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Sengupta, Nirmal
2019.
Traditional Knowledge in Modern India.
p.
127.
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For many years the official folk-lore of British India has included a story that Lord William Bentinck once contemplated the demolition of the Taj Mahal in order to sell its marble. The point of the story has varied with the mental climate of the time: at first it was an illustration of Bentinck's supposed meanness; the arch “clipper” would even lay hands on the Taj in order to make money. Later it became evidence of the supposed vandalism of the British in early nineteenth-century India; even Bentinck, the otherwise praiseworthy economical reformer, saw nothing in the Taj worthy of preservation. For many years, after the circumstances of its origin and its early expressions had been forgotten, the story lived on in the realm of verbal folk-lore, but more recently it has been revived in print and its truth largely taken for granted. The story, if true, would be a serious reflection on Bentinck according to the standards of any civilized age, and it is therefore worth asking with some particularity upon what basis of fact it rests.
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References
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page 184 note 1 By permission of the Duke of Portland through the late Mr. Philip Morrell.
page 184 note 2 Bentinok MSS. Major Mountain to Lord William Bentinck, 3rd November, 1834, from Meerut.
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page 185 note 3 Ibid., ii, 26–7. Seeds of the pipal tree were imbedded in the dome. They were removed and the dome repaired just in time.
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page 185 note 5 Moghul baths of the kind in question were massive constructions occupying the centre of a marble chamber. Without the bath there would only be a shell of the room left, and this, on Hastings' evidence, was ruinous in 1815.
page 186 note 1 Bentinck MSS. Bentinck to the Duke of Portland, 11th June, 1829. The evasions were by Lords Hastings and Amherst.
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page 186 note 3 Ibid. Bentinck to Peter Auber, 10th June, 1829.
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