Somnath

The shrine

Prabhas, at the meeting of three rivers with the sea, is an old place of pilgrimage. In the Puranas it is the place where the moon god Soma, cursed to wane, was restored by Shiva, and Krishna is said to have died near here. The temple of Shiva as Somanatha, lord of the moon, was by the early medieval period one of the richest shrines of western India, endowed with villages and served by large numbers of priests and dancers.

Mahmud's raid

In January 1026 Mahmud of Ghazni, after a march across the desert from Multan, attacked the temple. Persian and Arabic sources, among them the court poet Farrukhi and the scholar al-Biruni, describe its capture, the destruction of the linga, the killing of its defenders and the seizure of its treasure. They present the raid as a triumph of Islam over idolatry, and later Persian writers elaborated the story. Al-Biruni wrote that Mahmud's campaigns had ruined the prosperity of the country and made Hindus hostile to all Muslims.

Sanskrit and Jain sources of the following centuries say much less about the raid. The historian Romila Thapar, in her study of the many accounts of Somanatha, argued that the event was remembered quite differently by different communities, and that the idea of a single unbroken Hindu trauma owes much to nineteenth-century writing. Her argument has itself been strongly contested.

Rebuilding and later attacks

The Chaulukya king Bhima I rebuilt the temple soon after the raid, and Kumarapala rebuilt it again in stone in 1169, as an inscription records. In 1299 the army of Alauddin Khalji attacked it. It was damaged and restored several times in the following centuries under the Gujarat sultans, and Aurangzeb is reported to have ordered its destruction later in the seventeenth century, though the state of the temple at that point is uncertain. In 1783 Ahilyabai Holkar of Indore built a new temple of Somanatha nearby.

In 1842 the governor-general Lord Ellenborough announced that the British army had brought back from Ghazni the sandalwood gates of Somnath, carried off by Mahmud. The gates proved to be of a later date and of Islamic workmanship, and the episode was mocked in Parliament.

The modern temple

After independence, Vallabhbhai Patel resolved to rebuild the temple, and the work was carried on by K. M. Munshi. The ruins of the old temple were removed and a new temple built in the Chaulukya style. Jawaharlal Nehru objected to the involvement of the government, and President Rajendra Prasad attended the installation of the linga in May 1951 in a personal capacity over his reservations. The temple has since remained a powerful symbol in Indian politics.