Reclaiming History

The Madhya Pradesh High Court’s judgment on the Bhojshala complex in Dhar is an overdue acknowledgement of civilisational fact. For decades India’s so-called ‘secular’ establishment perfected the peculiar art of denying the visible.

In order to appease minority sentiments, a historically apocryphal narrative of ‘syncretism’ was imposed despite the evidence of desctruction on Hindu temples and educational institutes chronicled by the Muslim court annalists themselves. This resulted in temple friezes embedded into mosque walls becoming ‘syncretic architecture.’ During the Nehruvian and post-Nehruvian eras, the chronicles of medieval court historians boasting of smashed idols and razed shrines were treated as ‘communal inventions.’

Thus, the MP High Court’s ruling declaring Bhojshala a temple dedicated to Goddess Saraswati and accepting the Archaeological Survey of India’s exhaustive findings is significant precisely because the evidence was never especially ambiguous. The ASI’s 2,000-page report pointed to a vast pre-existing structure dating back to the Parmar kings. The bench observed clear indications of a Sanskrit teaching centre and a Saraswati temple. Ideally, this should not have required a heroic forensic effort.

The Bhojshala was associated with Raja Bhoja, the celebrated Paramara ruler whose court was synonymous with Sanskrit learning. Under Islamic conquerors, centres of Hindu scholarship and worship were frequently transformed into mosques. In fact, the testimony of Islamic chroniclers is often ignored precisely because it is too explicit.

The Adhai Din Ka Jhonpra in Ajmer, often presented in tourist brochures as merely an early Indo-Islamic marvel, was erected after demolishing the Sanskrit college founded by Vigraharaj Chauhan. Its reused pillars, carvings and temple fragments are visible even to the untrained visitor. The Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque in Delhi was constructed with material from demolished Hindu and Jain temples.

A civilisation asked to forget visible acts of historical destruction eventually begins to distrust the honesty of its own elite. That distrust fuelled the long Ram Janmabhoomi movement, culminating in the Supreme Court verdict of 2019. The Dhar Bhojshala case now joins that broader correction. The High Court relied upon archaeological evidence, documentary records and legal scrutiny. It even suggested that Muslims could seek separate land for a mosque. The implications for Gyanvapi and similar disputes are obvious. Cases that have languished amid procedural hesitation should now be expedited.

India cannot build a confident pluralism upon organised amnesia. Medieval Islamic conquests in India involved not merely political domination, but acts of civilisational humiliation directed at sacred sites.

This was recorded by the conquerors themselves with considerable pride. Modern India need not inherit either the triumphalism of the invaders or the resentment of the conquered. But it must at least possess the courage to recognise what happened.