Somnath Temple

Somnath is the best-documented case in Indian history of a memory being constructed long after the event it commemorates, and the argument about it is live, academic and political at once.

The event

Mahmud of Ghazni raided the temple in 1026 and carried off a great deal of treasure. Al-Biruni, writing not long after, recorded it. Further attacks followed in 1299, 1395, 1451, and under Aurangzeb in 1665 and 1706.

The standard account

In the popular telling, 1026 was a civilisational rupture: a great temple levelled, a trauma carried by Hindus continuously for a thousand years.

Romila Thapar's reading

Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History (2004) examines what the sources actually say, and they do not line up behind the standard account.

• Jain and Sanskrit inscriptional sources from the centuries immediately after 1026 barely mention the raid. Local records show repair beginning within about a dozen years and the site functioning as a pilgrimage centre again by 1038. A community carrying a civilisational wound does not usually neglect to write it down.
• Turko-Persian court literature magnified the raid enormously, because Mahmud's reputation as an idol-breaker was the point of the telling. The scale of the destruction grew with each retelling, for the glory of the raider rather than the grief of the raided.
• British parliamentary rhetoric in the nineteenth century, notably around the "gates of Somnath" episode of the 1840s, imported that inflated account into colonial politics, where it served an argument that Hindus and Muslims were irreconcilable and required British rule to keep apart.
• Only then does it become central to modern Indian nationalist politics.

Her argument is not that nothing happened. It is that the memory is substantially a later construction, and that its later uses are traceable.

The dispute

That reading is contested, and vigorously. It has been attacked as minimising the destruction of Hindu sites and defended as ordinary source criticism. The argument is unresolved and is not going to be resolved by evidence alone, because what is at stake is partly what the evidence is for.

The rebuilding

Vallabhbhai Patel pressed for reconstruction after Junagadh's accession in 1947; K. M. Munshi carried it through; the temple was completed in 1951.

Jawaharlal Nehru objected, on the ground that a secular state had no business rebuilding temples. He was overruled to the extent that President Rajendra Prasad performed the consecration, in his personal capacity, a formula that fooled nobody and was designed not to.

Almost nothing a visitor sees at Somnath is old. The building is modern; the argument is the antiquity.

Somnath was destroyed and rebuilt often enough across a thousand years that the 1026 raid usually attached to its name is only one chapter in a much longer demolition history.

More than one destruction

Beyond the raid by Mahmud of Ghazni in 1026 covered in this entry's companion article, the temple was damaged or destroyed on several further occasions across subsequent centuries by different rulers, including reported demolitions attributed to the Delhi Sultanate era and, later, to Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, with local rebuilding efforts following most of these episodes until periods of political instability made reconstruction impossible.

Rebuilt again after independence

The temple standing today was rebuilt beginning in 1950, championed prominently by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, independent India's deputy prime minister, and funded substantially through public subscription, a project widely read at the time and since as a deliberate statement of postcolonial national and religious restoration rather than only an act of religious devotion.

Also one of the twelve

Like Kashi Vishwanath, Somnath is counted among the twelve jyotirlingas, the ranked sites of Shiva's manifestation as light, giving it a devotional standing independent of, though certainly reinforced by, the repeated destruction and rebuilding that has made its history unusually well documented compared to many other ancient Indian temples.