Why I never visit the Taj Mahal?

Because I don't like it.

When I go to India, someone will ask: "Have you seen the Taj Mahal?"

"Nope. Also I probably never will."

The initial smiles fade, confusion replaces the twinkles in the eyes. The conversation is utterly destroyed!

Symbol of LOVE

So what do I mean exactly?

When I see this monument, I feel dissonance and not much else. I sense the fracture between living Hindustani culture and imperial overlays. Essentially a collision. Aesthetic myth-making and selective historical memory.

The only reason the Taj Mahal is associated with "Indian culture" is that humans are strongly biased toward visual grandeur, symmetry and emotional storytelling.

The Taj Mahal and the Silence of Nalanda

Have you ever heard of the University of Nalanda? One of the greatest institutions in human history. The lectures and debates alone that took place there are capable of changing one's perspective on the past entirely. Yet Nalanda is largely absent from our consciousness.

Taj Mahal is easy to photograph, simple to mythologize. It is luminous and emotionally narratable.

"An Emperor built it for love!"

This sentence requires no intellectual effort, it is easy to digest, immediately consumable.

Nalanda, in contrast represents decentralised scholarship, mathematics, astronomy, physics, medicine, metaphysics, debate and transmission of knowledge.

That doesn't compress on a postcard.

Most people engage with history aesthetically, not structurally. A white marble mausoleum is much prettier than the reality of conquest, taxation, destruction and civilizational disruption.

Beauty travels faster than truth. I guess.

An Empire Fossilizes Itself into Heritage...

Monuments are never neutral. Every empire builds in stone what it wishes to be normalized in memory.

The Islamic Empire conquered vast parts of the subcontinent with brute force, for centuries. With bloodshed came control over architecture, taxation, patronage, intellectual properties and historiography.

Over time, occupation becomes heritage.

Conquest becomes "dynasty".

Imperial monuments become "national treasures".

This mechanism is not unique. Enough to consider the Roman ruins in Europe, the Norman castles in England or the Ottoman architecture in Eastern Europe.

Time dulls ethical clarity. It is what it is. If a structure survives long enough, it will be absorbed into the identity. The Taj Mahal is not simply architecture but rather imperial narrative set in shiny marble.

Nalanda and Epistemic Erasure

Nalanda represented something fundamentally different. It was a living organism of knowledge and not a monument to a ruler. For centuries, scholars from all across Asia studied in Nalanda. Philosophy, advanced physics, logic, grammar, medicine, mathematics, astronomy - knowledge systems evolved through disciplined inquiry and great wisdom.

When the Islamic conquest burnt Nalanda to the ground, the loss was not merely physical. It was a similar tragedy to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.

It was epistemic.

Looks like libraries burn quietly compared to monuments. Ash does not photograph well, probably.

Yet, the total annihilation of knowledge institutions reshape civilisations far more than the building of tombs.

Tombs can be rebuilt. A lineage of scholars cannot. Never.

The Renaming of Origins

Consider another familiar example: the so-called "Arabic numerals".

The numerals used today globally, were developed in India.

They travelled west through Islamic scholars who recognised their value and carried them westward.

And so, the numerals are named after the transmitter, not the originator.

This pattern repeats in history over and over again, globally.

Knowledge often just bears the name of the last empire that carried it, not the civilisation that created it. Transmission becomes appropriation when power defines memory.

The Love Narrative and Its Simplicity

The Shah Jahan-Mumtaz story persists because it is really elegant.

It humanizes the emperor, sanitizes complexity and offers the number one universal theme: love.

But monuments built under imperial taxation and slave labour cannot be separated from the very systems that enabled them.

Devotion AFTER death is easy to romanticize, but the structural reality during life is much more difficult to confront.

This does not require hatred to acknowledge. It requires maturity.

Why the Dissonance Persists?

Global narratives always prefer black and white simplicity over nuances.

Nobody will ask what is native, what is erased, what is imposed nor what survived quietly...

Tourism prefers symmetry over scholarship.

National branding requires unity slogans and not uncomfortable history. Aesthetic symbols are politically safe; intellectual honesty is not.

The Deeper Question

Instead of rejecting Taj Mahal from now on, I have a different proposition.

I would rather ask:

What represents the deepest continuity of a civilisation?

Imperial marble or living knowledge?

Civilisations that lose narrative sovereignty often preserve the conqueror's monuments while forgetting their own intellectual heritage.

The task is not resentment, it is remembrance.

True civilizational strength should not be measured in monuments but in living knowledge, transmitted wisdom and the ability to recognise what is essential and what is ornamental.

The Taj Mahal is beautiful. Beauty sedates.

Nalanda was foundational. Knowledge liberates.

Civilisations must decide which they wish to be defined by.

That's why I'm not interested in the Taj Mahal.