The de-fabrication of a history

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.

SOMANATHA
The Many Voices of a History

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Romila Thapar
Penguin Viking
Pages: 250 +10