44
The Rebuilding of a Hindu Temple
When Turko-Afghan military forces adhering to Islam arrived in India, starting in the early eleventh century, they brought with them a set of theological premises very different from those of the varied Hindu groups they encountered there. Whereas Hindus appeared to worship a rich and complicated pantheon of divine characters, Muslims worshiped a single, exclusive divinity and considered all homage directed toward any other deity to be “polytheism” (shirk), anathema to the true religion. Whereas Hindus assumed that divinity would enter into and inhabit objects fabricated by humans, this seemed to Muslims an extreme example of hubris and a compromise to Allah’s transcendence. Whereas Hindus venerated their divinely animated images in temples, Muslims classified this as “idolatry,” and often considered it a religious duty to remove such objectionable practices from any lands they conquered. And since Hindu image-worship was the dominant mode of public religious practice in the subcontinent—indeed, so prevalent that some Islamic chroniclers came to view India as the original home of idolatry—Muslim conquests in India from the eleventh through fourteenth centuries were often accompanied by desecration and destruction of Hindu religious images and conversion of temple sites into mosques. Hindu claims of autonomy, conversely, were often symbolized by rebuilding or restoring temples that had been desecrated.
This inscriptional poem records the restoration of one of the most famous sites of Hindu-Muslim conflict, the temple of Somanātha (“Śiva as Lord of the Moon”) on the coast of Gujarat. Somanātha was a longstanding Śaiva pilgrimage center (tīrtha). Local tradition has it that it was first consecrated by the Moon who, waning from “consumption” (tuberculosis), worshiped Śiva there and so regained his rotund form. According to more skeptical archeologists, a modest temple may have occupied the site as early as the mid-seventh century. Around 970 C.E., the local Solaṅki ruler Mūlarāja built a more impressive royal temple at Somanātha, one of the largest temples of northern India at the time.
In the early part of the eleventh century, the Islamic ruler Sultan Maḥmūd of Ghazna (in present-day Afghanistan) launched a series of raids into northern India. Gradually overcoming the various Indian forces he encountered, Maḥmūd’s armies reached as far east as Kanyakubja, captured in 1018. But when a confederacy of Hindu rulers led by the Candella dynasty impeded further progress to the east, Maḥmūd turned his attention southward, toward Gujarat and the temple of Somanātha. The Ghaznavids understood Somanātha to be a tantalizingly wealthy and dominant Hindu institution. Muslim chronicles speak of an endowment of ten thousand villages belonging to the temple, of one thousand priests performing the liturgy, of three hundred musicians and dancers entertaining the god, and of fresh Gaṅgā water and Kashmiri flowers brought daily to adorn it. Moreover, they appear to have considered Somanātha the cultic center of idolatry, the Hindu equivalent of Mecca, and hoped that by destroying that temple they might strike a significant blow for Islam itself.
Maḥmūd’s forces marched into Gujarat in January 1026, and after a bloody two-day engagement at the temple, Maḥmūd defeated the local guardians and entered the sanctum. The temple was systematically pillaged and its metal images melted down, yielding some 20 million coin-weight (dinārs) in gold and other precious metals, which was transported back to Ghazna to help gild the mosque Maḥmūd was having built in his capital. He had the central icon, a Śiva-liṅga, broken into pieces and its fragments dispatched to Ghazna and (according to some accounts) to the caliph in Baghdad and to Mecca. Later Indo-Muslim accounts portray this encounter of Maḥmūd with the idol at Somanātha as a paradigmatic victory in the conquest of India.
The Solaṅki ruler of the area, King Bhīma (1022-1065) was only momentarily defeated, and soon after Maḥmūd’s retreat to Ghazna he set about rebuilding the temple. The new Somanātha may have been completed as early as 1030. No more Muslim raids occurred in the next hundred years to disturb the temple, though it appears that subsequent rulers may have allowed it to fall into disrepair. By the mid-twelfth century the Solaṅki dynasty had become the dominant power of western India, and the ruler Kumārapāla, instigated by his priest and religious advisor Bhāva Bṛhaspati, decided to rebuild Somanātha on a much larger scale, consonant with the grander Solaṅki dominion he and his predecessor had established. It is his restoration, carried out in 1156, that this inscription records.
The story of Somanātha temple, however, does not end with Kumārapāla’s reconstruction. Through the great reputation of Maḥmūd’s victory at Somanātha throughout the world of Islam and the diligence of Hindu Solaṅki rulers in rebuilding it as a sign of autonomy, Somanātha came to be seen as a primary point of regional contention. As the frontier of control shifted over the ensuing centuries, nearly every Islamic ruler seeking to establish control over Gujarat felt the compulsion to desecrate the liṅga of Somanātha, and every Hindu chieftain seeking independence felt an imperative to restore it. It is not possible to specify exactly how often the temple was attacked by Islamic forces and then rededicated by Hindu insurgents. Finally, in 1669 it was converted into a mosque, with a dome where the temple tower had once been, and local Hindus, rather than risk another restoration, declared that the liṅga in a smaller Śaiva temple on the outskirts of town was in fact Somanātha.
Through much of the British period the old temple stood empty and forgotten, but shortly after India regained independence in 1947, it was rebuilt one last time, largely through the instigation of K. M. Munshi, a prominent Gujarati author and freedom-fighter, and the support of Sardar Vallabhai Patel, India’s formidable Minister for States. The remains of Kumārapāla’s twelfth-century temple were bulldozed away, and on the site a completely new structure was raised, following as closely as possible the plan of the old one. “With the dawn of a new era,” wrote Munshi, “the new temple has risen like the phoenix, from its own ashes.” So once more the Somanātha temple served as a symbol, this time signifying the independence of the newly established Indian nation state and its continuity with a recovered past.
Considering this background, the most striking aspect of the inscriptional account of Kumārapāla’s rebuilding of Somanātha temple is what it leaves out. It completely ignores Maḥmūd’s dramatic destruction of the temple. Many Hindu accounts of the period seek to ignore Islamic attacks or to naturalize them as part of an ongoing struggle between demons and gods. Here, the inscription locates the destruction and rebuilding of the temple as one more in a sequence of recurrent disappearances and reappearances of the site, going back to the first age (kṛtayuga), when Pārvatī’s curse made it invisible. This entropic cycle of decline and resurrection, rather like the phases of the Moon with whom the site is so closely associated, is viewed as a natural corollary to the passage of time.
The theory of the four ages, accordingly, is central to the vision of this poem. As developed in classical and medieval Indian thought, this model of cyclical time embodies a belief in a past “golden age” (the first age) when society was characterized by law and righteousness, a notion of moral deterioration through successive eras up to the present “age of strife” (kaliyuga), and a faith that this degenerate era will be followed cyclically by a return to an age of renewed virtue. As Manu’s renowned codebook, the Manusmṛti, puts it, in the first age righteousness (dharma) stands firmly on four feet, in the second age on three, in the third on two, and in our present age of strife it wobbles precariously on its one remaining foot. Already an old theory by Maḥmūd’s time, it was nevertheless useful to account for the new situation brought about by Islamic victories, for it placed the present vicissitudes within an existing moral framework and predicted the eventual return of an older, happier order of things. Indeed, restorative acts of kings and priests like Kumārapāla and Bhāva Bṛhaspati were often credited in inscriptional panegyric with bringing back the first age.
Moreover, in the view of the inscription, the rebuilding of the temple was not simply a matter of human initiative, but also the result of a command of Śiva himself, carried out through the incarnation on earth of his favored devotee and mount, the bull Nandi. When Śiva noticed that the temple had been broken, the inscription tells us, he ordered Nandi to take birth on earth. Obligingly, Nandi was born as the brahman Bhāva Bṛhaspati in the holy city of Varanasi, and after an illustrious religious career he found his way to the court of Kumārapāla, where he persuaded the king to repair the temple. So the inscription takes both the destruction and the rebuilding of Somanātha largely out of human hands and locates them instead as the working out of larger cosmic patterns and movements.
In medieval India it was common to commemorate the construction of a temple or the installation of a divine image by inscribing a eulogy praising the patron and others associated with the deed onto a set of copper plates or into the stone wall of the temple itself. Prominent court poets often composed the inscriptional praises in elegant and highly ornamented Sanskrit verse. The eulogy recording Kumārapāla’s reconstruction of Somanātha (which is admittedly not among the finest examples of epigraphical verse from a poetic point of view) was composed by an unnamed poet specializing, apparently, in improvisational verse (he refers to himself as the “quick poet”). Carefully inscribed on a stone slab roughly 29 by 18 inches, it was preserved in the porch of the nearby temple of Bhadrakālī and rediscovered in the early nineteenth century by a British traveler and historian, Colonel James Tod. The lower part of the stone had been chipped away over the years, leaving verses 37 through 48 fragmentary and largely indecipherable; they are not translated here.
Certain conventions characterize the genre. Most often, inscriptional eulogies begin with several verses, referred to as “auspicious stanzas,” invoking the blessings of prominent deities. When dedicating a temple to Śiva, as here, one naturally began with an invocation of Śiva himself, and continued with other closely associated deities such as Gaṇeśa and the Moon. Next inscriptional poems generally proceed to praise the royal sponsor of the gift, and often give a highly flattering account of the king’s royal predecessors, as well. (Scholars have used these panegyrics of royal lineages extensively to reconstruct the dynastic history of medieval South Asia.) Here the poet departs from usual form by choosing not the king but the royal preceptor Bhāva Bṛhaspati as the primary agent of the temple reconstruction and the main subject of praise. Inscriptions then go on to record the specific provisions of the gift. For example, if the patron grants the royal share of revenues from particular villages or lands to provide for ongoing worship in the temple, the inscription might detail the boundaries of the lands, the amounts of revenue or produce to be remitted to the temple, and the persons responsible for payment. Many inscriptions document these more mundane matters not in high Sanskrit verse but in prose, using the local vernacular language. Here the inscription alludes to a royal grant made by Kumārapāla to Bhāva Bṛhaspati in passing, but is more concerned to record a whole series of town improvements and temple renovations carried out by the high priest at Somanātha. Finally, inscriptions often conclude with warranties that their provisions be observed permanently, by future rulers and inhabitants of the area, “as long as the moon, stars, and sun endure.”
In its description of the religious career of Bhāva Bṛhaspati, the inscription provides a normative account of relations between a medieval Hindu king and his chosen preceptor. Bhāva Bṛhaspati initially gains renown, the inscription tells us, during his pilgrimages around northern India, then makes his way to Dhārā, the capital of the Paramāra kings. From there he comes to the attention of the Solaṅki ruler Jayasiṃha, who makes him his highest priest, and thereby also implicitly declares his allegiance to the tenets of Pāśupata Śaivism that Bhāva Bṛhaspati propounds. Both Jayasiṃha and his successor Kumārapāla, however formidable their political authority, humble themselves publicly before the preceptor, bowing and even smearing his feet with sandal powder, a most striking act for any independent king. In recognition of his high status, Bhāva Bṛhaspati receives the title “Gaṇḍa” (chief one, high priest), a land grant for permanent support of his family and descendents, and virtual carte blanche to supervise the rebuilding of the great temple of Somanātha and to carry out other improvements in the locality. Reciprocally, Kumārapāla as patron of the temple receives the primary religious merit resulting from his priest’s renovations there. Even though the Solaṅki kings do not appear to recognize that their Gaṇḍa is in fact Nandi, Śiva’s divine bull, they do perceive his superior virtues and treat him—as the poet wishes all to know—with the respect due him.
The poet introduces a large cast of divine figures in the course of his eulogy, and assumes on the part of his audience a background knowledge of their appearances, biographies, and characters. Not surprisingly, much of this lore concerns Śiva, the god worshiped as the highest lord by Kumārapāla, Bhāva Bṛhaspati, and the Moon himself at Somanātha.
The poet repeatedly refers to Śiva as the enemy of Kama, the god of love. Kama was once attempting to distract Śiva from a deep meditation, it is told, when out of Śiva’s third eye blazed a laserlike flame, reducing Kama’s body to ashes. This is why the Love-god is so often referred to as the “bodiless one.” The poet must have felt it particularly appropriate to emphasize this well-known aspect of Śiva when praising the rather austere high priest Bhāva Bṛhaspati. Yet, as the poet also reminds us, this yogic self-restraint does not prevent Śiva from marriage to the goddess Pārvatī, and likewise the high priest has a wife, one Mahādevī (“Great Goddess,” an epithet often used for Pārvatī), daughter of Soḍhala.
Śiva wears the unwashed, matted hair of a yogi—hence one of his names is Kapārdin, the shaggy-haired one. In this unruly crown, we learn, is the River Gaṅgā. When an ascetic once persuaded the Gaṅgā, which had previously flowed only across the heavens, to descend to earth in order to alleviate a worldwide drought, there was a danger that the great river’s impact might devastate the terrestial world. Śiva caught the river in his hair, absorbing her force before allowing her to meander harmlessly onto the ground. Gaṅgā’s presence in Śiva’s hair does, however, put a bit of a strain on his domestic tranquility, for Pārvatī’s jealousy at seeing this other woman caressing her husband’s locks is a common poetic theme. Also nestled atop Śiva’s head is the Moon, and this attribute also is fitting to mention here, since the Moon’s worship of Śiva is the constitutive mythical act marking Somanātha as an especially holy site.
Though Śiva and his many aspects and exploits receive the inscriptional poet’s primary attention, other deities also appear in the eulogy, often to serve as measures for Bhāva Bṛhaspati’s greatness. In this way the poet compares the priest’s erection of Somanātha temple to Viṣṇu’s incarnation as a giant Boar, who once raised the earth itself on his powerful tusk to save it from being submerged in the ocean. Likewise, it is the poet’s conceit that certain well-known features of the gods Indra and Brahmā—namely, Indra’s thousand eyes and Brahmā’s four faces—exist only for the sake of seeing and praising the high priest more fittingly. And he refers to the legendary sage Agastya, born from a pot, who once quenched his immense thirst by drinking from the ocean until it was depleted; the water reservoir Bhāva Bṛhaspati constructed, by contrast, is drunk continuously by hundreds of buckets on revolving waterwheels, yet never diminishes.
As the inscriptional poem assumes a plethora of Hindu deities ranked hierarchically, with Śiva foremost, so Bhāva Bṛhaspati reconstructed the town of Somanātha as a home for many deities, with Śiva Somanātha preeminent among them. After renovating the main temple, we are told, the priest had new cupolas placed on the temples of Pārvatī, Śiva Bhairava (the “Terrifying Lord”), Śiva Kapārdin, Śiva Siddheśvara (“Lord of the Saints”), and other gods. He renovated a temple of Śiva Pāpamocana (“Liberator of all Sins”), he built two new temples for the goddess Durgā, he reinstituted worship in the local Viṣṇu temple, and he constructed a well apparently devoted to the goddess Sarasvatī. The pilgrimage site of Somanātha became under Bhāva Bṛhaspati’s direction a veritable city of divine dwellings, and the great mountainlike temple devoted to Śiva Somanātha towered over all.
The text has been translated from two sources: Vajeshankar G. Ozha and G. Buhler, “The Somnāthpattan Praśasti of Bhāva Brihaspati,” Weiner Zeitschrift fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes 3 (1889), 1-19; and Peter Peterson, “Stone-Inscription in the Temple of Bhadrakāli at Prabhās Pātaṉa at the Time of King Kumārapāla,” in A Collection of Prakrit and Sanskrit Inscriptions (Bhavnagar: Bhavnagar Archaeological Department, 1895), pp. 186-93.
The Rebuilding of Somanātha Temple
1. “Just because I allow the river of the gods, Gaṅgā, in your tangled hair, you now have her frolicking onto your ears and soon you will even have her sitting in your lap. You cheat!” Angrily Pārvatī the Daughter of the Mountain, accused him. But Śiva replied, “Most excellent woman, this is just the fame of the teacher Gaṇḍa, like jewels adorning my ears.”
2. May the Lord over Obstacles be victorious! I bow to you, Gaṇeśa! O Goddess of Speech, remove all that might hinder my new poem! Glitter on my tongue, my friend, that I may compose a tribute to the virtues of the high priest Gaṇḍa, eminent among all lords.
3. May the Moon be victorious, made spotless by the one who burned the Love-god’s body! When Somanātha had disappeared in the first age from Pārvatī’s curse, the Moon rebuilt it himself, following the orders of the Moon-crowned Śiva, and gave it to those pious and intelligent followers of the Pāśupata creed, along with a liturgical guidebook.
4. When a little of the age of strife had passed, Śiva noticed that the temple had been broken, and he ordered the divine bull Nandi to carry out its restoration.
5. In the excellent region of Kanyakubja lies the famous city of Varanasi, family home of the highest god Śiva and of both righteousness and liberation. There at his Lord’s command, all-knowing Nandi took birth in the home of a brahman headman, and followed the vow of Pāśupata conduct.
6. That ocean of austerities set out to tour the sacred fords, to initiate kings, and to protect the holy places.
7. And when he had become the very paradigm of pilgrims, and everyone honored him for his fine intelligence, the venerable Bhāva Bṛhaspati went to the city of Dhārā. His body looked like Śiva the Beggar, the Love-god’s opponent, worshiped by ascetics. He seemed a kind of living encyclopedia, unveiling his own teachings to all.
8. In the regions of Malwa, Kanyakubja, and Avanti his austerities glowed. The Paramāra kings became his pupils. The monasteries were properly protected. The venerable Solaṅki king Jayasiṃha enjoyed his complete fraternity. For all these reasons, the blossoming of Bhāva Bṛhaspati’s mind still shines today throughout the three worlds.
9. When Śiva reminded that holy personage of the reason he had incarnated himself in the fluctuating world, Bhāva Bṛhaspati made up his mind to rescue and rebuild the temple. On that very day, the Solaṅki ruler himself, with hands respectfully folded, made him highest priest in the kingdom.
10. When Jayasiṃha went to heaven, the valorous prince Kumārapāla, rising through his superior energy, at once climbed onto the lion’s throne of sovereignty. His majesty is unimaginable. Lord over the cities of Ballāla and Dhārā, he is a fearsome lion prowling the heads of those elephants, the illustrious chieftains of the jungly regions.
11. While the brave king Kumārapāla was exercising uninterrupted dominion from his heroic lion’s throne, bringing his kingdom prosperity as Indra’s tree of plenty does to the three worlds, high priest Bhāva Bṛhaspati examined the decrepit temple of Śiva, enemy of the Love-god, and advised the king that he should save this house of God.
12. And so, by order of Śiva who punished the Love-god, the firm-minded and universally respected Bhāva Bṛhaspati, born in the lineage of the sage Garga and honored everywhere for his excellent ancestry, brought about the rebuilding of the great temple tower. The king gave him the title, “Lord Gaṇḍa (high priest), master of all.”
13. The king presented his priest with ornaments and a pair of elephants, hung a pearl necklace on him, bowed his head down with devotion, and smeared his two feet with sandalpaste. Abandoning his high status, he took off his very own signet ring and made the place over to Gaṇḍa, presenting him also with an excellent, ancient ritual digest and all provisions for feeding devotees.
14. When he had built the temple of the Love-god’s foe, resembling Kailāsa Mountain itself, the king was extremely joyful and spoke these words to the illustrious and intelligent Gaṇḍa: “I grant the title ‘Gaṇḍa’ to you, your sons, and your grandsons, as long as moon, stars, and sun shall endure.”
15. King Soma, the Moon, built Somanātha’s temple in gold. Kṛṣṇa, whose bravery equals the demon Rāvaṇa’s, then made it of silver. Śrī Bhīmadeva built the “jewel peak” temple with huge beautiful stones. And when in time that had become worn out, the majestic Kumārapāla, best of all kings, built the temple for Gaṇḍa’s overlord Śiva, repository of all virtues, and named it Meru, the “World Mountain.”
16. After that the king of Gujarat, full of pleasure and joy, gave to his priest the town known as Brahmapuri, with all its trees and water, and had the order inscribed on three copper plates as the local assembly looked on: “This village may be enjoyed by you, your sons, your followers, and members of your family, howsoever you please.”
17. Because he restored the temple according to Śiva’s command, there has never been a person, nor will there ever be, like Gaṇḍa, the equal of Bṛhaspati, preceptor of the gods.
18. A group of bad royal ministers, overcome with greed for wealth, evil-minded and mad, brought the temple down. Now the teacher Gaṇḍa has quickly raised it back up again, as if he were playfully competing with the great Boar who once raised the earth on the tip of his tusk.
19. What opponents did he not put to shame before the king? Whose faces were not blackened? Whose pride not stripped away? Whose positions at court were not forcibly reduced, when he placed his foot on their heads? What adversaries were not made to accept a vow of begging after debating this powerful man?
20. If this tiny vessel the universe were not snugly tied outside with the ropes of his virtues, it would surely burst open from his splendors within it.
21. Wishing to see Gaṇḍa’s beauty, Indra, Lord of a hundred sacrifices, wears a thousand eyes. To sing his boundless virtues, wise Brahmā, the Creator, has four mouths. Trembling with the weight of his greatness, the earth needed to be tied down with mountains as its stakes. His fame could not be contained on earth alone, so three worlds were created.
22. Desiring fame, he rescued the proper modes of conduct, both external and internal, and taught them to people of the four classes.
23. When measuring out the town boundaries for renovating the temple, he filled it with five hundred and five respectable persons.
24. He extended the town, building formidable ramparts on both north and south sides of the deity.
25. He placed golden pinnacles on the temple towers of the brilliant goddess Pārvatī, the terrifying Lord Śiva, Kapārdin the Shaggy-Haired Śiva, Śiva Lord of the Saints, and the other gods.
26. He built a royal hall and dug a well of Sarasvatī to provide water for bathing the deities and cleaning the main kitchen.
27. In front of the temple of Kapārdin he put up a canopy with firm posts, a silver water channel, and a throne resting on a frog image for the deity.
28. He renovated the ruined temple tower of Śiva Pāpamocana, the remover of sins, and there built bathing stairs down to the river three body-lengths in height.
29. He had big houses built for many brahmans, and reinstituted the acts of worship for Viṣṇu.
30. In the middle of the new town and on the road to Somanātha he constructed two reservoirs, and there placed another temple to the goddess Durgā.
31. The reservoir Gaṇḍa built contains pure, sweet, ambrosialike water in vast amounts. With hundreds of shafts of water streaming from buckets on its many revolving waterwheels making a reckless, resounding, tumultuous roar, it seems to laugh at the ocean, which was drunk by the sage Agastya, born from a waterpot.
32. He wanted to gain a great heap of happiness, and so he built anew the temple of Durgā that stands near the God who wears the moon as crown jewel.
33. On solar and lunar eclipses he always honored the wise, learned brahmans who came to him with all sorts of gifts, and likewise on the five monthly holy days he pleased the very earth with his series of gifts, which became famous around the world. What other man could ever equal this treasure chest of virtues?
34. Devotion to the Love-god’s enemy, delight in contemplating the highest spirit, faith in the revealed texts, addiction to helping others, resolute forebearance, engagement in good works, and praise for the one who supports the whole world—for him, these are the highest pleasures.
35. Pārvatī belongs to Śiva, enemy of the demons’ triple city. Triumphant Lakṣmī belongs to Viṣṇu, who killed the demon Mura. And likewise to Gaṇḍa belongs a beautiful moon-faced wife, the daughter of Soḍhala, known far and wide on earth by the name Mahādevī (“Great Goddess”). In fame she matches the river Gaṅgā, in speech the Sarasvatī, and in beauty the Yamunā.
36. Her charm is like a fresh blooming campaka. Her arms are garlands of śirīṣa flowers. Her eyes are . . . curlews. Her smile is jasmine blossoms. Her high cheeks are the bright yellow flowers of the rodhra tree. Her body was fashioned by the Love-god himself using the beauties of each season.
[Verses 37-48 are omitted, being too fragmentary for translation. They praise the four sons of Bhāva Bṛhaspati and Mahādevī, and seem to describe a visit to Somanātha by the Paramāra king Bhojadeva during a lunar eclipse.]
49. The high priest, the sons and grandsons born in his lineage, and their wives may enjoy this village as long as the moon, sun, and stars shall endure.
50. The quick poet . . . composed this tribute to Gaṇḍa’s virtues, using beautiful verses.
51. Rudasūri, son of Lakṣmīdhara, transcribed it . . . in the mouth of Āṣādha (June-July), in the Vallabhi year 850 [or 1169 C.E.].