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Avatans Kumar is a columnist, public speaker, and activist. A JNU, New Delhi, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign alumnus, Avatans holds graduate degrees in Linguistics. Avatans is a recipient of the 2021 San Francisco Press Club’s Bay Area Journalism award. LESS ... MORE

When people see Nandi Maharaj, they know Shiva, the Mahadeva, has got to be around nearby. 

We always see Nandi Maharaj in the sitting position, facing Shiva. Nandi is a protector of Shiva, a Bhakt, a devotee, a messenger, and a symbol of Shiva himself in many ways. While Shiva “bristles with energy, and is full of creative tension,” writes Henryk Skolimowski (1930-2018), a Polish philosopher, in Dialog With Nandi (1998), “Nandi is passive, forever watching, and ever-present.” 

Situated at the bank of the river Ganga, the Mother, is the holy city of Kashi (also known as Varanasi or Banaras). Kashi is known as the City of Light and is considered the oldest continually inhabited urban settlement. Talking of Kashi’s history, Mark Twain famously wrote in his ‘Following the Equator: Journey around the world’ (1898): “Benaras is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend.” 

Local and foreign literary accounts are full of details about Kashi and Gyanvapi. According to the Skand Purana, Gyanvapi is “superior to all-important holy Teerthas” and is the “Cosmic Form of Shiva himself.” The Chinese traveler Hiuen Tsang visited Kashi in the 7th CE. In his memoir, he wrote about seeing a hundred or so temples and three thousand priests (Meenakshi Jain, Flight of Deities and Rebirth of Temples, 2019).

Kashi saw its first Muslim attack in 1033 CE. Ahmad Nialtagin, son of Mahamud Ghaznavi, and his army plundered Kashi. “The markets… were plundered… The people of the army became rich, for they all carried off gold, silver, perfumes, and jewel, and got back in safety,” Jain quotes from Abul Fazl al-Baihaki’s (995-1077 CE) description. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (Travels in India, 1889) called the pagoda of Banaras “the most famous” after Jagannath.

Frequent acts of vandalism by the religious zealots continued on Hindu temples across the Indian subcontinent for another 700 years. One of such attacks rendered Maharaj Nandi of Gyanvapi separated from his beloved Shiva. So, when people see Nandi outside the Gyanvapi mosque, they know precisely the location of Shiva. “When I had traveled to Kashi eight years ago,” wrote author Aditi Banerji (The Curse of Gandhari, Bloomsbury, 2019) on her Facebook wall, “I had seen Nandi Maharaj, of course, bereft of the darshan of his beloved Shiva.” 

Many take Nandi’s position outside Gyanvapi (Sanskrit, meaning “Well of Knowledge”) as an example of Hindu pacifism. However, such characterizations show a lack of basic understanding of Hindu Dharma. “[C]an a devotee wait patiently when his ishta is held captive, insulted and defaced, marred with spit and dirt from washed hands and feet?” asks Banerji in her post. “No,” she continues, “Nandi Maharaj has been stuck there, frozen, devastated, and helpless in the face of a pain of which we only can feel a fraction.” 

Nandi Maharaj is an ardent devotee of Shiva. To impose the morality of a Kshatriya fighter on the saintly sufferance of Maharaj Nandi would be to use Sri Aurobindo’s term – preach “varnasankara.” 

Iconoclasm, destruction, and desecration of religious places exemplify barbarism. They are an instrument of power. Our history is replete with examples of such destructions. Catherine Nixey’s ‘The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World’ describes the destruction of the temples of Serapeum in Alexandria and the Parthenon in Athens. Sita Ram Goel’s Hindu Temples What Happened to Them is a detailed listing of destroyed Hindu temples across the subcontinent.

Notwithstanding the theological and textual underpinnings of the Islamic invaders and rulers, the large-scale destruction of Hindu temples and the desecration and dismemberment of their sacred deities is a living reality for generations of Hindus. It has also been a source of grave civilizational trauma. No standing grand ancient Hindu temple older than about a hundred years exists in and around the National Capital Region of Delhi is a testament to the defeatist Hindu psyche. So have been the sites of Ayodhya, Kashi, and Mathura.

Over time and maliciously, Leftist historians perpetuated a narrative that, historically, Hindus were not attached to their sacred spaces, such as temples. However, this cannot be farthest from the truth. 

When Aurangzeb’s army attacked the Vishwanath temple in 1669 CE, the troops had to face the wrath of the warrior sadhus of the Dashnami Naga order. The sadhus “won the victory in a fight with the Sultan (? Aurangzib), and gained great glory,” writes Jadunath Sarkar (A History of the Dasnami Naga Sannyasis, 1958). “From sunrise to sunset,” Sarkar continues, “the battle raged and the Dasnamis proved themselves heroes; they preserved the honour of Vishwanath’s seat.”

In 1809, the Hindus of the area fought (the War of the Lat) with the local Muslims. On October 20, a minor dispute between the Rajputs and the Julahas (weavers) started a three-day carnage in Kashi. The clashes broke out when “Hindus attempted to erect a small shrine on the narrow strip of neutral ground between the mosque and the Vishwanath temple” (Jain). Both sides suffered losses. According to Jain, these clashes were among the worst Hindu-Muslim conflicts in Kashi’s modern history.

The Hindus of India are once again starting to see themselves and their history from their native lenses, not colonial or Marxist. They are now ready to reconcile with their transgenerational trauma. And that will mean reclaiming our Hindu heritage one Deva, one vigraha, and one mandir at a time. 

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Views expressed above are the author's own.

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