NEW DELHI — The Delhi High Court on Wednesday declined an urgent hearing of a public interest litigation seeking to halt the release of The Taj Story, a Paresh Rawal–led courtroom drama about the Taj Mahal. Judges said the case would be heard in the normal course, even as protests and boycott calls mounted over the film’s teaser and posters, ahead of the movie’s nationwide opening on Oct. 31, 2025.
The Taj Story at the center of a new Taj Mahal battle
The public interest litigation, filed by Delhi-based advocate Shakeel Abbas, asks the court to stay the release of The Taj Story, direct the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) to revisit its clearance, and mandate prominent disclaimers stating that the film offers a contested narrative rather than settled history, according to detailed case summaries in The Indian Express and a subsequent explainer in Hindustan Times. A bench of Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya and Justice Tushar Rao Gedela instead told Abbas the matter would be “auto-listed” in due course, effectively rejecting any special, last-minute hearing.
In his petition, Abbas describes The Taj Story as “highly provocative” and based on “fabricated facts” that could “erode faith in historical scholarship,” accusing the makers of spreading “a particular propaganda” about the Taj Mahal’s origins. The plea warns that depicting the monument’s dome being lifted to reveal a figure of Lord Shiva could inflame communal tensions, encourage vandalism, and even prompt “unnecessary interventions” at the UNESCO World Heritage site, concerns echoed in a PTI dispatch carried by ThePrint.
Controversy around The Taj Story first erupted when a motion poster showed a Shiva idol emerging from beneath the Taj Mahal’s marble dome beside a caption asking what if “everything you’ve been taught is a lie.” Social media users accused the film of pushing “propaganda” and “fake history,” while producer Swarnim Global Services issued a clarification stating that the movie “does not deal with any religious matters” and focuses only on historical debate; Rawal has also said publicly that he never intended to spark Hindu-Muslim conflict.
Despite the row and at least two PILs, The Taj Story reached cinemas on Oct. 31 as scheduled, with early reactions praising Rawal’s performance but questioning the script and pacing. Reviews and commentary have also highlighted the film’s embrace of long-debunked theories that the Taj Mahal stands atop a Hindu temple, turning what might have been a straightforward courtroom drama into a flashpoint in India’s culture wars.
Historians note that those temple claims date back at least to the 1989 book Taj Mahal: The True Story by P.N. Oak and have resurfaced repeatedly in Indian courts. In 2015, a district court in Agra admitted a suit by six lawyers who asserted the monument is a Shiva shrine called Tejo Mahalaya and sought the right for Hindu worship there, according to a contemporaneous report in The Times of India. More recently, courts in Allahabad and Delhi have rejected petitions to “open secret rooms” and reclassify the structure, while the Supreme Court dismissed one such case as a “publicity interest litigation”; a 2022 analysis by Voice of America underscored that mainstream scholars regard the temple theory as fringe pseudo-history, not evidence-based scholarship.
With the urgent-hearing request now off the table, the next phase of the Taj Mahal debate around The Taj Story will unfold simultaneously in the courtroom and at the box office. When the Delhi High Court eventually hears Abbas’s PIL, it will once again have to navigate the line between protecting artistic freedom and guarding against films that echo divisive political narratives about India’s most iconic monument.
