Notwithstanding the title, The Taj Story does not have much of a story to tell. What it does peddle by way of a narrative has not only been done to death over the decades but has also been debunked in several courts of the land, including the apex one. The writer of the film is constrained to admit as much in a series of title cards before the end-credits begin to roll.
The Taj Story is bargain-basement filmmaking that draws inspiration from unsubstantiated history to create a piece of cinema that expects full-on explosions from dud-bombs. It wends its way through prickly territory only to end up without a case strong enough to make itself essential viewing for those who care for the truth.
The overlong courtroom drama posits an oft-asked question – did Emperor Shah Jahan build the Taj Mahal or was the iconic Mughal-era monument an altered ancient Hindu temple? – as a middle-school debate topic and pits two seasoned actors – Paresh Rawal and Zakir Hussain – who spout arguments for and against what “this house (read: film) believes”.
With a runtime of nearly three hours, The Taj Story, produced by CA Suresh Jha’s Swarnim Global Services Pvt. Ltd and directed by Tushar Amrish Goel (whose previous joint effort, if IMDB is to be believed, was a 2017 movie that fell through the cracks never to be heard of again, Modi Kaka Ka Gaon), beats about the bush until there is no bush left to beat around.
When The Taj Story draws to an end, the parting note lacks finality. It is tame and inconclusive. From what this critic, one of about ten people who watched the film FDFS in a Delhi NCR multiplex, could gather, it would be hard-pressed to find an audience so ideologically inclined towards its line of thinking that it would have the patience to sit through it.
The sloppily solipsistic script is trapped in tedious tautology and rounds off each shot it fires in its chosen direction with the cinematic equivalent of a smirk, which is conveyed either through the gestures and facial expressions of those present in the court or through the upright gait of the protagonist (accompanied by triumphal trumpets on the soundtrack).
Erratic writing is the film’s biggest, but by no means the only, drawback. Marred by disorienting tonal inconsistencies, The Taj Story fluctuates wildly between the alarmist and provocative on one hand and the flip and fatuous on the other.
For effect, the courtroom is jampacked with people who break into peals of laughter every time Paresh Rawal’s character, a veteran Taj Mahal guide-turned-petitioner, delivers a wisecrack to demolish the feeble defence put up by Anwar Rashid, an advocate played by Zakir Hussain.
The two principal actors, spouting their aggressive arguments while flaunting books, documents and photographs in support of their assertions, do their best to pull the chestnuts out of the fire without achieving a particularly high success rate.
The opening sequences of The Taj Story unfold in 1959. A young member of a team of archaeologists descends into the basement of the monument for conservation work. In a sealed-off space, he espies something that the audience does not see but indirect visual and aural references to it return several times in the course of the film as a key missing link.
Cut to 2023. Vishnu Das (Rawal), a guide who has been in the business for three decades, decides on a whim – it is triggered by a documentary filmmaker who poses a question to him about the provenance of Taj Mahal – to go to court with a plea for carbon dating of the wondrous edifice that draws millions of tourists to Agra every year.
Hang on, we are jumping the gun a bit. Before he decides to be his own advocate before a two-judge bench, Vishnu Das, in an alcohol-induced moment of weakness, launches into a rant that goes viral. He loses his job. If you expect the screenplay to tell you who shot the video and how it got shared, banish that thought. The Taj Story isn’t that sort of film.
It gives rules of narrative logic a wide berth as it jumps from one thing to another all the way through as taarikh pe taarikh is foisted upon the petitioner, the defence lawyer and, not to forget, the audience. It throws a lot of pugnacious ideas into the air but most of them do not land for reasons that are inherent in the film’s structure.
While large parts of The Taj Story hinges on a them vs us binary, it has stray moments when Vishnu Das would have us believe that he is fighting for an ‘inclusive’ truth that is in the best interest of the nation cutting across sectarian lines.
At the same time, the film makes no bones about the identity of the bearded and bellicose people (led by a sketchily etched character named Nawaz and played by Anil George) who are out to deflect the guide from his righteous path. They use verbal threats, physical violence and even criminal acts to stop him.
The film cites a great deal of scholarship along the way but given the wild admixture of fact and fiction that it cooks up, one is never quite sure if the tomes that are held up on the screen are real or imaginary. Ditto for all the claims that are bandied about in the course of the legal joust (it lasts all of nine hearings) that constitutes the crux of the film.
It loses no opportunity to lampoon historians, educationists, archaeologists, leftists and secularists for ‘distorting’ India’s history to serve a particular belief system.
Punching bags aplenty – one of them answers to the name of Rehan Habib and he is a historian – surface from time to time to be mercilessly and gleefully pilloried by a newfangled legal eagle with a personal, cultural and civilisational score to settle.
The firm assertions that are peppered across The Taj Story would have achieved their avowed goal had the film been written better, mounted better and edited better. It isn’t. As a result, it falls well short of being passably entertaining or genuinely thought-provoking.
Verdict: The Taj Story is a throw of dice that is all over the place. Even Paresh Rawal cannot save it.
Also Read | “There’s No Hindu-Muslim Jingoism In This Film”: Paresh Rawal Breaks Silence On The Taj Story Controversy