Read the text - see the pictures and form your own opinion. http://www.stephen-knapp.com/was_the_taj_mahal_a_vedic_temple.htm

Kerry, I must frankly admit at the outset that I have not gone through the volumes of information and arguments that the link http://www.stephen-knapp.com/was_the_taj_mahal_a_vedic_temple.htm provides. Yet, my defence for writing the following is that before we are invited to invest time and labor needed for fully exploring the link, some kind of a prima facie case has to exist to say that Taj Mahal was not built by Shahjehan but was an acquisition from a Hindu ruler. Taj Mahal has stood where it stands for over 400 years now. Accounts survive of persons who saw it being built. Tradition has always associated it with Shahjehan. When other Hindu temples were converted into mosques, such as the temples at Mathura, Varanasi, Ayodhya, Somnath and other places, the Hindu origin of those sites has remained alive in peoples' minds from the very first day - that fact did not have to be 'discovery's. Yet we are now invited to believe that Taj Mahal's Hindu origin has been totally forgotten and needs to be 'discovery's. How could it have been 'forgotten' if it was a such a holy site for the Hindus? Besides, in all the long and recorded history of India of 2500 years, the city of Agra has never been counted among Hindu holy cities. Could this have been so had a Shiva temple stood there as recently as 400 years ago? Ancient cities like Mathura, Varanasi, Ayodhya, Dwarka and a dozen others considered holy or important by Hindus are met frequently in Hindu religious and classical literature. Agra does not figure even once. It gains prominence only after Mughals make it their capital. Since a prima facie case cannot be made out in favor of the theory of Hindu origins of the Taj Mahal, I would think that it will remain as a fad or an eccentricity. Each person has to decide for himself whether his valuable time and effort should be devoted to scrutinizing it. There is a revivalist school in India which is trying to prove that India did not have to take anything from the others and that everything good in India is entirely an Indian (or Hindu) creation. For them, Aryans and their ancient language, and the literature in it such as the Vedas, did not come from the West but are originally from India and spread outwards from India. They consider that the theory of Aryans migrating from the West is a mythology built by Western indologists of the colonial days, who, because of their colonial mentality, would deny that anything original could be an Indian creation. Some of the arguments of these revivalists border on the absurd. For example, they say that Christianity is an Indian creation - it is nothing but Krishna-niti (teachings of Lord Krishna) and that Taj Mahal is nothing but the adaptation of the original Hindu name of the temple 'Tejo-Mahalaya' (great house of light). (Forget the fact that as the name of a Hindu temple, 'Tejo-Mahalaya' sounds unconvincing!) Incidentally, what is a 'Vedic Temple?' Deities and temples as we know them are all post-vedic creations. Arvind Kolhatkar, Toronto, May 07, 2010.