Having read and enjoyed Robert Irwin's The Alhambra this summer, I was looking forward to trying more from Profile's ‘Wonders of the World’ series, which is edited by the fantastic Mary Beard; excitingly, a trip to Agra not long afterwards offered the chance to do exactly that. This volume takes the same basic approach – a pleasingly sceptical dismissal of many of the hoary guidebook tales, combined with a survey of the building's history, both the history of its construction and the story of how it's been interpreted and appropriated by subsequent cultures and movements.

‘The thing about the Taj,’ people told me before I visited, ‘is that even though everyone talks about how amazing it is, it really is amazing.’ And it still blew me away, even after I was told that. Tillotson is very good on the way no one sees the Taj now without preconceptions – we approach it ‘in awe and trepidation, with our expectations ready to be either shattered or fulfilled’. Part of the reason for the dramatic response is, perhaps, that professional artists now seem to have given up trying to represent it at all, writing it off as the domain of postcards and camera-phones – and indeed one can see their point when you can snap top-level stuff on your iPhone.

It's interesting, though, to read Tillotson's account of how many painters tried and failed to capture the experience of being there. For artists, he points out, ‘the Taj presents a special challenge: it arouses their creative instincts whilst warning that any imitation would be feeble’. Early British artists on tour tried to paint it as part of the English picturesque tradition, adding artfully dishevelled (European) trees to the garden; others more or less gave up by relegating the Taj itself to a background element. Photographers have not fared much better, though Tillotson sees the great Punjabi photographer Raghu Rai, whose pictures show the Taj in conjunction with local life, as one notable exception.

http://mediastore.magnumphotos.com/CoreXDoc/MAG/Media/TR2/d/0/b/b/PAR171658.jpg (Raghu Rai, 1985)

Well, perhaps. In any case, Rai is part of a relatively recent tradition: the idea that the Taj is some kind of Indian icon is something that came not from Indians themselves but from visitors.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was eulogised more by Western than by Indian writers and artists. Elevated to the status of national symbol by outsiders, not until about 1900 was it accepted as such by Indians.

And in fact even today, Tillotson points out that the Taj only gets a couple of million Indian visitors a year – compare that to twelve million for something like the Tirupati temple, which most foreigners have barely heard of. Although Tillotson never actually says so, there is definitely a sense that the Taj's image – though not of course the Taj itself – is in some way attached to, or even tarnished by, the image of the British Empire and India-as-colony, or certainly of some narrative of India that was imposed by Europeans. I don't know enough about the subject or the country to comment on the web of associations there, but it seems like an interesting mix, particularly given that the Taj was itself built by ‘outsiders’ (the Mughals, who came from Central Asia).

At any rate, and for whatever reason beyond its evident beauty, the fact is that it has been the iconic monument of India for over a hundred years, and everyone who has some image or narrative of India to sell has to incorporate the Taj into their theories. This has led to some pretty extraordinary contortions by those who dislike the historical facts. Many bewhiskered Brits of the nineteenth century found it impossible to believe that such an exquisite building could have been produced by the natives, and posited the help of Venetian craftsmen. I was also amazed to read of how many Hindu partisans have tried to claim the monument as part of Hindu culture, despite the elementary problems with the suggestion (like the fact that the Taj Mahal is a mausoleum, but Hindus do not bury their dead). Still, the argument has been made repeatedly, by fairly serious historians like Ram Nath (who claimed in print that the Taj ‘is not a monument of Islam’) as well as by a horde of total crackpots like PN Oak – though Oak's ideas about the Taj seem positively rational compared to his suggestion that Christianity is actually ‘Krishna-ity’ and the Vatican comes from a Vedic cult called the Vatika.

All of this is very enjoyable and very enlightening, and Tillotson marshals his sources efficiently to give you a pretty good grounding in the building's context considering that this isn't a long book. I don't know what languages he reads, but I would perhaps have liked some more detail on contemporary Muslim responses to the Taj – are there for instance writers of Urdu or Arabic or Persian who have viewed the Taj as some image of a former glorious empire? If so it would be interesting to know about it. Overall though, this concise, intelligent run-down is highly recommended for anyone planning a visit; planning a visit is even more highly recommended. ( )