Rating: *
Director-writer Tushar Amrish Goel’s The Taj Story is immensely offensive , and not just for distorting history to pander to a certain popular narrative in current Indian politics. It is offensive on a much deeper level.
This is not just a politically perverse project. It is worse. It a killingly dull and verbose film where the makers have mistaken reams of speculative research to be cinematic ‘truth’.
In truth—and that is where the problem lies—cinema can’t be about so-called research material being bandied about in a courtroom which looks as real as this film’s intentions.
For much of the playing time, Paresh Rawal and Zakir Hussain, who are capable of sustained performance under better circumstances, simply quote from obtuse documents and books with a straight face. We can feel their boredom under the guise of “telling the truth”.
And what, pray, is the truth according to this fallacious mischievous piece of non-cinema? That the Taj Mahal was not built by Shah Jehan. That the relic of love actually secretes hidden rooms filled with devtas and deities.
Watching the film the audience feels it is trapped in an audio library specializing in dubious disruptive books which would have been burnt by the swadweshi’s during the Quit India movement. This cinema exemplifies another kind of ‘Quit India’ movement. It wants to disregard and vilify every monument or idea that doesn’t follow the Hindu narrative.
The messy mischievous monsterpiece’s protagonist a tourist guide Vishnu Das(Paresh Rawal) quotes facts and figures that seem to have been googled , by the director and his unlikely hero. Rawal appears fatigued and disinterested throughtout, as if he is not really interested in putting a pin to the status quo but is forced to do so .
Why? Maybe he just wants to be on the ‘right’, no matter how trite, side.
All the cheesy propagandist courtroom antics(at one point Vishnu rebukes his opponent lawyer’s female apprentice for not doing any work right in the middle of the session) would have been passed off as Bad Cinema , if this was cinema at all. It is nothing of the sort. The direction is mechanical: one courtroom quip from Rawal followed by a shot of a giggling spectator, one counter-argument by the other lawyer followed by a triumphant snigger from one of his cronie… heated drunken dialogues on how history has been distorted to show the Mughals in a good light…Again, there is no substantial proof of this alleged distortion, which amounts to a distorted discourse on distortion in history.
Conspiracy theories abound. The Moghuls are the primary target from the beginning to end. A right wing politician(Akhilendra Mishra) is first taunted for harbouring a hidden agenda and then extolled as a looming figure of moral and religious rightness.
The Taj Story is so full of self righteous hatred for one community that it villainizesall men in beards. The stubble doesn’t count. Paresh wears a two-day stubble for almost three hours. Only Gulzar would tell us the secret history of this frozen phenomenon.
