The Taj at sunrise is a cliché because it is right. The mistake is what you do after.
Go at opening. It is worth the alarm, the light is genuinely better, and the crowd at seven is a fraction of the crowd at ten. None of that is controversial.
What goes wrong is the rest of the day. The standard plan is: Taj at dawn, back to the hotel, checkout, drive to Jaipur. So you see the most famous building on earth, in a slightly stunned pre-coffee state, and then you sit in a car for five hours while it recedes.
The better shape is to arrive in Agra the afternoon before and go to Agra Fort then, with a guide, properly. It is a magnificent fort in its own right and almost nobody gives it an afternoon. It also hands you the whole Mughal story — Akbar, Shah Jahan, the son who imprisoned him, the view from the cell he died in, which looks out at the Taj.
Then the Taj at dawn is the end of a story rather than a photograph at the start of one. Then drive.
Same two nights. Entirely different experience.
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