But Shah Jahan and his long suffering wife were not the incarnation of love that was Shiva and Parvati and their loving family and two devoted sons. Shah Jahan’s two sons were anything but devoted or loving to each other. And while one son was devoted to his parents the other son hated his parents and his brother and his sister and his entire family. So while one family symbolized love, the new owners of the Taj symbolized hatred. Shah Jahan’s beloved son Dara is the face on the left and Aurangzeb is the face on the right.   The fabled Emerald of Akbar became a symbol not of Divine Love or Human Love or Romantic Love but Mughal Madness and Mayhem and  Murder. So did the Taj.

Aurangzeb the bigoted son of Shah Jahan was a Wahhabist so he violently hated tombs in general and Hindu jahiliyyah barbaric native places  in particular. There is a letter from Aurangzeb to his father Shah Jahan whining that he was forced to spend money from his own purse to repair that miserable aged and cursed place (the  Taj Mahal). How aged could a ‘new’ tomb be?

And Tavernier, a famous  gem merchant said he attended a picnic on the grounds of the Taj when Shah Jahan brought the ‘much decayed corpse’ of his wife to the Taj to BURY IT ON THE GROUNDS  while boasting to the gem merchant of the riches of the confiscated place, the solid silver doors, the carpets of gems, the jewels. Where is all of that today? And why bury the  ‘much decayed corpse’ in the garden if this was a tomb?  Furthermore, why build a tomb for one woman and then build and then seal off hundreds of  rooms on 7 levels with elaborate support buildings including a music building ie Drum  Building, when  the Mughal was a devote Muslim and so loathed music? Plus ritual ghats for bathing? That is Hindu. Plus a crematorium? That is Hindu too. By a river? Hindu.  And build and turn around and seal off long underground hallways and build and then seal off windows and doors and vents and stairs deep down below the Taj? Plaster up a hundred rooms in the square foundation that the white marble Taj rests on? Build support stables  and restrooms and every sort of room for a mahal or palace or temple complex for pilgrims to use? For a tomb? Then not use rooms and instead crudely plaster them over or seal them up very crudely with crude bricks without plaster? Why build and then so crudely retrofit a building?

The Taj is famous for it’s inlay, featuring  white  Jaipur marble and Rajput style decor, but the only Islamic quotes are crudely placed ON TOP OF THE INLAY, the quotes random gibberish not coherently presented? Why RETROFIT  Muslim quotes ON TOP  of expensive inlay unless it was crudely done AFTER THE FACT?

The Rajah of Jaipur still have in his Kapad Dwara Royal Library the two original fireman imperial orders of seizure of the Taj  dated 12 18, 1633. And there are fireman orders only TWO YEARS LATER requiring the Rajah to provide such marble’ as before’ for some additional work. How could a building that was supposed to have taken 22 years to build be finished in two years and why ask for some small amount of additional marble such as was used before?

The Rajah of Jaipur ordered his famous white marble quarries locked up and he  locked up his masons and quarry workers and REFUSED TO PROVIDE WHITE MARBLE to the Emperor of India? Why? Unless this was salt on the wound of the seizure of his property! So the marble  was stripped off the upper floor empty and completely unused  rooms. That marble was then used to RETROFIT the crude quotes ON TOP OF THE INLAY and to add Islamic mosque decor and a cenotaph. It is to be noted the Taj is perfect except for touches of amazing crudity: cenotaphs done in a different style placed off center, crude quotes shoved  ON TOP OF BEAUTIFUL INLAY, crude steps inserted,  and other crude Muslim touches to retrofit a mosque into a supporting building .  It is also to be noted the beautiful parts are in the Rajput style including the OM flowers which are symbols of Shiva and plants and animals which a devoted Muslim surely could not permit? The crude parts are the Muslims details clearly added after the fact in a crude and frankly cheap retrofit. Alld all of the original riches that the gem merchants originally saw such as carpets of pearls and solid silver doors are now gone.  The Taj frankly symbolizes miserly contempt on the part of someone.True Love is not miserly and cheap and slipshod.

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So did Shah Jahan ever love that ‘much decayed corpse’ of his wife while he held a picnic as recorded in the memoirs of Tavernier? Tavernier wrote that the over proud emperor held a picnic as the ‘much decayed corpse’ was dumped into  a hole  dug in the garden. That  sly gem merchant Tavernier  watched as the grandstanding Shah Jahan boasted of the riches of the Taj (‘so as to be admired’) while boasting of his greatness and riches and power as Emperor of Hindustan. Tavernier recorded that the grandstanding man did not boast or even talk about the ‘much decayed corpse’ which  was buried in the garden of the Taj during a picnic. Does this sound like love?

Or did Shah Jahan steal a mahal  from a Rajput kin he hated? To loot and defile a holy palace the Rajputs probably originally built and were patrons off? Tavernier noted the proud emperor much boasted of the riches inside. But now he kept the empty Taj ‘locked’ and implied the Mughal was actually looting the rich interior of it’s once famous solid silver doors, carpets of pearls, gem incrusted railings,  as well as a treasure well filled with riches that the Hindu Jats of Agra had donated to their god Shiva. Shah Jahan saw the Taj as a symbol of loot. Shah Jahan saw the Taj as a symbol of his power to do anything he wanted to do. Anything.

Slyly, the gem merchant noted that the scaffold used to ‘finish’ the Taj’s exterior cost more than the ‘finishing’ ie the RETROFIT of random quotes from the Koran haphazardly  inserted ON TOP OF THE INLAY  in such a way as to be all but unreadable. The sly merchant noted the proud emperor boasted of taking 22 years and spending millions and chopping off hands of workers when Tavernier noted he had seen the Taj before and knew other gem merchants who had seen the Taj before and he knew perfectly well the Taj predated the proud man who boasted ‘as to be admired’. Mughals were already famous and notorious for looting native buildings and temples and forts from Hindus and plundering or enjoying them exclusively as booty of war and symbols of conquest. Babur himself boasted in his memoirs that he reduced the conquered Taj to his summer palace. Now Shah Jahan reduced the Taj from an object of beauty and a symbol of love into  venal loot.

Did Shah Jahan ever love his poor, long suffering wife? She gave birth to some 13 children (most of whom died ) and traveled everywhere with Shah Jahan as he waged expensive but unproductive wars on the Hindus and suffered and endued  in a way that today people would describe as ‘saintly’ . She was certainly described as  saintly herself — at least in hindsight. At the time Muslims at the court called her many names but none of those names were nice. Good Muslim women stayed in purdah and did not travel around with their men like camp followers. They certainly did not guard their man’s back and do the paperwork which their man was too busy fighting to do. But she  was honest, guarded his back, did the paperwork, did everything,  was incorruptible,  and utterly self sacrificing. Some of her few surviving children adored her as Love Incarnate. But did Shah Jahan?

But  Shah Jahan boasted of a haram of thousands of captive Hindus he often violently kidnapped and raped and ravished  per his own biography and other Muslim histories. His wars and taxes forced thousands of Hindu peasants to sell their own children into Muslim slavery according to Qaznivi and Fray Sebastio Manrique. It was in fact a culling of Hindus to satisfy the sexual drives of Muslim conquerors  and included girls and boys alike.
Shah Jahan’s Royal Haram featured 5000 concubines — mostly Rajput —- mostly kidnapped and exploited as sex slaves until their appeal tattered when they were then either handed around to be gang raped or else killed and dumped like garbage along public roads for Hindus to see their bodies with  their breasts hacked off. And memoirs and even the official biography of Shah Jahan boasted of this as if it was something to be proud of. But his love, if it even existed, was not mentioned.

Shah Jahan’s own drunken father Jahangir called Shah Jahan a proud and cruel braggart and ruffian and ‘wretch’ incapable of understanding love.  Italian gem merchants recorded how they saw mutilated bodies of Rajput ladies defiled by Shah Jahan or his men when he not destroying Hindu temples or burning cities in his never ending wars.  This of course was after the palace coup where the pockmarked little man later known as Shah Jahan ordered slaughtered every brother or rival to his claim to emperorship.

A Muslim called Mulla Abdul Hamid wrote how Shah Jahan  and his army gang raped Rajput ladies they captured in war as war booty. He told the sad story of the rape and suffering of the noble Rani Parvati of Rajah Bir Singh Deo. The bodies of the rani and her ladies were mutilated and the heads chopped off — after their sexual assault.  And Shah Jahan still found time to also attack 400 Christian Indians and terrorize them. When they refused to convert under pain of death he distributed them as war booty to be gang raped and enslaved.

Shah Jahan’s wars even reached Tibet where he tried to slaughter every Buddhist. Shah Jahan ended up waging wars even against the Rajput princes and his own Rajput kin at Jaipur.  Abdul Hamid wrote that during war famines that ended the rule of Shah Jahan India had been utterly plundered and Indians were starving. ‘Life was offered for a loaf but none could buy. Dog’s flesh was sold for goat’s and the pounded bones of the dead were mixed with flour and sold. Destitution at last reached such a pitch that men began to devour each other and the flesh of a son was preferred to his love. The numbers of the dying caused obstructions in the road’ And that was a Muslim biographer who wrote that.

His suffering wife guarded his seal and his reputation and raised his children  and was the incarnation of love. But was Shah Jahan the incarnation of love? He followed the Wahhabi school and denounced his grandfather Akbar’ s love of Sufiism.  Do Wahhabi Muslims love? They boast there are 99 names for Allah but ‘Love’ is not one of them. Allah is not the Divine Father but rather the Divine Master. A worshiper does not embrace Divine Love but rather surrenders to the Divine Slavery of Submission. Peace of Surrender.  Did Shah Jahan who never built anything for his wife when she was alive miss her after she died?  How did that ‘much decayed corpse’ end up in a looted temple to Shiva when it was buried on the grounds during a picnic?

Peter Mundy, English, noted in 1632  (a year of the death of Mumtaz) that the Taj was a most famous building for any tourist to see.  How could the Taj be build in one year? Mundy refers to the fact the Taj was famous BEFORE  the Shah Jahan seized it.  De Laet, Dutch, likewise noted the same and called the Taj  The Mansingh Mahal ie Palace.  Jahan Albert Mandelslo in 1638 (7 years after the death of Mumtaz) likewise referred to the Taj as predating Shah Jahan but seized.  Thereafter someone at some point turned the Taj into a tomb and the body of that ‘much decayed corpse’ was now INSIDE instead of buried on the grounds as Tavernier recorded. Who moved the body into the tomb? Not Shah Jahan who buried the ‘much decayed corpse’ of his wife in the gardens during a picnic. Tombs of saints are Sufi and ornate tombs are actually illegal according to strict Islam. Who was the Sufi who might have seen the Taj as a tomb worthy of a ‘saint’. In this case the saintly mother? And if the Taj was originally a holy place of Shiva and his Beloved when what happened to them?

There is evidence the smashed idols were locked in the sealed rooms. Many reports abound of  post colonial Indian civil servants who have actually peeked inside locked rooms below ground and seen smashed idols. One amazed civil servant actually saw an idol’s eye staring at him from a crack in the marble which was hastily repaired! Yet to this day Indian authorities refuse to unlock rooms, unbrick rooms, and unseal rooms which surely any historian or anthropologist would lust to see inside of? Why install iron gates and doors to lock off long corridors to potentially hundreds of sealed rooms? If Shiva and his Beloved are locked away moldering below ground then why not reveal them?

All Rajput buildings boast Elephant Gates and gem merchants referred to the Taj at one point  as having such a gate. Thomas Twining  in 1794 noted the Court of the Elephants of the Taj. Today all of that is  smashed.  An secret carbon test of ancient wood of a sealed door confirm the wood was 300 plus years older than Shah Jahan. The door was immediately ripped off and a steel door was installed to block off the secret 7th level deep underground. And to this day anyone can stroll along the river and see 22 rooms, windows, doors, crudely bricked up revealing hidden rooms crudely sealed  in a bad RETROFIT’ BADLY DONE with cheap brick minus plaster including bricked up air vents. Why build a gigantic tomb of 7 levels and over a hundred rooms inside the Taj plus support buildings typical of a working palace and pilgrimage center and then seal them all up IN A BAD RETROFIT? If the Taj was originally built to celebrate the love of Shiva and his Beloved then why not celebrate that love?

E B Havell, Mrs Kenoyer, and Sir W W Hunter have all confirmed Prof Oaks original evidence the Taj was seized by Shah Jahan and looted. Oaks was indeed an eccentric but there is simply too much evidence for an open mind to ignore. Certainly  at some later date the ‘much decayed corpse’ was reburied inside making the Taj a retrofitted tomb. But clearly the Taj did not start out as a tomb.  They note the South facing great door (Hindu) and OM flowers and Rajput decorations  and octagonal cupolas which are typical of Hindu temples  and the four FREE STANDING BRUJ  towers which are classic Rajput.  Minarets are always ATTACHED  and not free standing and usually feature only one and not four identical corner towers which are classic Bruj.  The inlay on one floor matches the dome pinnacle which is NOT an  Muslim crescent but rather is the trident of Shiva with traditional lotus. The Allah on the pinnacle is a crude RETROFIT which does not now match what once was obviously the mirrored version set in rich inlay. Why? The rich inlay version of the pinnacle image does not have ‘Allah’ because it was not be possible to RETROFIT such beautiful  inlay on a floor. The two facing support buildings are not Islamic and the one has been crudely RETROFITTED  to be mosque obviously after the fact. No other mosque in India is set up liked that. It is entirely atypical. Why? Because it is a crude retrofit. The Drum Building is heretic to devoted Muslims but needful to Hindu temples. Ditto the support choir building designed for chanting. The original ‘Tears of Shah Jahan’ was the original Shiva water pot that was suppose to drip on top of the altar.  Today an electric light dangles instead. Why remove the famous ‘Tears of Shah Jahan’ unless it was obviously a Shiva Water Pot? There is also a traditional Hindu Treasure Well designed to push Temple treasure down into the well water in case of enemies attacking to loot. Why does a tomb have a treasure well now minus treasure?

There are no proper records confirming any blueprints or accounts or fireman degrees other than the degrees of seizure. The Garden once was famous — for Shiva related plants and trees. The English found it much decayed and naturally then built a Capability Brown English Garden in its place.   The dome is an echoing dome designed to reverberate to magnify the chanting of Hindu priests but is improper for a supposed tomb. Why magnify noise?. The main entrance faces south and a Muslim building should face west and have a ‘window toward Mecca’ which the Taj does not have. That by itself is a siren call going off.  Wahhabists violently disapprove of fancy tombs for Muslims and destroyed tombs all over Mecca in a rampage so why allow Shah Jahan to build a haraam tomb as haraam heretic as the Sufi? Shah Jahan was not Sufi. But his son Dara was!

Taj Mahal might have started  as a symbol of Divine Love. Divine Love of Shiva and his Beloved Parvati but it might have become a symbol of  Sufi Divine Love for the Beloved. The saint in question? The saintly Mother. The Beloved Mother. The mother who was everything Shah Jahan was not.  Perhaps the older son of Shah Jahan, Dara, a Sufi, saw the face of his mother and realized  something. How could anyone understand the Divine Love of God unless he also  understood the face of God in the Beloved? Divine Love through Human Love? A saintly mother’s love? Perhaps it was Dara who moved his mother’s body from the garden where it was buried by Shah Jahan inside the looted Taj. Perhaps it was Dara the Sufi who  turned the Taj into a  Sufi like tomb as he studied with Sufi masters and danced the mystic dances of the Sufi. Meanwhile  his younger brother Aurangzeb plotted his bloody palace coup. Aurangzeb was a violent Wahhabist who hated Sufi in general and his gentle brother Dara in particular (along with hated sister who called Aurangzeb ‘the white snake’).

Dara wrote a book called the Convergence of the Seas that he claimed proved all religions originated in one god and therefore mankind should embrace each other instead of murdering each other in wars over religion.  He perhaps thought his beloved mother’s love inspired him. Perhaps he thought the Taj was a symbol of Divine Love mirrored in the face of  Human Love. Perhaps he thought Divine Love could heal the world.  Divine Love like a Mother’s Love. Perhaps he saw Allah not as the ‘Master’ but the ‘Father’. The God of Divine Love for all of his children? So he wrote the book that today is considered dangerously heretic by all except Sufi Muslims  and gave a copy to his aged father Shah Jahan.

Perhaps Shah Jahan finally understood love then? The love of his long ago dead wife. The love of Dara. The love he never could express in a life that  was manifested only in  relentless war of such destruction millions of Indians perished or starved. Perhaps that is why Shah Jahan declared Dara to be his heir instead of Aurangzeb (Muslim inheritance does not require the elder son to inherit).  That is Dara Shikoh  the young prince on the left. On the right is the bitter other son of Shah Jahan: Aurangzeb The Terrible. The two sons hated each other. Soon, like Cain and Abel, they were fighting each other in a bloody civil war as Shah Jahan was locked up by Aurangzeb  for his own good after a ‘breakdown’ never to be free ever again. Shah Jahan peered out of his jail cell window to see the moon bless the Taj which was the symbol to a betrayed man. A symbol of love. A son’s love. Dara’s love.

Aurangzeb won the bloody war and paraded his hated brother on an aged elephant in chains through Delhi. The people of Delhi wept. Aurangzeb then beheaded Dara and sent the head to the jail cell of Shah Jahan to drive the aged man mad. Aurangzeb destroyed every copy he could find of the damnable heretic book of Dara and swore jihad on India on the Koran. Jihad to the death!

The aged Shah Jahan  died of a broken heart and mind and Aurangzeb smuggled his much decayed corpse out in the dead of night and shoved him into that accurst tomb. Aurangzeb as a Wahhabist so he could only  have considered the Taj Tomb to be heretic and vile najis filth rather than a symbol of good Islam. Much less  love. The gesture was one of contempt. The crudely retrofitted marble  cenotaph is off balance and destroys the perfection of beauty of the chamber which had obviously been designed for a central altar (turned into a symbolic cenotaph).  Aurangzeb was a fanatic Wahhabist who meant to conquer India at last and cleanse the earth of jahiliyyah pollution and najis filth and barbarity and heresy. All of his fireman imperial degrees said so. Anything pagan Indian or Sufi heretic defiled  pure Islam just as the accurst Jaipur blood that flowed in his veins defiled the Arabic Ashraf Caste he longed to be. He violently hated his own degraded Rajput blood that his violent fanaticism said was vile najis filth. Muddy blood. Polluted blood. Polluted by India. Aurangzeb had been defiled by India. Defile by his Rajput mother. Aurangzeb would now make India bleed.

Aurangzeb ‘buried’ music and drew up a list of a thousand Hindu temples to be destroyed. He cemented idols into the front steps of his grand mosque for good Muslims to defile with their slippers. he sent war elephants rampaging through Delhi to crush Hindu protesting the cruel injustice of Sharia Law and Jizya Taxes with rites of humiliation to feel subdued (plus spitting down the throat to defile). He declared war to the death on India.  Then he  delivered not love but hate, not beauty but war, and made India bleed until it wept tears of blood. And if Aurangzeb saw the Taj as a symbol then it was a symbol of vile pollution of India that he meant to sterilize!

The neglected Taj watched as India was drenched in blood as Aurangzeb waged war north to south and east to west.  It was total war. Savage War. To balm his nerves Aurangzeb The Terrible knitted haji caps.  A mass murderer who knitted! Meanwhile, he made enemies of everyone including his hated Rajput relatives in Jaipur who finally did a ritual ‘divorce’ from their now hated Mughal relations.

Aurangzeb’s own biography proudly documented his war for Islam. His destruction of Hindu temples. His bloody battles. His murder of some of his own sons. His contempt for his Rajput relatives. He once appointed one of his Rajput relatives, the brilliant Rajah of Jaipur, to wage war against the Decca  but told him he could not order or command Muslims. Non Muslims could not give orders to Muslims. Muslims command and cannot be commanded. Muslims rule and cannot be ruled.  And if the Rajah of Jaipur could not conquer the Decca then his own principality would be razed to the ground and every man, woman, and child would be put to death. So much for once saving the life of Aurangzeb The Terrible!

 

Wahhabi purity of fanatic intent to sterilize India  went on for 50 years until India was all but bankrupt and ruined. A farm bullock rose in price 500% over the time of Akbar- hypo infliction. The economy was destroyed. Wootze Steel vanished. Indian textiles were ravished. War famines hit every three years. Surat Port decayed. The Great Trunk Road was recorded to be choked in jungle and dacoit outlaws.  The Dutch VOC and English EIC and French trade consortiums all gave up trying to export goods and became war munitions providers to Aurangzeb and his enemies who now included the Rajputs, the Decca Maratha, the Sikhs, the Jats, everyone. Aurangzeb bartered sea ports to hated kafirs to buy war cannon and gunpowder which once India was famous for producing. Clearly, India was  collapsing into utter ruin.

But Muslims even today bless Aurangzeb because he waged jihad.  Jihad on India. Muslim sites praised Aurangzeb The Terrible for almost conquering pagan India and converting it to Islam despite the fact he almost destroyed India in the process.  And even today Muslim organizations demand that the Taj be surrendered to their control. The Taj to Muslims represents Holy Jihad to conquer India. The Triumph of Islam to dominate India. The Triumph of Islam. Not love. Triumph. They consider India to be  the Jewel in the Crown of their conquest of the world. They rave that the World Wide Caliphate cannot be achieved until Spain and India are reconquered. And if India is the Jewel in the Crown of Islamic conquest of the world then the diamond of that jewel in the crown if the Taj.

The forlorn Taj moldered in ruined gardens as Aurangzeb died bitter and paranoid. He raved ‘trust no sons!”  as millions perished in famine and war and death. His few surviving scion he did not murder were helpless now as India commenced yet another century of war to pick the winner of a bleeding sub continent. Maratha fought Rajputs and Sikhs fought Mughals and and Rajahs fought Nawabs and Nawabs fought the British and Dutch as the French played agent provocateur. But in the end everyone simply killed everyone until  in a blood bath reduced all of India to ruins.

Graphs of the per capita GNP of India from 1500 to 1800 show a nation flat lined and  economically stagnating before then imploding as the per capita GNP of the West, including the young USA, soaring upwards to lessor or greater degrees. By 1700 America, even when it was still a colony, was as rich as India. By 1800 America was richer than India, China, and the Islamic countries. (Please note that per capital GNP is the individual wealth of the people rather than the wealth of the rulers or the abstract wealth of the whole nation which might not be trickling down to the lower 99% whatsoever. India had a tiny 1% of super rich. But 99% of Indians were recorded from 1500 as being the among the poorest of the poor in the entire world.) By 1800 all of  North West Europe and Canada and America were the richest per capita GNP countries in the world.  The richest country of all by 1800 of course was Britain. But Britain was economically walloping India and China and all of the Islamic World by 1500, doubling in 1600, doubling again in 1700, doubling again by 1800. But Britain did not achieve majority  control of India until 1818.

The Shah of Persia sacked and looted Delhi and hauled away the Peacock Throne of the Emperor of India. The Red Fort was bankrupt. Everyone was all but bankrupt. Finally by 1818 everyone staggered to a standstill to reveal the last man standing: General Lake. The British ‘won’ the war to rule a devastated India. Mughals had waged war non stop and then Indians waged war nonstop. Finally there was nothing left to fight for. India was all but destroyed.  So Everyone declared peace. Pax.

But the deepest pockets ‘won’. The EIC won by hanging on until it was the last man standing. And The EIC hung on by way of the deep pockets of London in general, The Mile (financial center of the world up to 1800) in particular, and courtesy of the deep pockets of the financial, economic, technological, and industrial convergence of events called the Great Divergence. So  the Pax was  not called Pax Mughal or Pax Sikh or Pax Maratha or Pax Rajput but Pax Britannia. The all but bankrupt EIC sold the Indian National Debt to London and marched in quiet victory through Delhi. The EIC were accountants and shopkeepers who accidentally became conquerors. There was no grand parade or Aurangzeb stampede of elephants to crush the people. They brought printing presses and newspapers into the town for the first time and started Delhi Collage. Then they finished the unfinished Delhi Canal to bring needed water to the town. They paid the bankrupt Mughal Emperor, demoted to King of Delhi, a million pounds a year to be their face. This was the usual practice of the EIC who preferred to rule behind Indian faces and use Indian laws and customs wherever possible (as long as they did not interfere with profit or bleed accounting into the red).

The mentality of the accountant and shopkeeper continued. Bankrupt principalities who owed the EIC money were forclosed and taken into receivership. They quietly moved residents into principality after territory like guests who simply never left. London liberals protested the misery of the Indians and passed reform after reform of the EIC until ‘Profit For Progress’ was passed —- as the EIC became bankrupt because ‘Profit For Progress’ was an business oxymoron.

 

The Taj like the other moldering pieces of now shabby Mughal real estate were drawn and  listed and inventoried and slowly were restored by the British as national monuments to India which was managed by an outsourced government for hire. But in 1818 the Wahhabists declared India to be Dar ul Harb Land at war with Islam requiring Holy Jihad to reconquer.  The issue was not freedom of religion. The British guaranteed freedom of religion to all. The Muslims could enjoy their Five Pillars with full security. No. The issue was that ISLAM NO LONGER RULED INDIA. ISLAM NO LONGER DOMINATED AND CONTROLLED INDIA. ISLAM WAS NO LONGER IN TOTAL POWER. And that is exactly what the holy fatwa said. Loss of control. Loss of power. Loss of domination. And oh yes! Loss of slaves! Slavery was outlawed and in India most slavery was Islamic slavery of Hindus. Millions. So many millions it was actually recorded that the Islamic slave markets in the Islamic countries through the Hindu Kush became so glutted by Indian slaves they debased the value to almost nothing. Perhaps that is why the pass over the mountains to the Islamic Slave Markets from India is called the Hindu Kush which translates into ‘Slaughter of the Hindus’ despite the fact no battle occurred there. But millions of Indians were marched across the icy pass to slavery and death. But in 1818 the Wahhabists declared India to be kafir controlled so they declared  Holy Jihad.

So to placate the bitterly defeated Muslims the British let the myth continue that Shah Jahan built everything! Shah Jahan did loved to claim that! He slapped his name on every building he did not destroy! Mostly Rajput buildings he then merely gilded with solid silver ceilings and the odd Islamic quote. Aurangzeb just destroyed every Rajput building he could. So to placate the Wahhabists  of Delhi the Taj was declared a Muslim Monument just like every mosque that used stones and columns of previously destroyed Hindu temples or the Red Fort which also predated Islam and was in fact proven by documents to be Rajput. The Shah Jahan name stayed slapped along with the cheap retrofit  as if a label of conquest and ownership. To the Wahhabists the Taj was as symbol of conquest and triumph and domination which they planned to reclaim once they kicked out the accurst dhimmi kafirs so they could once again crush the accurst pagan shirk under their slippers like the blurring stones of old idols set into the steps of the mosques  as they proudly paraded while defiling them with their slippers.

The British  painted pictures of the Taj and Queen Victoria commented how romantic the Taj was. So started the iconic image of the Taj was the symbol of Romance. Romance after all was originally a Western concept. Romantic Love from the West wrapped itself like an Indian Cupid around the Taj.  Today the world sees the Raj as Romance Incarnate. Human Love.  They don’t know how the Taj watched India bleed for centuries like a pearl in a  lake of blood. They don’t know the tragedy the Taj really symbolizes or the mounds of corpses that encircle it like moldering ghosts. Dara is shoved into an unmarked grave.  His book is still officially heretic. Akbar the Great is officially heretic and his mythic emerald  on which was engraved ‘Love triumphs only when it is kind. Love is universal only when it is shared’ is reputed to be lost. And alas, too many Muslims still embrace Holy Jihad instead of the Sufi ideal of Divine love of God reflected in the Beloved.

And the aged man in the center of the British Union Jack? That is Emperor Zafar. In 1857 he played one last tragic chapter in the Mughal Wars of India.  In 1857 the Taj watched as the land around it exploded into civil war. Indians butchered Indians. The Wahhabists in Delhi held a big convention and formally declared 1857 to be Holy Jihad. The Brahmins of the Bengal Army found themselves demoted to ‘accomplices of Holy Jihad’ which must have come as an ironic surprise considering how many Brahmins were butchered in Holy Jihads. Some of the final battles occurred around the outskirts of the city of the Taj  as countless people killed each other very savagely.

The civil war started as ‘liberation’ but just like 1817 Russia, The Iranian Revolution, or the Arab Spring, minorities of harden radicals turned the general upraising from liberation to war for their own agenda and ends and goals which had nothing to do with the original hopes and dreams. 1857 saw Rebels butchering not only English and Westerners but Indian Jews, Angle Indians, Bengalis civil servants, Sikhs,  Jats, Rajputs, Maratha (both in Gwalior and in the mostly Maratha Bombay and Madras Armies who were Loyalist), as well as Indian converts, teachers, engineers, telegraphers, and any Indian who embraced modernization or the West. It was ‘Modernize And Die’ vs. ‘Modernize Or Die’. Whatever the poor senile Emperor might have thought, the Wahhabists were using his fireman imperial stamp to bless Holy Jihad, the imposing of Sharia Law, Jizya taxes with rites of humiliation to feel subdued, burning of Hindu villages, and parading of Rajput heads on stakes after the English heads dried up, as well as general lawlessness, looting, anarchy, and all around badmash criminality by economically envious have-nots eager to become haves once again. The Loyalist Army was 4/5th Indian. The civil war would scar both India and Britain forever.

In all, historians guestimate that the Muslim Invaders triggered the death, starvation, slavery, or forced conversion to Islam of between 50 and 70 million Indians.  The Taj survived somehow when thousands of other Hindu temples and palaces were destroyed by Islam. Perhaps it was spared because it was used so often as a mahal or palace and Aurangzeb did not have time to destroy it.  Perhaps Dara’s gesture to place his mother inside the Taj spared it. Aurangzeb violently hated his parents but perhaps at the end of the day even such a fanatic murderer who knitted haji caps between massacres could not destroy the Taj because his mother’s much decayed corpse was inside.  Divine Love reflected in Human Love thus perhaps spared the Taj.  A mother’s love if not a father’s love or a son’s love. So perhaps in the end the Taj is also about  Mumtaz after all.