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![]() A new book
by Romila Thapar on Somnath re-examines the vexed issue of Ghazni’s
destruction of the famous Shiva temple in 1026 and the consequences, leading
to Advani’s Rath Yatra and the Gujarat riots.
She says her intent is “to explore the inter-relationship between an
event and the historiography that grows around it by placing the narratives
in a historical context.” Rather than a detailed reconstruction, she
emphasises “significant questions: who were the groups actually
involved and affected, if the temple did in fact continuously alternate
between rebuilding and destruction? What were the relationships between these
groups and did these change after each activity? Was it a matter of Muslims
desecrating Hindu temples, or were there other motives? Were such acts
deliberately exaggerated for purposes other than receiving religious
acclaim?”
Thapar
examines six categories of sources for answers. The largest, traditionally
relied-on, is the body of Turko-Persian narratives and chronicles. She also
looks at Sanskrit inscriptions from in and around Somnath four centuries
after the raid; Jain biographies and chronicles (pointing to rivalry with
Shaivas), Rajput epics, oral traditions on Mahmud, the British colonial angle
which resulted in Lord Ellenborough’s ‘restitution’ of the
supposed ‘gates of Somnath’ spirited away as a symbol of conquest
by Mahmud and the Indian nationalist reconstruction of this event.
The
reasonable points: Mahmud, the son of the slave-king Subuktigin, needed money
to sustain his new-caught kingdom and so he went raiding wherever he sniffed
money. Mahmud needed legitimisation as the big new player in Eastern Islam
from the Caliph of Baghdad and so he exaggerated his conquests (or his
chroniclers did). Later Muslim chroniclers added more masala to his exploits
to establish him as the founder of Islam in India (which he
patently was not).
Arabs,
the seafarer-trader ancestors of non-Sunni Muslim communities in Gujarat like
Bohra and Ismaili (like the Moplah of Kerala and the Marakayar of Tamil Nadu)
need to be distinguished from invading Central Asian-Turks like Mahmud. The
former became peaceful local settlers with strong business connections with
the Jains, who even built mosques for them. They must not be monolithised
into the general hate category of ‘Muslim invader’ (who, by the
way, had Hindu mercenaries in his pay), which is what the British did, to
divide and rule, a cue tragically picked by Hindu and Muslim nationalists in
the early 20th century (K.M. Munshi is cited frequently), which led to
Partition and never-ending Hindu-Muslim animosity. Good, so far, and what
every sensible Indian wants to take forward to a positive plane.
Then,
Thapar loses it, coming as she does from the ‘slave scholar’
generation. In trying “to suggest that the event of Mahmud’s raid
on the temple of Somnatha did not create a dichotomy”, Thapar is unable
to match the courage of Aligarh historian Prof. Mohammed Habib who in the
1920s was vilified by the Urdu press for saying squarely: “No honest
historian should seek to hide, and no Musalman acquainted with his faith will
try to justify, the wanton destruction of temples that followed in the wake
of the Ghaznavid army... A people is not conciliated by being robbed of all
that it holds most dear, nor will it love a faith that comes to it in the
guise of plundering armies and leaves devastated fields and ruined cities...
the policy of Mahmud secured the rejection of Islam without a hearing.”
![]() Thapar even glosses over Alberuni’s famous report
post-Somnath, despite citing his as “the most sober version”.
Alberuni (his was the first foreigner’s account of India after
Hsuien Tsang’s) wrote: “Mahmud ruined the prosperity of the
country and performed there wonderful exploits by which the Hindus became
like atoms scattered in all directions and like a tale of old in the mouths
of the people. Their scattered remains cherish, of course, the most
inveterate aversion towards all Muslims.”
Thapar’s
contention is that only Brahmins and Rajputs were affected by Muslim
invasions, whereas the ordinary people were drawn to Islam for its equality
in brotherhood. But with the other breath she points out how Arab settlers in
Gujarat picked up local customs,
including caste. Similarly, after examining Sanskrit inscriptions —
from four centuries later — she says there was evidence of prosperity,
trade and travel. But nobody (to the lay reader’s knowledge) says that
it was not back to business as usual, even while accommodating new political
realities. Similarly, she wonders why the Prithviraj Raso (the bardic history
of the last Hindu king of Delhi who fell to
Mohammed Ghori’s second attack in 1194) does not mention Mahmud’s
raid on Somnath. This leaves the lay reader profoundly uneasy: What exactly
is Thapar trying to say, by such reasoning? That the Chahamana (Chauhan) bard
in Delhi writing in praise of his
immediate patron should have chronicled what befell a Chalukya in Gujarat years
ago?
Yet
another over-exertion by Thapar: she says the name ‘Hammir’ is
“a Sanskritisation of the Arab title Amir... The currency of Hammira as
a personal name among Rajputs suggests an admiration for the qualities
associated with those referred to as Amirs”. But ‘hamm’
means ‘to move ahead’.
But
Thapar’s most interesting speculation, citing the Ghaznavid panegyrics
of Farukkhi and Gardizi is that the Mahmud’s 17 expeditions were a
justifiable Islamic mission (to another country, against another’s
house of worship), because he mistook the shivling of Somnath for the
‘lost’ idol of the Arab goddess ‘su-Manat’ whom the
Prophet of Islam had decreed should be destroyed. In the end, what Thapar
scores in saying, “Not everyone was destructive” and “Life
went on anyhow”, she loses, in a typical-of-her-ilk denouement, where
she argues, “He had BIG reasons” and, most peculiarly, “It
wasn’t so bad really”.
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