Talk:Gyanvapi Mosque

Sampath (2024)

A few months ago, Vikram Sampath published a book titled Waiting for Shiva: Unearthing the Truth of Kashi's Gyan Vapi. Hoping it might have something interesting, I started reading:

Pre-Islamic Varanasi

Phantom Pillars and Stupas

In Ch. 1, Sampath writes,

In the fourth century BCE, Emperor Ashoka [c. 304 – 232 BCE] built the 74-foot-high stupa, known as the Chaukhandi stupa, in Varanasi. On one of the pillars, he placed the image of the four lions that was later to become the state emblem of independent India.

To start with, the Chaukhandi stupa was not built by Ashoka. As Asher (2020) (p. 52-54) correctly notes, it is a structure from c. 8th–9th century CE; hell, the ASI signage, always trying to push back dates as farther as possible, gives a date of c. 4th–5th century CE! Leave that apart — the "image of the four lions" on a pillar of the Chaukhandi?!

There are, of course, no citations to Vidula Jayaswal's scholarship, or for that matter, H. P. Ray, et al.

Adi Shankaracharya

Sampath continues,

When the Advaitic philosopher Adi Shankaracharya set out from his little village in southern Kerala, traversing the length and breadth of the subcontinent to re-establish the principles of the Vedas that had come to disuse through the four mutts28 in the four cardinal points, he stayed for long at Varanasi too... The grand philosophical debates of Shankaracharya, his disciple Kumarila Bhatta, and others led to a gradual disenchantment with the promise that Buddhism held. Over time, it led to a revival of the Hindu/Vedic way of life.

Not-so-surprising reproduction of historically inaccurate details from late hagiographies, drafted c. 14th-17th centuries — obviously, our article on Adi Shankara is better!

Ghaznavids and Ghurids

Nialtagin

Sampath mentions Nialtagin's raid of Banaras but fails to mention that he had been installed as a governor — by Masʽud I — with the strict instructions to not display religious bigotry lest the Hindu officers' sensibilities be affected. Also, when Nialtagin refused to share the spoils of the raid with Masud, a Hindu general — Tilak — had him captured, murdered, and brought before the Emperor at Ghazni!

Not surprisingly, the entire stream of scholarship spawned after Gilmartin's Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia do not find a place.

Govindachandra

Sampath writes,

The fact that Vishweshwara was an important shrine in the twelfth-century CE is demonstrated by the Gahadavala ruler Govindachandra deeming it fit to leave behind an extant copper plate stating that he had offered prayers at the temple of Vishweshwara ...

In one of his extant copper plates, Govindachandra also leaves behind evidence of his having worshipped at Vishweshwara’s shrine.

The fact is sourced to Sukul (1974; p. 178) who, in turn, sources it to JASB (XXXI; 1862; p. 123-124). Fwiw, according to Niyogi (1959; p. 249) , this inscription has been lost (i.e., not extant anymore) and no facsimile exists.

In any case, I do not see where the inscription in question has anything about Govindachandra worshipping at Vishveshwara. Even if we assume that Sukul was referring to another of Govindachandra's inscriptions — JASB (XXVII; 1858; p. 243) —, how does Vishveshwara come into play? By a tendentious reading (leaving the saner choice of Pratisthan Pur (Jhunsi)), Srisa-pratisthana can be an allusion to some shrine of Vishnu at Banaras — Bindu Madhava, perhaps.

Muhammad of Ghor

Sampath writes,

The first Ghori rebel of prominence Ala ud-din Hussain plundered and burnt the city of Ghazni in 1150 CE, earning him the deadly sobriquet of Jahan Soz, or World Burner. Even as he embarked on widespread expansionist military campaigns after forcing a petrified Ghaznavid sultan to flee from the capital, he put his brother Mu'izz ud din Muhammad bin Saam in charge of the eastern conquests in the Indian subcontinent. This man is known in history as Muhammad Ghori, the founder of Islamic rule in India. He began his attacks on India starting 1175 CE.

Mu'izz ud din was apparently bored to have been Ala ud-din's nephew; so here, he has become his brother.

Atal Masjid

Sampath writes,

However, in 1376 ce, Firoz Shah Tughlaq began constructing the Atala mosque in Jaunpur by pulling down the Atala Devi temple constructed there by Jayachandra. Sukul speculates that if a prominent temple such as the Atala Devi temple in Jaunpur was demolished, it is reasonable to assume that those in Varanasi would not have been spared ...

The [Lal Darwaza] masjid was built in 1447 by Bibi Raji, the queen of Sultan Mahmud Sharqui. Several stone pillars from the Gupta period were also used as stools in the mosque gardens. Hence, evidently, the debris of demolished temples was being carried to Jaunpur and steadily used in mosque construction. The Lal Darwaza Masjid, for instance, was built partly "out of the stone material obtained through the spoilation of the majestic temple of Padmesvara built near the Visvanatha temple of Benares in 1296".

As if Anna Sloan never wrote her ground-breaking dissertation on the Atala mosque,

On the most fundamental level, close inspection of the first Sharqi mosque challenges the pervasive notion that it was constructed from the remains of a Hindu temple destroyed by the command of Ibrahim Shah Sharqi. A critical review of the site’s historiography reveals that the often-repeated account of Sharqi iconoclasm has relatively recent origins; it was initiated only in the nineteenth century with the publication of Khair al-Din Muhammad Allahabadi’s Jaunpumama, a text commissioned and disseminated by British colonial rulers. The trope of temple destruction from which Khair al-Din’s account derives has a long history in the rhetoric of the Muslim world; however, as a newly emergent body of work has begun to suggest, accounts of spoliation are often uncorroborated by extant archaeological and inscriptional records. Several kinds of evidence in the Atala Mosque help to substantiate recent suggestions that the rhetoric exhibited in dynastic chronicles was at times wholly distinct from the actual practices of Muslim rulers in Indie lands.

Alongside stones that could only have been made anew for structural contexts within the mosque, signatures of local Hindu builders dated to the Sharqi period provide convincing evidence that the Atala mosque was constructed from new materials rather than spolia. Moreover, the symbolic system projected throughout the entire series of mosques built under Sharqi rulers suggests that the use of new materials was not incidental, but rather, it was driven by the will to create a wholly innovative set of buildings. Every aspect of the Atala Mosque, for instance, reveals a conscious desire to create a new and utterly distinct mode of expression. Its structural elements, ornamental program, and inventive portal were all aimed at representing a singular Sharqi identity, rather than referencing either the sultanate past or the conquest of pre-existing sites ...

Through their reduction, regularization, and careful configuration, pillars in Sharqi structures more thoroughly resist the historical potential for structural elements to evoke spoliation. In this sense, the Sharqi mosque reflects a conscious departure from the symbolism of appropriation that characterized the set of structures in India often referred to as “conquest mosques.”
— The Atala Mosque: Between Polity and Culture in Medieval Jaunpur; University of Pennsylvania (2001); p. 304-306

Lodis

Sampath writes,

Among the first things that one of the most bigoted rulers of the dynasty, Sikandar Lodi (1489–1517 CE), did was order a wholesale demolition of whatever temples existed then in Varanasi. Around 1494–96 CE, Varanasi went through another terrible round of devastation. All its shrines and places of learning were heaped in ruins, and they remained this way, wailing in desolation for nearly eighty-nine long years.

This is sourced to Sukul (1974; p. 156) who, in turn, sources it to Bhatta's Tristhalisetu. I had read Tristhalisetu long back but in all probabilities, it has nothing on Lodi or some en masse demolition of Hindu shrines; the lone line of relevance is already in our article.

Hindu and Jain Patronage

Vastupala

Sampath writes,

Around this time, a Seth Vastupal from Gujarat [fl. 1220s] is said to have sent rupees one lakh for the worship of Vishweshwara. Clearly, by then, Vishweshwara had thus a pan-Indian appeal and fame that prompted such measures from the south, east, and west of India.

Sampath relies on Chandra (2022; p. 190) who, in turn, relies on the Prabandha Kosha (c. mid-14th century CE) of Rajashekhara Suri (Jinvijay (1935); p. 132, verse. 20-21): "बाणारस्यां देवविश्वनाथपूजार्थं प्रहितद्रव्य ल०१" (transl. One lac rupees were sent for the worship of Vishvanath in Varanasi.)

But can Vishvanath be automatically equated with the Vishweshwara — that is, can it only be an alternate name for the particular lingam/temple at Varanasi? The very beginning stanza of the Veraval Inscription (Sircar (1959; p. 141)) — issued in 1264 CE by the successor of Vastupala's patron-King — provides us with an answer. But, taking a look at contemporaneous inscriptions from Andhra Pradesh and Telengana — on the opposite corner of the subcontinent, a thousand miles away — sheds more light.

An inscription from 1269 CE (Ramayya (1948; p. 225)) records land-grants for the worship of "Visvanatha-Mahadeva" in a local temple; another inscription from 1280 CE (Lakshmi (2023c; p. 68)) records land grants for a temple of "Visvanatha-Dharmesvaradeva". Going further back in time, we come across an inscription from 1250 CE (Lakshmi (2023b; p. 266)) which records the existence of a temple of "Visvanatha deva" at Warangal during the reign of Ganapati; four undated inscriptions from Ganapati's reign (ibid; p. 344, 346, 355-357) that record grants towards the maintenance of a "Visvanatha-matha" and two temples for Visvanatha, established by Visvesvara Sivadeva, the royal preceptor; multiple inscriptions from two contemporaneous Cheraku Chiefs (ibid; p. 273) who ruled c. 1240 CE onward, patronaged several Shaivite shrines, and had the names "Immadi Visvanatha" and "Visvanatha"; an inscription from 1246 CE (ibid; p. 240) that notes of the donor's reverence to "Sri Visvanathadeva"; an inscription from 1202 (ibid; p. 117) that records a gift for the propitiation of "God Visvanatha"; and, an inscription from 1179 CE (ibid; p. 363) that records the establishment of a temple for "God Visvanatha Deva". Even, as early as the first half of the twelfth century (Lakshmi (2023a; p. 68)), we have reference to a Telegu Brahmin named "Visvanatha Bhattopadhyaya".

Pertinently, barring a single case — the temple of "Prasanna-Visveswara" at Elkurki (ibid; p. 340) — no shrine towards Visveswara was consecrated in these spans in Andhra; however, Visveswara was a common first name (Lakshmi (2023a; p. 96)). No shrine towards Avimukteshwara has been documented either.

So, to conclude, (1) Vishvanath was a pan-subcontinental referent to a form of Shiva and not limited to the Vishweshwara lingam at Varanasi, and (2) such an usage was gaining popularity since around c. 1200, certainly in no small part due to the production of literature like Kashikhand and Varanasi Mahatmya. Of course, other referents — Somanathadeva, etc. — were simultaneously abundant too.

Though, with the passage of time, perhaps some of these shrines got linked with the one at Banaras (or Somanatha), as highlighted by Eck (1998).

Suri's Vividha Tirtha Kalpa

In light of the previous section, it is tenous to read the relevant verse in the Vividha Tirtha Kalpa as indicating the existence of the Vishveswara temple than a generic spatial attribution to the centrality of Visvanatha/Shiva in the town.

Varanasi in the Mughal Era

On Brahmins in Banaras

Sampath writes,

O'Hanlon attributes merely mundane reasons for this migration, such as how in the pre-Mughal and Mughal eras "demand for cash revenues created substantial new advantages for Brahmin officeholders in the revenue systems of the regional states, while the expansion of settled agriculture, benefitted those, especially Brahmins, with access to capital to undertake its development". But a more plausible explanation can possibly be the fact that there was a spurt of literature extolling the hallowed status of the Kashi of the past that lay in devastated, howling ruins today ...

It was almost as if the collective consciousness of the country yearned for the resurrection of Kashi. In this context, the migration of the Brahmin families to Varanasi seems more conceivable. Whilst in Kashi, these families engaged themselves in intense intellectual work and created a new corpus of Sanskrit texts.

Giving quite serious competition to Hanlon, et al. /s

Shah Jahan

Sampath alludes to Kavindra Acharya as the mighty poet — the Hindu bulwark against Islamic onslaught, no less! — who impressed all the courtiers of Shah Jahan with his pleadings and compelled the Emperor to withdraw the pilgrimage-tax —

The tolerant imperial policy of Akbar had changed by the time his grandson Shah Jahan came to power. By his orders, the temples that were being constructed—no fewer than seventy-six in Banaras alone—were all destroyed. It was due to the intervention of a renowned scholar, ‘Vidyanidhi’ Kavindra Acharya Saraswati, who wielded considerable intellectual power and influence after the times of Narayana Bhatta, that the Hindus got some reprieve. Kavindra Acharya was a prosperous man who had migrated from the banks of the Godavari to Kashi, possibly after the annexation of the Nizam Shahi dominions by Shah Jahan. He had the largest collection of the rarest manuscripts and was a poet and scholar par excellence of his time. Moved by the pitiable condition of the Hindus, who had to pay a tortuously huge pilgrim tax to undertake pilgrimages to Kashi, Prayag, and other holy centres, Kavindra Acharya marched to Agra to meet the emperor and his son Dara Shikoh. Dara Shikoh was amenable and tolerant of non-Muslims and had built bridges with followers of several faiths. The acharya is said to have pleaded for the cause of the Hindus in the court of Shah Jahan with such persuasion, ourish, and eloquence that all the noblemen in the court from Iraq, Iran, Badakshan, Balkh, Kabul, Kandahar, Kashmir, Punjab, and Sindh were all left awestruck. Shah Jahan was left with little option but to abolish the pilgrim tax. An impressed emperor also granted Kavindra Acharya the title of ‘Sarva Vidya Nidhana’, or the repository of all knowledge. Kavindra returned to Varanasi to a hero’s welcome with titles, addresses, and gifts showered on him by grateful Hindus from all over India. His treasurer (bhandari) Krishna Bhatta, also an accomplished poet, compiled about a hundred such eulogies in Sanskrit that were composed in his master’s honour. These are said to be extant in the Asiatic Library’s collections.

The passage is a near-toto summary of the narrative purveyed by Haraprasad Shastri, over a century ago. And, for someone who harps incessant on "going back to primary sources", he doesn't know that (atleast some of the) the eulogies in question have already been edited and published — Diwakar (1966) and 2.

In any case, Allison Busch's scholarship is uncited; the literary culture in early modern India is paid no heed to, and inconvenient facts like Kavindra praising the Emperor as well-versed in the Puranas and the Vedas in one of his many panegyrics or one of Kavindra's eulogists noting him to have taught (Hindu) philosophy to the Emperor are left out.

Tavernier

Sampath writes,

A few eyewitness accounts have survived of travellers who came to Varanasi and had the opportunity to see this magnificent temple ... French traveller Jean Baptiste Tavernier, a dealer in jewels, was one such person. He made six voyages to India between 1636 and 1668 CE. He visited Banaras on his last trip in 1668 CE and wrote,

I come to the pagoda of Benares, which, after that of Jagannath, is the most famous in all India and of equal sanctity, being built on the margin of the Ganges, and in the town which it bears the name. The most remarkable thing about it is that from the door of the pagoda to the river there is a descent by stone steps, where there are at intervals platforms and small, rather, dark chambers, some of which serve as dwellings for the Brahmans, and others as kitchens where they prepare their food.

Sampath — much like Rosalin O'Hanlon and the original editors of Tavernier's account — fails to understand that Tavernier was not describing the Vishveshwara but rather the Bindu Madhava!

Hindu courtiers

Sampath speaks about Munshi Chandar Bhan's supposed reaction to the demolition of the Vishveshwara —

Kuber Nath Sukul mentions an interesting episode in Persian literature about the attitude of a common Hindu towards this demolition. There was supposedly (sic) a Brahmin in Shah Jahan’s court whose name was Chandrabhan; he wrote with the pen name Barahman. He had once proudly proclaimed in the emperor’s presence that he was born a Brahmin, lived as a Brahmin, and would die as one and remain one even if he were to be taken to the Kaaba in Mecca a hundred times. He declared rather insolently, "My heart is so enamoured of kufra (all Hindus were called Kafirs and the Hindu religion was kufra according to Muslims) that even if I go to Kaaba a hundred times, I will still return a Brahman." For such an audacious statement, it was quite expected that the poor poet would lose his head. He was fortunate to have well-wishers in the form of courtiers, who immediately jumped to his rescue by quoting to a frothing emperor the words of Saadi that if Christ’s donkey went to the Kaaba, it would still be a donkey on its return. Somehow, the emperor seemed to be convinced, and Chandrabhan lived on to see another day. He was unfortunate enough to see the day when Vishwanath was unrepentantly pulled down. After the mosque had been built, Aurangzeb, who still retained this man in his court, wanted to sprinkle salt on his wounds. He asked the poet if he would like to make any poetic comments on the occasion of the construction of a mosque at his most revered shrine. Chandrabhan composed himself and rejoined with a couplet that went something like this: "Oh! Sheikh, see the wondrous greatness of my temple in that it became the house of (your) god only after its downfall", implying how much higher it was when in its full glory. Aurangzeb was livid with rage but supposedly kept quiet.

Again, Rajeev Kinra who wrote an entire monograph on Chandrabhan is not cited. The penultimate chapter of his book deals with the substance of this passage.

On the first set of verses: Kinra notes that (1) they are not found in his diwan and show up for the first time in Afzal Sarkhwush's tazkira, written years after Bhan's death, (2) such a cheeky attitude does not fit with what we know of Bhan from his prodigious literary output, and (3) the Emperor would have not taken any offense at such a statement, even if aired, given the range of heretical stuff said by his contemporaries in the court. Nonetheless, Bhan would be associated with these verses — and nothing else! —, by generations of Muslim literati (and then, Orientalists); this, Kinra attributes not only to religious conservatism but also to their own anxiety at a time when more and more Hindus penetrated into the Mughal bureaucracy and the Indo-Persian literary culture.

On the second set of verses: Even Sarkhwush, having not much of a sympathy for Bhan, hinted that they were not his composition; so does Kishan Chand Ikhlas, who attributes them to Dayal Das Pasruri, pace popular memory. Ofcourse, they are not in his diwan. Now, how did they get linked with Benaras — in particular, the demolition of Vishweshwar — is unknown but within a century of his death, people begun to assert that he had retired to Banaras, which was factually inaccurate. Kinra sees in this, the devolution of Bhan from one of the finest poets in Shah Jahan's court to a generic Hindu who must have retired to Benaras, because atleast in the imagination of the Muslim literati, every Hindu did so!

Overall, Kinra was quite prophetic,

All the tangled complexity of early modern India’s social, ethnic, linguistic, religious, cultural, economic, and political worlds got reduced, eventually, to a simple tale of "Muslim rule" versus "Hindu resistance." What once was read as Chandar Bhan’s ignorance of Mughal decorum and cultural norms [in the gossips spread about him, etc.] is now seen as a kind of protonationalist political dissent.

Gyanvapi in British India

Assaulting the Laat by sneaking into Gyanvapi

Chapter 4 — "Sparks in the tinderbox" — discusses the 1809 riots and provides quite a seamless account borrowing from a range of secondary sources except IOR. And, therein lies the issue.

Any serious student of Indian history is expected to have read Gyanendra Pandey's The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (OUP; 1988), whose very first chapter emphasizes how the (secondary) sources describing the 1809 riots barely exhibited any coherence on any aspect of the riot — be it the immediate causes or the trajectory or the military response and performance — and increasingly diverged from what really happened, with the passage of time. Perhaps predictably, Sampath does not cite Pandey even a single time.

Pandey — citing the earliest report on the incident by the local Magistrate, W. W. Bird, just a week after the riot — writes,

At the site of the Lat Bhairava where, according to this [Bird's] report, a mosque and Imambarah had been erected in the days of Aurangzeb, there was also a mud construction which housed an image of Hanuman. A Nagar Brahman tried to convert this shrine into one of stone in fulfilment of a vow. This was resisted by Muslim weavers who worshipped there, on the ground that the stone construction would be an encroachment on "the masjid which surrounds the Laut".

Sampath writes,

The Lat Bhairav pillar, referred to in the Puranas as Kapali Bhairava, is in the form of a staff or pillar... The area around the pillar was commonly the haunt of tantriks, Kapalikas and Pashupatas. With time, the Nath Jogis and then the Gosains began to control it. Around it [the pillar] had soon mushroomed a mosque and a tomb site as well. Yet, the Hindus clung to the staff of their Bhairav and a small enclosing brick wall separated it from the adjacent idgah.

In 1809, a Nagar Hindu by the name Madhu Rai, who lived around this place [the pillar] amidst the burgeoning Muslim population, had fallen grievously ill. The popular belief was that this was the handiwork of some evil spirit. He therefore made a vow to Bhagwan Hanuman that if the latter annulled the effect of this spirit and his health got better, he would have the mud-shrine of Hanuman, which stood under a pipal tree by the Vishwanath temple, repaired to a permanent one of stone. Rai soon began to recover, and he was desirous of fulfilling his oath. The problem was that the Hanuman shrine was on a portion of the contested land that was common to the Vishwanath temple and the Gyan Vapi mosque of Aurangzeb.

Notice that Sampath's narrative asserts the Hanuman shrine to have been in the Gyanvapi/Vishesvara precincts; not at the Laat precincts. Obviously incorrect but be that as it may, let's read the remainder of his narrative:

The news of Madhu Rai’s attempts to construct a stone wall only added fuel to the lingering fire... They objected to this construction, calling it an encroachment on their idgah space. By the evening of 19 October 1809, a large gathering of Muslims had begun to assemble at the disputed site [Gyanvapi/Vishesvara precincts]. Soon, a small group of them under Dost Mohammad sneaked into the site. The pedestal on which Hanuman was seated was tilted over, the sacred tulsi plant uprooted, and "the great Lat itself was beaten with shoes".

At this point, readers might be surprised to know that the Laat is on the outskirts of Banaras, whereas the Gyanvapi is at the heart of the town; they are separated by ~2 miles. So, it ought to have been a tad difficult, if not implausible, for the rioters to attack the Laat after having sneaked into the Gyanvapi, but what do I know?

Now, in fairness, later accounts — including the one by Robinson, written 70 years after the riots, from where Sampath borrows liberally — mysteriously hold the starting-spot of the riot to be the Gyanvapi. While that had become a core question for Pandey — How did the site of the initial outbreak shift from the Lat Bhairava, in the open area a mile outside the limits of the city, to the Bisheshwar (or Vishwanath) temple in the very heart of it?" — and he went on to note how even scholars like Diana Eck had uncritically reproduced inaccurate later-day narratives about the conflict, such pedantry do not bother our author. This question, fwiw, would continue to bother scholars — see John Stratton Hawley's Hiding in Plain Sight: Gosains on the Ghats, 1809 (2012) and the brilliant exposition, therein.

But who cares for internal consistency when, after all, you are merely repeating the perennial colonial trope: (1) marauding Muslims raging down temples, (2) Hindus committing some equivalent vandalism in revenge, and (3) the colonial government stepping in to restore order?

Cow blood was spilled but where?

In the same chapter, Sampath writes,

Taking advantage of this, Dost Mohammad and his accomplices committed a great sacrilege. Phil Robinson writes:

A cow was dragged out from a neighbouring house and killed at the foot of the [Laat Bhairav] pillar. Its blood was taken into every corner, till all the sacred place was splashed with it, and then the carcass was flung with shouts of exultations, into the holy tank of Bhairav.

The news of this horrific incident soon made its way to the Hindu side. Brahmins and other devout Hindus gathered in large numbers in a scene of great distress and mourning. Their holy shrine had been defiled and with tears streaming down their cheeks, they had all gone on to a fast unto death as atonement. It was left to Mr. Bird to assuage their hurt feelings. Giving an account of what happened on this fateful occasion, Sherring quotes Rev. William Buyers, who mentioned this episode in his Recollections of Northern India:

In the early part of the quarrel, the Mussalmans, in order to be revenged on the Hindus for the defeat they had sustained, had taken a cow, and killed it on one of the holiest ghats, and mingled its blood with the sacred water of the Ganga...

As is evident, Robinson's account differs from Sherring's — while in the former, the cow was butchered at Laat Bhairaav and its blood spilled at the site, in the latter, the cow was butchered at some unknown Ghaat and its blood spilled at the Ganges. As Pandey notes, as time passes, the colonial accounts exaggerate — the history of a site gets transposed onto the town itself and then onto the country!

These inconsistencies do not, yet again, matter for our author. Do Bird's original report even mention anything relevant? I do not know.

Miscellaneous

The point of documenting these two views is to highlight the fringe and partisan nature of the work.

Those evil Marxists

Sampath writes,

Under successive rulers such as Anandapala, Trilochanapala, and his son ‘Nidar’ (fearless) Bhima, the Shahis kept providing a strong pushback to Mahmud’s incursions. It was hence not as is normally made out to be in popular Marxist historiography that Mahmud got away with a free pass to ravage India, but stiff resistance was posed during each of his annual misadventures.

A few pages later,

Places such as Varanasi, Kanauj, Badaun, Jaunpur, Chunar, and mostly even Ayodhya continued to remain outside the sphere of Muslim political in uence for some time. But it was just a matter of time, and once the Delhi Sultanate, or the Slave dynasty, was established in 1206 CE, the absorption of all these regions was carried out.

Views on Desai (2017)

Sampath is not happy with Desai's scholarship —

Scholars like [Madhuri] Desai totally disregard all the iconoclasm and even the term "Aurangzeb’s relationship with the city, being at the very least, complex". [Huh?] Horrifically, she even credits Aurangzeb, who through the dismantling of the temple supposedly transmuted the importance of Vishweshwara into an undisputed central, fulcrum figure. She sees the new temple as a resurgent centre of "triumphant Mughal cosmopolitanism"! Nothing could be farther from the truth and more ridiculous, as the hard facts of this and the previous chapters show. The Hoysala king, the Gujarati businessman, or the Bengal Sena ruler all predated the Mughals or Narayana Bhatta and still venerated Vishweshwara. Grand statements are made that the Mughal State encouraged the development of commercial centres around the shrine in the Antargriha zone—none of these are backed by proofs or evidence and are just biased conjectures and fertile imagination. This follows the pattern of several Westernized scholars who have particularly invested their scholarship and writings on Kashi and tried to belittle its importance, and as true apologists glorify the Mughals despite visible symbols of their barbarity and destruction.

Linga

Sampath writes,

The problem once again with interpreting words in Sanskrit without adequate knowledge about the language is that a literal translation, as done several times by Western scholars, is of little use when it comes to interpreting texts ...

Thus, to rubbish and negate the subtleties and the diversity of meanings and to dub the linga as just a male organ is highly reductive and intellectually puerile.

Notwithstanding the polemics, nowhere in the section does Sampath actually engage with the abundance of scholarship on the historical evolution of the term (and its associations), as espoused by Doniger and others. And pace his broadsides, no serious scholar claims that today's Shavites worship a linga by considering it to be a phallus!

Vedas > Newton variant of Hindutva

Sampath writes,

Even today, traditionally trained sthapatis/shilpis or sculptors can identify the 'gender' of a stone with just a touch or vision based on their pranic sensation. It is believed that even uncarved stones also have an element of prana or life force, even before the idol is invested with divinity through the procedure called prana pratishtha [lit. establishing life]. This finds resonance in the discovery centuries later of J.C. Bose’s study of metal fatigue and cell response, where he demonstrated that plants and even metals responded to emotional stimuli.

Conclusion

Going by the bias and the wild inaccuracies, it is perhaps imprudent to cite it even for the most harmless of trivia such as my latest additions to the article. The sole upside, in what is a torrent of disinformation, is the ASI report included in the appendix. TrangaBellam (talk) 20:05, 23 September 2024 (UTC)