Kashi Vishwanath Temple

The dispute over the ground shared by the Kashi Vishwanath temple and the Gyanvapi mosque is often reported as though the argument were about history. It is mostly about law, and specifically about one statute.

The documented outline

Little of the following is seriously contested by historians:

• A temple on or near the site was destroyed during the Ghurid campaigns around 1194.
• It was rebuilt in 1585 under Akbar, by Man Singh and Todar Mal.
• Aurangzeb ordered its destruction in 1669, and the Gyanvapi mosque was built there shortly after. Historians differ over the motive, general religious policy, or a response to a specific act of local political resistance, but not over the fact.
• Ahilyabai Holkar of Indore built the present temple alongside the mosque in 1780.

The statute everything turns on

The Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991 freezes the religious character of any place of worship as it stood on 15 August 1947, and bars courts from entertaining suits to change it. Ayodhya was expressly excluded from the Act; Kashi was not.

So the threshold question is not what happened in 1669. It is whether a court may hear the question at all. That question has still not been finally answered.

The litigation, in order

• 1991: a suit is filed on behalf of the deities seeking the whole site. The mosque committee argues the Act bars it. The proceedings are stayed for over two decades.
• 2020-2021: proceedings revive; a survey is sought.
• May 2022: a court-ordered video survey of the compound produces an object in the ablution pool. The Hindu petitioners identify it as a shivling; the mosque committee as a stone fountain. That identification has never been resolved.
• January 2024: an Archaeological Survey report submitted to the court concludes that a Hindu temple preceded the mosque, citing reused pillars and inscriptions. The mosque committee disputes its methods and its conclusions.
• January 2024: a court permits worship in one of the cellars. This is a possessory order, not a ruling on title.

What has not been decided

No court has ruled on who owns the site, on whether the Act bars the suit, or on what the disputed object is. Appeals are pending.

This entry sets out both parties' positions and attributes them. It does not adjudicate between them, and a reader looking here for a verdict is looking in the wrong place: there is not one yet.

Kashi Vishwanath has been destroyed and rebuilt often enough that the current temple is not even the most recent structure people mean when they say its name loosely.

One of twelve

The temple enshrines a jyotirlinga, one of twelve sites across India where Shiva is traditionally held to have manifested as a column of light, a category that places Kashi Vishwanath within a specific, ranked network of pilgrimage sites rather than as a freestanding local shrine.

Rebuilt by a queen, gilded by a king

After repeated earlier destructions, including one attributed to Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in 1669, the temple standing today was constructed in 1780 under the patronage of Ahilyabai Holkar, the Maratha queen of Indore, who rebuilt it at a location adjacent to, rather than exactly on, the site of the demolished structure. The temple's distinctive gold-plated domes were added decades later, funded by Ranjit Singh, the Sikh ruler of Punjab, who donated a substantial quantity of gold for the purpose.

A neighbour it cannot ignore

The Gyanvapi Mosque stands immediately adjacent to the temple, built in part from material associated with the earlier destroyed temple structure, a physical proximity that underlies the ongoing legal disputes over the site covered separately in this entry's companion article, disputes this article on the temple's own building history does not attempt to resolve.