Somnath: A brief history of the temple, and why Nehru opposed the President inaugurating it

Somnath, till 1947

Located in Prabhas Patan, Veraval, in Gujarat, Somnath is an important Hindu pilgrimage. According to the temple’s website, it is “the holy place of the First Aadi Jyotirling Shree Somnath Mahadev and the sacred soil where Lord Shri Krishna took his last journey…”

By most historical accounts, the temple faced several attacks from raiders, with the most damaging by Mahmud of Ghazni in 1026 CE.

Of course, not all Muslim rulers opposed it. Historian Romila Thapar, in her book Somanatha: The Many Voices of History, writes that “in the sixteenth century, Akbar permitted the worship of the linga in the Somanatha temple and appointed desais /officers to administer it.”

She also cites a remark by Abul Fazl about the temple — while he does not criticise Mahmud of Ghazni, he describes the temple raid as “the plunder of the virtuous”. “…fanatical bigots representing India as a country of unbelievers at war with Islam, incited his unsuspecting nature to the wreck of honour and the shedding of blood and the plunder of the virtuous,” Fazl writes.

Three generations after Akbar, however, Aurangzeb gave orders for its destruction. He subsequently issued “a further and later order for its destruction and its conversion into a mosque in 1706 just before he died,” Thapar writes.

The Somnath temple before restoration. (Express archive photo)

Gradually, the temple fell into disuse and disrepair. According to the temple website, in 1782, Maratha queen Ahalyabai Holkar built a small temple at the site.

The temple was first highlighted as a symbol of Islam’s excesses on Hindus by British Governor General Lord Ellenborough. In 1842, the British Army suffered heavy losses in its Afghanistan expedition. A retaliatory strike was carried out, and it is during this time that the “gates of Somnath” carried away by Mahmud of Ghazni surfaced in a major way. The British brought back a pair of sandalwood gates from Ghazni, claiming they were the original gates of Somnath taken by the invader. They eventually turned out not to be connected to the temple.

Ellenborough framed this exercise as the “avenging of an insult”.

On November 16, 1842, he issued a proclamation “to all the Princes and Chiefs, and people of India”, which read: “Our victorious army bears the gates of the temple of Somnauth in triumph from Afghanistan…That insult of eight hundred years is at last avenged.”

He added: “I have ever relied with confidence upon your attachment to the British Government. You see how worthy it proves itself of your love, when, regarding your honour as its own, it exerts the power of its arms to restore to you the gates of the temple of Somnauth, so long the memorial of your subjection to the Afghans.”

A photographic restoration of the ‘gates of Somnath’ brought from Ghazni by the British. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

This narrative persisted, and as the communal divide worsened in the run-up to Independence, many Hindus started regarding the restoration of Somnath as a project essential to Hindu pride. Among the more vocal of such people was Congress leader K M Munshi.

After Independence

After Independence, the Nawab of Junagadh, where Somnath was located, decided to accede to Pakistan, even though most of his subjects opposed this. The Nawab soon had to flee in the face of rebellion, and on November 12, 1947, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the then Home Minister of India, visited Junagadh. At a huge public gathering, he announced the decision to reconstruct Somnath.

This was endorsed by the Union Cabinet headed by Nehru. However, when Patel, Munshi and others conveyed the decision to Mahatma Gandhi, he suggested that instead of the government funding the project, the money should come from the people. The others agreed, and a Trust was set up for the purpose under Munshi.

Nehru’s letters to Rajendra Prasad on Somnath

By the time the temple was ready, Patel had passed away. Munshi approached Prasad for the inauguration. Nehru made no secret of his opposition to this. In a letter to Prasad in March 1951, he wrote, “I confess that I do not like the idea of your associating yourself with a spectacular opening of the Somnath Temple. This is not merely visiting a temple, which can certainly be done by you or anyone else, but rather participating in a significant function which unfortunately has a number of implications.”

Prasad, however, maintained that he saw nothing wrong in attending the event. A month later, Nehru wrote to him again, “My dear Rajendra Babu, I am greatly worried about the Somnath affair. As I feared, it is assuming a certain political importance… In criticism of our policy in regard to it, we are asked how a secular Government such as ours can associate itself with such a ceremony which is, in addition, revivalist in character.”

Nehru told Prasad he did not like ‘the idea of your associating yourself with a spectacular opening of the Somnath Temple’. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

When newspaper reports emerged of the Saurashtra government contributing Rs 5 lakh towards the ceremony, he wrote to Prasad, “At any time this would have been undesirable, but at the present juncture, when starvation stalks the land and every kind of national economy and austerity are preached by us, this expenditure by a government appears to me to be almost shocking. We have stopped expenditure on education, on health and many beneficent services because we say that we cannot afford it.”

He also wrote to Chief Ministers on May 2, 1951, “It should be clearly understood that this function is not governmental and the GoI has nothing to do with it…We must not do anything that comes in the way of our state being secular.”

Another thing Nehru opposed, as Thapar writes, “was a circular sent round to Indian ambassadors, asking them to collect and send to Somanatha containers of water from the major rivers of the countries to which they were accredited, as well as soil and twigs from the mountains of these countries.” Nehru asked the Ministry of External Affairs to ignore these requests.