Somanatha – The Shrine Eternal

Title: Somanatha – The Shrine Eternal

Author: K M Munshi

Publisher: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1976 (First published 1951)

ISBN: Nil

Pages: 186

 

Sometimes a place of worship is more than a location where devotees gather to offer hymns or libation to the deity and go home contended afterwards. When that place gets elevated in importance such as the direct patronage of a king or the allegiance of a large group of people, it becomes the symbol of the kingdom or nation. An attack or act of desecration of the place then becomes an atrocity against the people. Even those belonging to other religions then get offended at an affront to that shrine. The Somanath temple is one such institution that is acting as shorthand for India’s destiny in the last millennium. Coincidentally, the fall of the temple to Muslim invaders historically marks the birth of the longer of the two colonialisms that crushed India under its boots – the Muslim colonialism. The temple was destroyed many times, but the undying national spirit reconstructed it each time though on some occasions it was converted to a mosque. After India gained independence, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel intervened to reconstruct the temple under government supervision. The first edition of this book was hurriedly written to synchronize its publication with the installation ceremony of Somanatha in May 1951. This book is published by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan as part of a book university series containing 100 books each in nine languages. The objectives are the reintegration of Indian culture in the light of modern knowledge and to suit our present-day needs and the resuscitation of the fundamental values in their pristine vigour. Kanaiyalal Maneklal Munshi, popularly known as K M Munshi, was an Indian independence activist, politician, writer and educationist from Gujarat. A lawyer by profession, he had served as a minister in Nehru’s first cabinet and later as governor of Uttar Pradesh. This book was written while he was serving as the chairman of the advisory board of Somanatha Trust which was tasked with the rebuilding of the temple.

 

Somanatha temple was well known in India in the ancient past. Prabhasa Tirtha, where the shrine is located, is mentioned in the Mahabharata. Soma, the moon god, bathes at the point where the river Saraswati joins the sea and worships Shiva at the shrine – so the legends go. To visit Prabhasa on a moonless night which falls on a Monday, to undertake a fast, to bathe where Saraswati river meets the sea and to have a darshan of Somanatha is believed to render merit equivalent to numberless religious sacrifices. It was the place where the Yadavas fought among themselves which extinguished the tribe. This was where Srikrishna died after hit by an arrow. The first temple of Somanatha was probably established by the beginning of Christian era. The powerful Pashupata sect is centred around this temple. The first epigraphic evidence of Somanatha is of 960 CE in which Ananta Deva, a northern Shilahara king, came with an army to worship Somanatha at Prabhasa.

 

Mahmud of Ghazni was the first invader who had sacked Somanatha. Munshi gives a detailed account of the invasion without going into the gory particulars. On the morning of Oct 18, 1025, Mahmud left Ghazni with 30,000 cavalry. An equal number of camels carried the supply of water. They crossed the Thar desert and reached Patan. On Jan 8, 1026, after a battle in which 50,000 Indians laid down their lives, Mahmud captured the fort, entered the temple that was sanctified by centuries of devotion. He broke the linga to pieces, looted the temple and burnt it to the ground. Munshi then claims that Mahmud quickly left the place on the news of the approach of a powerful Hindu army. But al-Biruni writes four years later that Mahmud ‘utterly ruined the prosperity of the country and Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions’. Mahmud invaded Somanatha seventeen times, but the author provides a much sanitized version in which only the first attempt is mentioned. Probably, working under Nehru must have prompted him to placate his boss’ secular image and by corollary, to be economical with truth.

 

Not only content with the ignominy of desecration they heaped on Somanath, Muslim invaders converted it to a mosque twice. In 1299, Alaf Khan, a general of Ala-ud-din Khilji, sacked Prabhasa. He broke open the shrine, shattered the idol to pieces and carried away the fragments in a cart to Delhi. In 1469, Muhammad Bedga converted Somanatha into a mosque. But the structure went under ruin with no worship whether Hindu or Muslim. In 1701, Aurangzeb ordered to destroy the temple beyond possibility of repairs. By the nineteenth century, the Nawab of Junagadh happened to be the custodian of the structure, but the ruler of Baroda, who was a Hindu, managed religious affairs. There were frequent disputes between the two princes as the Muslim Nawab still wanted to control the temple, probably deriving inspiration from his predecessors. These were adjudicated by the British who mostly favoured the Nawab. After partition of India, the Nawab suddenly acceded to Pakistan. But the state was not geographically contiguous with that country and the population was overwhelmingly Hindu. The people rose in rebellion and the dog-loving Nawab fled with his kennel while leaving his wives behind. The author remarks that even in 1948, the gudhamandapa (central hall) was partly covered by a mosque-like dome. The structure was demolished and a grand temple erected in its place.

 

Munshi spends some time in listing out reconstruction efforts that had taken place on the temple. In fact, it was repaired and reconstructed immediately after Ghazni’s first attempt in 1026. Heroic action followed each successive raid. But the most magnificent was by Kumarapala who reconstructed the temple in 1169, which was the Fifth Temple. Aged, infirm, desecrated, it stood till Sardar Patel rescued it from neglect and pledged himself to its reconstruction. The decision to rebuild the temple was announced by Patel on Nov 13, 1947. Foundation was laid for the Seventh Temple (historically) on May 8, 1950. Installation of idols took place in May 1951 in the presence of Rajendra Prasad, India’s first President, under fierce opposition from Nehru who feared that secularism would be eclipsed by the republic’s president attending a religious ceremony. Prasad did not cave in to Nehru and boldly attended citing national honour. Munshi does not elaborate on this issue. The construction of the temple was completed fourteen years later in 1965. The overall height of the structure was 155 feet. No temple of this size has been built in India for the last 800 years.

 

After the Indian government started the activities for reconstruction with privately subscribed funds, suggestions arose to retain the old ruined temple as such. The author accuses them of worshiping dead monuments. However, the committee ruled out the idea as the temple lived in the sentiment of the whole nation and decided to rebuild it at the same place. After all, if the archeologists wanted a ruined temple for academic purposes, they are spoilt for choice among thousands of such dilapidated shrines destroyed by Muslim invaders elsewhere in India. In a lighter sense, it was a forerunner of the rallying cry of mandir wahi banayenge by about four decades. An intensive excavation by professionals brought to light material remains of earlier temples buried below. Centuries of vandalism has left nothing but traces of the great temple to testify to its ancient grandeur.

 

The book is confessed to be hurriedly written to coincide with the installation of idols in 1951. All the data was collected in the short period and much referential depth is lacking in the narrative. A part of the book titled ‘History of Excavation’ is written by B K Thapar of the Archeological Survey. There is much repetition between the different parts of the book. Verbatim reproduction of long epigraphic texts adds no value to the readability of the book. Several rare photographs are included in this small volume which are not available from other sources. Altogether, the book is a fine example of a first attempt to recreate history of a monument that is indistinguishable with national pride.

 

The book is recommended.

 

Rating: 3 Star

 

Explaining Life through Evolution

Title: Explaining Life through Evolution

Author: Prosanta Chakrabarty

Publisher: Penguin Random House, 2022 (First)

ISBN: 9780670095100

Pages: 232     

 

We are said to be living in a post-truth era where truth is not deemed something absolute. People accept anything as truth which they wish it to be. Social media makes a celebrity’s truth the same for all his followers. However, these are philosophical concepts open to interpretation at many levels and ways. I don’t know how scientific concepts which are always true can be reconciled with the concept of post-truth I mentioned above. Touching an electrically live object causes a painful experience is a proposition that is true whether you believe that there is such a thing as electricity or not. But facts in natural sciences cannot be expressed in such outright terms even though a large number of researchers have studied the phenomena and are convinced of its merit. Evolution is one such fact of the development of life on this planet. Since it runs counter to the fundamental postulate of Abrahamic religions on the creation of life, there is widespread opposition to it. We have seen similar resistance in the past when the Church opposed Galileo’s heliocentric theory and know what has come out of it eventually. Till that time, evolution will continue to be resisted by believers who propose comic alternatives such as Creation or Intelligent Design. This book is intended to explain the topic of evolution ‘to anyone with an open mind to learning’. It is also meant to be a tool to aid those who themselves want to explain the topic to others. Prosanta Chakrabarty is an evolutionary biologist at Louisiana State University where he is a professor and curator. He was born in Canada and brought up in the USA.

 

Creationists often ridicule evolution as ‘just’ a theory of the development of life. The author accepts that but adds the clarification that a theory in science is an overarching term that has stood the test of time. A theory is often interchangeably used with ‘law’. But in everyday parlance, ‘theory’ is something questionable that remains to be proven. It is this misconception which serves as a perfect opportunity for religion to teach creation and intelligent design in US schools as ‘alternatives’. Chakrabarty then explains Darwin’s ideas on what happened on earth. There is a single origin of life here. That was a huge leap forward in thinking. Natural selection is the causative mechanism to explain the diversity of all life. This idea was far ahead of its time when Darwin first introduced it. Most scientists then was of the opinion that different human races originated in distinct ways and places in the long past.

 

The book glances upon the period when Darwin’s “Origin of Species’ first appeared. Though Darwin had postulated that species groups mutate over time, he had no idea of how it actually came about. Unknown to Darwin, the ideas of genetics were just taking shape in the garden of Gregor Mendel and anything like DNA was not even dreamed of. That is the beauty and power of Darwin’s theory. Later discoveries corroborated its hypotheses and strengthened it on the face of severe criticism on the spiritual front. The zeitgeist of the time was that offspring were a mix of their parents, which is called blending inheritance. If this was true, variation would be lost in each generation due to the indiscriminate mixing. Mendel’s experiments proved this wrong and established that genetic traits are carried to future generations in discrete form rather than continuous. But Mendel did not know how variation was maintained in the gene pool. Mistakes in copying billions of DNA pairs cause mutations and change in traits. The author also explains how different groups in a species who are separated by geographical barriers change into different species in a process called speciation. Here, isolation and time is the key formula. The gene pool of separated groups will diverge through non-adaptive forces (neutral mutations, genetic drift) and adaptive forces (natural selection) due to the different environments these populations find themselves in.

 

A notable feature in religious revelations of the origin of life is that Man is the perfect creation of God. The Semitic religions claim that Man was created in God’s image. This book punches holes in this argument by highlighting evolutionary accretions in the human body that denigrates God’s talent as a craftsman, not to say of the blunders He has committed in ‘designing’ the human body. Several examples are given, of which the kneecap is one which is a troublesome set of tendons and ligaments where a ball-and-joint like the shoulder would have been a better design. The blood pressure in human body is more than other animals as we took to bipedalism later in the series and a higher pressure is required to pump against the force of gravity. But, only one coronary artery is there to supply blood to heart’s muscles to do the job. Several animals have more. Fish hearts are more foolproof that don’t get easily clogged with fat. As a land animal, we have the advantage of getting more oxygen directly from air than from water, but gas exchange is more difficult through lungs than with gills. Moreover, we use the same tubing for breathing as well as feeding with the attendant risk of choking.

 

The author has not been successful in achieving his objective of making evolution easily understandable to lay readers. But he has made it a guidebook of Wokeism by unnecessary tirades against supposed social injustices that are irrelevant in a book on evolution. In an instance of extremely perverted sensitivity, Chakrabarty advocates that humans don’t need genders. This is not due to any scientific or survival imperative, but due to some individuals in the LGBTQ community show deviant behaviour from their assigned genders. He then picks bones at the scientific community which usually represents a white man on the node to represent all humanity in the tree of life. He argues that representation matters and seeing the same subgroup represented as the ideal human is damaging. He doesn’t mention what it damages – probably wokeism, extreme liberalism or leftism? What in fact is the harm done if a person drawing the tree of life put the image of a person who looks familiar (or similar) to him? If evolution was discovered by African scholars, a black man would have appeared there and the world would have accepted that too. The author brings in Donald Trump into this book by quoting one of his speeches confusing viruses and their supposed vulnerability to antibiotics. Even Narendra Modi is there at the receiving end of the author’s barbs because he and his party are accused to be promoting ‘eugenic-themed pseudo-science’. He then calls Henry Ford ‘Hitler’s Hero’. He even manages to include Hindutva and Dalit-Brahmin hierarchy in this book. This is good political propaganda but a poor scientific treatise. He is more kind to the creationists than the political right.

 

The book is a total disappointment as it is ill-focused on all important topics and dwells too long on side-issues. Each chapter is practically independent of each other and hence the entire ensemble lacks coherence. Here you see the individual VIBGYOR colours but not the composite white light. Concepts are explained by illustrations that are complex, intimidating, not self-evident and probably created by a person who finds evolution confusing to himself. Each of them includes a half-page caption to make it appear intelligible. The book incorporates an irrelevant comic strip on Darwin’s life that is totally redundant with nothing new or interesting. Some illustrations printed in monochrome with detailed captions are repeated as colour plates with the exact same captions. Altogether, this is a miserably failed attempt to explain the subject in a meaningful way. Obviously, the author has wasted much time in this effort and the readers are advised not to repeat the same folly.

 

The book is not recommended.

Rating: 1 Star

 

Akbar of Hindustan

Title: Akbar of Hindustan

Author: Parvati Sharma

Publisher: Juggernaut Books, 2022 (First)

ISBN: 9789391165512

Pages: 386

 

There are very many number of books on Akbar in vogue. This book is the latest in the series. I slightly wondered what new things this author has in her oeuvre to tell us that we have not heard before and prepared a blank sheet in my mind to note down such things. What came of it I will describe at the end of this review. And I also failed to categorize this work into any literary genre. Obviously the author wanted some parts to shine out as a novel, some parts as story, still others as historical fiction and the whole of it perhaps as history. Unfortunately, it has turned out to be a chimera of fact and fiction. The Mughal period of Indian history is now increasingly subjected to critical review by scholars who want to eliminate the hyperbole, false accounts and misleading analyses put together by Left-Islamist historians earlier. This book is a feeble attempt to drive a wedge in the popular narrative by inventing – or at least unearthing from hitherto unheard of texts – incidents in which historical characters who are popular in today’s India have acted in ways that defy modern morality. Thus we read about Tulsidas regretting that the Shudras imparting knowledge to non-Brahmins and Birbal arranging the demolition of a temple. Akbar’s reign was marked by a pattern of steady, unrelenting expansion of the realm, a clear focus on the generation of wealth and an equally resolute suppression of any opposition to the emperor. This is clearly catalogued in the book. Parvati Sharma lives in New Delhi where she studied English literature and Indian history. She writes novels and children’s books. Her debut work was known for its depictions of love and sexuality in urban India.

 

The book is not tightly organized around a defining layout and completely lacks a structure. The emperor’s sayings and deeds constitute the bulk of the narrative. While reading through it, one cannot help wonder at the part played by chance in the crucial battle at Panipat (the second). Akbar’s forces met Hemchandra Vikramaditya (Hemu) who was the vizier of Adil Shah Suri, the last of the Suri clan. Hemu did not wear a helmet while riding an elephant in the battle. Suddenly, an arrow pierced his eye, but he bravely pulled the arrow out and with it the eye out of the socket which he wrapped in his handkerchief. But after some time, he slumped unconscious. The elephant was caught and the grievously injured Hemu brought before Akbar who was only fourteen years old. His regent Bairam Khan wanted Akbar to behead him as ‘a blow for empire and Islam’. Akbar meekly obeyed. The Mughals did not leave Hemu’s eighty-year old father also. They captured him and offered him his life in return for converting to Islam. He protested that ‘after eight decades of having worshipped my god according to my religion, why should I change it at this time merely from fear of my life and without understanding it come into your way of worship?’. The fanatical Mughals were not diverted by such theological niceties. The old man was summarily executed like his son. These incidents show how bloodthirsty and devoid of compassion the Mughals acted. But remember, they were the most benevolent under Akbar!

 

It is true that Akbar’s attitude changed during the latter half of his reign and other religions received some royal patronage but never equal status with Islam. Akbar established the Ibadat Khana as a debating platform for various Muslim sects to argue among themselves. But religion is best believed in its entirety rather than subjecting it to rational arguments by the opponents. Akbar saw through its hollowness and was disillusioned. Then he invited other heterodox sects and even other religions. In the end, he decided to start a cult of his own called din-e-Ilahi. Surprisingly, the author makes very few remarks about the new sect on which historian Abraham Eraly heaps his praise as “for a brief, shining moment, a new and brilliant star blazed over Fatehpur Sikri. Then the moment passed. And the night closed in again”. Sharma consistently tries to gloss over temple destruction and forced conversion which was commonplace. In one instance, she talks about Birbal, Akbar’s Hindu minister, sacking and desecrating a temple in Nagarkot and concludes rhetorically that ‘a Shia commander, running a bloody campaign for a Brahmin courtier by assaulting a shrine is not the usual template of bigotry’ (p.175). It is construed as ‘changing affiliations and antagonisms that propelled Akbar’s world’. This is a typical trait of the Left-Islamist cabal. They would arraign any number of reasons or provocations for an act which they cannot openly support with modern morality, but would never pinpoint religious bigotry of the invaders as the prime cause.

 

It is really amusing to observe Parvati Sharma bringing up a retrospective justification for ‘love jihad’ which is a serious problem now faced by Indian society with the story of a couple engaging in inter-religious love. In her story, a Sayyid nobleman falls in love with a Hindu married woman in Agra. Musa and Mohini, as they are called, secretly united twice but forcibly separated each time by the woman’s relatives. Musa dies of heartburn at the ‘injustice’ of Hindus not letting a married woman into his harem. At this, Mohini duly converts to Islam and commits suicide. The author then seethes at the fact that the couple would have met the same fate in twenty-first century Agra. She is probably right. Today’s Agra, or Uttar Pradesh or even India for that matter, has not reached the stage already arrived at in Pakistan where Hindu women are simply kidnapped, declared to have embraced Islam and her relatives then lose any legal right to reclaim her. Is this the model she wants to establish in India? Now we go back to Mughal times for a moment to examine love as a noble emotion that transcends religion. If such was the case, then why is it that not a single case is known where a Mughal princess married a Hindu nobleman who were said to be aplenty in the Mughal court? After all, love is blind, but the author is not. And she knows how to sound the right notes to appear secular in today’s India. Akbar commissioned many translation projects of Hindu religious texts in Sanskrit to Persian. But behind his back, the Persian scholars reproached the books proclaiming polytheism. Badauni termed the Mahabharata ‘a collection of puerile absurdities’ (p.196). Further details of the reluctance of Persian scholars literally to touch Indian epics with their hands can be seen in my review of Audrey Truschke’s book, ‘Culture of Encounters – Sanskrit at the Mughal Court’ earlier in this blog.

 

The book offers nothing new and is just a run-of-the-mill product that satisfies nobody. It starts with an intimidating cast of characters that gives 106 names with their relationship noted in a small paragraph. Needless to say, this is a pure wastage of time as the readers won’t be able to remember even half of them. And some of them are mentioned only once in the main text, so this exercise appears pointless. The requirement of referring to the names after reading the book does not arise either. The author should have provided a caveat informing the readers that they stand to lose nothing if they skipped the section. The book also includes many irrelevant side issues like Akbar’s hatred of homosexuality among his high-ranked officers and the detailed handling of such an affair involving an Uzbek warlord in his service. What is most repugnant about the book is its thinly veiled attempt at cheap political criticism aimed at current nationalist parties. Historians – I am not sure if the author can be called one – should stick to their topics rather than dabble in contemporary political drama and make a mess of what they should have done.

 

In the beginning, I mentioned about a blank sheet in my mind. At the end of the reading, I had yet to scribble anything there apart from some remarks about the jarring political tone of the book. This book is useless as regards information or entertainment and hence not recommended.

 

Rating: 2 Star