Anoop Verma's Diary: Itihasa & Darshana: The Reconstruction of the Somnath Temple

Wednesday, 13 July 2022

The Reconstruction of the Somnath Temple

Somnath Temple

On 9 November 1947, four days after the princely state of Junagadh joined India, Sardar Patel announced that the Indian government would reconstruct the Somnath temple at the same spot where it stood in ancient times. Jawaharlal Nehru and several leftist intellectuals advised that Somnath should be reconstructed as a secular historic monument, not a temple.

In Chapter 6, “The Ayodhya Movement,” of his book My Country My Life, L K Advani has devoted 10 pages (page 342 to 351) to describing the reconstruction of the Somnath Temple. Advani notes that Patel rejected the idea that Somnath should be a secular historic monument; he was firm about reinstalling the jyotirlingam in Somnath and making it a place of worship.

Patel argued: “The Hindu sentiment in regard to this temple is both strong and widespread… it is unlikely that this sentiment will be satisfied by mere restoration of the temple or by prolonging its life. The restoration of the idol would be the point of honor and sentiments with the Hindu public.” (Page 347, My Country My Life, by L. K. Advani).

Nehru was unhappy with Patel’s decision to reconstruct the Somnath Temple as a place of worship. He believed that the temple project was antithetical to India’s secularist ideal. But the Nehru cabinet had to approve the project because Patel had taken a firm stand. In his book L. K. Advani points out that the project was “fully supported and blessed by Mahatma Gandhi.”

After Patel’s death in 1950, Nehru started voicing his disapproval of the Somnath project openly. K. M. Munshi, minister of food and agriculture in the Nehru government, was heading the official committee that was supervising the temple’s reconstruction. Due to Nehru’s opposition, Munshi was practically isolated in his mission. In a cabinet meeting, Nehru berated Munshi: “I do not like your trying to restore Somnath. It is Hindu revivalism.” (Page 348)

Munshi refused to be cowed down. On 24 April 1951, in a letter to Nehru, he wrote:

“Yesterday you referred to Hindu revivalism. You pointedly referred to me in the Cabinet as connected with Somnath. I am glad you did so; for I do not want to keep back any part of my views and activities… I can assure you that the ‘Collective Subconsciousness’ of India today is happier with the scheme of reconstruction of Somnath sponsored by the Government of India than with many other things that we have done and are doing.” (Page 348)

In his letter’s concluding paragraph, Munshi attacked Nehru’s conception of secularism and talked about the importance of the Somnath Temple:

“It is my faith in our past which has given me the strength to work in the present and to look forward to our future. I cannot value India’s freedom if it deprives us of the Bhagavad Gita or uproots our millions from the faith with which they look upon our temples and thereby destroys the texture of our lives… this shrine once resorted to a place of importance in our life will give our people a purer conception of religion and a vivid consciousness of our strength, so vital in these days of freedom and its trials.” (Page 348-349)

The reconstruction of the Somnath temple was completed in May 1951. At Munshi's request, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, India’s first president, agreed to inaugurate the temple and ceremonially install the jyotirlingam. But Nehru and many leftist intellectuals were vehemently opposed to the presence of the head of state in a religious ceremony. Dr. Rajendra Prasad rejected their objection and kept his promise to inaugurate the temple.

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Nirad C. Chaudhuri

“In the south the temples have survived, and in the north they have not. Over seven centuries from the eleventh to the end of the seventeenth all the great cities of northern India dating from Hindu times were sacked by the Muslim invaders and conquerors of India. All the temples there and in all other centres of Hinduism were systematically destroyed. None were left standing at Ujjain, Ajmere, Delhi, Mathura, Brindaban, Kanauj, Prayag, or Benares—which were the centres of the political, cultural, and religious life of the Hindus. In most of these places mosques were built on the sites of the temples, and in some with pillars taken from them. This religious vandalism also worked its fury on the Buddhist centres. Moreover, it was not simply that the great temples in the cities were destroyed; so were the village temples. For most of the period of Muslim rule, there was a ban on building new temples and rebuilding the old in the regions the Muslims controlled.” ~ Nirad C. Chaudhuri

“The moral ideal, that when slapped on one cheek you should offer the other for a slap, has no place in politics. Here the maxim is just the reverse. If you are slapped, give proper return, and you would at once find a desire by the other side to make friends. The method of offering the other cheek for being slapped has now been tried for over 20 years. There has been enough of coaxing and fawning, which by giving undue importance to the other community has begotten only insolence and impudence. May we not now try the counter method and see its result?” ~ Rai Bahadur Lalchand

“Aristotle died in the autumn of 322 BC. He was sixty-two and at the height of his powers; a scholar whose scientific explorations were as wide-ranging as his philosophical speculations were profound; a teacher who enchanted and inspired the brightest youth of Greece; a public figure who lived a turbulent life in a turbulent world. He bestrode antiquity like an intellectual colossus. No man before him had contributed so much to learning. No man after him might aspire to rival his achievements.” ~ Jonathan Barnes

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“The age at which we obtain the complete use of reason may be determined as follows: [i] as far as the facility (to use it competently to achieve any goal) is concerned it is approximately the twentieth year, [ii] as far as calculation (to use other human beings for one's own purposes) is concerned, it is the fortieth year, and [iii] the age of wisdom be¬ gins around sixty. The latter age is entirely negative. We are finally able to recognize all the foolish mistakes we made in the first two.” ~ Immanuel Kant

“Where Plato is whimsical and ironic, and proceeds by suggestion and indirection, Aristotle is matter-of-fact, almost pedestrian. Where Plato’s writing is filled with his sense of better and more beautiful world behind, above, beyond the world of ordinary experience, illuminating that experience but transcending it, Aristotle keeps his feet firm on the ground of ordinary experience. This is Aristotle's reality, and the business of philosophy in his view is to make sense of the here and now.” ~ W. T. Jones

“The existence of man in political society is historical existence; and a theory of politics, if it penetrates to principles, must at the same time be a theory of history.” ~ Eric Voegelin

“Social evils cannot be reformed by legislation; defects of government machinery cannot be repaired by changes in the constitution; differences of opinion cannot be settled by compromise.” ~ Eric Voegelin

"There is no such thing as a right to be stupid; there is no such thing as a right to be illiterate; there is no such thing as a right to be incompetent.” ~ Eric Voegelin

"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim." ~ George Santayana

"One can easily imagine how indignant a humanistic liberal will be when he is told that his particular type of immanentism is one step on the road to Marxism.” ~ Eric Voegelin

"In National Socialist and related documents we are still further below the level on which rational argument is possible than in the case of Hegel and Marx. In order to deal with rhetoric of this type, one must first develop a philosophy of language, going into the problems of symbolization on the basis of the philosophers’ experience of humanity and of the perversion of such symbols on the vulgarian level by people who are utterly unable to read a philosopher’s work.” ~ Eric Voegelin

“The fallacy in the ethics of evolution is the equation of the “struggle for existence” with the “survival of the fittest,” and the assumption that “the fittest” is identical with “the best.” But that struggle may favor the worst rather than the best.” ~ Gertrude Himmelfarb

“The quest for the origin must take into account that the world of our experience is not a static structure but a process; and the speculation on the origin must project (in one symbolism or another) this experience into a process in the origin itself.” ~ Eric Voegelin

“The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye.” ~ Jacob Bronowski

“You can run agriculture for centuries by manual labor and oxcarts. But destroy the last of this country's industrial plant—and centuries of effort won't be able to rebuild it or to gather the economic strength to make a start.” ~ Ayn Rand

“Can you be a conservative and believe in God? Obviously. Can you be a conservative and not believe in God? This is an empirical essay, and so the answer is, as obviously, yes. Can you be a conservative and despise God and feel contempt for those who believe in him? I would say no.” ~ William F. Buckley Jr.

“The most radical change in the human condition we can imagine would be an emigration of men from the earth to some other planet. Such an event, no longer totally impossible, would imply that man would have to live under man-made conditions, radically different from those the earth offers him. Neither labor nor work nor action nor, indeed, thought as we know it would then make sense any longer. Yet even these hypothetical wanderers from the earth would still be human; but the only statement we could make regarding their "nature" is that they still are conditioned beings, even though their condition is now self-made to a considerable extent.” ~ Hannah Arendt

“Carefree, mocking, violent–this is how wisdom wants us: she is a woman, all she ever loves is a warrior.” ~ Nietzsche

“Which great philosopher, so far, has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer – were not; indeed it is impossible to even think about them as married. A married philosopher belongs to comedy, that is my proposition: and that exception, Socrates, the mischievous Socrates, appears to have married ironice, simply in order to demonstrate this proposition.” ~ Nietzsche

“Hubris characterizes our attitude towards ourselves,–for we experiment on ourselves in a way we would never allow on animals, we merrily vivisect our souls out of curiosity: that is how much we care about the ‘salvation’ of the soul!” ~ Nietzsche

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.” ~ James Joyce