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he recently released quasi-documentary Taj Mahal is the latest in a series of cultural attempts to present a purist vision of India, one that draws ever sharper lines between “us” and “them.” Once celebrated as the ultimate symbol of love, the Taj is now increasingly embroiled in contestation, its marble walls echoing not romance but rivalry. It has become a mirror to the divisions of the age, an object pulled apart by claims of ownership, ideology and identity.
For centuries, the Taj Mahal stood as an emblem of shared civilisation, Mughal artistry meeting Indian craftsmanship, Islamic geometry fused with subcontinental imagination. It was the physical manifestation of a culture that refused to see difference as division. Today, however, it is being forced to stand trial for its origins. The question is no longer who built it, but who it belongs to.
Culture, which once united people across creed and language, is increasingly being weaponised to separate them. The shared history that once defined the subcontinent, of overlapping faiths, cuisines, tongues and artistic traditions, is being rewritten as a tale of exclusion. The Taj Mahal’s fate is only the most visible symptom of this larger project: the remaking of a nation’s memory.
Even sport, once imagined as an antidote to war, is now turning into another battleground. India-Pakistan matches, especially in cricket, are charged with the same emotions as armed conflict. The cheering crowds, the flags, the high-voltage commentary, all recall the tension of war, though fought on pitches instead of plains.
In theory, sport was meant to channel aggression into competition, a peaceful substitute for battle. But in the subcontinent, it has become an extension of politics. When relations are strained, the games are cancelled; when the games resume, they are fought with a ferocity that leaves little room for joy. And yet, paradoxically, such matches should be allowed to continue. In the clash of bats and balls lies a strange catharsis, a release of tension that might prevent darker conflicts elsewhere.
India cannot simply cleanse itself of its past. For millennia, the subcontinent has been a crossroads of migration, trade and conquest, a mosaic of people who settled, mingled and redefined one another. To draw a line now and decide who counts as “authentic” Indian is to deny that complexity altogether.
To build identity on the purity of race, religion or language is a wild-goose chase, and a dangerous one.
Throughout history, even monuments have been subject to shifting interpretations. During the colonial and postcolonial eras, the Taj Mahal was viewed by some as a symbol of royal excess, an indulgence of a mighty emperor built on the sweat of the common man. From a feminist lens, it might be read as the ultimate patriarchal monument: a man immortalising his grief in marble, a woman remembered only through his love for her. Beauty, after all, can conceal as much as it reveals.
In recent years, India’s growing tendency to reconstruct its past through the prism of exclusivity has echoed, and at times surpassed, the early nation-building narratives of Pakistan. At Partition, Pakistan defined itself through religious distinctiveness, often at the cost of inclusivity. Its alienation of Bengalis in the name of purity led, eventually, to rupture. Now, in seeking to craft a singular Hindu identity, India risks walking the same path.
In Pakistan today, too, the crisis of identity has deepened. The irony of invoking Afghan conquerors as national heroes, while disowning their cultural descendants, is not lost on its citizens. These parallel pursuits of “pure” identity reveal the same anxiety: a fear of plurality, a discomfort with the messy reality of shared heritage.
The controversy around the Taj Mahal ultimately underscores one lesson: inclusiveness remains the only sustainable path to cultural identity. To construct nationhood on the basis of exclusion is to invite perpetual conflict, a regression into the endless quarrel of “mine” and “thine.” Such divisions risk not only fragmenting land but also eroding the collective imagination that once sustained it.
All nation-states are imperfect. Every border is contested, every flag stitched from compromise. Yet within these imperfections lies the richness of coexistence. The subcontinent’s greatest strength has always been its capacity to absorb, to let multiple identities flow into a single current.
To build belonging on the purity of race, religion, lineage or language is, as history has repeatedly shown, a wild-goose chase. What endures is not purity but mixture, not isolation but contact. The Taj Mahal, despite all efforts to claim or rename it, still stands as proof of that truth: luminous, layered and undeniably shared.
The writer is a culture critic based in Lahore.