The subject of desecration of a place of worship by an aggressor of a rival faith has been a bone of contention among scholars and lay people for decades if not for centuries. From academic research based institutions to news broadcasting agencies, all have milked this particular cow and have taken this topic to a point of saturation from where we don’t seem to move ahead. And contrary to popular belief, the advent of the internet has proven to have made people more ignorant than enlightened with the spread of misinformation and propaganda toeing the party line. Owing to the precedence that this subject has acquired in modern times, in this article we will delve into the history of this popular narrative and do a comparative analysis of case studies which would help us in extracting a contextual understanding of the subject matter.
The earliest instance that we find of this civilizational acknowledgement of desecration of one’s faith by an invading force is in the mid nineteenth century. The morale and reputation of the British East India Company took a big dent in 1842 when its army of about sixteen thousand soldiers was annihilated in the First Afghan War (1839-42). Now to recall the fact that it was only a handful of British (around 800,000) who managed to consolidate their rule on the Indian heartland inhabited by numbers far greater than their own, they would have had to create narratives to justify both their superiority vis-a-vis the Indian populace and their imagined accountability towards their subjects. So in order to save face after the Afghan War and to ensure that they kept a firm hold over their Indian subjects, they veiled the conquest as a demand for reparations to the Indian populace of the crimes committed by Mahmud Ghazni in the 11th century when he sacked the Temple of Somnath and carried off the temple’s gates on his way back to Afghanistan. Now the British sought to pacify their Indian populace by restoring these fictitious gates back to their rightful owners in India and thus gain some agency among them. And thus started this long narrative of invasion and desecration which was further propounded during the freedom struggle when religious affiliations took nationalistic tendencies
and people started looking into the past for heroes who upheld dharma and villains who tried to taint it.
Now that it has been established that it was Mahmud Ghazni’s raid on Somnath in 1025 that started it all, let us delve into the socio political background of this period by discussing Mahmud in congruence with his contemporary Rajendra I of the Chola Empire. Three years before Ghazni sacked the temple of Somnath, another expedition under the authority of Rajendra I marched 1600 kilometers north from the Chola’s capital at Thanjavur. Moving along the eastern coast, the army after subduing kings in Orissa, went on to defeat rulers in the western and south-central districts of the Ganges Delta. They ultimately went on to have a gruesome battle with Mahipala, the then ruler of the regent Pala empire of the Bengal region. The war booty of this expedition which the southerners took back with them consisted of a bronze image of Siva from a temple patronized by Mahipala, images of Bhairav, Bhairavi and Kali from the Kalinga rulers of Orissa along with precious gems.
At the same time when the power of the Cholas was nearing its zenith, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni planned a raid of his own on the temple of Somnath, built of stone about a hundred years ago and situated on Gujarat’s southern coast. The son of a Turkish speaking Central Asian slave, Mahmud raided India seventeen times in a span of almost twenty five years starting with his raid on Peshawar in 1001. In October of 1025, he started out with a cavalry of thirty thousand from his capital Ghazni in eastern Afghanistan and made his way through the ravines of the Sulaiman Mountains, heading south-east towards the indus valley. He reached the wealthy temple of Somnath situated on the shores of the Arabian Sea by December 1025 after having crossed the Thar desert. He attacked the temple, plundered its wealth and ordered that the residing idol dedicated to lord Siva be destroyed and taken back to Ghazni to be walked upon. For this infamous raid, the persian chroniclers hailed Mahmud as an iconoclast upholding Islam’s disdain for idol worship but contrastingly the contemporary sanskrit scholars of Somnath made no mention of it. The economic activities during this time also didn’t witness any disturbance and trade through the ports remained quite stable. The record of a pilgrimage made to Somnath by a king from Goa, twelve years after the raid, also fails to mention it. An inscription from 1169 records repairs being made to the temple due to natural deterioration over time and not because of the raid. Another instance is from 1216 when the overlords of Somnath reinforced its fortifications, not fearing the invaders from beyond the Khyber Pass, but to secure it from raids made by Hindu rulers of the neighboring Malwa region. It was as if the raid was either forgotten or the people were used to such instances of constant invasion and plunder. But why?
The answer to this lies in the geostrategic and martial culture of this period propagated in the
Sanskrit treatises on power, wealth and rulership. In the context of warfare, classical Indian thought affirmed that enemies should be accommodated as loyal subordinates instead of being completely annihilated. This was due to the fact that political relations were highly dynamic to the sense that no one was either a permanent enemy nor a permanent ally. This set of principles was uniformly followed by almost all dynasties of the time wanting to expand their empire by conquering other rulers and accommodating them as loyal subordinates, leading to perpetual conflict among rulers resulting in a constant invasion of each other’s territory. This martial culture further raises the point of the role and representation of temples in these raids. This period also saw the manifestation of the king’s power and his claim to sovereignty into a patron deity who was considered to be the real ruler and the king as their mere representative. This notion was propagated by the patronage of priests and construction of massive, bejeweled temples by the king that became symbolic of his power and his sovereign right to rule. This eventually led to these temples occupying the center stage in politically charged conflicts. Now the invading rulers in a ploy to discredit the regent king, desecrated these temples in order to legitimize their own victory. Thus establishing their own sovereign.
This doctrine was thus deeply entrenched in Indian political treatises resulting in a flux of geostrategic conflict. Recorded instances of Indian kings attacking the temples of their political rivals dates from at least the eighth century. Thus the raid of Mahmud Ghazni in 1025, when taken out of this geostrategic context and wrapped in the thinly veiled rhetoric of the aftermath of the Afghan War in 1842, led to the creation of the narrative of religious persecution of the Hindu realm by an invading Islamic force. But when compared to the raids of Rajaraja I and other contemporaries, it sheds light on the martial culture and statecraft of the medieval era in which temples were the symbolic manifestation of state power.
Well researched 👍
Very informative.