BHARATA BHARATI

Meenakshi Jain’s latest book recounts the Somnath Temple’s destruction and rebuilding across a millennium, from the Prabhas Patan tirtha to Sardar Patel’s decision of November 1947, without the ideological Marxist framing. – R. Jagannathan

Ever since the monopoly of history-writing by the Romila Thapar-led ‘secular’ cabal was ended, there has been a flowering of alternate history rooted in previously overlooked or deliberately misinterpreted ‘facts’. Today many more books are written outside the ideological confines of Marxist theory.

One author who deserves special mention among historians outside the Leftist group is Meenakshi Jain, who has taken it upon herself to shine a torch on those less known aspects of Indian history that Left historians deliberately chose to diminish or suppress.

Over the last decade, her books have focused on India’s ancient temple cities, their destruction under iconoclastic Islamic rule, and reconstruction during British rule and after independence. She has also written extensively on British efforts to demonise and exaggerate the negative aspects of Indian society (like sati), largely with the idea of justifying their own brutal colonialism.

Among these books are Rama and Ayodhya, Vasudeva Krishna and Mathura, Vishwanath Rises and Rises, Flight of Deities and Rebirth of Temples, The Hindus of Hindustan, Sati, The British Makeover of India, and Raja Bhoja Paramara, among others.

The latest in Jain’s massive oeuvre is Invincible Somnath: A Saga of Millennia. In this book, Jain recounts the geography, history, mythologies, and the repeated destruction of one of Hinduism’s holiest shrines and sacred cities.

To contrast its richness with the ideologically sanitised work of Romila Thapar, you could read the latter’s Somanatha: The Many Voices of History, where the author tries to diminish the enormity of the repeated destruction of the temple as something routine, where Hindus may not even have been traumatised by this destructiveness. While the history of Somnath and its famous temple can be written from multiple viewpoints, the best perspective probably comes from Jain’s book. Jain is the perfect antidote to Thapar’s Left-inspired and partially jaundiced history.

The title of Jain’s book says it all: Invincible Somnath. Somnath is the ultimate tribute to the endless faith that enabled Hindu rulers and devotees to repeatedly rebuild the temple after many Islamist depredations.

The book is divided into 14 chapters, followed by appendices that include a detailed reproduction of Jawaharlal Nehru’s hand-wringing over Hindu revivalism after Sardar Patel decided that the ancient temple must be rebuilt on its original site. It gives you everything about Somnath without ideological pontification.

From the sacredness of the Prabhas tirtha, where the temple is located in Saurashtra, to the area’s geography, to the foreign and local accounts of the temple’s history and its repeated destruction and reconstruction, Jain recounts it all without fanfare.

The early chapters describe the ancient history of Saurashtra, and also foreign accounts of the city where the Somnath Temple was built. While no archaeological evidence is available to determine the period when the first temple was built, it is believed to have been built somewhere between the mid-seventh to late eighth centuries CE. It is around the third temple, probably built in the tenth century CE during the Chaulukya/Solanki dynasty, that some dates start looking more certain.

While Arab attacks on the Indian subcontinent were known to have begun in the early eighth century CE, it was in the eleventh century CE, under Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, that Somnath started becoming a repeated target of Islamic destruction. Mahmud attacked India no fewer than 16 times. In his ninth (1017 CE), he plundered the city of Mathura, and in January 1026 CE he sacked Somnath and destroyed its sanctum sanctorum. He probably sacked what was the third temple of Somnath.

But the real story of Somnath is not its destruction by Ghazni, but its repeated reconstruction. Barely a year after Mahmud’s destruction, the fourth temple was being built in 1027, and in the next century it was rebuilt again as the older temple had fallen into a state of disrepair.

But Somnath got no respite as after Ghazni, Muhammad Ghori took it upon himself to continue to target the temple, this time though his general Qutubuddin Aibak. But Somnath kept rising again and again, as “each assault on the temple was met with renewed endeavours at reconstruction”.

During the period of Maratha rule, Maharani Ahilyabai Holkar built another temple near the site of the old temple, but it was after independence, in November 1947, that Sardar Patel, standing on the footsteps of the temple built by Ahilyabai, announced that the Somnath Temple would be reconstructed.

The initial plan was to build it with government funds, but after Patel discussed the idea with Mahatma Gandhi, it was decided that it would be built with public funds, and a trust would be formed to administer it. Patel did not live to see the temple built, and it was K.M. Munshi’s task to see it through. The temple was inaugurated in May 1951 with President Rajendra Prasad presiding over the function.

The book also contains many letters exchanged between Pandit Nehru, Rajendra Prasad and K.M. Panikkar, then India’s ambassador to China, with the Prime Minister expressing repeated disapproval of the President’s decision to associate himself with the inaugural function.

Panikkar comes into the picture because the Somnath Trust apparently asked him to send them waters from the Hoang Ho, Yangtze and Pearl rivers, and also twigs from the Tien Shan mountains, for the inauguration. Panikkar was embarrassed and scandalised, and Nehru commiserated with him.

On 11 May 2026, Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the temple to commemorate the 75th anniversary of its reconstruction.

There is no better tale of civilisational rejuvenation and revival after centuries of subjugation than the one involving the destruction and rebuilding of the Somnath Temple. And there is no better historian than Jain to chronicle this story. – Swarajya, 19 Auguist 2026

› R. Jagannathan is senior journalist and former editorial director at Swarajya magazine.