Never saw religious motifs inside basement rooms of Taj Mahal, says former ASI regional chief

Amid debate over the Taj Mahal, former ASI regional director KK Muhammed claimed that he never saw any religious motifs inside the locked rooms of the monument.

In an exclusive interview with India Today, KK Muhammed, former Regional Director (North) of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), said that he never saw any religious motifs inside the basement rooms of Taj Mahal while he held office in Agra.

His comments comes after the Allahabad High Court dismissed BJP leader Rajneesh Singh's petition to set up a fact-finding committee to probe the history of the Taj Mahal and open the doors of its 22 locked rooms. The petitioner sought the formation of special committee by the Archaeological Survey of India to examine the locked rooms and release the report.

KK Muhammed said, “The basement rooms of the Taj Mahal are not sealed, they are only placed under a lock to prevent tourists from venturing into the basement. The ASI maintains all these basement rooms. When I was the ASI Agra chief, I never saw any religious motifs inside these rooms.”

Muhammed said that there are many Mughal monuments in Agra that were built on such underground rooms and the Taj Mahal's architecture is not unique in that sense.

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Survey have been conducted from time to time by going to the basement to test the strength of the Taj Mahal.

KK Muhammed said these closed rooms had undergone extensive repair and maintenance 16 years back. Apart from that, o test its strength, a survey was conducted by the National Geographic Research Institute and the University of Roorkee in the year 1993, in which the basement wall of the Taj Mahal was said to be three meters thick. The area where the actual graves of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz are placed under the dome was solid. The University of Roorkee used electrical, magnetic profiling techniques, shear web studies and gravity and geo radar techniques in this study.