The Gyan Of Gyanvapi 

As yet another call was made for the eradication of Sanatana Dharma from Bharat, it might be useful to look at the career of a maniac who tried this more than three hundred years ago, and those who stood in his path. 

Aurangzeb’s fanatical Islamism had been kept in check for the first ten years of his reign by the presence of three powerful Hindu kings: Jai Singh of Amer, Jaswant Singh of Marwar, and Raj Singh of Mewar.  These three, the first two of whom commanded large armies outside their own kingdoms, had been crucial in putting Aurangzeb on the Mughal throne by either extending him support or by observing neutrality in the bloody internecine conflict that preceded Aurangzeb’s ascension in  CE 1658.   

It was the death of Jai Singh in CE 1667 and the transfer of Jaswant Singh to Kabul that allowed Aurangzeb’s Islamist tendencies to be enacted into imperial policy. 

Aurangzeb’s first wave of temple breaking in CE 1668-69 in lands directly under Mughal control, involved the temples in Kashi, including the Vishwanath, Gyanvapi and Bindu Mahadev temples. This was strongly opposed by Raj Singh and Jaswant Singh, which is recorded in contemporary histories of Rajputana. 

The Jaswant Singh ri Khyat and Mundiad ri Khyat refer to Jaswant Singh’s ire at Aurangzeb breaking the temples at Kashi after Jai Singh’s death at a special darbar held in CE 1669 in Kabul. The former quotes Jaswant Singh as saying, “If the emperor breaks the temples of his subjects, then there is no more dignity between the subject and the ruler. But if he breaks temples, we will break mosques, and then make whomever we want the emperor”.  

The khyatkar records that although Aurangzeb stopped breaking temples after the Maharaja’s remonstration, he began to do so again after his death in CE 1678. As Jaswant Singh had died without an heir, (he had two posthumous sons whom Aurangzeb refused to recognise), the gadi of Marwar lay vacant, with no firm hand to lead the kingdom. 

This left only Maharana Raj Singh as a significant Hindu power in the north, and Sauron-like, it was to Mewar that Aurangzeb turned his poisoned gaze. Maharana Raj Singh of Mewar had enraged Aurangzeb by giving  shelter to the infant son of Jaswant Singh (whom the legendary Durgadas Rathore had broken out of Delhi and almost certain death at Aurangzeb’s hands). He had also given refuge to the murti of Shrinathji against the jihadi’s maniacal persecution, and married a princess of Rupnagar whom the Emperor had previously determined to marry.

 Aurangzeb pitched the entire might of the imperial army against Mewar, withdrawing armies from the west and the south of the country to crush Raj Singh.  

The Maharana, like his ancestor Maharana Pratap, simply retreated to the hills, and from there, just like his illustrious ancestor, waged a war of a thousand cuts against Aurangzeb’s assembled horde. 

Udaipur was defended with a masterly empty city ruse by a small Mewari contingent, with the Mughal prince leading the invasion barely escaping with his life.   

In the Veer Vinod, Shyamaldas recounts how Barhat Naru, a court bard,  defended the Jagdish temple at the gates of the City Palace with just twenty men, who all fought to their last breath, their blood and bodies piled up on the stairs to the temple. The defence was successful, and the temple with its beautiful murti of Jagannath can still be seen in Udaipur today.

Unfortunately, many other temples in Rajputana were broken or defaced by Aurangzeb’s emissaries during this time, some of whom he specifically charged with the task of breaking temples. 

The Veer Vinod records how Aurangzeb had three large temples in Udaipur, built by Maharana Udai Singh, broken on 4 February, 1680. 

A further 172 smaller temples in and around the city were broken during this expedition, and the man in charge, Hassan Ali Khan, was given the title ‘Hasan Ali Khan Bahadur Alamgir Shahi’ as a reward. 

Aurangzeb’s men broke a further 63 temples in Chittor on the 4th of March in the same year, after which the Mughal finally retreated from Mewar to Ajmer. 

His son, Muhammad Akbar, no less of a zealot,  also broke 66 temples in Amer, while his brother-in-law, Taher Khan (Beg) went on to Marwar to break the major temples in and around Jodhpur city and Mehrangarh fort. 

Several contemporary bahis and khyats from Marwar recount the destruction of Marwar’s major temples by Aurangzeb’s forces in some detail. The Muraridan ri Khyat records that the murti in Gangshyamji temple in Jodhpur city, made during the reign of Sur Singh in the 15th century was broken in CE 1668 and a mosque was built in its place in CE 1680 when Aurangzeb was in Ajmer.  

The khyat further says that Maharaja Bakhat Singh had the mosque removed in CE 1752 and used its materials to repair the city walls.  Two years later, his successor, Vijay Singh, started the reconstruction of the Gangshyamji temple on the same site. 

Other temples in the Mehrangarh could not be reconstructed after they were destroyed by the Islamist occupiers of the fort because the sites were considered to be irremediably desecrated. The temple of Chaturbhujji, constructed by the mother of the Mota Raja Udai Singh in the 16th century, which was broken and made into a mosque by the ‘turkan’, was converted into a karkhana (workshop) after the Rathores retook the fort in CE 1707, while the desecrated sites of the temples  of Rancchodji and Anandghanji were converted into storehouses.  

The Jains and their temples also came under attack of Aurangzeb’s violent zealotry.  

The Jodhpur ri Dastur Bahi lists the Jain temples in Marwar that were broken by Taher Beg under Aurangzeb’s orders in VS 1737 (CE 1680). The temples of Parshwanathji, built in VS 1516 (CE 1460), and that of Munisuvratji, built by Siremal Shah in VS 1587 (CE 1531) — which housed a jewel-studded pratima—were demolished under the Mughal emperor’s order in the same year. 

After the temple of Shantinathji was broken, a small temple was rebuilt on the reclaimed site by Maharaja Ajit Singh in VS 1763 (CE 1707), i. e. almost immediately after his accession to the gadi. This showed the protection and care the Hindu rulers of Marwar gave to the Jains, who were a small but important community in the kingdom’s commercial and administrative realms. 

Aurangzeb’s jihad was devastating to Rajputana, but it was also an unbearable strain on the empire.

The embattled emperor tried to bolster his severely depleted finances through the levying of jizya tax on non-Muslims in CE 1679, which was fiercely criticised by Raj Singh. 

Robert Orme’s translation of a letter written by Maharana Raj Singh to Aurangzeb describes the sorry state of the land after his mindless religious wars: 

Aurangzeb finally retreated from Rajputana after wreaking havoc for two years, but having achieved none of his political goals: Mewar remained Hindu and proudly independent, and no amount of temple breaking or force would subdue the Rathores in Marwar.

And although Raj Singh died in CE 1680, some say after being poisoned at the emperor’s behest, his gadi was passed to his son, continuing the unbroken reign of his family in Mewar since the eight century. Meanwhile, Aurangzeb’s treasury was empty, one of his sons had revolted, and he had almost been killed during this disastrous campaign. 

Aurangzeb died a broken old man, perhaps having realised that his sins of patricide and fratricide, which he had hoped to expiate through converting people to Islam, had only been exacerbated by his actions. In a letter to his son Shah Azam Shah, written when he was close to death, he acknowledged “I have not been a guardian and protector of the empire. My valuable time has been passed vainly.” 

To his son Kambaksh he wrote, “I have committed numerous crimes and know not what punishments with which I may be seized.” Certainly, his mindless religious wars had brought all of India to ruination, impoverishing the land and leaving a country ripe for depredation at the hands of Western colonialists. 

The histories of those he oppressed clearly show that Aurangzeb, called a bigot and extremist in his own lifetime, built mosques on the site of important temples as a sign of religious triumphalism. In fact, the peace treaty of CE 1681 between Mewar and the Mughals, reproduced by James Tod  in the Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, makes specific reference to Aurangzeb breaking temples and putting up mosques over them, and sets the principal condition of peace to be that this practice must be abolished. 

Those who try to deny or obfuscate this fact do a disservice to truth and the discipline of history writing, and choose to destroy the credibility of India’s present values and its constitutional institutions merely to defend a cruel and misguided tyrant. 

The judiciary in India has recently started the process of the survey of the  mosque erected on the site of the Gyanvapi mandir within the Kashi Vishwanath complex.

While most would think this is a fair query in the quest for justice,  to those of us versed in the history of the region from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the need for a survey seems a ridiculous exercise to prove a self-evident truth, a truth which is clearly visible in the shape of the temple that still remains in the Kashi Vishwanath premises upon which the mosque has been built, and in the many contemporary accounts of Aurangzeb’s fanatical persecution of Sanatana Dharma and its adherents 

The Gyanvapi temple, along with the Vishwanath mandir, was a part of a prescribed parikrama of Kashi. A seventeenth century teerth pat from Mewar, now in the collection of the National Museum in Delhi, ( acc. No. 56.59/58) shows worshippers performing pooja at the various temples in this parikrama, including at the temples of Vishwanath and  Annapurna, which are all clearly labelled. 

This is likely to be a painting created to celebrate the pilgrimage of Maharana Jagat Singh’s mother, Rajmata Jambuwati, to Kashi with her grandson, Raj Singh who was still a prince. His father, Maharana Jagat Singh, commissioned the Rana Mahal and ghat for their stay in the holy city at the time, both of which still stand to this day.

In this painting, almost certainly made before CE 1654, the Vishwanath mandir is intact, as is the Gyanvapi mandir, which is represented as a shivling and kund, i.e., as an extant and intact Shiv mandir.  

How does the Islamist supremacism and triumphalism that the mosques built on temples/ built from temples represent, situate in a modern nation state that is supposedly dharm nirpeksh and secular? 

What does it mean to the idea of a secular state if the sentiment that made the Islamist destruction of the places of worships of Hindus and Jains— the symbolic dominance of Islam over their religions—is not only not condemned by the modern state but is enshrined in law through pieces of legislation like The Place of Worship (Special Provision) Act, 1991,  or  The Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958?  

The worshipers of Ram, Krishna, and Shiva are not dead and gone like the worshippers of Athena at the Parthenon, and yet the Ottoman mosques constructed there, also to show Islamist triumphalism, were removed from these historic sites without outrage. Why then is it so difficult to give the believers of a living faith, a majority in a country that supposedly treats all religions equally, the same grace? 

Mosques built over temples sites have no place specific symbolism except Islamist triumphalism and the symbolic subjugation of other religions, sentiments which surely do not have space in a secular and dharm nirpeksh nation. And if it is indeed argued that these sentiments that celebrate fanatical triumphalism are valid and ought to be protected, then we do not live in a nation that is either secular or dharm nirpeksh. It is, instead, a nation which has abandoned its Hindus. 

Technology today can move such mosques to alternative sites with care, where they would represent, rightly, the celebration of the faith of Muslims, rather than the subjugation of the faith of others, a sentiment which should be repugnant in a secular nation. This would represent a final rejection of Aurangzeb’s Islamism and the dawn of a truly secular India.