The "Real" answer to Ms. Romila Thapar's puzzle would have been answered had she been sitting pretty like Arab Goddess Su-manat in place of the Shivling when Md. Ghazni arrived.
She could have found a better explanation then, if only she could live to tell.
It's quite ironical that many marvel at the Beauty of the Taj Mahal, but not at the many lives that were sacrificed in building it. Maybe Shajahan had "BIG" Reasons for it, or "It wasn't so bad really".
Romila's narative of Shaiva ritualistic help in building Mosques is "akin" to the Iraqi help to the Americans in the Present day. After all, War has its effect!
Ravi
From: "Rasheed Ahmed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Romila Thapar's new book sheds light on Ghazni's Invasion of Somanatha
Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2004 16:51:53 -0600
http://www.business-standard.com/today/story.asp?Menu=34 <http://www.business-standard.com/today/story.asp?Menu=34&story=34407> &story=34407
The de-fabrication of a history Business Standard C P Bhambhri Published : February 16, 2004
Romila Thapar, one of India's most outstanding historians, has written an important book to explain the 'event of 1026 AD' when Mahmud of Ghazni raided the temple of Somanatha, plundered its wealth and broke the idol.
The dense and scholarly work is extremely relevant today because the forces of Hindutva have made it their business to construct social historical memory to target Indian Muslims by alleging that the Muslim invaders "humiliated" Hindu religious believers by destroying and plundering their places of worship.
The destruction of the temple of Somanatha occupies a central position in the Sangh Parivar's politics of history and it is not an accident that L K Advani launched his journey to Ayodhya in 1990 from Somanatha.
The destruction of the temple was projected as a great historic event of Hindu trauma when a believer of another religion wanted to convey the message that Muslim religious believers were superior to Hindu believers.
In her painstaking research work, Thapar, while appropriately rejecting the menopausal explanation of a historical event, analyses Turko-Persian sources, the Sanskrit inscriptions from Somanatha and its vicinity, biographies, chronicles and epics.
The author has used this opportunity to write about an event that actually took place and link it with the larger issue of "constructing, memory and writing histories".
Since the construction of social memory and the writing of history have to grapple with "the politics of a text", the author raises the question: was it a matter of Muslims desecrating Hindu temples or were there other motives?
The relevance of this question is that temple destruction cannot be reduced to a simplistic Muslim-versus-Hindu issue, and the multiplicity of motives involved in the act have to be found by clinically and critically examining the diverse sources of our information and the motives of the writers, including the hostility between the Arab and Turk writers, on India of that period. This is the real message of Thapar's research work: that every source of historical information should be put under scrutiny because many diverse interpretations are given by different informants, especially Turko-Persian sources.
The real villains of the piece are James Mill and other British colonial writers whose goal it was to project Muslim rule in India as the worst development for the country. Their objective was to suggest that it was British rule that was 'benevolent' and had a progressive social agenda for India.
The worst thing about colonial historiography, which projected society as Hindus versus Muslim, was that it looked at India from 'above' and the interactions, feelings and inter-relationships of the subalterns were totally ignored.
As Thapar informs us: "We have so far seen situations such as the raid on Somanatha as a binary projection of Hindu and Muslim, each viewed as a single, unified, monolithic community. But what the sources tell us is that there are multiple groups with varying agendas either involved in the way the event and Somanatha are represented, or else in ignoring it."
This fact of multiplicity of narratives on Somanatha has been fully substantiated by the author and successfully exposed the politics of history of both the colonial rulers and their imitators, the Sangh Parivar. She complains that, "neither of these historiographies viewed relationships in the past from the perspective of those low in the social order".
For instance, the author tells us that, "From the Veraval-Somanatha inscription of 1264, cooperation in the building of mosques came from a range of social groups from orthodox Shaiva ritual specialists to those wielding administrative authority and from the highest property holders to those with lesser properties."
The author successfully turns the argument against the Sangh's political historians and dramatises the complex reality by telling us that, "Attacks on Hindu temples by Hindu rulers also date to this time... The Jaina temples of Karnataka were desecrated and converted to Shiva use."
The objective of pointing out that Hindus destroyed temples of Hindu sects or Jaina or Buddhist temples is not to score a point but to put history in a proper perspective.
Thus, a Muslim raider destroying a temple should be understood by seriously examining the historical evidence that sheds light on the existence of a multiplicity of motives of the destroyers of the temple, whether Muslim or Hindu.
The author has raised a pertinent point to expose the intentions of the preachers of hatred with their half-truths about Somanatha. She writes: "The temple is a sacred place. But it has not been and is not the only kind of sacred place in India. It was both proceeded by and was and in coexistence with many other forms: the animistic worship of nature and natural forms such as mountains and rivers; sanctuaries around burials in the vicinity of megalithic settlement...".
Also, many temples as places of worship "reinforced social demarcation", a fact that continues in the form of Dalit struggle for entry to temples.
Moreover, the temple is not only a sacred space; "It became a signature of power, legitimised royal authority and participated in local administration". The projection of a desecrated temple as the sacred place of worship is motivated by the politics of hatred because temple construction was used by rulers to legitimise their rule.
A final warning about the use of historical sources for the construction of history is that, "The literature of medieval courts is frequently enveloped in a recognisable idiom, sometimes religious. But the idiom is not necessarily the reality and it may veil the inevitably complex reality. The historian therefore has to sift the literal from the truth. This requires that the historian listen to many voices, where available, before assessing the cause of historical process."
Thus, the existence of Hindu trauma at the destruction of the temple of Somanatha is not substantiated by the available historical sources of that time.
On the contrary, the political construction of the social memory of a Hindu trauma was manufactured by colonial historians and their successors, the Hindu political historians. The issue is not history but the politics of history and history in politics is always constructed on the basis of half-truths, falsehoods and poison injected into the mass consciousness.
Thapar has succeeded in laying to rest the false history about the Somanatha temple and such a contribution should be read by everyone who is interested in history and not in the fabrication of history.
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<http://www.indianexpress.com/sunday/eye_index.html>
Sunday, January 25, 2004
He Did it for the Money
But Romila Thapar wonders if Mahmud (despite 17 campaigns) mistook Somnath for Arab goddess Su-manat, finds Renuka Narayanan
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".
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=39623
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