In 2000 India's Supreme Court dismissed Oak's petition to declare that a Hindu king had built the Taj Mahal by saying he had a "bee in his bonnet" about the Taj. Till date, as of 2017, several court cases about Taj Mahal being a Hindu temple have been inspired by Oak's theory. In August 2017, Archaeological Survey of India stated there was no evidence to suggest the monument ever housed a temple. Giles Tillotson calls Oak's claims as a "desperate bid to assign a new meaning to the Taj" and "pseudo-scholarship". He states that Oak interprets the statements of Padshahnama about Shah Jahan's purchase of the land for the Taj from Jai Singh I upon where a mansion built by an ancestor of the Raja earlier existed, to claim that Taj Mahal was a wonder of ancient Hinduism. Tillotson adds that no evidence is offered by Oak to redate it to thirteen centuries earlier. He adds that the technical know-how to construct structural buildings didn't exist in 4th-century India, Oak's original claim, the only surviving architecture being rock-cut or monolithic. Oak later dropped this claim and claimed it to be from the 12th century. He adds that Oak claims Mughals built nothing and only converted Hindu buildings. In relation to similarity with buildings of West Asia, Oak also claims them all to be "products of Hindu architecture".
In a 13-page pamphlet titled Was Kaaba a Hindu Temple?, Oak derives a claim of a "Vedic past of Arabia" based on an inscription mentioning the legendary Indian king Vikramāditya that Oak claims was found inside a dish inside the Kaaba. According to Oak, the text of the alleged inscription is taken from the page 315 of an anthology of poetry entitled Sayar-ul-Okul, compiled in 1742 on the orders of a "Sultan Salim" from the earlier work of prophet Muhammed's uncle Amr ibn Hishām who had refused to convert to Islam, and, first modern version published in 1864 in Berlin and a subsequent edition was published in Beirut in 1932. Oak goes on to state that the anthology is kept in the "Makhtab-e-Sultania Library" in Istanbul, Turkey which has been now renamed as Galatasaray Lisesi school.
Reception
notes Oak to be a 'mythistorian' whose work resorted to exploiting comparative philology in the generation of delusional etymologies—associating Sanskrit sound-alikes with foreign terms such as Vatican=vatika, Christianity=Krishna-niti, Abraham as an aberration of Brahma-- to purvey an Islamophobic and anti-Christian agenda under the covers of Hindutva. Edwin Bryant in his work on Indo-Aryan theory describes Oak to be a self-styled historian whose works suffer from an ubiquitous and very poor standard of professionalism and critical methodology and who fit the definition of a crack-pot. Giles Tillotson describes Oak's work on Taj Mahal as a "startling piece of pseudo-scholarship", which was plainly a work of polemical fantasy intended to denigrate Islam and did not merit any serious scholarly attention. Art historian Rebecca Brown described Oak's books as "revisionist history as subtle as Captain Russell's smirk". Oak's theories have been noted to have found a popular following among right-wing Hindu factions in a bid to wage politico-religious battles. Tapan Raychaudhuri has referred to him as "a 'historian' much respected by the Sangh Parivar." Incidentally, one of his books "Some Blunders in Indian Historical Research" was banned from the Parliament's library by the Speaker of the Lok Sabha.
