January 8th 2012

January is the month for New Resolutions intended to improve the person or the quality of life. In India far too much money and effort is being spent on ‘Security’ resulting in the important areas of Health and Education being starved of funds. Perhaps some attention to facts and the destruction of bogeys and patently false myths will cause a change in mindsets and help reduce tensions and obviate the necessity for spending vast sums of money and effort on army and police.

The British propagated two great untruths about India . One was that India was always and irretrievably poor and the other that Hindus and Muslims are born and irreconcilable enemies destined to be forever at each other’s throats.

A study of the cold facts  will show that as the total arable area available in India is much higher in proportionate terms than that in any other country—even in absolute terms it is higher than most much larger countries. Similarly History reveals that communal riots (Hindus vs Muslims) did not exist before 1857—that there is no battle in which a purely Muslim Army fought an army composed only of Hindus. Even the greatest looter of temples, Sultan Mahmoud of Ghazni had a Brahmin general known as Tilak in his army and used him against his northern subjects who were all Muslim.

Unfortunately this well needed change will cut away the very ground under the feet of self proclaimed Hindus like Shri Praveen Togadia and Shri Narendra Modi of Gujarat and Shri Lal Krishna Advani erstwhile of Sindh and now an M.P. from Gujarat.

As Gujarat is the most communalized state in India and its recent pogrom against Muslims still an open wound in the Indian mind our Ministry of Minorities should abandon its passive and inert role for a dynamic and positive one in which it addresses real problems and tries to find solutions.

The average Hindu suffers from the alleged trauma of the sack of the temple of Somanatha near the Veeraval port of Gujarat . This feeling is common as between the self proclaimed and frankly communal followers of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh and the so called secular members of the Indian National Congress. This was shown when the shrine of Wali Fakhkhanee a Sufi saint and also a significant poet of Reiykhtaa and Dakhkhinee now called Urdu was razed to the ground by the RSS and totally obliterated by a metalled road running over the spot by the Congress which was in power in the civic municipal authority.

The Myth of Hindu trauma at the sacking of Somanatha was assiduously constructed by the British as part of their policy of of ‘Divide and Rule’. The foundation of their activity was the anti Muslim mindset which has been in existence in Christian Europe since the Crusade of the 10th Century. The present leader of the anti Muslim Crusade is the United States of America as successors to the ideal of ‘white, Christian supremacy’ developed in the 18th and 19th Centuries in Europe .

Romila Thapar’s history of ‘Early India ‘ published by Penguin examines the history of Mahmoud and Somanatha objectively and in detail. She says

‘Temples built with royal grants, that were maintained throught the income of estates and donations, served multiple functions s did religious monuments elsewhere such as churches and mosques. The primary function of a temple was as a place for religious devotion, especially if built for a specific religious sect or deity. But frequently it performed other roles as well.’

‘It was a statement of the power of the patron, indicating the generosity of his patronage and was intended to impress those who visited it.’

‘Conquest was therefore sometimes imprinted by the destruction of a temple.’

‘Thus when the Rashtrakuta King, Indra III, defeated the Pratiharas in the early 10th Century,a Pratihara temple at Kalpa was torn up to establish the victory’

‘On defeating the Chalukyas, the Paramara king of Malwa, Sabhavarma, destroyed the temples the Chalukyas had built for Jainas as well as the mosques for Arabs. Both the Jainas and the Arabs were trading communities of consequence, hence the royal patronage.’

Thapar states the reasons for the immense wealth accumulated in temples of the era and says

‘Kalhana (who wrote the Rajtarangini) records that Harsha of Kasmir not only looted temples but went on to appoint a special officer to oversee and coordinate this activity.

There are many accounts of the temple of Somanatha and the narrative of Al Beruni places its origin to only a hundred years before the raid by Mahmoud in 1026. He states that it was located within a fort on the edge of the sea’ It was venerated by sailors and traders who traveled as far as China in the East and Zanzibar in the West.

Al Beruni identifies the icon in worship as a lingam. There is no unanimity on this identification as some accounts make it out to be an anthropomorphic idol of Manaat, a South Arabian pre Islamic Goddess who escaped the destruction of the icons in worship at the Holy Ka’abaa before the advent of Islam.

In the early 19th Century the British in India were in crisis as their forward policy in Afghanistan had failed miserably. The Governor General, Lord Ellenborough converted this crisis into an opportunity by asking the commander of the army in Afghanistan to bring back the doors of the mausoleum of Mahmoud from Ghazni. Once in the plains these doors were mounted on  bullock carts strung together and covered with colourful tentage. A band of trumpeters and drummers was provided to accompany the entourage from place to place. On arrival at a habitation the band would play to attract attention and when a crowd gathered the Governor General’s proclamation was read out. It said that the doors or gates of Somanatha were removed by Mahmoud (a Muslim) to insult Hindu sentiment. The British as friends of Indians and preservers of tradition had brought them back to undo the wrongs of earlier times. Even the British themselves did not buy this story and fiery debates raged in their Parliament. The doors were subjected to detailed examination and found fake. They are now lidged in the Agra Red Fort and the sign spells out the sad story.

Unfortunately this alleged ‘trauma’ is now ‘the tale of the never ending wrong’ and has communalized the Hindus of Gujarat and elsewhere. We hope that the Ministry Of Minority Affairs will examine the problem and set the record straight.

Published as “Setting the Somnatha record straight is an imperitive” in the Sunday Guardian.