The raid on Somnath and its memory
The Turkish ruler Mahmud of Ghazni sacks the rich Shiva temple of Somnath in Gujarat, an event that later becomes a symbol of Hindu suffering under Muslim rule.
- Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History — Romila Thapar, Verso (2005)
- India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765 — Richard M. Eaton, Allen Lane (2019)
- India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy — Ramachandra Guha, Macmillan / Picador (2007)
Mahmud, sultan of Ghazni in today’s Afghanistan, raided northern India about seventeen times between 1000 and 1027, carrying off treasure from temple cities. In January 1026 he attacked Somnath on the Gujarat coast, a wealthy temple of Shiva, killed many defenders and broke its linga. Court poets in the Persian world celebrated him as a destroyer of idols.
- Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History — Romila Thapar, Verso (2005)
- India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765 — Richard M. Eaton, Allen Lane (2019)
The temple was rebuilt and attacked several more times over the following centuries. Romila Thapar’s study of the sources showed that local inscriptions afterwards hardly mention the raid; one of 1264 even records a mosque built at Somnath by a Persian merchant with the support of local Hindu notables.
- Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History — Romila Thapar, Verso (2005)
In 1842 the British Governor-General Lord Ellenborough claimed to bring the temple’s gates back from Ghazni, avenging “an insult of 800 years”; the gates proved not to be from Somnath at all. After independence the home minister Vallabhbhai Patel pledged to rebuild the temple, and President Rajendra Prasad attended its inauguration in May 1951 against Nehru’s advice.
- Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History — Romila Thapar, Verso (2005)
- India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy — Ramachandra Guha, Macmillan / Picador (2007)
A deep and remembered wound: one of India's holiest temples looted, its image smashed and its worshippers killed by a foreign invader, then attacked again in later centuries. Its rebuilding symbolises a civilisation that refuses to die.
- Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History — Romila Thapar, Verso (2005)
- India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765 — Richard M. Eaton, Allen Lane (2019)
Persian chronicles glorified the raid, but Sanskrit and Jain sources of the following centuries say little about it, and the temple was soon rebuilt and thriving. The idea of Somnath as a lasting "Hindu trauma" took shape largely in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, encouraged by British officials and nationalist writers.
- Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History — Romila Thapar, Verso (2005)
Many Hindus and some historians answer that the absence of lament in surviving inscriptions does not mean the destruction was forgotten or unimportant, and that downplaying it denies Hindu experience.
- Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History — Romila Thapar, Verso (2005)
- The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics — Christophe Jaffrelot, Hurst (1996)
Why it matters today
For many Hindus Somnath stands for centuries of attacks on their sacred places, and its rebuilding in 1951 for revival. L. K. Advani began the 1990 procession that launched the Ayodhya campaign at Somnath.
The temple's rebuilding was an early test of Indian secularism: Nehru objected to the President's attending its inauguration, while others saw it as national healing. The argument over how to remember such events continues.