After a lifetime spent reciting the Taj Mahal’s eternal love story, veteran tour guide Vishu Das says his faith is shattered.
“The story I’ve been telling all these years – what if it turns out to be a lie?” he asks, distraught, as he looks at the monument from a nearby rooftop. His desperation leads to a radical suggestion: “Couldn’t we just do a DNA test on the Taj Mahal?”
The moment ends with a grim conclusion: “We’re spreading a lie.”
This is a scene from Indian director Tushar Goel’s controversial film “The Taj Story,” released in October, that challenges the official history of one of the world’s most famous monuments of love.
In the scene, Das promotes a theory debunked by historians: that the 17th-century Taj Mahal is not a Muslim mausoleum, but a Hindu palace, captured by Islamic rulers and “repurposed” for their use.
“The Tale of the Taj” is the latest in a series of pseudo-historical films from India’s billion-dollar film industry that critics say seek to demonize or erase the country’s roughly 200 million Muslims and create a history dominated by the Hindu majority.
Those critics say the bill mirrors the ideology of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has been accused of Islamophobia and stokes tensions between the different faiths that coexist in the world’s largest democracy.
Paresh Rawal, the actor who plays Das in “The Taj Story,” is a former BJP lawmaker, though Goel, the director, told CNN the film was not funded or supported by any political party.
The film’s narrative runs counter to longstanding findings by the government’s archaeological department and has failed to convince many in India’s media and academia.
“The Taj Story” is “a collage of conspiracy theories,” The Indian Express newspaper wrote in a review, adding that it “only stirs the pot, combining fact and fiction to serve an agenda far removed from historical inquiry.”
Indian magazine The Week said it failed both as “compelling cinema and as a piece of propaganda”.
The film opens with a two-minute disclaimer stating that it is “a work of fiction” and that the filmmakers “make no claim to historical accuracy.”
At the box office, the response was lukewarm, with the film grossing about $2 million from a $1.3 million budget, Goel said. But for some, the narrative resonates.
“The truth can no longer be kept hidden,” BJP MP Ashwini Upadhyay told local news agency ANI. “If someone tries to stop the movie, then more people will watch.”
“It’s about knowing the truth,” Unnati, a moviegoer who did not want to give his full name, told CNN as he left a screening in Mumbai. “We have been deceived all this time. We have never known our own history.”
CNN has reached out to the BJP for a response.
A symbol of love
Rising from the banks of the Yamuna River – sacred to India’s Hindus – the white marble Taj Mahal is the 17th-century embodiment of an emperor’s love for his wife.
Commissioned by Shah Jahan in memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal, the UNESCO World Heritage Site is the most visited monument in India, attracting more than seven million people annually.
In its gardens, couples seek inspiration from the love story they immortalize. Beyond its walls, its image has become a universal symbol of India itself, embracing everything from travel posters to wedding invitations. For generations, it represented a story of devotion, unparalleled art and the country’s pluralistic past.
“The Taj Story” attempts to dismantle this narrative.
The 165-minute courtroom drama centers on Das, a tour guide played by veteran Bollywood actor Rawal. For 25 years, Das has presented tourists with the legendary love story, but this public performance masks a deep-seated crisis: he is a man who can no longer believe the story he is selling.
His growing doubts led him to file a public interest litigation challenging the official history of the monument, putting the film at its centerpiece: Was the Taj Mahal built by Shah Jahan, or was it a “repurposed” Hindu palace, as a revisionist theory popular in some Hindu nationalist circles claims?
In the ensuing courtroom battle, the evidence-based arguments of historians and archaeologists are constantly drowned out by Das’ fiery speeches condemning alleged “leftist agendas” and the “over-romanticization” of Mughal history.
“This film is about the historical facts of the Taj Mahal,” Goel told CNN. “Why wasn’t it taught in our textbooks?”
He added that the film is “not about Hindus or Muslims”, yet Muslim characters are cast as antagonists – from a rival tour guide who opposes Das’s campaign, to mobs attacking his children and vandalizing his home.
It’s a sentiment with which actor Rawal agrees. He told CNN the film “doesn’t talk about any faith” and “talks about facts.”
He added, “We’re talking about the board of education and why the historians played dirty and everything we’re talking about. . . . There are facts in front of me. . . . And I’ve checked with one or two historians, good, honest historians.”
Rewriting the past
The controversy surrounding the “Story of the Taj” comes alongside a larger attempt to redefine India’s past.
Since the BJP came to power in 2014, critics say, there has been a steady push to rewrite history through official channels, particularly targeting India’s Mughal period, when Muslim sultanates ruled over what became one of the world’s richest empires until the arrival of European colonialism led to its eventual decline and collapse.
Textbooks were rewritten to downplay the history of India’s Islamic rulers, cities and streets with Mughal-era names renamed, and Muslim properties demolished by authorities for illegal encroachment on government land and as punishment for alleged riots.
The “Taj Story” narrative also carries echoes of the controversy surrounding the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, a mosque that was demolished by Hindu individuals in a 1992 attack over the belief that it was built on the site of a Hindu temple. The destruction of the building sparked some of the worst violence India has seen since independence and was at the center of a heated and divisive debate over identity and history for decades to come.
People at the Ram Mandir and Babri Masjid on Judgment Day in Ayodhya, India on November 9, 2025. – Pankaj Nangia/India Today Group/Getty Images
While supporters tout these changes as a restoration of India’s pre-Islamic heritage, critics condemn them as a deliberate erasure of the country’s pluralistic history.
This is not the first time that the Taj Mahal has become a flashpoint for political and historical disputes.
In 2017, it was conspicuously absent from a tourism brochure published by the Hindu nationalist government of Uttar Pradesh, the state where it is located. The omission of India’s most famous landmark sparked backlash, which officials dismissed as saying the pamphlet was never intended for public distribution.
Five years later, a BJP-led politician filed a court petition seeking the opening of 22 sealed chambers inside the monument to search for evidence of a Hindu temple. The legal challenge was based on the long-debunked “Tejo Mahalaya” theory – a fringe claim popularized by right-wing author PN Oak in the 1980s that the mausoleum was originally a Hindu temple. The Archaeological Survey of India has consistently rejected this theory, stating that there is no evidence to support it.
While The Taj Story does not explicitly support the Tejo Mahalaya theory, its controversial promotional poster depicts the Hindu god Shiva emerging from the tomb.
Historian Swapna Liddle said the period when the Taj Mahal was built is “very well recorded”.
She added: “The Mughals were a very bureaucratic state. They left behind a lot of documents and we have all of that. This kind of project was a huge project.”
Bollywood as a mirror
For nearly a century, Bollywood has held a mirror to Indian society, the machinations of the world’s most prolific film industry reflecting the changing tides of a vast, developing nation.
Hindi cinema once reflected secular and democratic values espoused by India’s founding fathers. But many critics say the industry has veered to the right over the past decade — coinciding with the populist rule of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP.
2022’s “The Kashmir Files” and 2023’s “The Kerala Story” are previous high-profile film releases that have been criticized for maligning Muslims, perpetuating negative stereotypes, exacerbating religious tensions and distorting historical facts.
Meanwhile, films perceived as disrespecting Hindu traditions faced serious consequences. The film “Annapoorani” (2023) was pulled from Netflix after right-wing groups protested its depiction of a Brahmin woman – a member of the Hindu priestly caste – cooking and eating meat. The historical epic “Padmaavat” (2018) sparked violent nationwide protests from Hindu groups who claimed it distorted history by suggesting a romantic connection between a revered Hindu queen and an invading Muslim sultan.
An auto rickshaw passes a banner of the Bollywood film ‘The Kashmir Files’ installed outside a cinema hall in Delhi’s Old Quarter on March 21, 2022. – Sajjad Hussain/AFP/Getty Images
These films, historians argue, are part of a larger campaign to redefine India’s national identity by elevating its Hindu heritage and denigrating its Muslim past.
Historian Liddle said that for many people, their “general idea of history” comes directly from popular culture.
She said that although these are “fictionalised accounts”, they have tremendous “impact and influence” because the public genuinely believes they are “real history”.
The Taj Mahal itself remains unaffected by the controversy.
As it has done for centuries, the marble shines over the Yamuna River, a silent testament to symmetry and grace. But the story India tells about it is fracturing.
“We are witnessing a series of films that seem to very consciously project historical Muslim figures as villains,” Liddle said.
“This clearly aligns with a political agenda, and this is a kind of evil that is very, very dangerous.”
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