A section from the journey

What This Does Not Mean

As we close this hard chapter, we must shut two doors firmly. The first is denial: do not let anyone tell you nothing happened, or that it did not hurt. It did. The second is the opposite error: do not let anyone tell you this was one long, total war to erase a faith. It was not. Temples also rose, were repaired, and were honoured throughout. Somnath itself fell and was rebuilt again and again. The truth lives between the two doors, and so does the dignity of this age.

We have reached the close of the hardest chapter in our journey. Before we walk on, a careful teacher must do one last thing. He must shut two doors firmly, for there are two wrong ways to leave this room, and the truth lies between them.

The first wrong door is denial. After all our careful talk of politics and disputed numbers and shared blame, someone might be tempted to slip out by saying, then it was really nothing, the pain was made up. No. We shut that door hard. The desecration was real. Where it fell, it fell again and again, and it left a true wound. We have never explained that away, and we will not begin now.

The second wrong door is the opposite error, and it is just as false. It is the claim that this whole age was one long, unbroken war to wipe a faith from the earth, seven centuries of pure erasure. The evidence simply does not support that, and we shut that door too.

Why does it not hold? Because all through these very same centuries, the opposite was also happening, everywhere. Temples were being built. Old ones were being repaired and made grander. Rulers gave them land and gold, and some of those rulers were Muslim. Hindu life went on. Hindu officials served at the highest levels. Most temples, in most places, simply stood, and the lamps were lit at dawn as they always had been.

There is one temple whose life story tells the whole age better than any argument could. Let us end with it. It is Somnath, the very temple where this chapter began, broken by Mahmud in the year 1026.

Hear what happened next. Within a few short years, Somnath was repaired, and pilgrims were streaming to it once more. In the centuries that followed, it was rebuilt, and struck again, and rebuilt yet again. Then the great queen Ahilyabai Holkar restored it in the seventeen hundreds. And in our own time, after India became free, it was raised once more, and it stands today.

Do you see it? That single temple is the whole age held in one place. It fell, and it rose. It fell again, and it rose again. Each time the worst happened, hands came to build once more. That is not the story of a faith erased. It is the story of a faith that bent like a tree in a great storm, and did not break.

So here is the line to carry away from this chapter, and to hold in both hands at once. The loss was real. And the story is more tangled, and more human, than either anger or denial would have it. The tradition grieved what it lost, deeply and truly. And it kept building. Both of those are the truth, together. Neither one alone is.

Because this age is remembered in more than one way, let us close as we have all along, with both held side by side, fairly and without heat.

The rishi steps to the Threshold — where accounts differWhat must this age NOT be flattened into — neither denial of the loss, nor a story of total, unbroken erasure?

What scholars find

Scholars close both exits. Against denial: temple desecration was real, repeated where it occurred, and a genuine loss — the nuance about politics, numbers, and shared idioms never means 'nothing happened.' Against maximalism: the evidence does not support a single centuries-long total war of erasure or the inflated tens-of-thousands figures; throughout the period temples were also built, repaired, protected, and endowed, including by Muslim rulers, and most temples and Hindu religious life continued. Somnath is the model case: raided in 1026, repaired within a few years and again a thriving pilgrimage site, rebuilt and sacked repeatedly, restored by Ahilyabai Holkar in the eighteenth century, and rebuilt again in independent India. Romila Thapar further shows that the memory of Somnath as a single fixed national wound crystallised much later; how an event is remembered has its own history.

As the tradition holds

The tradition holds that the loss must never be denied — the wound was real and is rightly remembered with feeling. And, at its wisest, it holds equally that the loss is not the whole story, and was never meant to harden into endless grievance. Its own deepest memory is one of return: that worship continued in the heart and the home when stone could not stand, that the saints kept singing, that the South raised a great empire, and that what was broken was rebuilt, again and again. Somnath restored, Kashi rebuilt by Ahilyabai — these are the tradition's own proof that the faith endured. The tradition asks for honesty in both directions: do not explain the pain away, and do not let the pain become the only thing the age is allowed to mean.

Think of a time you were hurt, yet did not let the hurt become the whole of your story, when you grieved honestly, and then went on to build again. That is what this tradition did, across centuries. What helps you, in your own life, to hold a real loss and a real hope in the same two hands?