Somnatha - I

When Mahmud of Ghazni raided Somnatha and desecrated the temple, what was the subsequent reaction from the local people? how did hindus view that event? how did they come to terms with it? After Ghazni's raid he had been and still continues to be hailed as a champion of Islam, as a holy warrior who brought Islam in India. His raids are glorified in words and repeated in deeds throughout the medieval Islamic world. Turko-Persian accounts mention the event in gory details. If we call this 'epics of conquest' what were the corresponding 'epics of resistance' from hindus of the time? what was the retaliation?

There is a serious lack of contemporary accounts to begin with and that hindus have no sense of history writing complicates it further, what is available is the inscriptions and texts from about a century onwards of the event and there seem to be a mysterious silence about the event. Almost all accounts mentioning somnath apart from Turko-persian ones don't mention the raid at all. But one unusual 'memory' manifests itself repeatedly. One inscription dating the reconstruction of the temple in 12th century(that is more than a century after the raid) attributes the dilapidated temple(and hence the need to reconstruct) to 'Kaliyuga' where there is moral decay,rajas dont protect their temples and administrators are corrupt. There are stories saying that temples will continue to be destroyed in Kaliyug. In one such story from 15th century speaks of a dialogue between Narada and Vayu, a question is posed that, if an image, when consecrated, becomes the habitat of the deity, how can it be destroyed by the Yavans(meaning Turks here)? Why do the gods not prevent this? The answer covers more than one facet. It is said that there has been and will continue to be a conflict between devas and the daityas and other evil ones. The Yavanas are a part of this conflict, which will continue until the end of this Kaliyuga cycle. The current Yavanas are presumably repeating what the earlier ones have done and doubtless the Yavanas still to come will be doing the same. The Yavanas destroy images as do the asuras, and devas do not prevent this, since the conflict is eternal and cannt be stopped. It is now the Kaliyga and iconoclasm is to be expected because the world turns upside down in this age. The Yavanas are already carrying the burden of being cursed. Whenever rulers are lax in their duties or devoid of faith in Shiva, the Yavanas will break images. Fatalism is complete in this story, no one is thinking of fighting against the Yavanas and save the temples, all they are prepared to do is to rebuild the temples once the Yavanas have their rampage spree. In another story it is said that due to too many good people heavens are overflowing and then gods decide to destroy the temples themselves and thereby corrupting people so that they become less virtuous and heavens become less crowded again. In yet another story it is explained that in the Kaliyuga gods leave the idol so it simply doesn't matter if you break them or worship them. How utterly resigned to fate! Am I using this myths selectively or is it really that after having failed to resist the Turks, after having failed to protect themselves, Hindus resorted to mythmaking to assuage their trauma? Is this the sign of Trauma? To me it seems rather clear that these are the 'epics of resistance' represented not through defiance and glories of war but slowly and subtly through mending inner beliefs in such a way that not only tolerates but accepts the mayhem of the outer world no more in your control. Myth-making is effectively used as a balm to the wounded conscience.

Romila Thapar poses a question somewhere in her book("Somnatha the many voices of a history") "why the saviour figure of Kalkin, the tenth and last Vaishnava avatara, is not invoked to counter the Turkish attacks on temples?", she considers only two admissible answers to her quest "..those so traumatized either exorcise it by referring to the experience again and again to expurgate their fear; or, alternately, they suppress it by withdrawing and refusing to have anything to do with those who have perpetrated the trauma." No there can be other possible reactions if only we are ready to understand their semantics.