In Milton's Paradise Lost, the great Mogul city of Agra is revealed to Adam after the Fall as one of the future wonders of God's creation. This was hardly an understatement: by the 17th century, Agra had grown larger even than Constantinople and, with its 2m inhabitants, dwarfed both London and Paris. A succession of riverside palaces and “sweet-smelling gardens with sweet blossoms” spanned both banks of the river Yamuna.As the Mogul chronicler Abdul Aziz put it, the city was “the wonder of the age - as much a centre of the arteries of trade both by land and water as a meeting place of saints, sages and scholars from all Asia . . . a veritable lodestar for artistic workmanship, literary talent and spiritual worth”.

It was the Emperor Shah Jahan (1592-1666) who was responsible for the jewel of the Agra waterfront, and the Mogul empire's most enduring creation, the Taj Mahal. The Taj, which was designed by Shah Jahan's master architect, Ustad Ahmad Lahauri, is arguably the most admired building of the past 400 years, a masterpiece rising above the river Yamuna as perfect, beautiful and shimmeringly symmetrical as it was when its great dome was first completed in 1643. The mausoleum was built in white marble in memory of Mumtaz Mahal, “the Chosen One of the Palace”, Shah Jahan's favourite wife. In the words of the court historian Muhammad Amin Qazwini, “The intimacy, deep affection, attention and favour which his Majesty had

for the Cradle of Excellence [another of Mumtaz's titles] exceeded by a thousand times what he felt for any other. And always that Lady of the Age was the companion, close confidante, associate and intimate friend of that successful ruler, in hardship and comfort, when travelling or in residence.”

While Shah Jahan was capable of bouts of cold-blooded brutality - to seize the throne he had to rebel against his father and murder two of his brothers, their children and two cousins - he was nevertheless the most aesthetically sensitive of all the Moguls. As a boy of 15 he had impressed his father with the taste he demonstrated in redesigning the imperial apartments in Kabul. As a young emperor, he had rebuilt the Red Fort in a new imperial architectural style that he had himself helped to develop. During his reign, the workshops of his palace groaned with gleaming rubies the colour of pigeon's blood, inscribed spinels and jewelled daggers. The Taj was the culmination of his life of discriminating architectural patronage.

Most Mogul scholars agree that the mausoleum of Mumtaz Mahal was designed to be a model on earth of the heavenly mansion prepared for the emperor's wife in paradise. It was also very deliberately devised as a monument of political propaganda to the power, genius and good taste of Shah Jahan and his dynasty: “A dome of high foundation and a building of great magnificence was created,” wrote Qazwini. “The eye of the Age has seen nothing like it under the nine vaults of the enamel blue sky, and ear of Time has heard of nothing like it in any past age...it will be a masterpiece for ages to come increasing the amazement of all humanity.”

Yet for all its fame, remarkably little has been written on the Taj Majal, and Giles Tillotson's slim and balanced book is, without question, the best short introduction yet produced, a worthy complement to Ebba Koch's detailed scholarly monograph of two years ago, The Complete Taj Mahal, which reconstructed the entire architectural context of the Taj and revealed Agra to be a sort of Mogul Venice centred along the Yamuna waterfront. Tillotson's account of the construction of the Taj owes much to Koch; where he comes into his own is in his wonderful exploration of its many layers of meaning, and in his analysis of how different viewers have seen the Taj, each claiming it for their own in more or less subtle ways.

So it was in the East India Company period that British artists such as Thomas Daniell and his nephew William produced images of the Taj surrounded by English trees “of no species known to India...[that] create the impression we have stumbled on this scene in the corner of the park of an English county house”. The Victorians went further. Convinced by the mid-19th century of the racial inferiority of all Indians, they developed a ludicrous theory that the Taj - which owes nothing in any way to the influence of European architecture - was, in fact, the work of a European architect, either one Austin of Bordeaux or Geronimo Veroneo, both of whom were known to have been in Agra at the time of its building.

Likewise, the Hindu supremacists of the 20th century have found it equally hard to believe that such a masterpiece was built by the same Muslims they despise in modern India. Thus the architectural historian Ram Nath in 1972 convinced himself that this masterpiece of high Mogul-Timurid style was “not a monument of Islam” in the strict sense as it had, or so he claimed, been “produced in accordance with our ancient vastu canons”.

More dotty still were the writings of PNOak who, in his 1968 book The Taj Mahal is a Hindu Palace, which Tillotson calls a “startling piece of pseudo-scholarship”, reassigned not just the Taj but all other Islamic buildings across the width of Asia to an ancient Hindu civilisation that once conquered the world. Its traces can be found, apparently, in the place names of both Argentina (derived, according to Oak, from the name of the Hindu hero, Arjun) and Salisbury (“formerly Shail-eesh-pury, signifying a hilly area and a Hindu temple”). In the same vein, he was of the opinion that “Westminster Abbey is also a Shiva temple”, and that “ancient Italy was a Hindu country and the Pope a Hindu priest”. Alarmingly, Oak's theories are still doing the rounds on the internet, where they are widely believed in the more credulous corners of the Indian diaspora and have formed the basis of a claim to the Taj by the Hindu revivalist organisation Bajrang Dal, which has demanded that the Taj be “renamed” the Tejo Mai Mahal and “reconverted” into a Hindu temple.

Tillotson's short, sensible and scholarly book is a wonderful antidote to this sort of nonsense, and briskly dismisses these and many other similar Taj myths and fables with the firm hand and steady tread of an authoritative umpire. This is a much-needed and eminently readable book that is likely to remain a standard work for many years to come.

The Taj Mahal by Giles Tillotson
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